Has anyone else noticed a dramatic decline in the availability and performance of Battle.net (particularly the USWest Realm) in the last few weeks alone? When I first got the game about a month ago, I had no problems setting up a character and getting in my first two hours of play to secure the character's long-term position on the server. However, I have a tough time imagining how new users can even get those first two hours in with the current conditions. It's horrid.

Waiting in a line of hundreds to create a game? Koreans and other residents of Asia flooding the USWest server because their own realm is even more unreliable than the ones in the U.S.? I think Diablo II is a tremendously addictive game, but Battle.net has become the huge thorn in its side, and it's a double whammy when you consider that the cheat-free multiplayer environment of the game is one of its best features.

What does everyone else think?

[The Dude]

I agree Trevor. While I haven't played Diablo 2, I do play Starcraft. And I must say that the performance of Battle.Net through the SC client is awful. Reliabilty of the network is shawdy and the chance that the server finds a private game is slim. While I heard that they added more servers to the BNet network, I believe it didn't even make a dent to alleviate the server congestion. I really hope they update the whole BNet infrastructure.

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Paranoia-
You only have to be right once to make it all worthwhile

-Unknown

[keyser_soze]

From what I understand, the cheat free environment is what is using up most of the bandwidth and causing the problems.

When blizzard added updates to b.net, the servers became less reliable and slower. When D2 came out and thousands and thousands more people started using bnet, it also slowed down b.net much, especially because it was cheat free. It takes a lot of resources to ensure no one is cheatin' you.