Your point? PTRs happen during seasons, not after them. With S19 roughly half way there’s maybe 5-6 weeks left, during that time the two week PTR has to be completed, leftover bugs fixed and changes implemented so that the patch can go live as soon as possible after S19 ends.
I’d say there’s one week spare time at most before the PTR has to come up.
Don’t push the PTR too far back! As you said in another thread the PTR this time will be two weeks long and there’s only limited time left before S19 ends and the time to release patch officially comes. Leave enough time after PTR to actually fix bugs and implement changes.
Don’t rush things this time! That’s why it’s necessary to get the PTR up soon.
Any ETA on the blog post about game balance? Many of us fully support your/Blizzard’s ideas on game balance but it would be nice to have this displayed prominently to avoid confusion. Also, it will help players prepare mentally for proposed changes that will be tested during the PTR.
Yeah, Matthew, what’s the ETA? stares at the email with the text awaiting review
It’s in progress. I did the bulk of the writing before break with some touch-ups after coming back, now it has to go through the multi-phase preparation for release: verifying text with our development team for accuracy and tone (it’s here now), review with our editorial team for grammar and polish, delivery to our localization teams to be translated into all our supported languages, and then re-distributed to all our regional community managers for formatting and publishing. There’s also asset creation and review that happens in tandem, for things like headers and thumbnails or any in-blog images, all which follow a similar structure.
Barring any unforeseen circumstances, it should publish before the release of the 2.6.8 PTR.
Thanks Nevalistis and best wishes for a successful year.
I understand the corporate bureaucracy that goes into outward facing communications. Game balance tends to be a contentious issue; however, we appreciate the improved transparency on communicating about this issue from Matthew. For forum harmony, it would be great to have a logical game balance approach that is clearly communicated.
I keep quoting or direct people to this link when the topic of game balance comes up. Matthew’s post seems exquisitely clear to me. We appreciate Blizzard’s efforts to balance the different classes in the game. Almost universally, the players feel that a well-balanced game is the most fun game.
Curiosity question: How many languages are supported?
Thank you for the update Nevalistis! One small question I have pertaining to said article “Is there any mention in there a paragon level at which the dev team focuses majority of their decisions on?” for example Builds of X nature should be “120” viable at “2500” paragon for “push” (just an example). I only ask this because in theory there is 20,000 different points of data (with the paragon cap being 20,000) at which a build could be deemed “worthy of game balance approval”.
Just trying to help out the dev team with “being transparent” so that the theory crafting portion of the community can give detailed breakdowns after the “Game Balance” article is released. We can crunch the numbers and give you updated %'s for existing items (if a build needs to be buffed) to hit the target GR levels within the paragon parameters that the dev team looks at for “data points”. Also give %'s of damage numbers for upcoming build ideas for future patches.
I hope that you and the rest of the development team had a great holiday break! please continue to work hard on this game we all love.
Good to see you both back and on track for some more action in 2020.
I am really exited on this theme, because one of you mentioned, that the themes might be rotating at some point, don’t know who it was.
At least for me, i would say, that we will see a new theme coming up again and not an old one?!
As some other people of the playerbase allready said, S19 was pretty damn amazing and game-changing, maybe game-breaking?^^
Iam curios of what we will see for the next season.
Again, thanks for the info. It gives a pretty obvious timeline, for me.
Really wish there is a QoL rework for the lobby feature. It’s really annoying joining public GR games and everyone is looking to do different levels. Hoping to see something similar to D2 lobby. This will prevent lower paragon levels being vote kicked, and higher paragon players constant leave and rejoining the rooms to find the “right” team.
Blizzard Soon - long time away
Soon - maybe this year?
Very very soon - we will have a News Blog or announcement in the coming weeks.
NOW - we can tell you exactly what is going on.
We are at the Soon stage. When they have more info, they will share it.