One life to live #45: Diablo 3 Hardcore lag
Posted 29 June 2012 by XanthI’ve been fortunate the past month and avoided the massive lagocide inflicted on the 
Hardcore community. A lot of good characters died to something they couldn’t see, couldn’t fight, and most importantly couldn’t control. Is this something we have to learn to deal with or something that will get better in time?
I recall vividly sitting in my parents basement(yup it happened) playing Diablo 2 late night in the middle of a storm. As my amazon was rounding a corner the lights in the room flickered and quickly faded to black. The power was out only for a few minutes and once it returned I anxiously checked my amazon’s fate. She didn’t make it through that storm. That was the risk I took playing in those conditions. I knew what could happen. So what’s a storm and a dial up modem have to do with D3?
Knowledge of risk. Each game you create, each person you party with, each area you enter carries the risk your character will die. The one thing that is different with lag is it can’t be assessed until you experience it. In D3 at the moment you can be cruising through a level, beating down everything you see, and then be stopped in your tracks for no reason at all. Last night My barb was in Whimsyshire plowing through some ponies, when I was almost done in by an arcane champ pack and lag. As their arcane orbs ticked around me I’d try to run out, only to find I hadn’t really moved. I was lucky enough that I was over level for the content. However, many in inferno can not say the same.
What do we do about an unknown risk? The second you feel it, or see it leave! It’s hard but sometimes you have to just step away. From my experience the servers don’t just hiccup and go back to normal. Those lag spikes come in waves. If you dodged the first one don’t sit and wait for the next to get you.
“this is bullshit! I’ve only died to lag! Hardcore blows! Give me my char back! rabble rabble rabble”
Blizzard will not give a character back due to a lag death. I know it sucks, and it’s on their end and not yours, and you want to control your death, but that’s how these games work. Lag is sadly something we have to accept in hitting create on a Hardcore character. You know it going in, and can’t expect someone to change the rules now that they are affecting you.
It is disappointing however that after 6 weeks of being out we are seeing this kind of server instability. I recall lag killing a some people back in D2 but never in massive droves. Blizzard in one fell lag spike has caused a good amount of people to start over twice in the same month. Hopefully July has a better record and (in light of the mass killings) Blizzard addresses their servers issues.
The game is still young but each new hiccup creates unease in the Hardcore community. Complaining like petulant children won’t change things, yelling for your character back, or screaming how the game sucks won’t help anyone. We knew those risks going in to the game. Our characters can and will die for any number of reasons, some in our control, some outside. However, if we as a community can point to lag and say “Blizzard do something about this” and not lose that voice in a week when everyone is back to 60, then perhaps lag can go back to being the lame excuse you gave for a death you were embarrassed about as opposed to the thing that’s killed more characters than Inferno. Until Blizzard does something or says something about how they will handle lag, keep asking!
One Life to Live covers the Hardcore play and life style in the Diablo community. It is written by Xanth and published weekly. Post your comments below, Follow me on Twitter @HCXanth or contact the author directly. For all the archived news about Diablo 3 hardcore check our Archives!
This is another reason why I’ll not play hardcore D3. Most of my D2 hardcore was played in single player mode. Unfortunately that is not available in D3. As to whether or not the problem will “get better”, only time will tell. One wonders why a company the size of Blizzard can’t invest in enough/better servers to prevent the problem in the first place.
One wonders how people can be so ignorant. Sir, do you really think that Blizzard owns and operates all the servers in question? That’s ridiculous–they partner with vendors who provide the uptime, data links and infrastructure for the millions of players Blizzard serves.
If you’re some kind of network engineer miracle worker with a PhD in latency, let them know, I’m sure they would love to hire you.
That’s why you have a rigid SLA terms or partner with a vendor who actually knows what they are doing.
Holy nerd police.
He said, “invest in some better servers.” This includes having such arrangements with “partners and vendors” that would allow for oversight of things like lag.
So an arrangement that precludes lag? Might I recommend Networking for Dummies, 7th Edition.
You’re the stereotypical kid on the internet who thinks he knows anything about computers because he plays games, please remove yourself.
Lag happens. It doesn’t take a dummy at Blizzard to look at a graph and noticed a major, significant lag spike happened and thus restore any HC deaths during those five seconds. And have this be the *only* time they do so.
I don’t even play HC. But I have enough sense to consider this a possibility. And I also know that it would garner a copypasta reply from Blizz along the lines of, “resurrecting HC chars would be opening Pandora’s box.” And to this I would also disagree for the reasons in my first (technically second) paragraph.
Only thing is no matter how much they spend theres still some stuff they cant fix that the data route, all it needs is for one of the connection points to go wobbly and you got lag.
There a lot of things that can cause lag spikes, and Blizzard doesn’t control all of them. And I don’t mean problems on the user’s end – I mean that the internet is vast and packets can be held up after they leave Blizzard’s server facilities.
Everything you wrote is correct. None of what you wrote applies to the massive gamestopping lag waves that have hit blizzard system wide now twice.
This is 2012. Blizzard should have quality data centers. Blizzard should have methods on place to deal with server side issues like this.
Blizzard shouldn’t allow your character to just sit…uncontrolled for minutes…there should be some sortbof reasonable time out
I only once lost a character due to my own stupidity in d3. My other two deaths were a person joining the game (thus bigger and badder mobs, this was @ start) while I was running around to wait for the cd on my potion. My ****ty computer couldnt handle the new monk graphics that well and I fpsed lagged her to death. The other death was a freezing computer. Both were barbs. The third barbarian is now in Act II Inferno and doesnt really get close to death if I just play focussed.
The one death in which my own stupidity spelled her doom was on my monk. In act I, normal, just passed the SK
Watching a stream on the side the screen killer 
Totally my fault.
And I cant remember a death in D2 in which I was just stupid. It was either TPPK (ok, stupid but beyond my control to a certain degree and 100% not within the bounderies of the legit game), which I remember well since it killed my first barb who had a enigma. And otherwise the FE bug @ Lister.
Black Wall of Death – it still happened 3 years after Diablo 2 was released, and it killed many.
But in D2 you could build to survive lag.
The disconnect timers just were not that long. Most of the time you were fine with a DC even if there were a bunch of mobs hitting you.
In D3 all you need is a fallen and you might be dead.
Exatcly this, you are dead 90% of time after normal difficulty, any mob any gear.
Lag has always been a part of D2 and it weeds the non-hardcore players out of hardcore. D3 should be no different, online only has nothing to do with it, at least for me because I was a D2 HCCL player. I’ve lost many, many characters due to lag but that’s simply part of the game and part of what keeps you going. If you can’t handle the death, then don’t put yourself in a position to die, go back to softcore.
I agree 200%. If the heat is too much for you get out of the kitchen.
I disagree. I want to play the game as the people who designed the game intended. Lag isn’t intended. It would be like saying, “don’t play football if you don’t want to get struck by lightning.” Nope, the refs call the game. They do something about it.
This is more of an arguement against online-only. D3 hardcore is really no different from D2′s hardcore on old Battle.net. If you want the option to play in a lag-free environment the only option is D2 Single Player, friend. The internet will always have lag.
“It is disappointing however that after 6 weeks of being out we are seeing this kind of server instability. I recall lag killing a some people back in D2 but never in massive droves.”
That would be because there were never millions of ppl playing D2 at the same time. D3 is a victim of its own success, in very many ways.
I still have yet to come across any significant lag, 260 hours in.
Since it’s obvious that Blizzard won’t budge on their online-only “feature”, the very least they can do to help remedy these kind of massive lag deaths is to implement an in-game warning system. I know they have the latency meter, but I’ve had lag along with time-outs even with it in the green. All I’m asking for is to have the game monitor response time from the server & if it shows signs of taking longer than usual just have it pause the game & pop up a message stating as much. Then we at least would have the option to continue (with the possibility of more lag) or play it safe & exit.
One thing from D2 which was removed in D3 was the ability to instantly leave the game upon noticing lag…
If you spot lag or hiccups while playing in D2, Save and Exit or Alt+F4 usually helped save you.
Now in D3 even to attempt to leave the game you need to communicate to the server to initiate the leave game command…
Which is total fail, I haven’t died with any characters over lvl 35 but I just don’t see the point of HC in D3 when the entire game is gear driven and no corpse looting, seriously… If I’m playing with a friend and I die he can’t loot the items I was carrying haha, real immersion…
I left Starcraft 2 after less than a month because I couldn’t play with the lag. (I live in Brazil, and the servers are on the US).
I (with at least a handful of friends) have given up D3 because of this as well.
It is NOT lag spikes, it is constant lag through the entire country, across multiple service providers. So, it must be Blizzard’s end.
The saddest thing is that Blizzard does not answer to tickets, and never even posted something on the forums, acknoledging this or saying they are trying to find a solution or something. They simply ignore everyone.
I lost a 56 in hell old tristram…after I’d cleared town. A risen killed me apparently. None had been on the screen…but one must have sauntered over and beat me for a few minutes. I had 46k life and risen would hit me for about 2k. At this point I’ve only lost characters to lag…and I’ve only lost characters to sudden game disconnecting lag. So I’m taking a break from HC. I’ve lost my fair share of characters to lag over the years..but this has just been rediculous…so far the only way d3 can kill me with lag. And its been sudden sand on blizzards end.