Diablo 2: Resurrected’s Connection Problems Are Caused by Legacy Code

Diablo 2: Resurrected has been experiencing a number of connection issues recently, with players being unable to login for long stretches of time in the recent days. While the community has been expressing its anger all across forums and social media, community manager Adam Fletcher (aka PezRadar) has posted a lengthy explanation on the Blizzard forums of what’s causing these problems.

A lot of it can be blamed on the servers, according to Fletcher, since the infrastructure just isn’t capable of handling the level of player activity that the game has been experiencing in recent days. Exacerbating the issue is the constant rollout of updates, which caused the servers to misbehave, since it kept backing up processes instead of servicing requests.

Blizzard also kept a significant chunk of the game’s legacy code, which was responsible for keeping track of a number of operations for players. As a majority of the returning players put signficant stress on the 20-year old service, it eventually began buckling, which caused all sorts of issues.

“In 2001, there wasn’t nearly as much content on the internet around how to play Diablo 2 ‘correctly’ (Baal runs for XP, Pindleskin/Ancient Sewers/etc for magic find, etc),” Fletcher wrote. “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.”

Blizzard is taking three steps to address the issue while it works on a major technical patch – rate limiting, a login queue, and “dividing critical functions into smaller services”. Player response to the ordeal hasn’t been positive, but it would certainly be great if the fix bears any fruit for the betterment of the game.