Blizzzard’s release of Diablo III had gamers sitting on the edge of their seats, feverishly copy-pasting their password and hitting enter again and again as they attempted to get into the game (or get back in again, for some). However, despite needing some patience to log in, and the occasional restarts to game servers, their game uptime has been a wild improvement over the vanilla days of World of Warcraft’s first release, when a five-hour queue to get into the game was an average for the first week. And that was just logging in.

To be sure, Diablo III’s release could have been smoother. I’m sure launch dates are everybody’s nightmare at Blizz HQ. But with a smooth, lag-free game play and only a slight snafu with getting back into game (if you left the party and got to the menu screen, you couldn’t enter again), I am pleasantly surprised to have been able to play the game for almost 14 hours on the first day.

Of course, if only everyone could be so lucky. When servers were shut down for “emergency maintenance”, Blizzard forums were loaded with complaints, defense, and jokes alike. Blizzard’s now-epic thread was filling with posts at a rate of about a hundred posts every five seconds. “Warp speed!!” as some posts commented, adding to the speedy flow of posts. One user even copy-pasted the Wikipedia page on Honey Badgers to provide amusement, and was requoted several times throughout the 415-page thread.

Many users expressed their surprise at being able to have several hours of smooth gameplay. Others were a lot more critical, ignoring the fact that a mere day after release, the servers were actually quite stable. Could Blizzard’s launch day have gone better? Definitely. With many unable to get in, and an emergency maintenance about ten hours after release that lasted three hours, there are obviously some things that Blizzard needs to work on for future launch dates. Perhaps if they had given themselves a little more time, a smoother one would have been achievable. It is, however, probably quite difficult to test-run the servers for a million plus players running rampage the second logging on is permitted. Especially seeing as Amazon declared that Diablo III topped the charts in pre-order numbers. So even if Blizzard keeps underestimating the pressure of a million people on their servers, it seems that they’re doing enough right to hold the market on PC gaming and 591 pages of grateful fans. Now, since their second server maintenance is finished, excuse me while I try and log in.