Diablo III: Blizzard To Address Game Breaking Bug, Server Collapse

Blizzard is currently in the process of dealing with a mountain of problems with Diablo III, which just launched yesterday and is already causing mass outrage.

Firstly, to get to the less significant one, Blizzard are currently trying to fix a game breaking Diablo 3 bug that has been reported multiple times on the official Diablo 3 forums. The bug occurs when players trade a shield with a Templar follower found early in the game, and this causes players to be booted from the game, shown an error 3006 message, and then be unable to log back into Battle.net. The problem seems common with the Demon Hunter class, so be careful with your gear for now.

Blizzard has said that it’s busy looking into the problem and suggests that players avoid the Templar until it can deliver a hotfix. It didn’t specify when this would be.

And now onto the main event, which is that the launch servers have been battered by the absurd amount of traffic. So people often can’t play the game. Now you know why there aren’t reviews up yet.

The issue began when excited players all trying to activate their games online in short time caused the servers to slow down dramatically, and eventually display error messages that prevented them from logging in and playing. The problem was out of control last night, and so bad that players started trending their error messages on Twitter, because hey, what else can you do.

Blizzard told fans this morning that those who still can’t get into the game should “wait and try again”. New servers are being launched to accommodate for the traffic while Battle.net is offline to make room.

“Please note that due to a high volume of traffic, login and character creation may be slower than normal,” it said in a statement.

“If you’re unable to login to the game or create characters, please wait and try again. We’ve temporarily taken our Battle.net websites offline and launched more servers to accommodate for the traffic. We hope to resolve these issues as soon as possible and appreciate your patience.”

In my opinion this is pathetic. It’s what you get when you want to use online activation and try to turn single-player campaigns into permanently-online experiences. Especially games like Diablo III which will obviously be overflowing with traffic after its launch. I mean the game has only been anticipated for the last twelve years. I haven’t bought Diablo III yet, but I know I would be extremely pissed if I just spent almost R500, or R700 for the Collector’s Edition, but can’t play my single-player game.