Blizzard explains why ‘Diablo 2: Resurrected’ is having problems

Blizzard Entertainment has offered an explanation on outage issues affecting Diablo 2: Resurrected and the steps it’s taking to resolve it.

In a forum post yesterday (October 14) from its community manager, the development team wanted to provide “some transparency” around multiple server issues that have been affecting the game.

“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,” the post 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.”

Diablo II: Resurrected Update:

???? Servers
???? Legacy Code
???? Notes on Progress

Read here: https://t.co/o8WnR3LwEs

— Diablo (@Diablo) October 14, 2021

The post gets more detailed and specific into what’s causing Diablo 2: Resurrected‘s server issues, explaining how their global databases work as well as providing a timeline of downtime experienced from October 9 until now.

In short, one key reason behind these outages is a result of legacy code, with one legacy service in particular “struggling to keep up with modern player behaviour”.

Going forward, the developers will addressing the issues first by limiting the number of operations to the database around creating and joining games, which will just be a temporary mitigation rather than a long-term fix.

A login queue for Diablo 2: Resurrected is also being created, similar to World Of Warcraft, in order to keep the player population at a “safe level”, which has been implemented in the back-end but will roll out soon on PC, followed by console.

Finally, the team is breaking out critical pieces of functionality into smaller “microservices” such as a GameList service that is only responsible for providing the game list to players, with the aim to then scale up game management services, which should reduce the amount of load.

Elsewhere, Back 4 Blood has received a hotfix that makes the campaign difficulty a bit easier.