Since comments are disabled in the main thread but you ask for feedback, lets open it back up:
Why this is happening:
In staying true to the original game, we kept a lot of legacy code. However, one legacy service in particular is struggling to keep up with modern player behavior.
This service [...] is a singleton, which means we can only run one instance of it in order to ensure all players are seeing the most up-to-date and correct game list at all times. We did optimize this service in many ways to conform to more modern technology, but as we previously mentioned, a lot of our issues stem from game creation.
So you have lots of legacy code, still 40 bucks. So you tried to fix you singleton instance, that does all the work (ok, sure), but it didnt work. With the lack of quality checks, what can we expect from further developments? Diablo 2 launched twenty years ago, it was a struggle, yet you dont seem to improve. Why?
We mention “modern player behavior” because it’s an interesting point to think about. In 2001, there wasn’t nearly as much content on the internet around how to play Diablo II “correctly” (Baal runs for XP, Pindleskin/Ancient Sewers/etc for magic find, etc). Today, however, a new player can look up any number of amazing content creators who can teach them how to play the game in different ways, many of them including lots of database load in the form of creating, loading, and destroying games in quick succession. Though we did foresee this–with players making fresh characters on fresh servers, working hard to get their magic-finding items–we vastly underestimated the scope we derived from beta testing.
Well maybe I’ve played a different Diablo II back then.
What we are doing about it:
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Login Queue Creation:
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(right now, it looks like a failed authentication in the client) and should be fully deployed in the coming days on PC, with console to follow after.
Too bad you dont have other clients with exactly the same authentication process. You’re not reinventing the wheel.
You sell a game with core content is online play. If you can not provide that service, dont sell it. Its easy as that. It’s not like you rushed the release, it’s not like market analysis could fail that hard.