diablo-3
I have a character in Diablo 3 and am able to create games with the options of starting from a lot of quests. However, when I try to join a public game, I notice that my options are severely limited. I am wondering why that is?
For example, I am able to create a public game with a quest from Act 4. However, when I try to join a public game in act 4, that option is unavailable.
I am wondering how does Blizzard decide when you can join/create a game with certain quest.
To answer your questions directly:
You can only create a character starting on Normal difficulty. You'll have to defeat all 4 act bosses and complete the Prime Evil quest on Normal difficulty to go to Nightmare and play with your friend who is on Nightmare, and you'll have to redo this process for any character you create. This follows for other difficulties as well. Edit: There are now level restrictions: you must be 25 to advance to Nightmare, 50 to advance to Hell, and 60 to advance to Inferno.
You must be online when playing Diablo 3, so you can join your friends whenever you want. You can join a friend's game without invitation unless it is private. If it is private, message them asking for an invite.
If your friend just buys the game you can join him in his quests, but he cannot join you until he has unlocked the difficulty you are playing on.
One important thing to note is that the only restriction for friend joining you is that they have unlocked the difficulty you are playing on. Unlocking quests doesn't matter; only unlocking the difficulty does.
So if you want your friend to play with you, change your quest to a quest on their difficulty. Note that this doesn't mess up your save file or anything; you will be able to return to your previous quest and difficulty after you've played with your friend.
First click the Change Quest button in the main menu (notice I am currently on Hell difficulty):
Then select Normal Difficulty from the drop list:
And finally select the any quest (here I select Prime Evil) and click the Select Quest button:
Note the warning: the only drawback to this is you lose all progress for your current quest. So finish up what you were doing before switching your quests!
After clicking OK, then you should notice your current quest change in the main menu:
And now when you start the game your friend can join you.
I've done this with my friend to skip the Butcher on Hell difficulty, mostly because I wasn't geared to fight him toe-to-toe. Proof is here that joining your friends can help you skip bosses (I skipped Butcher but killed Belial):
However, to advance to the next difficulty you will have to defeat all four act bosses.
You can pre-download Diablo 3 once you've purchased it online. As @dlanod mentioned, you can generally pre-download Blizzard games.
However, to more directly address the question you have proposed you need to remember/be-aware that Blizzards downloader is a Peer to Peer downloading scheme. They use small feeders to populate different sections of the game to different people and then all of those people are offered up as hosts to everyone else to get those parts.
So the situation is not really a few hundred thousand people all hitting one or two servers for the game, but a few hundred thous and people all getting a small piece pretty quickly from the server like normal web browsing or MMO traffic or whatever, and then sharing that with everyone else as long as they are downloading.
There should not really be any release day concerns with access the server to download the client to your system.
Best Answer
Joining a public game on a specific quest is limited to characters who are in a specific level range, which depends on the quest (and the difficulty). This limit only exists for public games, not when creating a new game or when joining a friend.
For instance, joining a public game on the quest "The Doom in Wortham" on nightmare is limited to levels 35 to 41 (inclusive), as you can see in this screenshot (look for the red freehand circle):
That means that if you are outside that level range, you cannot join a public game which is currently on that quest.