Blizzard Entertainment’s action/role-playing game Diablo II has been a huge success with PC and Mac gamers alike since its release this past summer. One key to Diablo II’s popularity has been the game’s prodigious support for multiplayer game play, through Blizzard’s Battle.net online gaming servers. Recently the service may have been hacked, and Blizzard is now taking steps to mend the damage done.
Diablo II’s gameplay takes place within a medieval fantasy world populated by mythical creatures, monsters, demons, and otherworldly menaces. Hardcore Diablo II players have, in some cases, spent months developing the capabilities of individual characters they’ve created — garnering experience, hard-to-find inventory items, magic devices, and much more. Players affected by these recent server problems have seen their characters killed off, or have logged in to find items missing, skill points erased, and experience lost.
Blizzard Entertainment has not directly commented on the apparent compromise to its Battle.net security, but company system operators have posted information over the recent holiday weekend that suggests the company is aware of the situation and is doing what it must to resolve the problem.
On Blizzard’s own Diablo II Realm Status message board, system operators indicated that they were taking the Diablo II Realm down for “emergency maintenance” on New Year’s Eve. On Monday, Blizzard system operators confirmed that players had “experienced character losses” during the previous week, and said that the problem which caused the character losses had been fixed.
Blizzard Diablo II Realm sysops then outlined plans to recover from the difficulties. The company plans to restore all hardcore Diablo II characters that were killed between December 19th and January 1st. Players who are worried about potentially lost items, skill points or experience are also being given access to a manual method for that recovery, as well.
On Wednesday, Diablo II Realm sysops outlined the specific details of how the recovery will be managed — the service is to be taken offline for about 24 hours beginning on Sunday, January 7th, in order to restore dead characters and lost skills, experience and inventory. If you believe your online Diablo II characters have been affected by this problem, visit Blizzard’s Web site at the link above for the latest information.
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