Can't play games cuz of lag

I don't know why anyone can stand playing Diablo II on bnet. The game gets so frustrating when you go into a room and all of a sudden die when enemies appear all of a sudden and kill you. Why can't Blizzard get things right for a change? They should use all the money that they get from people blindly buying their games and actually use it to fix up the B.net network. I didn't pay $55 to get this poor of a service and I dotn' think anyone else should. The B.net community has become tolerant of the evil monster that is lag, and this should not be happening. The players should be demanding more so the lazy Blizzard developers can stop sitting on their asses doing nothing. B.net shouldn't be synonomous with lag, but instead with fun.

Also, how can I reduce this lag? I always have a red lag bar and can never play any games! Help!

[Canis Lupus]

Lag is caused by a whole variety of factors, both from the server and client side.

In Battle.Net's case, the lag is usually caused by overloaded servers, or servers that are always being upgraded in the middle of "rush hour" (usually defined as more than 50,000 users online at once). Also, Diablo II has VERY bad netcode, which causes lag EVEN if you are not connected to battle.net, so that inherent game lag coupled with server lag is a HUGE amount of lag http://www.opentechsupport.net/forums/smile.gif

Lag can also be cause by people whose connections are slower than yours. This should not be a problem with realm servers, but if you are playing Open, the ingame lag usually stoops down to the level of the person with the highest latency (commonly AOL users). Hence, people with faster, low-latency connections are bogged down when people with high latency connections join their game, or vice versa.

In any case, Diablo II lag is nothing new, especially in Battle.Net. I am sure the Blizzard people are "trying" to solve the problem, and hopefully they will with the upcoming D2 1.04 patch.

However, my take on it is that there is just not enough servers to accomodate the sheer amount of people playing online. Either that, or they need to upgrade their hardware/software on the server end to keep up with the huge load Battle.Net experiences everyday, and especially on weekends.

Of course, we would not be speculating about what the problem is or how to solve it if Blizzard was more open and was actually telling us what was going on, what they are doing to fix it, and when we can expect it to be fixed.

This lack of communication with their customers is already a bigger problem than just the lag.