Eager to hop into the Diablo IV open beta when it launches later this morning? Well, you may want to grab yourself some snacks and a nice book to read, because there’s a good chance you’re going to be waiting a while to actually play. The Diablo IV early access beta held last weekend initially saw players waiting hours to get into play, and it seems that’s going to happen again. Earlier this week in an interview, Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson expressed hope queue times will not be a big issue at the game’s full launch, but queues will remain a part of the beta process.
In a new blog post, Blizzard specifically warns of “lengthy queue times,” insisting that they’re an unavoidable part of running a beta.
“When we open the gates again this Friday to absolutely everyone, we are expecting a lot of people. There will be lengthy queue times, particularly on Friday when we first launch and during peak windows. This past weekend helped us to forecast the capacity we expect this weekend, and we will be using that capacity to intentionally stress our systems in preparation for launch. In summary, while we know it can be frustrating, we need queues to properly stress test our services and we are designing to ensure we have them some of the time.”
Basically, a key component of any online beta is systematically testing server capacity, which you do by starting conservatively, then opening up more capacity. In other words, the queue times aren’t just a result of Blizzard underestimating how many servers they need. Fergusson explained the process in that interview from earlier this week…
“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.”
Hopefully, trying to play the Diablo IV open beta isn’t too frustrating a process and this test actually does result in minimal queue times when the full game arrives. If queue times are still a mess at launch, players will be able to rightfully call bull on Blizzard’s explanations.
Diablo IV launches on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PS5 on June 6. The open beta kicks off today (March 24) at 9am PT on all platforms.
