This is the point where we can move into player behaviour
This was compounded due to an update that we launched earlier that day intended to enhance performance around game creation-these two factors combined caused our database to become overloaded, causing it to time out. We took the decision to roll back that Friday update we’d earlier D2R Items hoping to reduce the load on the servers leading into Sunday while giving us the opportunity to explore the root of the issue.”
It turned out that changing the patch wasn’t enough. Sunday saw an even higher increase in traffic, and the servers were again smashed. It happened again on Monday. The above linked post is very long and meticulously comprehensive in its explanation of the causes.
However, in particular Blizzard assigns the blame to some old software that was used for making games and joining them, and also reading characters from the database. “We have improved this service in a variety of ways to conform to more modern technology, but as we’ve said before that a large portion of our issues stem from the process of creating games,” says the post.
“We have mentioned’modern behavior of players”, as it’s an interesting issue to contemplate. It was 2001 and there wasn’t nearly as much content available on internet around what it takes to play Diablo II ‘correctly’ (Baal plays for XP or Pindleskin/Ancient sewers for finding the magical item, etc.).
However, today the new player is able to find any number of fantastic content creators who can help them take part in various ways, many of them including lots of database load by creating.
loading, and completely destroying games in quick succession. While we anticipated this with players creating new characters on fresh servers, struggling to locate their magical items to find-we completely misjudged the potential of our beta testing. “Basically the problem is that you’re all too experienced, and videogame guides can be blamed. (You can check out the top Diablo 2 builds guide here.)
The post concludes by discussing what Blizzard are doing about the issues, which includes a number of less than ideal solutions. This includes rate limits which prevents players from playing more than one game in quick time, and queues for logins.
This will ensure that players don’t overload servers and instead queue like they’re playing an MMO. The rate limit is currently in effect and is viewed as “mitigation” instead of a long-term fix, whereas queues will be implemented “in the coming months on desktop computers.”
In addition, Blizzard say they’ve drafted people from all over the company, “not just on the D2R Ladder Items” for help working on the issues. It is hoped that eventually, they will have it working without limits.