Open Beta Weekend and Unlock #5
Make sure to check out today's news to get information on the Open Beta Weekend, as well as the Blizzcast 17 that was unlocked yesterday.
Beta Server Maintenance (Read Updates at top)
Blizzard will be temporarily closing the beta server at 8:00 a.m. PDT to do some maintenance. After completed, they will be slowly letting players back in.
Originally Posted by Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
(We're preparing to bring down the Diablo III beta at 8:00 a.m. PDT to quickly address an issue, and will be gradually increasing the amount of players allowed on after it's complete. This may result in an Error 37 while attempting to log in, and we recommend that you keep trying. Thank you for your patience.
PANIC TIME!!
https://twitter.com/#!/Bashiok/statuses/193804596966207488
at least diablo 3 is offering some kind of challenge
There's nobody running around. You guys are thinking that these errors are a problem that Blizzard is desperately trying to fix. They're not, they are planned errors.
"Stress Test" means just that. You have to stress the system before you can test how it responds under stress.
It's not that there are too many beta players and Blizzard doesn't have enough servers so they're getting hammered. On the contrary, Blizzard probably has 10 times as many servers as are needed for this beta, because they'll need that many when the game goes online in 3 weeks.
What's happening is that Blizzard is deliberately shutting down servers, letting fewer and fewer servers handle the load until queues slow down, errors appear, or something crashes. This is what "stress testing" is all about. It's not about "oh, let's see if our servers can handle the influx of beta testers". It's about "let's break our servers in a planned manner, then dig through logs to understand the different modes of failure".
Of course, this means a !@#$ty experience for the beta testers, but that's how stress tests work.
I bet I know your choice.