As per usual these days alot of Game companies are using regional servers, instead of allowing free private servers. I'm a bit concerned about the performance of blizzard's servers.

My fears are that there will be alot of lag when i play diablo 3, and for me that is completely unacceptable. Having played Ubisoft's Assasin Creed revelations and other games that require a persistant internet connection, there have been numerous times, when the server's performance causes my game to lag. And there have been loads of times when i cannot even play a game because the servers are under maintenance. With a game as addictive as Diablo, do the publishers really think that gamers will be happy with sub par performance. I mean im still seething that their will be no lan support. So gone are the days you could easily setup and lan your favourite games.Blizzard, and activision make more than enough money, why does blizzard hate its consumers so much?

[sub. ed. by 808] Basically Blizzard is telling South Africans the same thing it did with World of Warcraft: Here pay premium price for sub-par service. Its R525 for the game which works out to $67 and yet there will be no proper service to the country. We've got it on good authority that over 10 000 pre orders have gone through BT-Games alone, this exlcudes all the other retailers, so if you assume that 50% of sales are from pre-orders, which is being generous, and that bt games sells 50% of all games in South Africa, which is once again probably a bit low, then 40 000 people will be getting told that they can go to hell, and not even the hell they are trying to invade. Blizzard is basically making pure profit off RSA, while we pay more for both the game and the internet connection, and then all we get is a 'sorry' and a 'play on an EU server' with ping over 300.

Due to all of this it will not be possible to play a hardcore character if you live in this country, because at any moment, traffic prioritization or routing your signal half way across earth might interfere with your character, drop youer connection and then force your hero to stand around for the next 10 seconds doing nothing to defend himself, while a boss monster rips his guts out.

This is REALLY poor form by blizzard/activision. Even EA, the worst company on earth according to recent polls, is willing to give us servers for games that they sell to us, for 33% less money. [ /sub. ed. by 808]