While Diablo and brothers never really had much trouble returning to Sanctuary over and over again, the heroes who seek to slay them (over and over) certainly have! As we reported earlier this week, the Diablo II Resurrected servers have been struggling since the game launched late last month. And with rollback, lag, and constant disconnections plaguing the servers as recently as this past weekend, players were beginning to wonder what in Baal’s balls is going on over there with the Diablo IIÂ servers.
A blue post on the official Diablo II Resurrected forums last night finally reveals the issues. According to Blizzard, netcode written from 2001 and modern player habits do not mix well. One example? Hundreds of thousands of players were creating games to one-shot a single boss mob (like the well known Pindleskin), ending the game, and then creating another game to do the same thing over and over and over again. This knocked down the servers faster than Diablo could say “not even death can save you from me.”
“Our server outages have not been caused by a singular issue; we are solving each problem as they arise, with both mitigating solves and longer-term architectural changes,” Blizzard writes. “A small number of players have experienced character progression loss–moving forward, any loss due to a server crash should be limited to several minutes. This is not a complete solve to us, and we are continuing to work on this issue. Our team, with the help of others at Blizzard, are working to bring the game experience to a place that feels good for everyone.”
There’s a silver lining in the explanation for the outages, at least: As of Tuesday, the game hit a concurrent player high.
Moving forward, the folks at Blizzard promises to improve and optimize on the server structure by addressing small projects that can be completed in a day to larger projects such as adding “a GameList service that is only responsible for providing the game list to players.”
It might not be a bad idea to just play singleplayer for a while, especially since the ladder hasn’t even started yet.
