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Diablo 2 Resurrected: Blizzard explains the causes of the servers

The past week was hard for each player of Diablo 2 resurrected. Standing server crashes and rollbacks tugged at the nerves. In a game like Diablo 2, in which the improvement of its own hero represents the central gameplay element by good items, it is absolutely unacceptable if these valuable objects accidentally disappear from the inventory. Who loses Jah or Ber-Rune after a server-down, understandably, for the time being, it does not have a buck on Diablo 2. In addition, a patch destroyed the PS5 version of Diablo 2.

In addition, the silence of Blizzard caused the causes of crashes and rollbacks for further frustration, but also speculation about dupes and exploits made the round. After all, there is now a lane blog post from Blizzard Community Manager Pezradar, who is dedicated to the problems.

The cause of the continuing server failures at Diablo 2 Resurrected have been primarily sudden and significant increases in traffic since 9 October 2021:

On Saturday morning Pacific time, there was a global failure due to a sudden, significant increase in traffic. This was a new threshold that our servers had never experienced before, not even at the start. Was the situation worsened by an update, the We had published the day before to improve the performance in creating new games - these two factors together overloaded our global database and led to a timeout. We decided to take back the update from Friday, hoping that the servers thus Relieve until Sunday, while at the same time we would have the opportunity to examine the cause more accurately .

Am Sunday, however, turned out that the measures of Saturday did not sufficient - traffic rose even further, so it came to another failure. Our Game Server noticed that the connection to the database was interrupted, and immediately tried to connect again, which led to the fact that the database was no longer behind, as it was too busy to process a continuous stream of call attempts from game reserves. During this time, we also recognized that we could improve the configuration of our database event logging required for the restoration of the normal state in the case of a database failure.

Aber Because we were online in a time window with high player activity, with hundreds of thousands of games within ten minutes, the servers are crashed again. That was bad.

So we had to make many corrections, including configuration and code enhancements that we play into the global backup database. On Monday, October 11, we then switched the global databases. This led to another failure, as our backup database falsely continued to carry out its backup process, which meant that it spent most of the time copying from the other database while actually asking questions from servers. During this time we discovered more problems and suggested further improvements. We found a now obsolete, but strongly load-generating query, which we could completely remove from the database, we optimized the authorization tests for players when they join a game, which further reduced the stress, and we have further performance improvements in the test phase.

02:21 Diablo 2: Resurrected: Massive, technical problems with the Remaster

The question of why Diablo 2 Resurrected is not yet able to cope with sudden traffic spikes is also addressed by the Community Manager:

To stay faithful to the original, we have maintained a lot of old code. However, in particular, one of the original jobs has enormous difficulties to deal with modern player behavior . The service that contains some improvements to the original is responsible for critical game functions For example, for creating games, updating / reading / filtering game lists, checking the state of the game server and reading characters from the database to ensure that a character can participate in what is being filtered. From This service can only run an instance to ensure that all players will see the latest and correct playlist at any time. We have optimized this service in many ways to adapt it to more modern technologies, but as we have already mentioned, many of our Problems from the massive creation of new games.

What the team says is also explained.

We mention the modern play behavior because it is an important point. In 2001 there was not nearly as much information on how to play Diablo 2 Right (Baal Runs, Pindleskin, Alt-Sewers, etc) However, a new player [...] can quickly learn how to play the game in different ways, many of which include a lot of data banklast in the form of creating, loading and closing games in quick succession. Although we have foreseen that - Players who create new characters on new servers and very many items farms, we have far underestimated the scope we derived from the beta tests.

What the players from Diablo 2 besides the server-downs as mentioned in the most violent frustrated, the rollbacks that almost arbitrarily destroyed progress. Also, there is an explanation of Blizzard:

The loss of progress occurred in some players is due to the way we curl in the regional and in the global database, - ie we lock your character in the global database, if You are assigned to one of a region (if you play in the US region, your character is locked for the USA region, and most actions are solved in the database of the USA Region) .

The problem was that during a server failure, as the database collapsed, a number of characters in the regional database were found and we had no way to move them into the global database. At this time we saw two options: either we lock all characters with unsaved changes in the global database and thus lose part of the progress because the global database is overwritten, or we go completely down the game for an indefinite time and leave a script Running the regional data writes to the global database .

Damals, we have opted for the former: we kept it more important to keep the game running, so that the players can play as the game for a long time to restore the data. We are very sorry for all players who have lost important progress or valuable objects. As a player we know how much a rollback hurts, and we feel that too.

Image gallery (Enlarge view for sources)

This will certainly not really comfort the items that have lost items. But what does the team do to prevent server from crashing or items from Diablo 2 in the future?

We limit the number of database accesses, such as creating games or joining them. [...] those of you who make pindleskin runs, for example, will get into a game within 20 seconds and get out again Create a new game. In this case, you will encounter a limit at a specific point. In this case, an error message is displayed that states that there is a problem with the game servers. This does not mean that the game servers in this Case do not work, but only means that the limit has been reached to temporarily relieve the database so that the game can continue on. We can assure that this is only a temporary measure - we do not see this as a long-term solution .

Furthermore, it has always come to smaller problems, which therefore stir that herds of players simultaneously log in. And to diagnose them quickly, you need to get the logging flows of the players under control.

To solve this problem, our employees work on a queue for the registration, similar to what you may know about World of Warcraft. In this way we can observe where the system is overloaded, and take care of it before the game Completely collapsed. We will gradually lift the upper limits for the simultaneous logins if we are on a secure level. This login queue has already been implemented in part in the backend (at the moment it looks like a failed authentication in the client) and should Completely implemented on the PC in the coming days, the console will follow later.

Furthermore, it is also about other functionalities that affect game lists and other. At the end of the posts, the developers also explain that of course they work hard to resolve the problems and themselves are longtime Diablo-2 players. After all, after one-week silence there was an answer for the reasons. Whether the announced fixes actually improve the stability of the servers remains to be seen. This afternoon at 15:30 clock we will most likely know if the measures work. At this time, the Diablo-2 servers crashed regularly in the past week.

Summary can be clarified: The server failures were not caused by a single problem, but through many small problems. The traffic was unexpectedly high, caused by Modernes game behavior. With a small number of players, there was a loss of character progress - in the future, every loss should be limited to a few minutes due to a server crash. This is not a definitive solution, Blizzard continues to work on the problems.

Sequel follows...

08:54 Diablo 2: Resurrected | Results of our survey: So you have evaluated the Remaster

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Diablo 2: Resurrected: New PS5 patch is live, update should fix problems with play button

Blizzard has released a new version of patch 10.12 for the PS5 version of Diablo 2 Resurrected. PCNSWXSXPS5PS40

Diablo 2 Resurrected: Server are already down, the sixth day in a row

The latest PS5 patch for Diablo 2 Resurrected prevents you can log in to online games. Already no good news. PCNSWXSXPS5PS40

Diablo 2: Resurrected: Patch 10.12 for PC, new update for PS5 in preparation

Blizzard releases the patch 10.12 for Diablo 2 Resurrected on PC as a download. For PS5 players, there is a new patch today.

By Maria Beyer-Fistrich Brand / Editorial Director 15.10.2021 at 11:45

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