We reported a few days ago about Diablo 2: Resurrected ever-recurring online server outages. Turns out Blizzard has a temporary solution for it: player queues.

That’s right: due to the game’s legacy code conflicting with modern-day network adjustments, Blizzard’s developers will be implementing player queues in a remaster of a 2000-era game to solve its modern-day server woes. The company will also be using methods like rate limiting and “breaking out the game’s critical pieces of functionality into smaller services” to make sure online play is stable for all. This also helps the developer tackle the overall online server downtime issues in a manageable method.

Diablo community manager Adam Fletcher dished out the solutions in great detail below:

Rate limiting: We are limiting the number of operations to the database around creating and joining games, and we know this is being felt by a lot of you. For example, for those of you doing Pindleskin runs, you’ll be in and out of a game and creating a new one within 20 seconds.

In this case, you will be rate limited at a point. When this occurs, the error message will say there is an issue communicating with game servers: this is not an indicator that game servers are down in this particular instance, it just means you have been rate limited to reduce load temporarily on the database, in the interest of keeping the game running. We can assure you this is just mitigation for now–we do not see this as a long-term fix.

Login Queue Creation: This past weekend was a series of problems, not the same problem over and over again. Due to a revitalized player base, the addition of multiple platforms, and other problems associated with scaling, we may continue to run into small problems. To diagnose and address them swiftly, we need to make sure the “herding”–large numbers of players logging in simultaneously–stops. To address this, we have people working on a login queue, much like you may have experienced in World of Warcraft.

This will keep the population at the safe level we have at the time, so we can monitor where the system is straining and address it before it brings the game down completely. Each time we fix a strain, we’ll be able to increase the population caps. This login queue has already been partially implemented on the backend (right now, it looks like a failed authentication in the client) and should be fully deployed in the coming days on PC, with console to follow after.

Breaking out critical pieces of functionality into smaller services: This work is both partially in progress for things we can tackle in less than a day (some have been completed already this week) and also planned for larger projects, like new microservices (for example, a GameList service that is only responsible for providing the game list to players).

Once critical functionality has been broken down, we can look into scaling up our game management services, which will reduce the amount of load.

This is a bummer for those playing online, but at the very least you can still play Diablo 2: Resurrected offline.