When Diablo III, an always-online title, launched in 2012, Blizzard's servers were crushed under the demand from the number of players. The Error 37 that many players saw telling them that the game was unavailable ruined their early-adopter experience until Blizzard was able to sort out the issues. Ahead of the midnight launch for the Reaper of Souls expansion, the developers assure gamers that there's nothing to worry about this time around.
Lead producer Alex Mayberry says that "it will be fine", mainly because the last update to Diablo 3 actually contained the same codebase as the expansion-gamers have effectively been playing it for weeks.
"When 2.0.1 went live a couple of weeks ago, that was the same codebase as Reaper. I mean, it is Reaper with Act 5, Crusader and Adventure Mode turned off," Mayberry explained. "Come tonight when it's time to launch, we just turn those things on."
As such, the servers shouldn't be slammed as hard as they were when the main game launched, and Error 37 isn't expected to rear its head again this time around.
"We planned it out this way," said Mayberry. "We planned to give ourselves a good month of time where we could get the code out, get people on and resolve issues. The worst part is going live and having all these issues and having to resolve them while players are upset. It's much easier to do this pre-patch and then have the time to react to the things we saw, especially on the server side.
Blizzard is clearly looking to avoid the same issues that plagued the launch, and it's good to see they've learned from their mistakes and want to make the experience better for everyone. Mayberry is excited for the launch and thinks it will be positive overall.
"Everything's looking really good for tonight...Volume of people plus new code usually equals problems, so we've got the code out, we believe the infrastructure's in place - I don't anticipate that degree of problems that we had at the initial launch. I think it's going to be fun."
Source: Eurogamer