[News] 'Legacy code' in Diablo 2: Resurrected is causing widespread connection headaches

[L-MOK7H]

The first few weeks of Diablo 2: Resurrected have not gone especially smoothly. At launch, players reported troubles with disappearing or locked-out characters, and some were unable to start the game at all.

Three weeks down the road, some players are still struggling to connect to the game's servers: Multiple reports of investigations into, and resolutions of, Diablo 2: Resurrected login problems have appeared on the BlizzardCS Twitter account since October 9, mostly recently just a few hours ago.
There are clearly serious problems with the game, and with fans growing increasingly antsy about Blizzard's apparent inability to fix them, community manager PezRadar has posted a lengthy forum update explaining what's gone wrong, what's being done about it, and why it might take some time to get things fully sorted.

"On Saturday morning Pacific time, we suffered a global outage due to a sudden, significant surge in traffic," PezRadar explained. "This was a new threshold that our servers had not experienced at all, not even at launch. This was exacerbated by an update we had rolled out the previous day intended to enhance performance around game creation—these two factors combined overloaded our global database, causing it to time out."
To help ease the load, Blizzard rolled back the Friday update, but that measure proved inadequate—an even bigger surge in traffic caused another outage on Sunday. Things went sideways yet again on Monday when Blizzard made fixes to Diablo 2's backup global database and then tried to switch to it. After the switch was made, the database continued to run its backup processes instead of servicing requests from remote servers.

That issue was fixed on Tuesday, but another high concurrent player count that same day resulted in further "degraded database performance," which database engineers are still working to fix. The situation is dire enough that the Diablo 2: Resurrected team has roped in engineers from other parts of Blizzard to help fix smaller problems while it concentrates on "core server issues."

"We reached out to our third-party partners for assistance as well," PezRadar said.

Ironically, it seems that Blizzard's desire to maintain an authentic Diablo 2 experience in the remaster is a chief cause of all these headaches. One "legacy service" in particular handles critical functions including "game creation/joining, updating/reading/filtering game lists, verifying game server health, and reading characters from the database." It was upgraded and optimized for Diablo 2: Resurrected but is still rooted in 20-year-old tech, and it's having a difficult time keeping up with "modern player behavior."