Blizzard cautions players to prepare for lengthy wait times during this weekend’s Diablo IV open beta.

Still, I have moderate confidence in that, since the Diablo 3 issues Blizzard has made great strides there and actually not a single launch has gone badly.

Nevertheless, there have been no problems, for example WoW:WoD, where you did not want to log out of your Garrison in primetime, because that was asking for login issues. Or, for example, queues at the time of release (with WoW sometimes only for specific servers). Or other smaller issues that affected some of the players, but in general Blizzard launches have gotten a lot better.

In recent years, I have practiced the following (when I have taken time off around a release): I check at the release time (at Blizzard often 00:00 for us in the EU) whether it is playable (the last few WoW and WoW Classic releases for example, did this go well), is it so, do I play for a while to get a head start on the suit. If there are game-breaking issues or long queues, I just go to sleep and log in early the next morning, which actually always works perfectly.

But I also realize that this is going to be a Diablo release that many have been waiting for for years, making it probably a bigger madhouse than a normal Blizzard release. Which of course can lead to a different situation.