Blizzard's Diablo 3 Stress Test Lives Up to Its Name

This weekend, a few hundred thousand of Blizzard’s most devoted fans tried their luck at playing the Diablo 3 beta, which had been opened up to all for one weekend only ahead of the game’s May 15th release.

Blizzard touted the event as a “stress test” meant to simulate launch conditions of a large amount of players all trying to login to the servers at once. A more appropriate name could not have been chosen, as both the servers and players were under a large amount of duress for most of the weekend.

I couldn’t get the beta to work until late Friday and halfway though Saturday. Sunday access was only through spam clicking “Start Game” about fifty times until I was graciously allowed to play, but even late last night, I was still getting one of the many numbered error messages I had become intimately familiar with over the course of the weekend.

So does this mean launch is going to be an utter disaster, if the servers failed these “stress tests” so miserably for most of the weekend? In short, no. The fact is, open beta tests are often complete failures from a player perspective. The same thing happened with the World of warcraft beta, but that went on to achieve much success anyway. Even though a company like Blizzard has to deal with servers hosting hundreds of thousands or millions of players daily, events like these are necessary to problem solve ahead of the big day.

Every time we tried to log in this weekend and failed, we were doing our part to help Blizzard. This would help explain why their response to all inquiries was “keep trying. ” They wanted people to copy/paste their passwords every fo
ur seconds and try to log in. That’s exactly the sort of “stress” they need to test.

Source: forbes.com