Unusually long queue times ruined Diablo 4's Season of the Malignant launch
Say what you will about the response to Diablo 4's pre-Season 1 patch, but it sure looked like too many people were trying to log in at the same time.
The first season of Diablo 4 officially kicked off last night everywhere in the world. Season of the Malignant is one event many who fell in love with Diablo 4 had been anticipating, but the overwhelmingly negative response to the pre-season patch could have lead you to believe the turnout would be poor.
Whether the people complaining are trapped in their own bubble, or the game's servers simply ran into unfortunate issues at launch, the result remains the same: most people couldn't play the game when the season went live.
The two most common issues have been the exceedingly long wait times to get into games, and the random disconnects. The long queue times were exacerbated by the absence of a countdown or any sort of indication of how far along the queue the player is, or how long they're going to have to wait to get in.
"Queued for game start, start game pending," is the message everyone was staring at last night. In fact, if you happened to check Diablo 4 on Twitch, you'd find most livestreams with the content creator sitting back in their chair looking at said screen, waiting for servers to let them in.
The problem was somewhat alleviated an hour or so later when the game started displaying an actual wait time, which could run into the 40s. I saw a few 15-20 minutes myself, and one disconnect got me a nice 35-minute wait.
Thought yall quitting? can you guys quit so I can login?
by u/Melicalol in diablo4
The server overload also caused some disconnects and in-game rubberbanding/traversal problems across regions, which was particularly frustrating when it occurred in the new seasonal quest line dungeon, as it meant having to make a long trip from the town you spawned in every time, not to mention repeat the entire dungeon.
Blizzard quickly acknowledged the issue (which was affecting both the Americas as well as Europe), saying that it's investigating the cause. Queue times eventually dropped, however, but Blizzard did not offer an update as to the cause, or whether the issue has been permanently solved.
At the time of writing, you can long into Diablo 4 without much trouble, so hopefully that will remain the case for the rest of the day, and over the weekend. If you couldn't log in yourself last night, you definitely should do this one step before starting a new seasonal character.