An Issue Occurred

Every time I leave a game or fail to join a game, I can no longer create or join games. I am completely shocked that a AAA company of decades has as much of a reputation for crashes and network problems as they do anything else. I’m keenly interested to understand whether this is a symptom of over zealous profit margins at the cost of player experience.

The Global database does not scale well to the Global application and traffic which is why servers were down from the 9th - 14th of Oct every day. They are working on it, but the temp game creation timer is a way to lower data flow while they work to fix it. The same goes for the Queue to log in.

What we are doing about it:

Rate limiting: We are limiting the number of operations to the database around creating and joining games, and we know this is being felt by a lot of you. For example, for those of you doing Pindleskin runs, you’ll be in and out of a game and creating a new one within 20 seconds. In this case, you will be rate limited at a point. :point_right: When this occurs, the error message will say there is an issue communicating with game servers: this is not an indicator that game servers are down in this particular instance, it just means you have been rate limited to reduce load temporarily on the database, in the interest of keeping the game running. We can assure you this is just mitigation for now–we do not see this as a long-term fix.

Full thread if you want all the tech details Diablo II: Resurrected Outages: An explanation, how we’ve been working on it, and how we’re moving forward

Rate limiting on baal runs which take >1 minute is a very different thing than rate limiting pindle. Again - my point was, blizzard is not some indie game developer with no experience in scaling network / database traffic. I have every confidence in the talent, and none in senior management’s ability to resource that talent properly.

I can’t say I disagree. They used the old Database code that worked fine in 2000 for Regions (US West, USEast, etc). Then they applied it at the global level for all Regions and platforms which is why it went belly up all those days in a row.

It is not going belly up now, but the queue and rate limiting is not a fun way to play. They don’t mean for it to be permanent though. Just until they change the database code and make it work for the intended application.

Why that was not done FIRST, I don’t know. I don’t work there. At least they did not try to release ladder right away.

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