The launch of Diablo 4’s open beta is imminent, however, if you’re eager to get your hands on it right away, you may need to exercise patience. According to a post by community manager Adam Fletcher on the Blizzard forums, the company anticipates “significant queue times” for the beta, particularly on Friday, March 24, the day of its release or Saturday, March 25 for us people on the other side of the Earth.
“When we open the gates again this Friday to absolutely everyone, we are expecting a lot of people,” the post reads in part. “There will be lengthy queue times, particularly on Friday when we first launch and during peak regional windows. This past weekend helped us to forecast the capacity we expect this weekend, and we will be using that capacity to intentionally stress our systems in preparation for launch. In summary, while we know it can be frustrating, we need queues to properly stress test our services and we are designing to ensure we have them some of the time.”
Additionally, Fletcher mentions that the game might be intermittently taken offline for implementing fixes or making “infrastructure adjustments.” The post ends by encouraging players to report any glitches they encounter and provide overall feedback on the game.
Blizzard has previously justified the use of server queues. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, company head Rod Fergusson expressed his support for the practice, stating that it may be necessary to maintain the game’s stability and prevent it from crashing.
During our time with the Diablo 4 early open beta, the worst I’ve had to queue on launch day was about 31 minutes and the following day about less than a minute. So do be patient as I also suspect very long waiting times, possibly as long as a few hours.
