Diablo II: Resurrected’s PTR is open and the focus of this round of testing is on database issues. With the game’s initial launch plagued by server issues and data loss, the dev team eventually shared the root causes of the major issues and outlined plans to help them by making changes to how data was processed and saved. After improving stability and reducing downtime, they’re now continuing to test these changes and more.
Players get level 99 test characters on the PTR in order to try and stress capacity out. Since this is the database testing round on PC, the parameters reflect this. One of the major changes shared by the team involved how character data was saved and how it would be saved going forward. The data was initially saved on the global database, which stresses the capacity and hurts stability. So this test saves the data to the regional database, which should help smooth out those issues.
With all of that in mind, the devs are looking for everyone to really test out these server changes.
“To help us test these database changes, we encourage players to play and log in and out A LOT. Furthermore, it would be helpful if players could creator characters of different types (Hardcore, Classic, etc.). This will assist us in gauging the fix on our end.”
The team has worked to address stability since the rough launch, but these tests should help with the rest of the necessary fixes. This first PTR has gotten some initial feedback that the test character builds didn’t feel right, but a community manager response indicated that the focus was on the database and testing the server so things might feel less balanced since gear isn’t based on anything specific to the meta. They later pushed a small update that creates a mule character called Tokens that just let you get respec tokens that you can share across characters.
For more on the Diablo II: Resurrected balance PTR, see the update here
