With Diablo II: Resurrected, Blizzard has released a truly great remaster of one of the all-time great action-RPGs. Over the past week though, being able to play the game has been an issue due to server troubles. That whole thing where you can't log in and play. In a new detailed post Blizzard opens up about the issues it's facing, the causes, and the steps it's taking to get things back into a position where players can get back to Baal runs.

On that note in particular, Blizzard notes that with decades of guides and info out there players are jumping into Diablo 2 in ways that are causing stress on the infrastructure.

"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)," Blizzard writes. "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."

On top of this the game is seeing more players now than at launch with concurrent player counts hitting hundreds of thousands all connecting to databases and character servers. Based on the mix of legacy code and modern code and modern behaviour (that is seeing a lot of high-level efficient play) there are short term and long term solutions being rolled out. For one a login queue is coming, as is a time limit on being able to quit and restart a loot run. Plus, smaller servers to handle more local things to take the pressure off of the large global database covering all Diablo 2 data across all platforms.

It's a sizable post and definitely worth a read if you've ever been interest in how server stuff works. For me, I just want to continue my Hammerdin's Hell run -- and get that gear. Fingers crossed things don't fall over again this weekend.