Diablo 3 PTR extended to hammer out login and latency issues

The Diablo 3 PTR has been up and testing patch 2.6.10 and Season 22 for the past two weeks, but there’s been a complication, and the PTR has been extended indefinitely to help find and resolve issues with higher than normal latency and some problems with people logging in to the game as well. What this could mean is that Season 21 will be extended and Season 22 will be delayed — it’s hard to say, since we have no idea when Season 21 will end at present.

It’s impossible to say what’s causing the issues, and as a result, the team is going to disable Season 22’s Theme and see if that helps with the problems. If that doesn’t do it, the next step will be to disable the extra slot for Kanai’s Cube, the next likely suspect in the hunt for October latency. But patches are complicated things — it could be neither of those systems, or both of them combined, or some other issue that’s not related to either, and the only real way to find out is to do what they’re doing and test each option to see what happens. Obviously, they’ll keep testing until they have a culprit, and you can help by logging on to the PTR and playing Diablo 3 and then submitting your feedback so they can narrow down what’s causing the issues.

I’m glad to see them taking the extra time to nail it down now — Season 21 had some problems out of the gate, so I’m happy to wait a little longer for Season 22 to ensure that it doesn’t have the same situation. It’s also a good reminder of just how complicated it can be to add things to a video game. Often we get caught up in what we want to see, and forget that this is an established system that needs to be altered to fit a new Theme or item and those alterations can have unforeseen side effects that often are pretty confusing on first glance. It’s hard to think that a Season theme or an extra slot for Kanai’s Cube could cause latency spikes, and it may not even be the case this time, but the only way we’ll find out is with some testing.

Still, I’m a sad Barbarian over here waiting for my shadow buddy to kill demons with me. Hopefully it’ll be resolved soon — and we can all help by hopping onto the PTR and making with that sweet, sweet feedback.