Blizzard has opened up the Diablo III beta stress test to all gamers this weekend. The beta testing started on Friday the 13th and will remain open until Monday, April 23 at 10:00 a.m. PDT.  During this time period anybody can play the game for free, thats is if you can log in without any error codes.

In order to play Diablo III’s beta, you will need an active Battle.net account. Create one If you don’t have one already (its free), then sign in and create a "BattleTag”. After that just download the game from the game management section.

As you can imagine, Diablo 3’s servers are getting pounded by gamers trying to eagerly log into this highly anticipated RPG action game. The whole reason why Blizzard has opened Diablo III to the masses this weekend is to see how much of a beating their servers can take before the official release on May 15, 2012.

The whole point of the Diablo 3 stress test is to push Blizzard’s servers beyond the breaking point, in order to see if there are any unexpected failures they will have to fix before releasing the game to the general public.

The video below is an example of not being able to log into a game on Diablo 3 and getting an “error 3006”



In the process of this stress test, Blizzard has now started to temporarily cap the amount of gamers who can log in, due to some server stability issues.

"We've temporarily capped Diablo 3 open beta concurrency until we can address some stability issues," Blizzard’s community manager Bashiok said.

Typically in a stress test of this sort, you increase the amount of people online while decreasing the amount servers available to play on. This will show where the breaking points are and how much Blizzard can get away with when Diablo III’s servers are at full capacity.



This is the whole point of this “stress test”, to Push its servers to a breaking point. In short, Blizzard wants this beta test to fail in order to see how much they can get away with.

In my experience today, I was able to download Diablo 3, create and name a character in less than 45 minutes. But as soon as I tried to create a game to start playing online, the game froze. After having to force the Diablo 3 program to quit, I tried logging in and then kept receiving an “Error 37” message.

Update #1: Just now while writing this article, Blizzard has acknowledged this problem with games not starting after creating a character and has brought down all it servers, in order to fix the issue (picture below).

“We have brought all Diablo III beta servers down in order to resolve an issue in which games are unable to be created after login. We will provide an update in approximately 1 hour.



Update #2: Now I am able to play the Diablo III beta. Game play can be a little choppy but other then that, seems to be going well when playing with other players online.

The most common error a user can expect is “Error 37” and “login failure”, when attempting to log in to the Diablo 3 beta.

“The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later. (Error 37)” (pictured below)

This error just means the servers are already full, from the cap that Blizzard has placed. The only thing you can do in this situation is just wait it out and come back in 30 minutes to see if the cap has been raised. Or you can just keep trying to log in until you are able to get in.



Some players are also seeing Error 3003. If thats the case, click on Options and change your region to "The Americas". Diablo III’s Open Beta is limited to US servers only.

Bashiok has warned its fans, "This is a stress test, and issues are expected. You may have trouble logging in due to the sheer number of other people attempting the same," However, he did reassure fans that the issues will get sorted out as soon as possible. The test servers are expected to handle a lot more people then they currently have online.

So just remember while you're trying to play the Diablo 3 beta this weekend, you're helping Blizzard with their stress test. Expect hiccups, thats what happens when you're testing out pre-released beta games.

Have you played Diablo III? How do you like it so far? Have any issues with game play or logging in? What error codes are you getting? Leave your thoughts down below.

Check out BestBuy for more info on Diablo III Collector's Edition - Mac/Windows

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