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Blizzard Entertainment's Bashiok recently posted an update on the status of the 1.13 patch for Diablo II, an update which was originally announced early in the year. The release has been held up by worries about the impact of increased player stash sizes on the battle.net servers.

The service is designed specifically for the requirements of the game. Meaning that specific hardware has and continues to be used because the game was designed to run on it. The limitations now are that this hardware is pretty old, the storage capacity is more than enough to hold the data from an increased stash size, but at peak load can the service and database actually handle the ability to record all the data without fault? The feeling is probably not.

Now, that's only a reasonable doubt. If we were to throw caution to the wind and see if it works anyway the teams that would be responsible for cleaning up the mess are hard at work on completing the new Battle.net for StarCraft II. We're just not willing to bet the manpower that it will work and potentially impact one of our next major game releases.

The question then comes up that why don't we just upgrade the hardware? As I sort of hinted at this isn't off the shelf hardware and we can't simply throw in some new parts and hope it all works. It would be months of work, again, by teams of people that we simply aren't willing to remove from their current tasks.

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It has been a while since the last update, and I'm sorry about that, but we haven't had any new developments until recently. As much as some people want daily affirmations, they aren't helpful. We'll give updates when they matter, and we have a meaningful one going up this week.

Diablo II Patch 1.13 Status

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