Diablo III Launch = Technical Disaster?
Posted 16 May 2012 by FluxThough I personally didn’t have too much trouble playing when the servers first went up yesterday, if you go by the gaming media’s coverage of Diablo III’s launch, it was a complete disaster. Dozens of articles on every sort of gaming and tech site stress the technical problems, the inability to log in or create characters, the disconnects, and the server outages.
Seriously, look at Google News for “Diablo 3 launch” and easily two-thirds of the articles make it sound like some sort of Titanic Hindenburg crashed into a sky iceberg. Some quotes and links to give you a sense of the amount of angry headlines:
From this I have to think the general fan’s opinion of D3′s launch is that it was a disaster. Was that how things went for you guys? As bad as these media stories make it sound?
For me, Diablo III’s launch wasn’t bad. Thanks to delays from ending our live launch show and getting my computer set up to livestream the playthrough, I wasn’t able to log onto the EU server until about an hour after it went live. When I finally did, it took a few minutes of trying, but I was able to get in, create a Wizard, and create a game fairly easily. It took Elly a good fifteen minutes to get logged on as well, but once she was in we played together in the same game for a good five hours straight. The game was actually more stable than our computers, as I had two hard crashes and she had one, while the same game remained online the entire time.
I didn’t try to log onto the US servers at midnight, but the players I’ve talked to said logging in was impossible for half an hour or so, but after that things went pretty well. The Asian servers were online hours earlier and weren’t great, but mostly held up, from reports I’ve read.
So why is the online news coverage so negative? Did a lot of journos try at 12:05, get realm unavailable messages, and /ragequit?
Remember last year after the online-only “feature” was announced and got a lot of bad press, yet most of you guys were supportive of it and insisted (as did Blizzard) that everyone had a good internet connection by now, that Blizzard knew how to run game servers with at least 24/7 (or at least 23.8/7) uptime, that people who wanted single player mode were just pissed about losing out on piracy, etc. Anyone rethinking their opinion on that issue yet, or are you perfectly willing to suffer through a day or a week (or a month?) of repeated server inaccessibility for what you see as a greater good?
It was extremely hard to logon to the EU servers during prime time yesterday as well. I would say it’s pretty bad.
I don’t think these problems will last, though. Curiously, it seems that only the logon server(s) is having problems. Once logged it, playing usually works fine.
until they take the server down.. which has happened a handful of times.
I could log in without a problem at 5pm on EU but then I had to cut it off (family) when I tried to log back at around 8:30 I wasn’t able to up until 10 o’clock. And after that I got no achivements and sometimes my whispers didn’t appear at the recipent.
So all in all, though the game is a blast I agree with the negative press on the technical issues. This could have been done much smoother especially on the second night.
I logged on and off at various points from about 5 to around midnight in EU last night. Didn’t get an error or a queue once.
My log in problems the first night were due to my servers being set to Americas but once I changed to Europe I got one error (37) then immediately tried again and got in and from then on no problems.
I got booted off last night for the EU patch but as I was due to call it a night anyway it didn’t bother me.
Sorry for people who have had problems but I’ve had none.
I think some of these reports are tinged with spite. From some journos I know there’s not a lot of love lost for Blizzard.
I had a very different experience. Two British friends and I were trying to get onto the EU servers starting at about 6pm; it took us about two hours just to log, then about half that to get all three of us in the same game.
As Sangdrax said, once you got in it was fine. It was just a massive hassle to muscle our way in initially. Thankfully it went much smoother today. Let’s hope that our collective logging issues are over.
The game is a blast, so I can’t really bash. Sadly, I didn’t have much time to play and just now got out of the beta content, even though I was at the ready when the europe servers went live. Couldn’t get in, etc, had to go to work, come back from work, same thing..sadface.. I have a total of 4 hours playtime I think, but.. I guess I don’t mind that much YET as I have a lot of other things to take care of. If this was a weekend or if I managed to get a week off and this happened, yea, I’d be outraged.
I’m hoping for smooth sailing when the weekend hits. If not, then I’ll rage. =P
Since I work in the IT industry I’m kind of used to these kinds of things and also used to the customers’ reactions to these kinds of things.
Common sense pretty much tells you that if you’ve been X months/years developing something then there’s no excuse for failing on launch day but it’s very very hard to come up with tests that simulate what real people do once they get their hands on a system. You can’t simulate in a realistic way 5 million people trying to log in at the exact same minute on launch day.
Honestly I think the launch went pretty well, since I have (unfortunately) seen first hand some horror stories on launch day for systems that are way more critical than a video game is.
But how is that still possible in this day and age?
Technology evolves, but it seems there are always issues with networks that have huge work loads. I don’t get it.
If you look at the making of software: IDE’s get better, API’s get better, etc. Technology to make software advances, but I don’t feel it’s the same for the network aspect: server hardware improves, backbone improves, … but it seems this all isn’t sufficient enough?
Microsoft also had issues in the past with the release of their publicly available Windows Vista betas. But with the release of Windows 7 Betas and Windows 8 CP all went well!
Blizzard really failed in my eyes… Glad I didnt buy the game yet (no time) or I would be disappointed.
(I’m studying for Software Engineer but I haven’t had yet any really network related course, so I’m new to this.)
common sense & economics, i’d say.
how many servers do you buy and keep running?
enough for everybody, of course.
and what is enough? not a simultaneous multi-region launch ‘enough’ of course.
imagine your capacities are to support 100k people for the login servers (SIMULTANEOUSLY).
now imagine what happens when 1.5m fans basically DDOS the servers at 12:01 ?
now server stress will be much more streamlined and less peaked than at launch time.
and for me D3s server hold up well very well so far. (and i DESPISE D3 being online only)
so, i would start to worry if problems persisted for more than 12 hours*. which would indicate serious hard- and/or software issues or misplanning.
*for something so thoroughly beta- and stress-tested as D3.
I think it’s mostly about money. Bliz could buy enough servers and redundancy on realms and log ins to support everyone playing at once. They’d be fine if the limited sales and ramped up the servers with more testers added over time, as companies do during beta tests. But consumers would never tolerate that, as we’ve become used to simultaneous world wide launches. Look how much complaining people did about having to wait just 8 or 10 hours longer, between Asia / EU/ US servers?
They have 10m people playing Wow by spreading it over thousands of servers. Of course all those people don’t log onto WoW at once or it would kill the system. That’s what happens when D3 launches. Tthere’s a higher concurrency than there will ever be again. Could Bliz provide enough hardware to deal with the launch rush? Probably. Would that be very expensive to scale up to a capacity that would be a lot of wasted space ever after? Yes.
So I think they sort of resign themselves to a lot of crush issues and bad press at launch, figuring that’s just the cost of doing business, and is a cheaper cost than doubling the server capacity over what they’ll need after this week.
Flux (and the others), in the end of all things, technology evolves but Physics is still Physics.
Everything has its limitations and networks are no exception, it doesn’t matter how much redundancy you put into it, there’s always a limit to be broken (bandwidth is finite).
Sure we can extrapolate on what that limit may be and try and provide stability up to that point but:
1 – is it really interesting (economically) to invest in having system stability for 9 million simultaneous logins that will only occur once in a while (release day, new expansion, important content patches, …) and then will become redundant since half the hardware used will probably due for 99% of the time?
2 – have we extrapolated well enough how many people will try to login on release day?
I’m guessing for Blizzard #2 is pretty easy to calculate, as it is for us to know how many people maximum will use our software. When we launch new versions though we still limit access to handful of users (and it really is a handful) before we let hundreds/thousands in and even then we have a clear knowledge of how many maximum users will there ever be – still the system doesn’t hold up if they all did login at the same time, something that never happens 99% of the time.
Honestly I don’t see anything wrong with what happened. Maybe Blizzard should have let people in in batches instead of opening up the floodgates at 23h59 but that would probably be worse because then people would think it’s unfair for some to have earlier access, even if by 30 minutes. I was expecting the downtime and I was expecting everything to be working properly a few hours in as it seems to be (I still haven’t played since Amazon decided I don’t deserve to receive the game until Friday so maybe I’m being fooled by the torrent of live streams and youtube videos).
^^^^^These were literally my exact words to all my friends… why buy the servers before you have the money? wait til you know you have X players and adjust… besides, they already had our money at that point.
You also have to understand the people that Blizzard caters to….gamers. For the most part, gamers are immature, childish, impatient etc, etc..and they absolute know that the problems that they are having are not going to do much to curb people buying their games. It’s a fact. When the RROD was happening to 360′s, there was a failure rate of over 50% for ALL CONSOLES SOLD. 50%!?! What company do you know can have a failure rate that high, and STILL sell their product and/or not go out of business? Because gamers have the memory of a rock, Microsoft knew that this would cost them money, but customers would STILL come back for more.
I’m utterly disappointed.
I tried to login for an hour between 20:00 and 21:00 yesterday and it failed every time. That’s not even release night. I still haven’t been able to play the game.
Journalists _wants_ it to be a fail, because it would make a good story. “Modern” journalism (sadly) isn’t about telling you what actually happened, it’s about choosing an angle for any given story, and presenting it. Sometimes the same f***ing journalist covers different angles to the same story in different articles! It’s gotten to the point where “artistic writing” and getting the most interesting angle, is more important than the actual content of the story.
I had issues with my install, which was my own fault, and had to spend the first few hours re-downloading and re-installing. So I didn’t experience the first two hours first-hand. After that though, I haven’t had any issues at all. I’m sure there are lots of people outthere who actually have problems, and I feel bad for them, but calling it a disaster after two days, is an outright lie.
Journalists are not being sensationalists in any way. If you launch a game and because of a stupid feature (online only) many players are unable to play after waiting so much time then its a really bad sign, especially because many players struggled to find some spare hours to play because they have a busy life and can’t just keep playing every time they want.
The game won’t fail because of this problem, but it already showed one wrongly move made by Blizzard after they removed single player. If players could play the game offline I’m sure many would be perfectly fine by not being able to connect right now.
Let me steal my own post to say something else. Didn’t you guys find REALLY odd that there’s a single server for the whole North America, Latin America, Australia/NZ and Southeast Asia? I can only see one reason for Blizzard to include so many people in the same region, and that’s because the RMAH (a giant single RMAH brings more money than a few smaller ones).
As always, money is more important for Blizzard than the quality of their services. No wonder why there are so many issues in log in process with so many players in the same server.
I would give up the RMAH in a heartbeat for our own servers in Australia
latency is stupid for single player.
I am fine with this since I have not yet receive my copy of the game
I haven’t received my copy yet either, but it should arrive today. It’s sad that we’ve had such a rough start with Diablo, but also understandable due to the massive interest players have in the game. On one hand, I wouldn’t have minded getting my copy of the game at the same time as when the servers went live, but at the same time, I’m kind of glad I’ll be a couple of days late. Hopefully, the majority of the biggest problems will have been sorted out by then.
I have the game, but my computer hasn’t arrived yet!
the log-in problems have been significant…ppl are raging…, i think the source of the negative sentiment is that Blizz has publicized heavily the midnight launch rather than being: ok guys **** might happen so keep it cool, and just log two days after release;)
for me and most of my friends (EU) launch was smooth like baby ass.
Same here (EU). No problem whatsoever for me and my 12 playing pals.
I’m sure problems do occur for many people, though much like DMB I find it not surprising at all and wouldn’t call it a disaster for such an infrastructure given the circumstances. Back to HC.
Well it take a little patience and repeating CTRL+V+ENTER trick to log in, but when You in its a blast, i played 3 hours with friend and it was quite difficult when chars are undergeared:)
I must say one thing, its probably only my imagination but after clicking “LOG IN’ button i instantly clicked ALT+TAB and game usually logged in in the background, even it was impossible (>30 attempts) in regular way. For me it even worked when i was logged in and couldn’t create new hero due to server stress, i clicked ‘Create” button and after minimalizing and waiting for a while hero was there.
As is say it unbelievable but i wouldn’t say impossible, but it works for me few times so i don’t bother if you believe me or not:P
Funny thing, I observed exactly the same regarding ALT+TAB. Also managed log in after doing that.
“So why is the online news coverage so negative? Did a lot of journos try at 12:05, get realm unavailable messages, and /ragequit?”
have you not been reading the threads on your own forums ?
“but the players I’ve talked to said logging in was impossible for half an hour or so, but after that things went pretty well.”
they lied
from the minute the servers went live (3am New York time) until 5:30 am, I was not able to log on, and I was not alone
Blizz even took down the D3 web site (I guess they got tired of seeing all the complaints)
then today (Tuesday evening) the servers were lagging like crazy and they took them off line again
big fail
go read the official forums
so many people having problems
look at the blue posts in the corner of this page, lol
they’re all about Errors and people failing to log in
Obviously a lot of people didn’t get on and aren’t happy. But I think you’ll find that people who had no tech problems and played happily are far less likely to post threads raging about the fact…
You know how many angry forum comments Elly, me, and the half dozen other people I know personally, who told me about their pretty good opening night tech experiences have posted? None. Since none of us had a “can’t connect” nightmare to motivate it.
Don’t confuse a noisy aggrieved minority with the CW of the majority. That sort of quandry underlies most of the votes I post on this site, since our anonymous votes that samples thousands of fans, provides a much more representative community cross-section than the forum posts and comments of people who have been motivated to complain by their own technical difficulties.
And how the heck would you know that the majority were happy?
So post a vote, let’s see the numbers.
I first logged on about 5am EST (2 hours after launch in my region) and had no problems whatsoever, played about 2 hours it was fantastic. Then since I had to go to work I played on my laptop on the commuter train for an hour with a very spotty 3G connection and only got dropped from server twice in an hour under those circumstances. Often when I am using my phone 3G connection on the train websites barely even load at times so this really speaks volumes for the D3 server connection being pretty solid.