With the launch of the Diablo 4 open beta, players are noticing that queue times appear to be shorter than last weekend's beta – though that could quickly change. Open beta for the highly-anticipated ARPG has now begun and Blizzard has already warned players that long queue times, server outages, and technical issues are likely. Yet Diablo 4 players logging on early on Friday have been surprised to find queue times that are less extreme than prior.
When the early access beta launched on March 17, Blizzard faced a potential disaster. Not only did Diablo 4's early access beta queue times explode to over 2-3 hours on both PC and console, but players who got through the queue were frequently disconnected and had to restart their wait. But Blizzard responded with relative quickness. Queue times plummeted by Friday evening and were all often negligible for the rest of the weekend. The prospect of a surge of players for the Diablo 4 open beta has proven worrisome since, though.
Yet the disastrous open beta launch that some Diablo fans feared doesn't appear to have occurred. While there is a Diablo 4 queue, it has so far remained significantly shorter than queue times seen for the early access beta. Where queue times for the early access beta reached as high as 2-3 hours, open beta queue times peaked around 60-75 minutes. While another surge is certainly possible as Diablo fans finish work, the worst may have been avoided.
Queue times have even started falling for Diablo 4. After surging to around 60 minutes on PC, the queue dropped to closer to 30 minutes just over an hour past the open beta's start. Queue times did climb back up from there, and are now settling around 40 -50 minutes just two hours after the open beta began. This could be due to Blizzard's early access beta hotfix carrying over improvements to the open beta. However, it's difficult to predict whether that total will change over the weekend.
As positive as the queue improvements are, the Diablo 4 open beta is not without its issues. Players are reporting missing skill bars, sudden crashes (error 316719), disconnects, and continued problems associated with Diablo 4's RAM usage on PC. There are also plenty of odd in-game issues, too, like Druid transformations turning players into odd-looking monstrosities. It is a beta, still, and Blizzard will be collecting feedback to prepare Diablo 4 for launch.
While it's impossible to predict how queue times will be changing going forward, one safe takeaway is that Blizzard has clearly made improvements to Diablo 4 even since the early access beta. Perhaps queue times will skyrocket soon and this is an entirely undeserved compliment, but Diablo 4 open beta players will certainly hope otherwise. Blizzard will continue to work through the weekend to fix what Diablo 4 issues it's able, so expect further updates as they're made available.
Diablo 4 releases June 6 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
