This past weekend saw the launch of the Diablo IV early access beta, and while the overall response from players was fairly positive (you can check out Wccftech’s hands-on impressions here) those trying to get into the game were initially met with something that’s become somewhat of a trademark for Blizzard launches – long queue times. While these became less of an issue as the weekend progressed, waiting for hours wasn’t uncommon on Friday.
So, are things going to be even worse when the Diablo IV open beta and full release arrive? In a new interview with Eurogamer, Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson tried to play down concerns. According to him, over a million people played the early access beta this past weekend and many more will participate in the open beta, which is exactly what they want, as these betas are designed to stress test their servers and systems. During the early access beta they issued “six really big hotfixes that fixed dozens of issues” and are now feeling “really good” that Diablo IV will be a “lot smoother at launch” in terms of queueing and server stability.
Interestingly, Fergusson also delved into exactly why online games often have server issues at launch, and it isn’t just because they underestimate how many people want to play.
“Of course, the ideal is that there are no queues – that is where we want to be. […] Sometimes, queues are part of how many servers are available and those sorts of things, but the other side of queues, honestly, is around protecting the services. Sometimes you’ll put a queue in place just so that if there’s one particular service – like writing to the database – that you’re trying to not overwhelm. […] And that’s actually what happened [with the early access beta]: we actually turned up the queues a little bit to protect this while we were working, and then, once we did the work, we were able to start dialing [server capacity] up and dialing it up and the queue was going back down again.”
The Eurogamer interview covers a number of other topics, including why PC isn’t getting same-screen co-op (Fergusson somewhat improbably blames it on the difficulty of getting multiple Battle.net accounts signed in on the same PC) and class balance (tweaks will be made, but some classes are meant to peak at different levels, which you won’t appreciate until you play the full game). Even more is covered, so do check out the full interview here.
Diablo IV launches on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PS5 on June 6. The open beta kicks off on March 24 on all platforms, so let’s pray for reasonable queue times.
