Diablo Immortal may be a solid mobile version of Blizzard’s hack-and-slash dungeon crawler, but it’s no secret the game has been mired in controversy due to its egregious microtransactions. It was previously speculated that maxing out a single character could cost as much as $100,000. However, it now seems the estimate was very low, as the actual amount may run upwards of half a million.
Fully upgrading a Diablo Immortal character requires legendary gems, which are obtained from Elden Rifts. These quests reward you with the coveted jewels upon their completion. But because this is a gacha game, they’re spouted out at varying degrees of random rarities, as these things tend to go.
The likelihood of getting a fully upgraded five-star legendary gem is less than 1%, according to calculations by Redditor BullHorn 7 from earlier this month. You could use legendary crests at $2.50 each to increase those chances, with the option to equip 10 crests before the start of each Elden Rift. That’s $25 just to get a single all-the-way-maxed-out, legendary five-star gem. However, there’s an “awakening” mechanic which lets you upgrade the gems more, and that’s what ends up hiking the cost of leveling a character from $100,000 to upwards of $540,000. You could effectively see this as the game’s real, hidden level cap.
According to Twitter user Andrew “SpaceDrakeCF” Dice, a founder of the indie Japanese game localization studio Carpe Fulgur, awakening your legendary five-star jewel unlocks five more gem slots, which then can also be upgraded. You need a material called dawning echo and talk to Vic the Master Jeweler in Westmarch before you can awaken your gems, but once you’ve completed all the prerequisites, you can then drain your wallet to hopefully make your character OP.
G/O Media may get a commission
Save 46%
Fire TV 55″ Omni Series 4K UHD Smart TV
Alexa-enabled The Omni Series are all produced 4K UHD picture quality and are equipped with the same interface you may be used to on a Fire TV Stick. That means they are also Alexa enabled so no need to type in your favorite movies and shows. Just hold the remote button and ask Alexa.
“So now that some people have begun max-leveling their five-star gems (because yes, you also need to level the dam things), it turns out that there’s an additional mechanic,” Dice tweeted. “You can awaken a five-star gem to give an item five additional gem slots.”
Dice linked to a Reddit post by user ShiftYourCarcass, who briefly went over the methodology for how and why it would cost so much to fully max out a character in Diablo Immortal. They explained that part of the price comes from the dawning echo material, which can be easier to obtain via the in-game store for 1000 eternal orbs or $25 for the 1500 eternal orb pack. Talk about yikes.
Read More:Diablo Immortal’s China Release Delayed Following Social Media Silencing
“If you’re to be lucky and average around $15,000 per 5/5 star gem for 36 gems, that alone would tally up to $540,000,” ShiftYourCarcass wrote. “On top of that, you’ll need six dawning echos, which is an additional $30 per gem for six gems which is $180. Now, the thing is on top of that you’ll be looking for specific 5/5 star gems for you character build, you’ll also need duplicates of that gem to upgrade the 5/5 star gem so the cost of $540,000 is a basis if you have good luck, and up to over one million dollars for those unlucky whales.”
Kotaku has reached out to Blizzard for comment.
It’s always worth pointing out that you aren’t obligated to partake in stupid in-game microtransactions like these. You could have an awesome time with Diablo Immortal without spending a single dollar, though it does become troublesome if you want to participate in some of the game’s PvP. In that regard, it feels almost as though Blizzard is funneling you into spending money just so you stand a competitive chance. It’s not hard to see why the game had the lowest Metacritic score ever a little earlier this month then.
I do, however, wanna shoutout Twitch streamer Quin69 who, after spending $6,000 and got absolutely zero five-star legendary gems, finally got one $15,000 later. That’s a real one.
The last time we checked in on streamer Quin and his attempts to buy his way to glory in Diablo Immortal, he had spent $6600 and not attained a single 5-star Legendary Gem. I am happy (?) to report that, after more than doubling his investment, he finally has his loot.
As I wrote earlier in the month:
You would think that after a while you’d eventually get some of the game’s best gear, a 5-star Legendary Gem, because that’s how the law of averages works, right? Wrong! As Quin69 has clearly proven here, the law of averages is inherently cruel and unpredictable, which is why bookmakers have been taking advantage of it since the dawn of time, and why games like Diablo Immortal are built on predatory economic models designed to exploit people’s most dangerous and vulnerable psychological impulses.
That was then! This is now, and Quin has since posted that after spending NZD$25,165 (USD$15,818) on the game—with NZD$10,000 of that coming in a single stream—he has his 5-star Legendary Gem:
G/O Media may get a commission
Save $1000
85″ Class QN800B Samsung Neo QLED 8K Smart TV (2022)
Discover Samsung Summer Sales Event The Smart TV utilizes a feature called Real Depth Enhancer which can increase the contrast of elements in the foreground the way the human eye processes depth, making the content you watch richer than ever before.
Remember, simply buying your way to these items isn’t the only way you can get them, and as we’ve seen here is indeed the worst way, but that’s not the point. The point here is that having it as an option at all is one of the reasons predatory game economies suck!
As Kotaku AUwrote when reporting on his “achievement”:
Quin has certainly drawn his share of criticism throughout the experiment. His reckless spending and bursts of white-hot anger after failed drops caused many to wonder about his emotional stability. Others, even in our comments, were unhappy to see him giving Blizzard exactly what it wanted: his money. In the end, though, he proved his point. Chasing five-star Legendary Gems is a fool’s errand, a system designed to clear out bank accounts while giving very little back to the player.
Anyway, thanks for your service, Quin69. You can now stop playing Diablo Immortal for good.
Review aggregation sites are hardly the arbiter of a game’s quality, particularly when it comes to user reviews, and particularly in the era of review-bombing. Still, some data points are unignorable: As noted by VGC, Blizzard’s recent Diablo Immortal now holds claim to the lowest user score on Metacritic.
First released this month for PC and mobile devices, Diablo Immortal is a free-to-play iteration on Blizzard’s genre-defining series of fantasy loot games. Though I haven’t played, my colleagues say it’s actually pretty good, if you’re able to ignore all of the bullshit that tends to come with the earning model. The core gameplay loop is a blast, they say, and the production values are through the roof.
It seems that many players, however, are unable to look past that stuff. As of this writing, Diablo Immortal’s PC version is the 4,887th highest rated game, per user reviews, on Metacritic—putting it squarely at the bottom of the list. It’s directly behind Warcraft III: Reforged (0.6) and the infamously maligned Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition (0.6). Of the roughly 2,500 user reviews for Diablo Immortal on PC, around 2,475 are negative. (The iOS version sports a 0.5 rating. Metacritic does not appear to list any user reviews for the Android version.)
Screenshot: Metacritic / Kotaku
Most of the criticism is leveraged directly at Immortal’s microtransactions. “The microtransactions are so bad and make the game so trash I actually created an account to give it a zero,” one person wrote. “This game is just masked gambling machine for kids,” wrote another. Another likened it to “psychological warfare.”
G/O Media may get a commission
User reviews are often a scourge, with manygamesweatheringunfaircampaigns over bad-faith “issues,” but plenty of reports indicate Diablo Immortal’s microtransactions are indeed exploitative, even in comparison to other games guilty of similarly underhanded practices. One streamer spent $6,000 on microtransactions, ultimately failing to turn up any high-tiered gear. There’s also the well-publicized claim that it takes more than $100,000 to fully level up a character in the game (though that math seems…dubious). The game’s internal purchases are in part why it’s not available in countries with strict anti-loot-box laws, like Belgium and the Netherlands.
The point seems clear: Diablo fans want microtransactions far, far away from their Diablo. Good thing Blizzard recently clarified that next year’s Diablo IV will be a premium-priced game, therefore absent all the (extremely penny-pinching) bells and whistles that punted Diablo Immortal to the very bottom of Metacritic’s list.
While there are some who can distance Diablo Immortal’s experience from its economy, there are plenty—myself included—who can’t. And sure, we could just talk about how shitty that economy is, but a funnier and more effective way would be for someone to actually start sinking some serious cash into the game and see what happens.
That someone is not me, but Twitch streamer Quin69. He has been pouring money into the game, $25 at a time, to see what he can get for his outlay, and at time of posting has spent just over NZD$10,300 (or around USD$6600).
For that he has got…well, I’ll let him explain (you only need to watch the first 14 seconds):
You would think that after a while you’d eventually get some of the game’s best gear, a 5-star Legendary Gem, because that’s how the law of averages works, right? Wrong! As Quin69 has clearly proven here, the law of averages is inherently cruel and unpredictable, which is why bookmakers have been taking advantage of it since the dawn of time, and why games like Diablo Immortal are built on predatory economic models designed to exploit people’s most dangerous and vulnerable psychological impulses.
(Let’s note here that simply buying your way to these items isn’t the only way you can get them, and is indeed the worst way, but again, having it as an option at all is one of the reasons predatory game economies suck!)
Making things worse here is that, while Diablo Immortal has a “pity pull” system, designed to eventually hand out quality items to those unlucky enough to have spent loads of money but not got one, even this has extremely low odds, with the chances of getting a 5-star Legendary Gem at around 1%.
This stunt follows estimations that if someone wanted to simply buy their way to fully maxing out the game it would cost $110,000, a figure you normally associate with luxury cars and housing, not a video game character.
Last week Blizzard launched Diablo Immortal, the next entry in its long-running, loot-driven action-RPG franchise. However, unlike previous games, this one is free-to-play, and was built from the ground up to be a mobile game first. While it did also come out on PC last week, the reality is this is a very different kind of Diablo. Between being a phone title, having F2P-style in-app purchases, and being part of a popular legacy franchise, it’s created a large debate about the game and its true cost.
Kotaku staff writer Zack Zwiezen and editor John Walker have both been playing, so got together to chat about the game, how much they’re enjoying it, and why it might not be the evil, money-sucking monster some have claimed. At the very least, it’s a perfect way to kill some time while watching old episodes of The Simpsons.
John Walker: How many previous Diablos have you played?
Zack Zwiezen: I played a lot of Diablo III and its expansion and some Diablo II…
John: When you say a “lot”, do you mean you got to the point of playing online with a regular group until it accidentally became your full-time unpaid job?
Zack: Oh well, not that much. I did however buy and play it on three different platforms across at least 250+ hours.
John: It’s impressive you weren’t turned. You know. Into one of them.
Anyway, I’ve played a bunch of all of them, but never “properly.” I’ve always approached them as single-player ARPGs, something to aimlessly click on while watching a crummy TV show. And absolutely loved them for that.
G/O Media may get a commission
Save 90%
Getflix Smart DNS & VPN: Lifetime Subscription
VPN data protection Ever find yourself unsure of what to watch? Have you fully exhausted every Netflix show available to you? Well with a VPN you can change your region to elsewhere around the globe, accessing a whole slew of new content.
Zack: Same. Back in the prime of my Diablo III days, I’d burn through podcasts and long YouTube video essays while killing thousands of demons and skeletons. It was a perfect thing to combo with another piece of entertainment, assuming you didn’t want to focus on either entirely. And Diablo Immortal has started to fill a similar role in my life.
John: Yeah, me too. Except, I keep finding myself teaming up with other people.
Zack: Disgusting, John. I thought you were better than that.
Screenshot: Blizzard / Kotaku
John: I hate doing that normally. As soon as other people are playing, I become certain they all hate me and I’m ruining the game for them. But here I both don’t care and clearly aren’t.
Zack: This has also been my experience when I play with others in Immortal. Usually, we just plow through a dungeon creating a mess of particles and fire that cause my iPad battery to weep softly as it quickly dies.
John: And then we part, without even a goodbye. Cheap, meaningless raiding. The best kind.
Zack: Yeah, it really is. I never feel like I need to look up a guide or yell at anyone for messing up. We all get the assignment and without voice chat can quickly pull it off. Good shit.
John: Yeah, I’m playing it, like, all the time, both at my PC and then picking up right where I left off on my phone, and I’m having a great time with it, and the more I’m enjoying it, the more I’m convinced that people who vociferously like Diablo must surely hate it. Because die-hard Diablo people usually hate anything I love. Like my wife, and son.
Zack: But John, I’ve been told by folks online that Diablo Immortal is actually bad and evil! That it will steal your bank account or something.
John: Have you, at any point, felt like you needed to pay for anything?
Zack: No. I’ve definitely seen some ads pop up and the game isn’t shy about that stuff, like pestering you that a cheap chest is on sale. But hours and hours into the game, at level 32 or something like that, I’ve never hit a paywall. And as someone who has played a lot of mobile games in my life, that is not always the case!
John: Why has Blizzard just made this whole game for free?
Zack: I don’t know. I keep thinking about how this game with a few changes could easily be a $40 thing. And yet, if you just want to play the story of Diablo Immortal and run some raids online, you can do all that for…nothing? At least that’s what it feels like to me. What level are you at?
John: I am level 51! And I am a Shadow!
Zack: And have you spent any money in-game because you needed to or felt like it was the only way to move forward?
John: Never. I paid for a Battle Pass because I’ve never done that before in any game, and wanted to know what would happen.
Zack: I’m so proud of you. The grumpy old man can evolve.
As for buying stuff in-game, I know that if you want the best of the best gear and items, the stuff you’ll need to win in PvP and top the leaderboards, you’ll likely need to fork over a lot of money. But I just don’t care about any of that. As we established, this is a game that I play when I’m watching YouTube or old Simpsons episodes, so all the anger around it has confused me. You don’t have to spend $100k in this game, as that one YouTuber alleged. I promise!
John: Yeah, the game just doesn’t seem to want me to have paid for any of that to do anything it has offered so far. So, say, in a couple of days I hit some sort of end-game wall, Shadows vs. Immortals I think it’s about, and to take part in all that bullshit I’d need the best equipment? I’d say, “Yay, I finished this extraordinarily detailed free game!”
Zack: Right. I’m at the same point. If the awesome free game stops letting me play after 30 hours or whatever, I’ll just move on and enjoy something else.
This all reminds me of how some folks will waste days or weeks playing games they hate, that they find broken or unfair or bad. And I just wish some people would realize that it’s okay to hit a wall and move on. Not everything needs to be min-maxed and perfected. You don’t always need to get the best of the best and win the whole thing. You can just…move on.
John: Yeah! It’s like a Happy Meal toy that’s surprisingly decent. You’re not going to play with it forever, but you didn’t throw it out that same day.
Zack: And yet, there are people reading this who will leave angry comments below saying we are shills or ruining gaming…
John: Well, here’s the thing. The other thing that keeps surprising me is how needlessly detailed it is. I know this is Blizzard, and this is what it does, but at the same time the game says “NetEase” when it loads up too. But you do a dungeon and suddenly the boss fight turns out to be three stages, each one involving a big environmental change, and then there’s a surprise bonus bit at the end. Or maybe I’m just doing some of the bounties from the bounty board, and instead of “kill 10 of those” which some are, it turns out to be a whole little story, an investigation into a crime or something.
This isn’t disposable. This is a whole proper Blizzard game. It’s odd, because it really doesn’t feel like playing Diablo at all. It feels maybe closer to World of Warcraft?
Zack: Yes! And all the tiny little animations and details out in the world too. I saw someone getting dragged to their death and it was a bit shocking and gruesome and I was like…wait, this is on my iPad! This is not the kind of game I expect to play for free on a tablet. I keep looking around, thinking a cop will show up and arrest me for stealing this $60 game.
John: Well, I mentioned it earlier, but it’s both on my telephone and my PC. I can genuinely walk away from my desk, and just carry on playing on my phone.
Zack: Which is another very awesome thing about Immortal.
John: You know what? If I’d paid $60 for it, I’d probably be a bit miffed at the graphics and how incredibly flaky and buggy it is. I’m forgiving a lot for the $0 entry fee. It disconnects me so damn often, and I’ve had it crash both on my phone and PC a huge number of times.
Also, the PC version is abysmal. It doesn’t even have resolution settings, and looks like what it is: a mobile game stretched far too thin onto a monitor.
Zack: I can’t actually play the PC version at the moment. It’s too dark and the map keeps breaking. But credit to Blizzard for doing a PC port at all so I don’t have to try and emulate it using Bluestacks. And yeah, the zero-dollar price helps me not be too bothered by all these issues and shortcomings
John: It’s odd, given Blizzard’s PC origins, that the desktop version is quite so poor though. Although it’s rather cheekily called it a “beta”. Mmmmmhmmm, this identical product to the telephone version is magically in beta now that it’s on my PC? Hmmm…
Zack: It’s for sure an odd thing, but hopefully it’ll get improved. And if not, the iPad version has been working well for me, even with its touch controls. But ultimately, I keep wondering why this game has broken some people online.
John: Oh, because it has the word “Diablo” involved. I remember writing in 2011 about how heinous it was that Blizzard was forcing always-on internet requirements on Diablo III, and was roasted online for my dissent. Then the game comes out and I say I’m having fun and I’m equally harassed.
Screenshot: Blizzard / Kotaku
Zack: Yeah. I think Diablo has a tendency to, ironically, drive people mad. And I’ll admit that if this was the only Diablo game we knew Blizzard was working on, I’d be a bit sad. But Diablo IV is coming. We’ve seen it. So I just don’t get the weird army of angry fans who seem hell-bent on attacking people who enjoy Immortal.
John: But is it? Will it ever really come out, Diablo IV? Will it? Also, if Blizzard hadn’t wasted all its time making this really very good free mobile game, it’d have finished Diablo IV over 40 years ago!
Zack: Well, the future of Diablo, the next game, and what happens next might be the perfect reason to do another VGchat. However, seeing as you are British, sarcasm is beginning to creep into this current chat, so I think we should wrap it up.
And also, to answer your sarcastic query, I do assume Diablo IV will one day be finished and released simply because the Diablo brand is…Immortal!
John: I feel good that I ironically mocked the people who haven’t read this far and are already leaving their comments, rather than acknowledge your terrible “joke.”
Blizzard shared a lengthy list of Overwatch 2 patch notes today detailing changes it’s making to the first-person shooter a little more than a week into the player-versus-player mode’s closed beta.
In addition to squashing bugs, such as crashes and easily abusable level geometry, Overwatch 2’s first beta patch introduces a variety of both buffs and nerfs for its various heroes.
For example, jack-of-all-trades Soldier: 76 was apparently “over tuned” and “extremely mobile,” at least according to the developers. His movement speed while using his Sprint ability is being reduced by 10% to compensate.
The lovably squishy Roadhog, on the other hand, was “underperforming” and frequently dying while using his ultimate. As such, Whole Hog is being changed from a “channeled” ultimate (e.g. Cassidy’s Deadeye) into a “transformation” ultimate (e.g. Winston’s Primal Rage).
Blizzard believes this will make playing Roadhog “more interesting, effective, and fun” while also giving his ultimate added flexibility.
Overwatch 2 players reacting to the update seem to particularly enjoy Zenyatta’s improved Snap Kick, which now does 50% more damage and knocks foes further away from the delicate support character.
“We understand 5v5 has made support heroes feel more vulnerable, and we wanted to give Zenyatta tools to help create space between him and enemies,” the patch notes read.
As for support characters as a whole, Blizzard also detailed how it plans to address community concerns about the role’s overall vulnerability and lack of variety compared to tanks and damage-dealers.
“Longer term, we believe the most effective way to tackle this issue is to add exciting new support heroes to the game, and that is part of our plans,” a Blizzard blog explained earlier this week. “In the near term, our hero design team is also experimenting with significant, but shorter lead time, ideas including new and refreshed abilities for some existing support heroes.”
The blog adds, however, that any major changes that may be coming to support heroes will probably miss this current beta test.
Overwatch 2’s closed beta is ongoing and scheduled to run through May 17.
Blizzard pulled back the curtain on the next chapter in World of Warcraft in a developer livestream Tuesday, and it’s all about dragons. The appropriately titled Dragonflight expansion will unleash players upon the Dragon Isles and let them roll as a new playable dragon race called the Dracthyr. And of course you ride some of the dragons too.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight focuses on Azeroth’s Dragon Aspects who will once again help the game’s heroes take on the baddies. The Dragon Isles where much of the action takes place will be split into four zones, and the developers said exploration will be a key focus of the expansion. To that end, players will be tasked with becoming dragonriders and making use of four new drake mounts to navigate the world.
Here’s the trailer:
Some of the dragons can transform into people on a whim, and these are called Dracthyr. This new playable race makes sole use of a new Evoker class to wield long-range attacks and heals. Unlike the game’s existing races, however, they won’t have access to any other classes. With less overall customization comes a more focused moveset.
“[Evokers are] able to use their wings to buffet people away, they’re able to breathe fire out of their mouths, they’re able to knock people back with their tail,” lead combat designer Brian Holinka told Polygon.
Blizzard also revealed Dragonflight will see changes like the game’s “largest talent system revamp yet,” improvements to the HUD, and new crafting and profession systems. At the start of the livestream, game director Ion Hazzikostas was candid about some of the issues the game has had since Shadowlands released in 2020. Community feedback during this period led to the team “re-examining some of the assumptions and foundations of World of Warcraft about things like character investment and mains versus alts or how catch-up should work or the appropriate role of friction in our systems,” he said.
In recent years, WoW has faced stiff competition from the explosion in popularity around Final Fantasy XIV. In addition with discontent over the Shadowlands era of the game, the game has also suffered from the cloud of misconduct and abuse that hangs over Blizzard’s past following a lawsuit by California regulators last summer alleging gender discrimination and harassment, including by some of the MMO’s former “star” developers.
Dragonflight doesn’t have a release date yet, but Blizzard is currently taking sign-ups for the expansion’s beta test. The studio also announced Wrath of the Lich King will be added to World of Warcraft Classic, free for existing subscribers, sometime later in 2022.
Breakout PC action MMORPG Lost Ark was first released in South Korea all the way back in 2019. Only earlier this month was it finally released in the U.S. and Europe. It’s quickly become one of the most popular games in the entire history of Steam, with over 1.3 million active players last weekend. It’s currently the number-one most-played game on the service, beating out mainstay classics like Counter-Strike: GO and Dota 2. And with that many people playing, you better believe there are a ton of Steam reviews.
Overall, the Steam reviews for Lost Ark have been positive. However as the game has continued to struggle with long server queues in Europe, the Diablo-like MMO’s seen an uptick in negative evaluations. That’s reflected in some of the most popular reviews on Steam, with some players even sharing various recipes for food you can make while waiting to get online. Other reviews comment on how they’ve waited years to play this game, as Smilegate first announced it in 2013. So between that and the server issues, there’s been a lot of waiting.
Many of the reviews, positive and negative both, express how much they enjoy the combat, often calling it satisfying and fun. This is something I mentioned in my first impressions of the game. While it has a bland story, something other Steam reviewers pointed out too, the combat is really the star of the show. The use of “hitstops” and large groups of enemies really helps elevate the action above that of other ARPGs. In Lost Ark you feel super powerful, basically from the start, which is a nice change from how most MMOs go.
Of course, many reviews also reference Diablo. It’s almost impossible to talk about Lost Ark without doing so. In fact, it might be illegal? Everyone else talks about Diablo when talking about Lost Ark so I’ve been doing it too–better safe than sorry. Interestingly, a not-insignificant number of reviews suggest Blizzard should be concerned about how Diablo IVcompares to Lost Ark. I’m not so sure about that, but there are probably some lessons to be learned from any game that clicks with so many people so quickly. (Though I think Blizzard has…other things to worry about right now.)
Some Steam reviewers point out that a lot of Lost Ark is very generic and samey, which isn’t wrong. You do spend a lot of time collecting things to take to NPCs and then repeating that over and over. But the numbers go up and that’s fun.
Overall, it seems that things are going well for Lost Ark. Even the spike in negative reviews from angry folks unable to log on seems to be subsiding after Smilegate and its partner Amazon added more servers this week. Will Lost Ark continue to dominate the Steam charts for the foreseeable future? I don’t know, but based on a lot of these reviews, I wouldn’t bet against it.
Diablo 2: Resurrectedlaunched, it’s authentic as all hell—but then the D2 servers took an instant trip to the Seventh Circle. For the last week, players have faced constant login issues and outages. And by the sounds of things, the poor server engineers must be absolutely hating life.
First up: any time a developer posts a blog that surpasses 2,000 words, you know the shit has really hit the fan. It’s a massive explainer on all the issues facing Diablo 2: Resurrected players lately, and it’s so extensive because the problems aren’t caused by a single issue but a mix, ranging from an inability to deal with the game’s popularity, its architecture, and even down to the fact that players are just way more efficient at smashing Diablo into the dust in 2021.
The first major problem outlined by the team is how players’ characters and data are stored. If you’ve played any Activision or Blizzard multiplayer game over the last few decades, you’ll know that you generally login to a set of servers as close to your location as humanly possible. It’s not an individual server per se, but a cluster of servers that service an entire region.
Anyway, these servers all have their own regional databases that store the data of the characters that play on them. This is needed because there’s too many people playing Diablo 2 to just continually upload everyone’s data to a single, central point.
“Most of your in-game actions are performed against this regional database because it’s faster, and your character is ‘locked’ there to maintain the individual character record integrity. The global database also has a back-up in case the main fails,” Blizzard wrote.
G/O Media may get a commission
These regional databases periodically send information back to the central database, so that way Blizzard has a singular record (with backups) of your thicc Level 88 Barbarians, Necromancers and so on. Which sounds all well and good—until that central database gets overloaded and the whole system, much like the engineers working on it, needs a nap.
“On Saturday morning Pacific time, we suffered a global outage due to a sudden, significant surge in traffic. This was a new threshold that our servers had not experienced at all, not even at launch,” Blizzard explained.
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. We decided to roll back that Friday update we’d previously deployed, hoping that would ease the load on the servers leading into Sunday while also giving us the space to investigate deeper into the root cause.
On Sunday, though, it became clear what we’d done on Saturday wasn’t enough–we saw an even higher increase in traffic, causing us to hit another outage. Our game servers were observing the disconnect from the database and immediately attempted to reconnect, repeatedly, which meant the database never had time to catch up on the work we had completed because it was too busy handling a continuous stream of connection attempts by game servers. During this time, we also saw we could make configuration improvements to our database event logging, which is necessary to restore a healthy state in case of database failure, so we completed those, and undertook further root cause analysis.
Not exactly the recipe for a fun weekend, that. It also explains why players were having so many issues with progress, too. You’d pick your character, start a game, play for a while, but the regional server couldn’t communicate with the central database after an outage. So it couldn’t tell Diablo 2’s source of “ground truth” about the new gear and XP you’d gained, resulting in frustrated players losing some of the progress they’d made.
The problems only got worse from there. The Diablo 2 servers came back online, but they did so during a period when most players were online—so even though the servers rebounded quickly, they crashed almost straight away as soon as hundreds of thousands of Diablo 2 instances fired up.
And if the weekend was bad, what followed on Monday and Tuesday wasn’t any better:
This leads us into Monday, October 11, when we made the switch between the global databases. This led to another outage, when our backup database was erroneously continuing to run its backup process, meaning that it spent most of its time trying to copy from the other database when it should’ve been servicing requests from servers. During this time, we discovered further issues, and we made further improvements–we found a since-deprecated-but-taxing query we could eliminate entirely from the database, we optimised eligibility checks for players when they join a game, further alleviating the load, and we have further performance improvements in testing as we speak. We also believe we fixed the database-reconnect storms we were seeing, because we didn’t see it occur on Tuesday.
This is the point where I keep hearing my brother’s advice in my head: “Never get into networking.”
Somehow, Diablo 2 hadn’t had enough. The game enjoyed its best-ever highs for concurrent players on the Wednesday Australian time—after almost a week of constant login issues and crashes. Blizzard says there were “a few hundreds of thousands of players in one region alone”—which could either be a lot or relatively standard, depending on how Blizzard’s servers define regions. (A few hundred thousand would be hugely impressive for, say, Australia. For a “region” like the United States, not so much, but if that region was a small part of the United States, then maybe it would be. The blog post doesn’t specify here.)
Screenshot: Kotaku Australia / Blizzard Entertainment
According to the devs, one of the biggest problems causing all of this is how the original Diablo 2 handles core pieces of player behavior. While Vicarious Visions updated the original D2 code where they could, a large part of the project was keeping what code worked.
Which was fine, up until the point where it no longer started to scale.
Diablo 2 has a particular way in which it pulls data from the central database to make sure players can do the things they want to do. Joining a game? That’s calling back to the central database. Want to switch characters? That’s another check to central command to make sure you get the character you asked for, in the spot where you left it, with all the gear you’d worked for.
Diablo 2, according to the team, was designed to be centralized. The downside of that means that only a single instance of this particular service can be run at any one time, so they can’t offload some of the weight to regional servers.
“Importantly, 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,” the devs wrote. “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.”
For now, there’s a range of short-term solutions and roadmaps to rewrite Diablo 2‘s architecture so it can better scale for modern demand. The service that just provides a list of games to players, for instance, is being broken out into a service of its own.
The devs will also be introducing a login queue, ala World of Warcraft, to prevent situations where the servers get overloaded when hundreds of thousands of game instances are launched all at once:
To address this, we have people working on a login queue, much like you may have experienced in World of Warcraft. This will keep the population at the safe level we have at the time, so we can monitor where the system is straining and address it before it brings the game down completely. Each time we fix a strain, we’ll be able to increase the population caps. This login queue has already been partially implemented on the backend (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.
Players will also be rate limited, but only in instances where games are being created, closed and recreated in short spaces of time, which is mostly instances where players are farming areas like Shenk & Eldritch or Pindleskin. “When this occurs, the error message will say there is an issue communicating with game servers: this is not an indicator that game servers are down in this particular instance, it just means you have been rate limited to reduce load temporarily on the database, in the interest of keeping the game running,” Blizzard advised.
It all sounds like an absolute nightmare, to be honest, and I feel for the engineers who have what looks like months of retroactive fixes in front of them. There’s a school of internet thought that says, well, Blizzard should have seen this coming and planned for it. But that’s also fundamentally part of the risk you take with remasters. These games were written back in an age where information and multiplayer services didn’t have the popularity or ease of access that we have today, and it’s difficult to know whether a lot of that old infrastructure scales the way we think it might. Sometimes it does — right up until the point where it all collapses in a flaming heap.
This article originally appeared on Kotaku Australia.
In an interview with Axios Gaming on September 17, the design director on the upcoming Diablo II remake explained that folks trying to decide if they should buy the game should “do what they feel is right.” Many players don’t want to support Activision Blizzard games after a recent lawsuit made public horrible stories and claims of abuse and harassment mostly targeting women at the company.
Diablo II Resurrected is the first major release from Blizzard since a damning lawsuit was filed on July 20 by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing after a years-long investigation turned up stories of multiple women suffering daily harassment and abuse while working at Activision Blizzard.
Diablo II Resurrected was announced back in February 2021, before the lawsuit, and is being developed by Vicarious Visions using the original source code and gameplay of the classic action RPG first released by Blizzard back in 2000. The studio was not specifically named in the suit and has in the past worked on non-Blizzard/Activision titles, but the lawsuit and the fallout that followed have affected the team at Vicarious Visions.
“It was definitely very troubling to hear these types of things,” design director Rob Gallerani explained, “And we really wanted to support our colleagues and our co-workers.”
The lawsuit included horrible stories of abuse and after the suit became public, Kotaku learned of a hotel suite that was reportedly a booze-filled meeting place where many would pose with an actual portrait of convicted rapist Bill Cosby while smiling.
G/O Media may get a commission
Since these stories and reports have surfaced, numerous former and current Blizzard higher-ups have apologized, with some leaving the company including Blizzard President J. Allen Brack. Games like World of Warcraftand Overwatch have also removed mentions and references to people named in the various claims and the lawsuit. And Activision itself seemed quick to hide its logo and company name during the announcement of the latest Call of Duty.
As a result of this and all the controversy, Gallerani told Axios that Vicarious Visions did a full scrub of Diablo II Resurrected to see if any references, names, or quests needed to be removed or changed. According to him, nothing was found.
After the lawsuit became public and stories of harassment and abuse continued to be shared online by women and men, many players have struggled with buying the companies’ games or boycotting them.
Gallerani’s comments to Axios seem to leave the decision up to players.
In August, Kotaku reached out to employees at Blizzard and Activision about if they supported fans boycotting upcoming games. Some didn’t respond. Others didn’t want their comments to draw attention away from the ABK Workers Alliance’s current demands.