For those who attempted to play some Diablo II: Resurrected, there is a possibility that you encountered some difficulties. The game's servers have been experiencing difficulties, preventing players from creating or joining games, among other things. Act II was a tough one for me, and my friend and I both noticed a lot of rubberbanding as we walked through it. Blizzard is fully aware of the situation and has narrowed down the root causes. Indeed, there are a variety of factors contributing to the chugging. Several safeguards, such as rate limiting and the creation of player queues, are being implemented by Blizzard to combat the ongoing server issues in Diablo II: Resurrection.
Adam Fletcher, Diablo community manager, was on hand to provide an explanation for what occurred over the course of the weekend. To summarize, the servers experienced a massive influx of players on Saturday and Sunday, far exceeding the number of players who played when the game first launched. It was "exacerbated by an update we had rolled out the day before that was intended to improve performance around game creation," according to Fletcher, who stated that the problem occurred on Saturday. Blizzard rolled back the Friday update and got to work trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Eventually they succeeded.
Diablo II, old code, and a server queue are all present.
To be completely honest, one of the most significant problems with the remaster is that it was built on a foundation of mostly old code. The author, Fletcher, claims that a specific service is to blame for some of the server issues. The service in question "handles critical pieces of game functionality, including 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," according to the website. This service was created to monitor player behavior more than two decades ago, but times have changed since then. Fletcher claims that modern players interact with the game in a different way than previous generations.
According to Fletcher, "in 2001, there wasn't nearly as much content on the internet around how to 'correctly' play Diablo II (Baal runs for XP, Pindleskin/Ancient Sewers/etc for magic find, etc).""Today, however, a new player can look up any number of amazing content creators who can teach them how to play the game in a variety of ways, many of which involve a significant amount of database load in the form of creating, loading, and destroying games in rapid succession. "Despite the fact that we foresaw this (with players creating new characters on new servers and working hard to obtain their magic-finding D2R items), we vastly underestimated the scope of the information gleaned from beta testing."
Fletcher goes on to say that the problems were exacerbated by the frequency with which the game was saving data to the global database. To put it another way, it was overdoing it. Fletcher and the Diablo team believe that your character should be saved to the regional database on a regular basis, and that this should be done automatically. However, for the global database, it should only occur when the game needs to "unlock" you, which should be infrequent. At the moment, the team is working on modifying the way in which savings are accomplished.
the numbers one, two, and three
The Diablo team has devised a three-pronged approach to reducing server issues. The first step is rate limiting, which means that the game will limit the number of times you can create and join games. When this occurs, you'll receive a standard error message as a result. Second, Diablo II will feature server queues for the first time, making it the first game in the series to do so. You will be able to see it as soon as it goes live. Currently, this work is partially completed for things that can be completed in less than a day (some of which have already been completed this week), and it is also planned for larger projects, such as new microservices (for example, a GameList service that is solely responsible for providing the game list to players)," Fletcher writes. When critical functionality has been compromised, we can consider scaling up our game management services, which will reduce the amount of load on the system.
It is, to be honest, a bit of a disappointment all around. Overall, I anticipate some frustration with the random error messages that will appear when joining games, even after having to sit on your bum for a while to get into them. Hopefully, things will become more stable in the coming months, because we have demons to battle.