Yes, I should know better. Yes, many could have seen this coming a mile away. Yes, I did offer up an official review of Diablo 2: Resurrected for Shacknews and had assumed that the game would be in a much better place right now than it was on launch week. This did not come to pass and the excuses given tell you what you need to know about what management over at Blizzard thinks of you.
D2R attempts to bring back a certified PC gaming classic, with all its warts, while also trying to spruce things up for a modern audience. As a new coat of paint, the package isn’t the worst thing in the world, but unless all you care about is graphics, then D2R is in worse shape than Vanilla Diablo 2.
It sucked enough that the upgrades, alterations and quality-of-life changes were nearly nonexistent at launch, but now, most players will probably be experiencing intermittent connectivity issues with Battle.net servers and/or hard crashes to desktop. This problem only seems to be worsening each day.
Blizzard community support spoke up on the issue last week claiming that unprecedented play demand resulted in the game’s database being taken offline multiple times. Despite scrambling to get some fixes out there, the same thing happened a few more times. Blizzard says the problem is too many people playing the game and too many people playing it “the wrong way.”
In this case, “the wrong way” means that people are creating new games, clearing a specific mob/mobs, collecting the loot, and then restarting the process. For as long as Diablo 2 has been around, this is the ideal way to farm for either XP, crafting mats, or specific items. Blizzard says the additional strain of these match creations is ruining their backend. It also mentions that people today have access to better strategy content and guides, so they aren’t wasting time playing the game aimlessly (which happens to be easier on Blizzard servers).
A side effect of this is that joining and moving around through games has become frustrating and sometimes impossible. In the evening, you’ll even be placed in a queue to open the game, even if you only have offline characters. Again, Blizzard explains that these complications are from legacy code that wasn’t designed to handle this type of load. Good thing that held multiple alpha and beta tests that let players properly test the game so they could have seen this problem coming. Oh wait.
The implication from Blizzard that this should be no big deal or that everything would be fine if people played Diablo 2 in a less “correct” way rubs me the wrong way. The Warcraft III remaster was a disaster, no one knows what Overwatch 2 is, and the future is as cloudy as ever. Don’t be like me, spend your free time elsewhere unless you like applying white face paint and big red noses.
