Blizzard responds to Diablo 2 Resurrected server issues
"We wanted to provide some transparency around what is causing these issues."
Diablo 2 Resurrected has been suffering from server issues since launch, as previously reported.
Now, Blizzard has shared a detailed blog post to explain why and how they're moving forward.
"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," it reads.
"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."
The post goes on to explain how the game servers work, with connections between regional servers and a larger global server. Between saving too often to the global servers and increasingly high numbers of concurrent players, the servers have struggled to cope.
Interestingly, the remaster utilises a lot of legacy code from the original. "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," reads the post.
It seems this legacy code can't quite keep up with modern sensibilities, as player behaviour has changed since the early 2000s. That includes repeatedly creating new games to farm items which can overload the servers.
Blizzard is therefore working on three major fixes.
Firstly, the team is rate limiting the number of operations to the database around creating and joining games, though this is just mitigation for now.
Secondly, a login queue has been created to maintain safe levels of players across servers. As fixes are made, the population cap will increase.
Lastly, critical pieces of functionality are being broken into smaller more manageable pieces of work.
"This game means so much to all of us," reads the post. "A lot of us on the team are lifelong D2 players-we played during its initial launch back in 2000, some are part of the modding community, and so on. We can assure you that we will keep working until the game experience feels good to us not only as developers, but as players and members of the community ourselves."
You can read the full blog post here. In our Diablo 2 Resurrected review we described it as a "faithful revival of an uncompromising classic".