This has been an ongoing problem with Diablo 2 for a long while. Every single time I see a "Diablo Walks the Earth" message, the server shortly crashes. (C/I, char gets "tagged" and is unable to make or join games for ~5 minutes)

On servers that walk slowly (Takes more than a few minutes to sell Sojs and walk) the server crashes within seconds of walking. On servers where there is only 2 sell messages before walking (with each sell message increasing by about 60 or 70) the server takes approx. 4 minutes to crash.

This is really infuriating, as most of the time, I assist people in killing DClone for them; and I can only help a few people before the server crashes. A few months ago, I could sit in a game overnight if there were sell messages, and DClone would be there for me in the morning, if he ended up walking.

This has been going on for a few months now, and I'm getting tired of my buddies missing out on loot because of servers crashing.

First things first: most walks happening are forced by parties. They decide on a server to "walk" and "announce" it so people got some time to "camp" it before the "walk" is initiated. Naturally a to-be-walked server has a full load of games waiting for the walk to happen.

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Q u o t e:
This has been an ongoing problem with Diablo 2 for a long while. Every single time I see a "Diablo Walks the Earth" message, the server shortly crashes. (C/I, char gets "tagged" and is unable to make or join games for ~5 minutes)

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Those "tags" are character specific.

Simply re-connect to your game with a different character, then idle for 10 minutes so the tag on your main char is gone and re-connect again.

This works as long as the game (or server) did not crash so the real question is: did the server crash by it's own world event?

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Q u o t e:
First things first: most walks happening are forced by parties. They decide on a server to "walk" and "announce" it so people got some time to "camp" it before the "walk" is initiated. Naturally a to-be-walked server has a full load of games waiting for the walk to happen.


Those "tags" are character specific.

Simply re-connect to your game with a different character, then idle for 10 minutes so the tag on your main char is gone and re-connect again.

This works as long as the game (or server) did not crash so the real question is: did the server crash by it's own world event?

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Yes, this is more of a question of a server bug, than it is about a client side problem. I know about the waiting out of the tagged char, and I have traded for quite a few non-ladder Sojs to sell to charsi to force dclone to spawn on a server, sometimes with 5 or more people (if we each could find about 12 or 15 Sojs from selling old gear.)

The fact is, there are FEWER players, MORE servers are online (some have been resurrected) and this is only a recent problem. And the variable time limit that seems to depend on the quickness of the walk, seems to have an influence on the rate of crashing.

Why does a server that walks SLOWER, and ends up with the same amount of games; crash immediately. But a server that walks quickly, takes a few minutes to crash? I know I personally take the anni and run. So after a few minutes the server load should be LESS. Not to mention Blizzard isn't stupid, and they definitely have a server load balancing system in place to make sure servers don't get overwhelmed.

This sounds more like someone exploiting a weakness in the servers, than a server bug. I'm just not sure Blizzard is aware of it. I know that Diablo 2 has been handed to the Legacy Team of maintenance programmers, so it's not that large of a priority.

It's just that, frankly, the game has been destroyed by the combination of servers crashing during one of the funnest events, spam, general botting, and the replacement of the (frankly abysmal) in game trading options with a third party site. I understand the game is old, I would just like to be able to kill dclone at my own leisure, without worrying that the servers will crash, and my character will be rolled back without an anni I personally invested in causing to spawn.

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Q u o t e:
Why does a server that walks SLOWER, and ends up with the same amount of games; crash immediately. But a server that walks quickly, takes a few minutes to crash? I know I personally take the anni and run. So after a few minutes the server load should be LESS. Not to mention Blizzard isn't stupid, and they definitely have a server load balancing system in place to make sure servers don't get overwhelmed.

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That load balancing system distributes the to-be-created games towards the servers so their load is spread equally. Once your game runs it does not move to a different server. By "camping" a specific server who has been selected for a "walk" it fills up with active games more and more so the load balancer (should) select this server fewer and fewer times to create new games. Maybe that selection threshold is higher on USEast than on other realms.

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Q u o t e:
This sounds more like someone exploiting a weakness in the servers, than a server bug. I'm just not sure Blizzard is aware of it. I know that Diablo 2 has been handed to the Legacy Team of maintenance programmers, so it's not that large of a priority.

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A bug or the exploit of one .. possible. At least i won't rule it out beforhand.

To give you an idea of why the servers are so volatile: A few months ago I reported a security hole in the Battle.net D2GS software (of which I will not go into here) that would enable a would-be attacker to crash an entire server, and hence all the games scheduled on it, by using a mere 3-4KB/s (Tx)