Adam Fletcher, a representative from the Diablo community, was on hand to provide an explanation for what had occurred over the course of the previous weekend. On Saturday and Sunday, the servers saw a significant increase in the number of players, far outstripping the number of players who had joined the game the previous day. It was an update, according to Fletcher, that had been rolled out the day before that exacerbated the problem. The update was intended to improve performance around game creation. According to Fletcher's account, the problem occurred on Saturday afternoon. Following the rollback of the Friday update, Blizzard immediately went to work attempting to figure out what the hell was going on with the game. Eventually, they were able to achieve success.
1. To be completely honest, the fact that the remaster was built on a foundation of mostly old code is one of the most significant flaws in its design and implementation
2. Author Fletcher claims that a specific service is to blame for some of the server issues that have been reported in the last few days
3. A number of critical game functions, according to the website, are carried out by the service in question
4. These functions include: game creation and joining; updating, reading, and filtering game lists; verifying game server health; and reading characters from the database to ensure that your character can participate in whatever it is that you are filtering for
5. This service was established more than two decades ago to monitor player behavior, but the world has changed significantly since then
6. Unlike previous generations, Fletcher believes that modern players interact with the game in a different way than they did previously
7. He gives specific examples
As Fletcher points out, there wasn't nearly as much information available on the internet in 2001 about how to 'correctly' play Diablo II (such as Baal runs for XP, Pindleskin or ancient sewers for magic find, and so on) as there is today. A large number of amazing content creators are now available to new players who can teach them how to play the game in a variety of ways, many of which require a significant amount of database load in the form of creating, loading, and destroying games in rapid succession (which is not uncommon). Players creating new characters on new servers and working hard to obtain their magic-finding D2R items was something we expected, but the amount of information gleaned from beta testing was something we completely underestimated.
Fletcher also claims that the high frequency with which the game was saving data to the global database exacerbated the problems. A more accurate description would be that it was a case of going too far. Developer Fletcher believes that your character should be automatically saved to the regional database on a regular basis, and that this should happen on a regular basis as well. It should only occur when the game needs to unlock you, which should be a relatively infrequent occurrence when it comes to the global database. At the moment, the team's focus is on increasing the efficiency with which savings are achieved in order to achieve greater savings.
The first, second, and third positions are the most significant.
The Diablo team has devised a three-pronged strategy in order to reduce the number of server issues that occur. Rate limiting will be implemented first, which means that the number of times you can create and join games will be limited by the game itself. In the event that this occurs, a standard error message will be displayed on screen. For the second time, Diablo II will be the first game in the series to include server queues, making it the first game in the series to do so. Keep checking back for updates because you'll be able to see it as soon as it goes live. It is currently being completed for tasks that can be finished in less than a day (some of which have already been completed this week), and it is also being planned for larger projects, such as new microservices (for example, a GameList service that is solely responsible for providing players with a list of available games). Whenever a critical function has been compromised, we can consider scaling up our game management services, which will reduce the amount of load placed on the system and allow it to be restored to its previous state.
I have to admit that it has been a bit of a letdown in terms of everything. The random error messages that will appear when joining games, even after having to sit on your bum for a long period of time in order to be able to join, will, in my opinion, cause some frustration overall. We are currently dealing with demons, so we are hoping that things will become more stable in the coming months.
