Diablo 2: Resurrected Developers Detail Changes to Address Connectivity Issues

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Neither Blizzard nor players have had an easy time since the launch of Diablo 2: Resurrected on September 23. The game has been riddled with game crashes, server connection issues, character deletions, lost progress, and a few game-breaking bugs. The problem has been so incessant that some Diablo 2: Resurrected players have begun to request refunds, which Blizzard has not honored.

The latest major issue plaguing the game has been the inability for many players to log into it. The problem was believed to have been fixed on Saturday, October 9, which proved to be untrue, and players on Sunday continued to report the same issue. Though Blizzard has kept gamers somewhat updated through its customer service Twitter account, many players feel that they are not being sufficiently informed about what the exact problem is and why they can’t play a game they paid at least 40 dollars for.

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In a blog post on Thursday, the development team finally spelled out the reasons for the Diablo 2: Resurrected connectivity problems and what is being done to fix them, beginning with explaining how the game’s servers work. There is one global database that holds character information and progress for all players, as well as smaller databases for each region that store the same data. Information like in-game actions is first sent to a player’s local database and periodically written to the global database. To prevent errors or redundancy, characters are locked to the local database, and the global database serves mainly as a master copy and backup.

The Diablo 2: Resurrected login issues that began on Saturday, October 9, were due to the local servers being inundated with unprecedented traffic, which surpassed even that experienced during the game's launch. Combined with a Friday update intended to improve game creation performance, the global database became overloaded and timed out. Emergency maintenance was conducted to roll back the Friday update, and the development team believed the problem to be fixed and made an announcement on Twitter.

This proved to be untrue, unfortunately. Announcing that the login issues had been fixed caused an additional surge in traffic, which caused the central database to enter a kind of disconnect/reconnect loop. In other words, it spazzed out trying to keep up with the influx of information. Fixing this new problem caused a further surge in login attempts, which resulted in yet another lengthy server connectivity issue. This cycle of fixes, traffic surges, and database failure continued throughout the week, and the development team of Diablo 2: Resurrected has reached out to third-party partners for assistance.

In sum, despite the ongoing problems, Diablo 2: Resurrected continues to experience unexpected player counts in the hundreds of thousands, reaching all-time highs. There are a few reasons that the database and servers are unable to keep up with the high traffic experienced over the past week. The blog post goes into detail about each of these things. For example, one problem is that a lot of legacy code remained in the game in an attempt to change as little of the original Diablo 2 as possible. One particular legacy service handles things like game creation/joining and verifying game server health, and it is not handling modern player behavior well.

Diablo 2: Resurrected is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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