The team felt the former was the correct decision as it allowed people to keep playing the game. The team had no way of moving characters over to the global database, so they felt they had two choices: unlock everyone with unsaved changes in the global database, or bring the game offline entirely for a time. Players’ characters were becoming stuck in regional databases during the server outage. Though we did foresee this – with players making fresh characters on fresh servers, working hard to get their magic-finding items – we vastly underestimated the scope we derived from beta testing.”įletcher also talks about progress loss.
Today, however, a new player can look up any number of amazing content creators who can teach them how to play the game in different ways, many of them including lots of database load in the form of creating, loading, and destroying games in quick succession.
“In 2001, there wasn’t nearly as much content on the internet around how to play Diablo II ‘correctly’ (Baal runs for XP, Pindleskin/Ancient Sewers/etc for magic find, etc). “We mention ‘modern player behaviour’ because it’s an interesting point to think about,” Fletcher says. In staying “true to the original game”, the team kept a lot of the old code, with one legacy service in particular “struggling to keep up with modern player behaviour”. Community manager Adam Fletcher has posted a lengthy explainer on Diablo 2’s blog sharing what’s happened, why it’s happened, and what the team is doing to tackle these issues going forward.Īlongside surges of popularity overwhelming the servers, Fletcher says that part of the issue comes down to legacy code. Blizzard has peeled back the curtain on the technical side of Diablo 2: Resurrected’s server issues, which have plagued the new PC game since launch.