Diablo II Beta Sign-Up Monday

GeekLife.com writes: "Blizzard announced their public beta test. This time there are 100,000 lucky winners. The sign-up is over at ZDNet's Gamespot. " Following up on the first round of beta testing in which only a lucky few got selected, this test round is for stress testing the Battle.Net servers in preparation for release. I (and almost everyone I know) couldn't get in on the last one, so I'm hoping my luck is better this time around.

Comments

a new slashdot icon for windows games?

[HomerJ]

I'm like a alot of people that read slasdhot. We don't run Windows, or care about Windows-only games. This isn't a flame saying that "blah Windows sucks", but myself, and alot of other readers don't run it. We also don't care about games that are Windows-only, and will never see linux versions.

I think it's time for a new icon for Windows-only games. Maybe Gates holding a sidewinder or something. I would LIKE to filter out Windows-only game articles, but it just falls under "games", and I'd miss stuff I'd want to read.

It's also another opinion of mine, that Slashdot shouldn't be giving free good publicity to a company like Blizzard, that has pretty much given free-software and the whole linux community the finger. Does that mean not reporting on certain things Blizzard does, or only the bad? No, but you also don't have to treat Diablo 2 like it's the second comming of Jesus either.

I'll step off my Blizzard bashing soapbox, but this opionion of "WIndows sucks, but it's ok when Diabalo 2 comes out, and I don't care if it only runs on Windows" is so hypocritical, it's not funny. That very idea is why you don't see more games in linux. Why go though the trouble of making a linux version if the vast majority of linux users are willing to keep Windows around and buy Windows versions of games?

Cruel.

[slothdog]

Personally, I think it's cruel and inhumane for Blizzard to do something like this during my finals week.

Yes, Diablo II uses Battle.Net very differently.

[Tridus]

In Diablo/Starcraft/War2BNE, Battle.net basically acts like a big chat network. It lets you talk to people, get stats, and *find* games. The games themselves all play as Peer-To-Peer systems, battle.net itself isn't really involved at all once the game starts.

Diablo II introduces something called a "closed" character. While a normal character resides on a players system like in Diablo and you can play it in any form of multiplayer game, closed characters are stored on the server and can *only* be played on Battle.net with other closed characters. During those games, they use a Client/Server setup, with Battle.net taking a more direct role in how the game is played. The idea being to try and prevent some of more flagrant hacks that plagued Diablo.

Now if you play an Open Character (as I intend to, since I also want to play with the same character over LAN's and the like), it doesn't work this way. But because the battle.net population is paranoid, you will see a *lot* of closed characters being played, hence the test. They want to make sure the system won't die before they release the game.

hth