Open Letter to Blizzard (and an offer)

General Discussion
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I’ve been playing Blizzard games since Diablo I in 1996. I’ve seen some amazing things from this company. They made the best games, had the best support, and had a dedicated company making games for gamers. All of that is gone now. Not going to speculate on the reasons, there are many, but the fact remains.

Diablo III: Either Blizzard doesn’t care, doesn’t have the resources, or are incapable of fixing this game. This latest PTR is a prime example. The testing methodology is terrible. What should minimally be test, fix, test, fix, go live has become test, test, fix, go live. The odds of getting anything right using that approach is minimal.

Season 22 was supposed to be a balancing effort. Right now, based on the PTR, for soloing, we have some great classes like Crusader, DH, and Necro. Some decent classes like Monk and WD. And some terrible classes like Wizard and Barb. The PTR brought changes that got us to this point. There are still major imbalances. Where are the changes to address this? Are they ever going to be made? It’s clear they won’t be tested before going live. The chance of getting anything balanced and addressing all the issues folks have brought up are slim.

With some simple changes and testing many of these issues can be resolved. Yet Blizzard is silent on what they are going to do, if anything. So now the plan is to possibly make changes, and then just go live and pray. Anyone confident that is going to to work?

Offer to Blizzard: I have an extensive background in QA and Reliability for multi-billion dollar high tech companies. I am retired and live an hour from your headquarters. I will provide testing assistance for no monetary compensation. All I ask in return is free Blizzard games for me and my kids for as long as you are in business. What do you have to lose?

Sincerely,

Tarkus

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Lol, don’t you know they don’t test their games?
I mean, maybe something along the lines of you run around and see if you’re going to fall though the map or not, but that’s the extend of it.
Legion wasn’t tested.
BfA wasn’t tested.
No idea what’s going on with Shadowlands, but it turns out it was so bad, that they had to delay the game, so it clearly wasn’t tested…
In regards to D3, no need to comment.

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I can’t really disagree with you. Wasn’t always this way. Unfortunate they’ve gone down this path.

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My favorite Blizzard games were D2:LoD, WoW TBC, WoW WotLK.

I’ll always remember when I and a bunch of friends returned to WoW for Legion and we were so disappointed by the very structure (or lack of such) of the game.

No PvP vendors, just mindless grind of world quests and mythic+ dungeons. PvP was pointless, Raiding was pointless.

Finding legendary items was all based on pure luck… out of 6 or 7 people, I was the only one to find two, the others didn’t get even one.

People would get denied spots for certain activities depending on which legendary items they had…

Grinding artifact power for like 12 hours every single day instead of having a complete character on max level in terms of skills… no time for actual fun, player driven activities in an MMO…

Absolutely disgusting experience… so it’s all good an well if people test dungeons, raids and whatnot, whether the floor is solid, whether the skills are bugged and whatnot…
but if they are not allowed to comment on class balance, the gear progression and acquisition and whether those fundamental things make sense or not, or if the bad design gets pushed though anyways… then testing is pointless.

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Yeah, WoW right now is bad. B A D ! But at least there is still D3. For all its faults, it’s still better than WoW. What they did to the AH was just criminal. That was the final straw for me, stopped playing in February, saved me almost a 120 dollars so far too. Thanks Activizzard.

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Well there’s diablo 2 which has always been the best study subject for how to make a good diablo game. Every little thing is a big thing w diablo 2. Listen f/e to how a gem drops, has an awesome sound effect, its clear and distinctive, you can see it on the ground w/o picking it up and see it’s color, and know what it is. Or you step in a fire-chest and your necro goes “Ahh!” like hes, actually burning or catching on fire.

Its ‘super tiny didn’t notice’ things like this, let alone the big huge things like itemization and purpose and such, that are why diablo 2 is so, so, totally above diablo 3 it’s not even close. D1 as well too.

There are at least 100 examples of things like this that diablo 2 did better, most people who know this stuff aren’t on these forums so when you say correct things with examples, they either get attacked or ignored like they’re not right opinions to hold, even tho the majority of the world would agree, just not on these specific diablo 3 forums.

The good news is the more ppl that see these ‘tiny little didnt notice’ but gigantic differences between old-dev blizzard and new-age blizzard, the more obvious it is to everyone how much more brains and tlc went into diablo 1/2 vs 3. Hopefully youtube will get a 2020 and forward batch of new, clear cut example comparison videos, that take tons of time to make, so that more people are educated on this ‘opinion’ and start to see it as 'not a minority or 50/50 opinion" like it’s downplayed on here.

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I’m pretty sure the Human Resources department at Blizzard doesn’t read the forums, nor hire based on comments posted here.

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do you know a good summary on youtube about the current status?
i played it at the beginning and then after several long breaks. at the beginning it was really very cool. even if items were ugly. graphics, atmosphere with music and sounds were much better than with the competition. the quests were also interesting.
later too much dumb content came in. and you could see the effect on the players. i couldn’t sit in the speak team because my ears kept bleeding. also in the chat i saw almost nonsense with lots of smilies and exclamation marks.
in the game there were quests where you should collect poop … quests were dumb as if they were developed for 6+ years children.

as a comparison i had eve online at the time. And there you won’t get any further in pvp without a very high level of intellect. You also have to know a lot, and that trains your brain on its own. the disadvantage is that the game is structured like a second job and it plays like excel.
It is also mostly played by people who are significantly older than 30 years. I hit everything from 30-60. it is even very popular with old grandpas and you can discuss many real life topics there.

even then, many years ago, it was clear to me that they would develop the game for 6-18 young people. and I should absolutely avoid it.

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While that is kind of you, CA law does not allow companies to have people do work for free that they pay others to do. Not even the intern positions at Blizzard are volunteer. Those are paid positions and also have travel and housing paid.

If you wish to participate in the PTR and provide feedback there then you can do so when they are open.

Otherwise, if you want to do QA for Blizzard you would have to apply for an open position.

Also remember everyone, the job of QA is to verify what the Devs created works as the Devs intended. That does not mean what the Devs created is a good feature or good idea! QA only determines it technically works.

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Should we start sending invoices to Blizzard for the PTR write ups? Some posts are gold. :grin:

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From what I understand, it is a process, and the balancing will take place over several seasons and multiple balancing passes. No one said it was all happening this season.

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How is Barbarian terrible? Zdps and wwrend is on top.
I do agree that the other sets for the class is not ideal, hopefully future patches can fix that.

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Its unreal, they turn down a QA tester who is retired because they legally would have to pay them, point them towards PTR, however people like you test on PTR and provide very high quality feedback and get ignored 9 times outta 10.

Blizzard got lost in the storm.

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@BarbarianFTW
That’s the sad thing. Compared to many games nowadays, D3 despite all it’s flaws is a solid game in comparison.

@Thorodan
I’d say it’s true, that devs should look into D2.
But I also gotta tell ya, D2 wasn’t a perfect game either.
In some regards it was pretty lame prior to LoD 1.10 and the synergy bonuses…

@NoItosMyMain
Why do you need a good summary on youtube? Unless it’s coming from a youtuber then it’s not true?

The issues are essentially the same as what I described in regards to Legion.
Your character skills are not complete on max lvl, in Legion you had to grind artifact power, now you obtain skills from so called covenants or something like that.

Something like PvP and Raiding doesn’t seem to be the main focus. Too much nonsense to occupy your time, rather than you the player having time for fun, player driven activities.
Feels like a fake MMO.

What do you know about PvP in WoW?

PvP in Vanilla WoW was utter trash, two button, two-shot fest.
TBC and WotLK had the best PvP balance, subsequent expansions dumbed it down and made it less and less balanced.

Even during the good patches, there were comps that required skill and coordination, but there were also comps, that were just about button bashing and relied to luck and high crits, not really outplaying anyone.

Also, what’s the PvP in Eve, that requires high level of intellect?

Age is in no way a guarantee, that people are intelligent.
The sad reality is, that most people have average intelligence between 90 and 110. The chances, that you’ll run into someone with 130 or higher are rather slim… and if you’re not of a similar level, you’re unlikely to get along :stuck_out_tongue:

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Thorodan: Yeah D2 is that famous person that did the right thing, around the right people, at the right time, in the right location. Talk about perfect timing. D1 was a masterpiece in its own right, a trailblazer for gothic role playing games. It got people away from the table tops and all the dice, pencils, maps, graph paper, character sheets, miniatures, etc. and placed them in front of a pc for countless hours. In my opinion, D1 and D2 are the T1 and T2 in the gaming industry.

NoItsMyMain: On youtube? No, unfortunately not. I stopped paying attention to that game 8 months ago. Yeah the start of WoW was absolutely mind blowing. Yeah the races were a bit cartoonish and the items, like you said, were ugly. They didn’t have transmog back then, I wish they did. But the game itself was fun enough, I was able to overlook some things here and there. After Wrath of the Lich King, WoW went down hill. I think that’s when Activision took over Blizzard. Of course some players could say that WoW went down hill because of Wrath of the Lich King, it brought in all the ‘casuals.’

ElobaCarcen: Yup. That’s why I still play D3. Of course it also helped that I played D1 as little kid and D2 as an older kid. I will play D4. I am sure it will be good enough for spending hours killing monsters and grabbing loot.

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I actually don’t blame Activision in any way for the poor quality of WoW.
I highly doubt, that they caused the game to get worse in any ways.
I simply don’t see Activision higher ups going to Blizzard and making them mess up the formula and ruining a cash cow.

Also, who cares if there are casuals in WoW. If everyone is on pro level, then everyone would be pretty much equal. You need casuals to be… well, better than them at the game.
Lich King… although was worse than TBC in some regards, in others was better… so I’d say both expansions were solid. If WotLK brought in more casuals, so be it.

The problem starts, when you start messing with the basic structure of the game, to the point, that it no longer feels like an MMO, and it’s not fun.

Running mythic+ in Legion to get my gear wasn’t fun, I wanted to get my gear from battlegrounds and arena, but the gear there was significantly weaker (at least during the first 3 months).
The inability to earn and choose legendary items, reducing the whole thing to luck wasn’t fun.
Farming artifact power 12 hours a day to fix my character abilities wasn’t fun.

And a lot of people reported, that getting random traits on their Azurite armor pieces in BfA is not fun…

And now Shadowlands is delayed, because a lot of people reported, that the covenant system is also not fun…

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ElobaCarcen

I consider myself to be a casual player because I am not competitive and I don’t take gaming too seriously. Yes I enjoyed PvP, Dungeoneering, and Raiding; just not at the level of the so called pro or competitive players. I grew up playing D1 and D2. When I wasn’t playing those two games I played AD&D with friends and family. So I take a different approach to playing games, heck even sports.

I just want to be entertained and Wrath of the Lich King did that for me. Then again, so did Burning Crusade and Vanilla. Did I like the idea of the Horde having Paladins or Elfs? Or the Alliance having Shamans or Space Goats? No, not at all. Did I make one? Sure, I did. Did I like it? Nope. That’s okay. There was still enough for me to like in the game, it kept me entertained.

If you think about it, one could argue that giving the Horde Paladins and the Alliance Shamans started the downfall of WoW. The Horde became too much like the Alliance and the Alliance became too much like the Horde. Horde didn’t have cute stuff, no elves, it’s not the Alliance. Alliance didn’t have monsters, the Horde did. I guess it really depends on how far you wat to go. Flying could have started the downfall of WoW. I, for one, actually liked it. I got to experience the whole world.

Now when I say casual player, I mean the people that only play a few minutes here and there and have the nerve to complain and/or demand. You don’t even play the game enough to earn the right to complain and/or demand anything. If it’s not your kind of game, play something else. Go away. I am sure many others felt the same way. I have that attitude with those kind of players in regards to D3.

I do. I blame Activision/Blizzard. Who do you think they listened to? The actual players, some being a bit much in all due honesty, or the ‘casuals’ that I mentioned above? The casuals. The players that didn’t care (and will never care) about the game itself. All they want is instant gratification. Why even bother playing the game?

Also, who is making these games these days? People that actually play them and have fun, or once again those ‘casuals’ that I mentioned earlier? As for Shadowlands being delayed, I can see that. From what little I read and saw, I wasn’t going to purchase it at all. Even if the AH wasn’t socialized, I still would have quit when Shadowlands went live. But I quit sooner than later. WoW is just not a good or fun game anymore. I lasted longer than my friends that started at Vanilla launch as I did.

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First, The OP made a cute, tounge-in-cheek offer (surely someone who makes such a well written post isn’t naive enough to expect that it will be taken seriously) to test for Blizzard for free. He’s definitely not the first person to make a post like that.

Second, no one from Blizzard made any response or refusal - not sure where you pulled that idea out of (I can guess though).

I see what you did there.

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To be honest, if they don’t get their stuff together in Shadowlands, it will probably mean the end for WoW. I think up to 2015 or so you could safely say that WoW was still undisputedly the best alternative for MMORPGs, but that isn’t true anymore. Anyone I know who migrated to FFXIV makes fun of wow and has no interest in coming back, me included. I have lots of friends who are playing Elder Scrolls Online or even asian mmos over WoW. Even Runescape 3 which just got added on Steam, feels more alive than WoW does. In fact, the only people I know who are still playing WoW are playing either Classic, or private servers for previous expansions.

I’m fine with D3 because I don’t really take that game seriously. I have it on my Nintendo Switch and it’s literally a thing I carry around and do some greater rifts to kill time when I’m at airports or planes (I fly a lot due to my work). I can’t see myself playing it as my main game though (although that was never the case with ARPGs to me).

I like some of the things they’re doing with Shadowlands, but I’m not convinced it’s going to be enough.

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are you sure?, were did you guess?

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