Diablo 3's open beta weekend sputters to a close today at 10 am PDT. The sudden announcement of an open beta was designed to serve as a stress test for the game's servers.
It didn't take long for Blizzard and fans to achieve their goal of breaking their servers. Shortly after the beta opened up on Friday, fans were greeted with login errors – particularly server full errors.
Error 37 was the most frequent as servers reached their capacity. According to Blizzard, "this was likely due to us lowering the concurrency cap to address an issue or error." On Saturday, community manager Bashiok revealed the Diablo 3 beta "peaked at around 300K concurrent" users, or…"a lot".
The beta itself wasn't too long. It was basically what players have had access to all along. About two to three hours of gameplay that concluded with the Skeleton King boss.
Overall, despite the frustration of many over the capped servers and downtime, the beta testing was pretty much a success. The servers broke, which is what the testing is designed for and I'm sure Blizzard got the necessary information they needed before the game's May 15th launch.
For those of you who did participate, don't expect your progress to carry on into the release version. All characters, gold, etc. will be wiped before the game's launch and you won't be receiving any "reward" for testing. Other than being able to say "I was there."
