Rate limiting games? this is a terrible idea

Literally a bandaid on a gaping wound.

FYI, “rate limiting” is when you lower the amounts of requests done to a server every second. This can be beneficial to some extent, but it could also make things like picking up items feel broken, laggier games and spell casts (like teleport) and other such things (like game creation). It’s not a good solution.

Rate limiting a game that’s 20 year old with a GUI upgrade that could run on a toaster. There’s other issues at play here. Rate limiting is like putting a 10 round cap on magazines in Warzone and making everybody melee each other to death because “bullets cause a performance hit”. Why not 10 seconds? 60 seconds is almost unbearable for people who don’t casually poke around Cold Plains stabbing things with cracked weapons.

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Gimp game with trash servers and user experience

I remember you could only make so many new games per hour, back in 2001-ish. Maybe 6 games per hour?

Without limits you have the problem of server outages. Server outages that could last 3-5+ hours a day with possibly no end in sight. With limits they have the servers running in real time so they can see what is going on so they can fix the problems. It is under this controlled environment that they have the best chances of fixing the servers. Without it they only have guess work instead of games being played in real time on the servers.

You do know that Asia and EU players can join NA servers and Asia is around 12 ahead of us. What is morning to us is evening to night to them.

Is this why there is a ~300 ping latency now? I was sub 100s average yesterday.

I wonder what the difference is between old d2lod’s realm down and this rate limiting system. It sounds like they’re basically sending us back to the time when we had to stay in the same room to kill all bosses… this is new realm down

IF rate-limiting is the only solution that is possible right now, then at least give us a timer or something that we can track before we can rejoin/create a game.

Also, perhaps consider rewording the error to accurately reflect what is happening e.g. “You have attempted to join/create games too quickly. Please try again in X seconds.”. I have traded with people who have thought the only way to get rid of the error was to restart their client.

I still can’t figure out why the act of attempting to join a game that is full, or create a game that already exists also gives you the lockout though, considering it is a simple query and the game doesn’t actually have to generate a world, load any characters or anything. It just seems overly punishing having a blanket (and long) retry timer applied to every type of failed action.

It should be something like:
Creating a new game (1 minute lockout)
Joining an existing game (30 second lockout)
Failing to join a full game (10 second lockout)
Failing to create a game that already exists (10 second lockout)

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Somehow Google is able to work without queues for searches. That’s because they have a huge amount of capacity. So while I’m sure they could optimize how things work here on this game, it really does come down to just being stingy about capacity.

Also, this is another lie where they said that there would be no wait times between games. They had to have known this was going to happen. Even David Brevik could predict it and he hasn’t been with the company in 20 years. They said wait times between games would be a thing of the past. And just like the mod support they promised, it’s just another bait and switch.

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It is almost unplayable at this point. I spend more time trying to find a game and being “timed-out” than playing. That is why I am in the forums right now because I am “timed-out.” Blizzard spend some money and get more servers, it is not hard.

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There’s a queue because regional saves have been removed and everything’s been reverted to global, so early morning queues are due to the high traffic of people playing the game in Asia.

I don’t have a problem with rate limiting, but the way they limited it was pure laziness. They said it was specifically to cut down on the spam game creation, but it also has locked people out who type in a game name wrong/a non existent game and try to join games that are full. It’s absolutely inexcusable, and all of these issues combined with the massive optimization issues that lead to continual game crashes have left a lot of people incredibly upset, and for good reason. It’s also been over two weeks since they last gave an update, with the team ignoring people on twitter and the forums since. This is not how you deal with customers.

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There should be no lockout for trying to join a full game, a non-existent game, or trying to create a game that already exists.

You’re looking for logic behind it when there is none. It was pure laziness when programming so that it just includes all users trying to join any type of game with no exception, regardless of the circumstance.

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No, they chose to rate limit instead of increasing the amount of servers used. They decided that their customers’ investment in their product was not worth their ability to keep their promise to them. Increasing servers would cost the company money, which they weren’t willing to spend. This is a Capitalism problem. This problem could’ve been solved right away. As much as I hate Amazon, they had the exact same issue with New World, so they added a ton of new servers.

It comes down to Blizzard being more than happy to take our money but then not thoroughly investing it to keep the experience stable, so we get left with a less than desirable product, something that contradicts what was promised to us. Another company lying about it’s product - shocker!

Heck even the original D2:LOD has rate limiting and is that a shocker to you. You cannot endlessly make games without a hitch. That is what others have said in threads like this one. Even though I didn’t play online in the original D2:LOD nearly as much as I have done in D2R.

I like the route they are taking. As long as players stay mostly to their region then it will work. The only reason that I can think of that players change regions is to see if they can be in a shorter queues. So if the saves are done locally will alleviate the stress more than enough to at least greatly reduce the queues to where they are not that much of a factor. Along with changing things on the rate limiting where it is not much of an issue then I am all for it. Otherwise the solution will always be to throw more servers at a problem instead of actually fixing the problem by having character saved regionally more often. Then the global save can be done with less frequency than it is now.

Do you think that if this was D3 and we could play with our friends in EU using the same characters that we use in NA that we would be playing with them at a rate where the global server would have to keep our character saves like the global servers do with D2R. I say no they wouldn’t because we probably wouldn’t be playing with them at a rate where it would need to be saved like it is now.

Exactly.

Instead of stitching the gaping wound they apply a bandaid on it.

And the bandaid shows the estimated cure time.

PATHETIC. Shame on you Activision

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To Activision we are not customers

We are cashcows

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The easiest fix for countless game creation would be the option to reload everything via in-game button or /reload in chat.

That way, nobody would Save & Exit > Create new for 35 times to farm Pindle or whoever.

obviously u are correct that buying more servers is the answer to the problem, but you need to keep in mind that, the IT and networking people… ( you know the people who know what they are actaully doing) dont get to make these types of decisions… “management” does

and management is going to do everything in their power to not have to spent more money.

thats why purposely didn’t buy anywhere near enough servers, thats why if people buy the game and get angry and leave the amount of servers they need might go down.
its always management trying some BS cost cutting measure and screwing over the customer… i don’t blame IT, the more than likely have their hands tied.

i know i always had my hand tied when i worked in IT.

management donest want to hear “we need to buy more servers” server cost TON of money and we are in a global chip crisis and they are very hard to come by.

its even possible that IT finally did manage to convince management and they just cant get the servers yet because of the crisis.

i lot if people are throwing out hate saying " why cant you get this to work" when in fact the IT team could fairly easy do so given the proper resources… the point is IT teams are almost NEVER given the resources they need because doing it the proper way is expensive AF… and management always wants to save money rather than doing things the proper way.

Buying more servers isn’t the answer to this particular problem. This problem stems from them having a single process that handles all game creation, joining, removals, etc… In modern applications you design them in such a way that you can dynamically scale up. In the case of something like this you’d have a queue that stores requests and then you’d have a variable number of worker processes pulling from that queue and handling the requests. The workers would likely be talking back to a large central database to be able to coordinate everything and avoid conflicts. What we have right now is the old legacy code which is a single monolithic (not split out) process that handles everything in-line. Meaning, it can only handle one request at a time, and it likely has a very limited internal queue for requests. So basically if it gets flooded with requests it becomes overloaded and falls over. Hence why they’ve implemented the rate limiting for now. The proper solution is for them to completely rewrite that service code so that it’s more modern and can scale up dynamically with request load and also so that it can be spread out over multiple servers instead of just one. That’s obviously going to take time though so unfortunately we’ll likely be stuck like this for a while.

Also, in terms of the lag and rubber banding that we’ve seen seeing during peak gameplay hours: these days servers are generally hosted on cloud services such as AWS or GCP which means that spinning up more servers during peak demand then shutting them all down when demand is low is something that is quite simple and relatively inexpensive for companies to do. That’s what needs to be happening here with the game servers themselves. During peak periods more game servers should be dynamically added in and then spun back down when no longer needed. That’s a whole other issue though not related to the rate limiting.

Which means they knew this was going to happen. If they didn’t, they are incredibly incompetent. So they sold a game they can’t actually make. They made promises they knew were not going to be the case. Twitch viewership is at all time lows and they still can’t get things going as well as Bnet 1.0. That viewership has a strong correlation to active players. This is not about heavy population launch numbers anymore. That lie is done with. Even if that WAS the case, they easily could have predicted it as well.