Diablo 2: Resurrected’s launch saw its fair share of server issues and, unfortunately, they’ve persisted after its first few days out in the wild. As players continue to have trouble logging in and vanquishing demons, Blizzard has explained that legacy code and high concurrent player counts are the reasons behind these issues, while outlining its approach to fix them, which includes implementing a login queue.
The developer notes that Diablo 2: Reusrrected’s server issues were not caused by a “singular issue,” the ones during the past weekend occurring because of unexpected surges in traffic. The remaster uses “a lot of legacy code” but one of its services is particularly struggling to keep up, even with a set of improvements to accommodate the way in which modern players will approach farming for loot.
“This service, with some upgrades from the original, handles critical pieces of game functionality, namely game creation/joining, updating/reading/filtering game lists, verifying game server health, and reading characters from the database to ensure your character can participate in whatever it is you’re filtering for,” the developer wrote on its website</a>.
“Importantly, this service is a singleton, which means we can only run one instance of it in order to ensure all players are seeing the most up-to-date and correct game list at all times. We did optimize this service in many ways to conform to more modern technology, but as we previously mentioned, a lot of our issues stem from game creation.”
When the original game launched, there was less knowledge about optimal farming spots or routes which, nowadays, is easily accessible through guides and content creators. These methods involve ” lots of database load in the form of creating, loading, and destroying games in quick succession,” which the developer did anticipate, but not to the current extent.
The post linked above goes deeper into how the game’s databases are split and how they save characters, which has to do with some players losing progress. As far as fixes go, Blizzard will start by implementing rate limiting. This means that at some point when quickly creating and quitting games, during stuff like Pindleskin runs, you’ll receive an error noting an issue communicating with the servers.
“[…]this is not an indicator that game servers are down in this particular instance, it just means you have been rate limited to reduce load temporarily on the database, in the interest of keeping the game running. We can assure you this is just mitigation for now–we do not see this as a long-term fix,” Blizzard added.
Diablo 2: Resurrected is also getting login queues, in an effort to stop high numbers of players from logging in simultaneously. This “will keep the population at the safe level we have at the time, so we can monitor where the system is straining and address it before it brings the game down completely.” As these strains are fixed, the population caps will be increased. The login queue will go live first on PC, “in the coming days,” after which it will also make it to consoles.
Blizzard is also looking to break out critical pieces of functionality into smaller services, as well as a fix for character progression loss, but it sounds like it might take a while before the game’s server issues will be fully solved.
Diablo 2: Resurrected is out now on PC, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and Nintendo Switch.
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