Blizzard servers falling apart?

[Rawly]

Is it me or are the servers falling apart, all the time getting join bug when making games, getting massive pings for no reason going from <100 to nearly 2k. I put it down to lod dupers going mental again but is it that?

Nothing wrong with my connection, nothing has changed in my set up been happily running along making 20-50 games in a row every 5-7 mins upto about 2 weeks ago now cant make more than about 4 in a row without having to sit out a 2-3 minute join bug because my character is stuck in some none existant game!!!

This is on euro servers. This is really annoying as i have #11-14 in my sights on the ladder, I was going to see if i could sneak into top 10 but......

[goomba]

Is it me or are the servers falling apart, all the time getting join bug when making games, getting massive pings for no reason going from <100 to nearly 2k. I put it down to lod dupers going mental again but is it that?

Nothing wrong with my connection, nothing has changed in my set up been happily running along making 20-50 games in a row every 5-7 mins upto about 2 weeks ago now cant make more than about 4 in a row without having to sit out a 2-3 minute join bug because my character is stuck in some none existant game!!!

This is on euro servers. This is really annoying as i have #11-14 in my sights on the ladder, I was going to see if i could sneak into top 10 but......

east too, has had some pretty laggerific moments in the past couple of weeks, FTJ (failed to join) and even realm down after only a couple of games in my experience.

I too haven't had any significant changes to my set up. Ironically, last night, I had no issues at all in norm games whilst power levelling my new palladin.

[Fearlessone]

Remember this summer? From mid-May thru August the lag was even worse, usually worse lag spikes. The lag got better for a few days in early August just after the latest maphack banning. So why now again? Because it's holiday season in the United States. Students are just finishing up finals. Starting Nov. 24th was the Thanksgiving holiday and it won't end until after New Years Day, 3 major holidays.

As game maker you will often get 'fail to join' which really means failed to make, and probably will receive a 5 min penalty for whatever idiotic reason. Or you will try to enter a not full game, and get 'game full', which lasts about 2-3 minutes. During this time, the game won't appear on the game list and no one can join. Here, clearly Blizzard's computers can't count. Or you may go from one char to another too quickly, or make too many games too rapidly and receive a 'realm down' or 'cannot connect' msg, and that is a 5-10 min penalty. Or you may exit a game and very rapidly create or join the next or another game, and you get a 'failed to join' msg and you are hung up with the door not opening to the game and the silly msg, for about 45 seconds to a minute.

-The very rapid make/join penalty is an anti-duping penalty thats been around since 2003. The idea was to drop something on ground, exit during some sort of lag, and return with another character before the servers could catch up. It's annoying, but counting 5 seconds before rejoining or making seems to be best.
-Switching from one char to another, several times and rapidly, even if u DON'T join a game, causes your account to be flagged and if you exit from the character menu (the screen where u have selected a character and have the options of joining chat or seeing game list) too quickly, you will get a realm down type of penalty. This is very annoying when you do 2 sorts of things: going thru your mules looking for a certain item, and logging into your chars to refresh the expiration countdown.
-The inexplicable ability to make or join for a full 5 minutes often happens if you exit a laggy game during a lag spike. You're a duper! ....or so Blizzard's brainless computers ascertain. It also happens every few games anymore, especially if you are in a series of games, be they mf or exp games. Whether it's certain you are going to be penalized even before u hit the 'Enter' or 'Create' button hasn't been established. Maybe you try to join on a server that is undergoing some lag and get socked with the penalty. The next guy will have been with you the previous few games and will join just a few seconds later and get in, without penalty.

Now back to the seasonal lag issue. Why is it that an extra 20-30% players cause so much lag? Are Blizzard's servers dedicated to Diablo2 so old or so few anymore? Or perhaps when these guys get out of school they want their 'instant godliness' and do bots. Back when 75,000 people played this game at a time, it would be quite laggy from 8-10 pm every night, and from mid afternoon to evening on weekends. Nowadays, even with only 25,000 ppl on, the lag can occur anytime. Is that because the bots are running 24/7 with only one person games? Are their duping bots out there with the ability to lag the game or the entire server? Or perhaps Blizzard is causing artificial lag to crash the bots. Have you ever been in an LoD game where the Baal-bot stands motionless for a few seconds and then exits, its programming warning it to go? A well-worded question can often provide half the answer.....sheer speculation on my part.

[Demek]

lately it suddenly got worse
i got used to realm disconnected during muling and i usually know when to stop for 2-3 minutes, np

[fledgeling]

I lost so many items due to this lag, it's not even funny

[Rawly]

Remember this summer? From mid-May thru August the lag was even worse, usually worse lag spikes. The lag got better for a few days in early August just after the latest maphack banning. So why now again? Because it's holiday season in the United States. Students are just finishing up finals. Starting Nov. 24th was the Thanksgiving holiday and it won't end until after New Years Day, 3 major holidays.



There was a period earlier in the year when the game wasnt worth playing when the dream exploit cause lots of people to deliberately lag the servers so they could dupe in lod. This isnt as bad as then but...

I dont think it is due to holiday time in europe just yet most schools dont finish until this weekend. It is also not due to making games too quickly i can just log in and fail to make on my first game !!! Do you think they run some maintainance routines every now and then or something or do you think the servers run none stop until the reset.

[Zodijackyl]

Recently, waiting 5 seconds before making a new game (i.e. cs runs or mf runs) brings your chances of failing to join back to the old levels, just rapid game making or leaving/joining now increased chance of FTJ.

[purplelocust]

Back when 75,000 people played this game at a time, it would be quite laggy from 8-10 pm every night, and from mid afternoon to evening on weekends. Nowadays, even with only 25,000 ppl on, the lag can occur anytime.
I don't know how they have things set up, but probably they use virtualization or other methods to shift loads among servers, depending upon demand. So it may be that their first order of business is the paying WoW customers and that the amount of server power to handle Diablo comes second. If they do something like that, a big rise in WoW use could lead to more lag for Diablo. That is pure speculation, though

[WarlockCC]

You didn't get the memo that all the Diablo/2 reams are now housed on the same server(Pentium 2-300) ?
Seriously though. On the off-hours(3-6am server time), I have no probs playing. I also have no people to play with or public games to play in, but that's another matter.

[Flubble]

i cant even make a game on the realms now :undecided: every time it just sits there and then i get "Failed to join game", i can join other peoples games perfectly fine, but they are sooooo laggy i just give up with it and wonder why i even try to play online anymore :undecided:

i never experienced it being this bad pre 1.11 :undecided: maybe all those torch fires are adding to the lag. i saw this fury druid slapping away and the amount of fire was ridiculous :largesad: it was worser than being next to hell shenk! its took 5 minutes for the fire to stop, then we all ran around faster than the speed of light for ages. i cant bear to imagine an 8 player game where everyone has those torches.

[WarlockCC]

Just another reason I am glad to be playing classic. No Diablo impersonators around, nobody but big D himself gets to play with fire like that. :)

I played a bit during the day the last few days and kinda thought it was my torrent client running in the background that caused the lagspikes for me.

Cause right after I turned it off, it played fine for me. just the occasional spike once every 5 games or so, but that was it. Perhaps it's clearing up already.

Just have your supply of purples handy and hit that button on time.

[quadeddie]

i cant even make a game on the realms now every time it just sits there and then i get "Failed to join game", i can join other peoples games perfectly fine, but they are sooooo laggy i just give up with it and wonder why i even try to play online anymore

i never experienced it being this bad pre 1.11 :undecided: maybe all those torch fires are adding to the lag. i saw this fury druid slapping away and the amount of fire was ridiculous it was worser than being next to hell shenk! its took 5 minutes for the fire to stop, then we all ran around faster than the speed of light for ages. i cant bear to imagine an 8 player game where everyone has those torches.

What's a torch? :dunce:

[Flubble]

What's a torch? :dunce:

Hellfire Torch large charm thing, its on LOD, it has a 25% chance of casting a diablo style firestorm when striking with a melee attack
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/6299/htlclu5.png

[Demek]

i bet in next patch they will add large charm: diablo's horn :laugh: and uber cs with uber diablo clone who will drop it

[Fearlessone]

On the off-hours(3-6am server time), I have no probs playing. I also have no people to play with or public games to play in, but that's another matter.

I would guess that they arent seriously mixing up the realms on the same servers. Over the years there have been problems on all realms at the same time and problems that covered just one realm, and didn't spill over to the other realms. USEast seems to have had more than its share of these multi-day problems, while us over here at west are aok. All the realms are having these same sort of problems now, I would guess by the responses here.

When they come out with Diablo3, I will predict that when the lag abates from the huge number of just-bought-it customers, then the duping or other hacks will take over. Probably making the game unplayable for weeks at a time. And Blizzard will do 'something' and a Munificently attired Rep will stand at the balcony and address the throng: "Those who would trespass have been punished severely, and all known dupes, hacks and cheats have been eliminated". But they will come back anyways the next time school goes out or some sort of extended vacation, so dont believe them!

[Phalmos]

Time for Blizz to replace those 386's... Lag's bad on all realms as far as I've heard. I switched to classic in hopes of finding some sort of haven from the lag, but it's followed me there too. I've abandoned all hope in Blizzard ever caring about their original fan base that put them where they are. Nice to know they appreciate us putting them at the top of their industry...

[Rawly]

i bet in next patch they will add large charm: diablo's horn :laugh: and uber cs with uber diablo clone who will drop it

There is already a diablo horn that drops from the anderial like uber, not a charm though. Needed to open the red portal to the uber tristram

[Pied]

Its getting insane...

9/10 times i fail to create a game. A game will ALWAYS lag after 10 minutes, its going crazy!

Why is blizzard ****ing this up so bad? Why o why......

[WarlockCC]

Obviously, Phalmos brought the lag with him from LoD. ;)

It is starting to affect my off-hours aswell now. Freshly started up, with a freshly created character on a freshly created account, my first game, I get Failed to join, two times.
I then made the game with a mule and it was fine, had to wait five mins for the game to be permed so I could join with my new char. And I could play for a while. After about 30 mins it did get laggy though. Later on, when playing with other chars, I noticed Hell games appear to get laggy faster.
My 89 pala died and then got disconnected, undo-ing the death, returning my XP. :)
So I guess every cloud has a silver lining.

[Dacar92]

I have had a lot of lag lately too. I am playing LOD hell act 1 atm, and I had to quit last night becasue of it. It wasn't even fun.

[Fifty Squirrels]

I get pretty bad lag on Us West as well, I just exit Diablo and start it back up again and it's usually fine. But lately, I've been getting a glitch where D2 closes itself in the middle of a game.

[Flubble]

i only just come back to D2 in november

but i am done with even trying with bnet now, i havnt been able to connect to europe for 3 days now, i got lagged up, kicked out and havnt been able to connect since :largeannoyed: i cant even play warcraft 3 on europe either!

looks like i get to invest some more time into Ascarons Sacred game now :smiley:

[bobofuzzlymunky]

i remember on uhh... some holiday, lol... the east server was completely downed, noone could connect for the whole weekend (labor day weekend was it?) either way, itll probably crash again this week due to christmas vacations at blizz. just last night i was uber-ing and got thrown out of the game, couldnt join the game with any chars on any of my accounts, so i gave up and waited 5 mins, tryed again and it was still up! (came out 20-17 pally torch!)

[goomba]

I lost a decent fcr str/dex/rez and I ferget what else it had ring due to a 'rollback' over the weekend.

:(

[WarlockCC]

I found a way to make games with my new char. Complete giberish for names seems to work more often then the usual kind of names which describe what is to take place inside.
But if I make a game with a normal name, I get stonewalled. So gibrish it is for me. Long Gibrish that is. Preferably filling the length.

[Rawly]

I found a way to make games with my new char. Complete giberish for names seems to work more often then the usual kind of names which describe what is to take place inside.
But if I make a game with a normal name, I get stonewalled. So gibrish it is for me. Long Gibrish that is. Preferably filling the length.

You sure you are not spotting patterns in randomness?

That said when i started creating the game with a different character, so the same one doesnt make a game 2 in row had a good run of 12+ games before one didnt connect, but im guessing this is just luck. Although i will try the game name theory of yours as anything is better than going to make a coffee every other game to wait out the join/create bug when you fail to make a game.

[WarlockCC]

For some reason, when you press Alt + F4 while it's in the join/create bug, it lobs you back to where you where before you started to create the game.
With the old, original, real "failed to join" I used to get impatient, hit Alt + F4 and restart Diablo, as this is a lot faster then 'waiting it out'.
(mainly due to the -skiptobnet parameter though)
So, when I got the new Failed to Join" for the n-teenth time, I hit Alt + F4 asif on auto-pilot.
That's how I found this oddity in Alt F4 behaviour. Normally in windoze, it closes the program(if the program is set up properly to respond to this command. Yes, the program you're running gets to descide what it does with your precious Alt F4 keypresses).

[beardy]

its just ur normal ppl lagin to servers and dupein theres 2 workin methods that alot ppl know atm so ya

[Fearlessone]

My prediction is that the lag will get a bit worse in the next 2 weeks and then subside after New Years. Then it will return to normal levels by early February. This is in line with holiday schedules and the resumption of school after the winter recess. Same thing happened last summer. Maybe Blizzard will choose to do something about it in a few weeks and initiate some bannings.

When these student hackers go home on a break, they have time to do the latest lag duping hack, success breeds more interest and transfer to their friends. The worst duping sprees and account entry hacks occurred during break times, as anyone who has played this game continuously since 2000 will tell you.

Most of the people who play this game are students in high school and college, it seems. The smarter ones are the ones most likely to come up with hacks. And having other ppl around you in high schools and colleges who also play diablo causes word of new hacks to spread. Just imagine if someone told you about a new hack in October. Wouldnt you probably wait till Thanksgiving or Xmas break to use it full steam?

I have a realm down now, for over half an hour, I was muling thru 2 accts. It happens every time i look for an item now....