Nice, from Friday the 20th to the 22nd Diablo 3 will be online to all of the non-beta testers. Apparantly they want to stress test their servers to the max. It goes live to all non beta testers at 12:01 PDT. Closed beta testers will be able to continue the closed beta to the first of May. Korean server will have the same deal starting on the 23rd of April.

While this is good news to those who are not so lucky to be picked up for the closed beta testing, I'm afraid 3 days are way too short, especially for those with low bandwidth. :(

I feel your pain, I thought it was going to be available at midnight, it turns out that's it 12 PDT noon today.

Well, you still have 12 hours to study for today & another 3 days to go before your exam. That's like 3.5 days available to cram everything into your brain. :D

I'm not terribly interested in the game, but as a demo, why not? Might as well take a look at what all the fuss is about.

taking a look, but i doubt this will make me get over the always-online requirement. still, mighty fine of Activision-Blizzard to give everyone the opportunity to play the game before release.

It's pretty much a win-win scenario for both Blizzard & the [s]fanboys[/s] players.

There will be a Starter Edition of the game, just like with SC2 and WoW.

Agreed. It's also a good hardware test for me because I'm curious if it can run well enough on my crappie lappie. I'm not too confident, but it can't hurt to try. Already downloaded the client so I can give it a go tomorrow night.

From what I've seen/heard/read so far nothing about this game screams "buy me!" like Blizzard's older titles did. It seems like they've lost my interest ever since WoW was in development.

but the SC2 and WoW Starter Editions weren't available BEFORE release, were they? i bought SC2 on release and don't remember having had an opportunity to play before launch day.

World of Warcraft had an open beta though, before the American release. Then a short while later, a European closed beta that you got into if you preordered the game (or maybe just the collector's edition) or were lucky in a random draw.

I preordered the CE and so would have been admitted into the closed beta, but then I got lucky in the draw so I cancelled the preorder to give someone else the chance - when I finally bought the game shortly after release, the store still had barely a handful copies left of the CE and had raised the price with two thirds of the price compared to if I had stood by my preorder (I still bought it though).

There were long (6+ months) beta tests for both WoW and SC2. I remember us (me and some friends) being so desperate to play we started with US beta, then switched to EU and when that ended we switched to KR beta :)

Bump for being the first on this thread. I do apologise, it turning out to be a massive fucking failure. Apparantly Blizard didn't anticipate the overwhelming demand for the game, what a bunch of fucking idiots. Yeah, i'm pissed /end rant.

If you didn't realize this stuff is basically Stress-testing, then this is your wakeup call I guess. There's still a whole weekend. Chillax.

They found some login and stability issues and have temporarily capped the number of players till they resolve it. Just a matter of time.