[quote name='crystalklear64']well nightmare diablo was beaten and supposedly people were near hell diablo but the servers were taken down for maint. didn't think we'd get to hear about how tough inferno is on the first day especially when blizzard had said it'd take people months...
i get the feeling its just going to be slightly difficult and when they said all that stuff about how impossible it was going to be, it was in relation to casual players.[/QUOTE]
People reaching Hell difficulty doesn't surprise me much. There are some very dedicated people out there and Diablo isn't meant to be a large game like World of Warcraft. It has a lot of stuff, however it's very focused and fits a lot into a little.
The way they've described Inferno is "Inferno is based around our internal play test group we created specifically for Inferno. We found what was hard for them and then doubled it. None of our internal team has managed to beat Inferno yet." I don't believe their internal test team for inferno are slouches, so hopefully it lives up to taking a while. I expect maybe a week for most hardcore people. I know a few blue posters said they're expecting it to take roughly 3 weeks in a best case scenario if the person doesn't use bugs/glitches/"Not working as intended" things, so who knows. There are a lot more people who will be attacking it and seeing things at different angles that the internal test team didn't.
[quote name='ExplodingRat']There's a free starter edition, for all the guest pass beggars. Just go download that and try it.[/QUOTE]
No, there isn't. For the first month that is disabled and people can only get in via Guest Passes.