Back in September, Blizzard Entertainment decided to appeal to gamers’ sentimentality by releasing Diablo II: Resurrected. Unfortunately for the publisher, the game has responded like it has been hit with a Y2K level bug.
The game is meant to be an update on the version released in 2000. While the graphics and network functions have been changed, none of the item systems or game balance are different from the original.
The main issue has been server outages. And according to the game makers, the outages are caused by the original game’s code. But that is not the only issue. A statement released by Blizzard read:
“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. 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.“
Blizzard is reacting to the issue by making a couple of small changes. The first is rate-limiting, which will stop players from starting new games if they have recently started too many. Second, player logins are going to be slowed so that the servers do not get overwhelmed.
In attempting to maintain an authentic experience many crucial systems were kept in place, including, “game creation/joining, updating/reading/filtering game lists, verifying game server health, and reading characters from the database.”
According to PCGamer, it appears that the legacy code is unable to keep up with “modern player behavior.”
Read Blizzard’s full accounting of the issues here.
