Satan 1: My Diablo 3 Clone

THREE NIGHTS AGO:

I'm playing Diablo 3 and I'm stuck at Act 2 Inferno.  When you enter a cave, and every single rare spawn you encounter is a spider that can outrun you and one-shot you, perhaps I should have taken that as a sign that this cave run is going to take about two hours.  Maybe if I was paying attention to the signs instead of ragestomping my mouse, I should have come to the conclusion to skip this troublesome cave.

Except  I can't.  It's part of the progression and if I reset the RNG, I'll have to redo the cave before it, too.  And lord knows what hilarious affixes I'll encounter in that run.  (Invul + waller + mortar + molten rolfroflrofl) I'm not a gambling man, so I just tough it out... for two grueling hours.  After around 50k in repairs, I finally give up and flip furniture.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I head over to the Pride Parade Diablo 3 Forums to prepare for the inevitable ragedump and then I notice that the entire forum is an ocean of piss:

1. People on the shore, saying the waves aren't that intimidating.  ("I'm not in Inferno, but I think...")
2. People on yachts saying they aren't having any problems.  ("Wizard/Demon Hunter here, Act 4, +100 mil, you should have played harder prenerf, son!")
3. People are happy that they are drowning. ("The game is supposed to be challenging! YUMMY PISS!")
4. People who are rather upset that they are drowning. ("This isn't a game, it's a digital manifestation of Schadenfreude.")

I have a hard enough time standing in my own piss with a straight face, let alone the collective piss of others, so I stifle my reactionary rant as I have not found a way to profit from the Communist jet-planning heehaw that many of the fans/cultists are religiously fixated on committing.

I then remember a quote a friend of mine is forever fond of saying to me, "Show them.  Do not tell them."  And as we all know, plot forwarding device friends always have the best wisdom.

So I call upon my programming skills and bang out a script that mimics my experiences in that spider-drenched cave.  It literally took me 15 minutes to write.  It would have taken me longer to craft an air-tight argument to deflect obvious fanboy automata.  And my rant would not have ended up on Kotaku.

The script represents two possible outcomes:

1. Being killed instantly, and then being reminded that you need to purchase gear at a value that inflates by 14.9% every day. (85% chance of occurring)
2. Surviving the fight and being awarded an extremely trivial and useless item. (15% chance of occurring)

To simulate some sick graphics, bro, I pulled down some random stuff I found and tiled it without concern.  (Thank you, http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/) In fact, absolutely zero thought went into the presentation on purpose.  Content with this completely intentional train wreck, I then tried to pass it off as gameplay and dubbed it "Satan 1: A Diablo 3 Clone"  I released it into the wild, expecting the fanboys to froth wildly and tell me to "L2P", "GG NUB", "OPP", "At this current period in time, it is recommended that Wu-Tang Clan should not be disturbed in any way whatsoever.", or other common and extremely inefficient simulations of testosterone.

Well, that didn't happen.  At all.  Apparently, a lot of people were having a similar experience and my crappy script was a simplified embodiment of it.  In fact, two days ago, that script ate up 3GB of outgoing bandwidth.   Lemme bust out the maffs:

• That be 3,221,225,472 bytes of requested traffic.
• Each request took up around ~4,000 bytes.
• People played my game ~805,306 times.

It appears I've been extremely successful in converting my cave spider problem into a serious content delivery problem.  So I converted the delivery strategy to use Ajax calls instead.  This reduced subsequent calls to 1,500 bytes.  As of yesterday, I pulled down 1.3GB of traffic.  That means people played my game ~900,000 times yesterday.

Today, I minified the CSS and the JS, added GZip compression, enabled browser caching via etags, (Oh, Safari, you're such a special snowflake...) and have begun laying out a binpacking strategy to get client requests to be as tiny as possible.  I setup up Google AdSense late yesterday and I pulled in an amazing $1.24 in 14 hours.

So... I've created a monster whose 15 minutes of fame must surely expire soon.  In the meantime, I'm going to roll out more serious outrageous features and see just how far this rage-born parody can go.