#1 - Jan. 24, 2012, 8:16 a.m.
Rule #1: If you've had sleep, you are not eligible to enter.
Rule #2: Try to keep it somewhat PG.
11am PST - Employees roll into work. Over the weekend, each of them had this great idea about how to make Diablo III perfect. Now if only they could remember it.
12am PST - Lunch!
1pm PST - The first person back from lunch gets to flip the switch and bring down the Diablo III servers. He or she then laughs maniacally as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
2pm PST - Two employees engage in a 1v1 game of Mario Bros, yes the real Mario game. The winner gets to decide the next nerf to the Paladin class. Not that either of them actually plays World of Warcraft.
3pm PST - Someone suggests that maybe they should start applying the patch. Then someone else suggests they sneak into the Lead Designer's office and see if he left his computer unlocked so they can set Microsoft Office auto-correct to replace the word 'the' with the word 'butt'.
4pm PST - One of the designers gets up to go use the bathroom. He comes back to find that all of his filing cabinets are now blocking the entrance to his cubicle. Taped to the cabinets is a sign of Jeff Goldblum with the caption, "Jeff Goldblum Is Watching You Poop".
5pm PST - Dinner! Someone has to storm Ghostcrawler's Fortress of Doom (also known as the break room) to prevent him from cannibalizing all of the crab cakes.
6pm PST - Time to start implementing the new patch. And why is the patch listed as version 0.666?
7pm PST - The patch is complete. Some poor tester boots up Diablo III only to be serenaded by the sweet sound of Rick Astley. After submitting the default bug report template, the actual patching begins.
8pm PST - That same tester boots up Diablo III which promptly crashes. Every tester in the room collectively rolls their eyes and says, "Here we go again." By now it is actually synchronized.
9pm PST - The programmer who checked in the code that broke the build is seen running for his life down the hallways with Chris Metzen in hot pursuit wielding a Dragon Soul replica and screaming, "My anger level is over 9000!"
10pm PST - Someone at Blizzard remembers that Community Managers exist and, by extension, players. A message appears on the forums claiming that everything will be fixed in another three hours. Except that everyone knows it won't.
11pm PST - Absolute silence invades Blizzard as everyone tries to figure out how to make the game playable again. Finally someone fixes the code and begins celebrating only to be shot down by a barrage of nerf darts and somehow knocked unconscious. Thirty minutes later someone else rediscovers the fix and checks it in.
12pm PST - Patching begins once again. Bets are made on whether or not it will work. But that quickly falls apart once everyone bets on it failing. So instead they bet on whether or not the newest intern can chug a gallon of 2% milk.
1am PST - Blizzard halts the patching and brings the servers back online just to see how many people log on. The servers are then quickly shut down to finish patching.
2am PST - The patch is finally finished and the servers are brought back on line. So many people try to log in all at once that it crashes the authentication server.
3am PST - The servers are rebooted and at long last, things are playable. Too bad too, because one of the designers has an idea that they should include a level 50 Cow King in the beta that runs around randomly butchering players.
And I am off to bed. Night all. Enjoy.
