There is also another factor that needs considered…console. The port to console like Switch was outsourced thus it may be that the Diablo team within Classic team do not have the ability to modify the whole game or would want to pay the outsourced team to add in their changes.
Given they are still supporting PS4, XB1 and Switch where they get the same patch as PC then the Classic team may be hindered in what they can do…I say may as it is unknown.
Of course tweaking numbers they should be able to do but simply requires a team to test…hence why PTR is now 2+ weeks long so we can do some of that testing.
This is kinda what we are talking about:
There are things that are not difficult to balance or to implement and therefor we wonder why it does not get done.
There are sets and legendaries that could get a severe buff, and they still would not be meta.
I understand the process, but the question is why do they need a QA Test for a numerical change?
Who knows, maybe PTR’s should last 4 weeks, starting in the last months of a season, if the whole back and forth with the QA takes so long…
They don’t need a full QA process to change a multiplier when it’s goal is to try it on the PTR.
I can think of several variations on a reduced QA process that allows quick turn around.
I don’t know what inertia in their company won’t let them change their process. Something like this is a people problem, that is people not letting the process change.
Yes, changing a simple number from one value to another can introduce bugs into an application.
Just look at the fourth Kanai’s Cube slot. While not precisely changing a number, the principle remains the same.
The internal structure of the software likely follows an OOP (Object Oriented Programming) model, which allows for new application objects to create additional functionality all the while inheriting the base properties and functions of the parent object.
Internally, the addition of a 4th Kanai’s Cube slot is probably not a lot of code, because it’s properties and functions are similar to the original 3 slots, with the exception of it allowing for all items types to be slotted. All that is really required is something along the lines of (as an example only):
Ok, that is perhaps an over simplification of how it would work, and isn’t a true representation of the internal Diablo III code.
But that one change. That one, seemingly simple and unobtrusive change has introduced a set of bugs in it’s own right. We’de not be getting an extension of PTR 2.6.10 if it didn’t:
That article clearly states that PTR 2.6.10 will be extended with the Shadow Clones theme being turned off and then again later with the 4th Kanai’s Cube being turned off.
This is to provide a mechanism through which they can determine which of the changes (Theme or 4th Slot) is responsible for the latency issues people have been experiencing.
That’s the way software development works. Changing something will always introduce a bug of some kind, even if not in the way you might expect.
Sure, anybody can do the math and draw their own conclusions. Only the Diablo III team can do the math and implement the changes without breaking it completely.
To be honest, I do neither consider the additional Cube Slot, nor the Shadow Clones a “small numerical change”.
I created a small, highly, simplified representation of what I think a Spreadsheet would look like that they could be working with - based on my experiences with modding Diablo 2 LoD - to better illustrate what I am referring to:
As you can see, I imagine they theoretically could just change the value of e.g. Teleport’s Cooldown from 11 Seconds to 6 or 8 or whatever else they want. They even could remove it completely on some Runes and replace it with Charges or Resource Costs.
They even could make a completely new Rune (in my example called Above and Beyond) that allows you to teleport through objects (like doors) with a simple chance in the correct row, also increase Teleports maximum range from 50 to 80 Yards and slightly reduces the CD fro 11 to 9 Seconds.
And of course you easily can change the damage values of an offensive skill as well.
Of course there are different rows / parameters for collision with enemies and objects and also things like closed door, but for the sake of simplicity and to better illustrate my point in this example, I compiled them into a single one.
And there of course would be many, many, many more rows as well that determine the behavior of secondary missiles, cast time, which animation to use, what kind of AoE, elemental damage type etc. This is just very, very simplified.
The point is that I don’t think that changing one of these kinds of values would introduce a critical bug like the Shadow Clones or the 4th Cube Slot currently do on this PTR.
And I hope that my explanation is enough for you to understand why even a simple change can become a big problem. Whether it’s a small numerical change, or something a little more complex, like adding a 4th cube slot or the Shadow Clones.
Lets just focus on changing a numerical value, say perhaps % Damage Increase?
Everything is hypothetical, in the hopes of explaining it.
Unchanged, let’s say our hypothetical Wizard item adds 500% Additional Damage, and allows our Wizard to kill 100 Monsters per minute.
Lets change that buff to 5000% Damage Increase. Now, our Wizard can kill more than 2000 monsters in the same amount of time.
Every time a monster is killed, it needs to be processed by your computer, the data sent back to the server, and the appropriate data returned. In instance (1) above, that’s enough time to not cause lag because there’s not a lot going on. Now, In instance (2), because far more is being killed in the same amount of time, both your computer and the server needs to do far more work in 60 seconds than it ordinarily would have.
It doesn’t sound all that bad when considering solo, but remember than even when playing solo, there are bound to be 100,000s of plays on the server also, and that all adds up.
This is very well the likely the reason why either the Shadow Clones, the 4th Kanai’s Cube slot or perhaps even both combined is why people have been experiencing lag and other issues.
In a four player party, in the case of the Shadow Clones, effectively for 60 second upon activation there are 8 players on the battlefield, all contributing to the fight.
The 4th Cube Slot? I do not believe that it’s impact would be so great as that of the Shadow Clones, but it does add additional processing to both the client and server sides of the game.
All that data needs to be transmitted in two directions over the 'net.
More data means more time means more lag, especially when dealing with 100,000s of players…
Sure, I understand that, but increasing the damage of an item tenfold is nothing that I would consider a “small numerical change”. It certainly is a simple numerical change, but not a small one…
I was talking more about things like of Teleport, e.g. reducing its Cooldown to 8 or 6 Seconds, or to give it Charges or Resource Costs instead.
How would that increase the lag by a significant degree? It wouldn’t.
It are things like these that the community is asking for since a long time and they are not being done.
Or halving the Damage of Frozen Orb and doubling the Damage Multiplier on Unstable Scepter / Triumvirate / etc, which would bring the other Arcane orb runes more or less on par with FO.
Is it perhaps because those desired changes are not being implemented precisely because of the problems they might introduce if they where?
Remember that Blizzard has a far greater understanding of the internal workings of Diablo III than any of us could possibly understand.
So unless we are working for Blizzard and have direct involvement with Diablo III development, neither of us can truly say how even “a simple change” would affect the internal working of the game.
I’ll say this one last time: Most everyone on these forums who think they are so clever with their suggested changes have no clue how such change will affect the game, and then go all Karen when Blizzard doesn’t implement their “special-expert-knowledge” changes.
I’ve made suggestions in the past, and try to do so regularly. If they make sense, that is.
But I don’t insist upon it as if I was entitled. If Blizzard doesn’t implement my ideas, then I move on and continue playing the game as it is.
Like which for example?
I can not imagine that reducing the Cooldown of Teleport would require more than a simple and small numerical change and I also can’t imagine that it would introduce severe issues.
If things could be done so easily in D2 LoD as I illustrated in the image above, then why should Blizzard create a system where it is super difficult to make these changes for D3 that eventually would also create massive issues?
I literally can not come up with something where reducing the Cooldown of Teleport or replacing the Cooldown with Charges would cause severe issues.
Sure, they do, but why would the devs themself create a system where it is so difficult for them to change minor things, especially when the game was designed with the intent of being adjusted in the future. That doesn’t make sense.
It is not rocket science and it would not make any sense for Blizzard to turn this into rocket science.
Me neither. I have made several posts, even in the past few month where I explicitly stated that I do not demand these changes or that these suggestions of mine should be implemented (I can give you links to that), however, I am still wondering (in a neutral way) WHY some things that are easy to change and that would improve the game a lot, are not being changed.
I am not angry about that, but actually am rather calm & neutral about it and my tone and attitude remains friendly, even when there are things I don’t like, but I am just wondering about what exactly is going on behind the scenes. I am sure that there are reasonable and understandable explanations for why the things are the way they are, but we don’t know what these exact reasons are.
And I am not even angry about that we do not know the exact reasons for why certain things are not changed or adjusted. I actually just wanted to clarify to you that there are indeed things that could be changed/adjusted relatively easy since you stated that they are not that easy.
I am not blaming the devs, just clarifying things to you.
I only mentioned Increased DMG. Things like Cooldown Reduction or Increased Attack Speed may alone cause problems (frames, internal cooldowns on procs, overlapping skills with very high cooldown etc.).
D3 is massively more complex that D2. There are much much more things happening and calculations to be done there. Have you played LoD Online? Do you know what happened if ONE skelemancer joined the game? It was a lagfest. I don’t know what happened when there were more than one skelemancer ingame, as I just leave a game with skelemancer in it. I never question the performance of the game - we do see rubberbanding sometimes and ocasional mishaps like with shadows + 4th slot, but usually, 99.9% of time the game works really, really well.
This is the part that added something really meaningfull to the story. With more than one system to support and with the differences these systems have, they probably need to support 4 or more completely different codebases. If they release simultaneously, is itself a reason why stuff takes time.
Next time Blizz, just ask us if we want new, hard to implement and not impactful themes.
Hi, I actually mod D2. Never released anything since I mod things to fit my style.
Sure, you can easily change 500% to 5000% however, this DOES have side effects. There are several conditions to consider. Auras, skill dmg, weapon dmg, multipliers and such. All these things can have unintended consequences because of such a “simple” change.
For instance, you’d think that simply changing the inventory size of your character was okay in d2 right?
Only a couple of problems with a simple change as that. The bitsize used to store the character has the capability to go out of bounds and thus corrupting the save.
Same thing can happen with damage numbers. Certain interactions going out of bounds will cause lag, crashes, corruption etc.
Sure you can clamp values and sure there are workarounds. But finding these issues and making sure they DONT go to a PTR environment takes time for the QA team to do.
I do neither consider changing the size of the inventory nor increasing the damage of an item or set tenfold to be a “small, simple change”.
What I was referring to when I was talking about "small, simple changes are things like changing the duration of a Cooldown on a Skill or a replacing the Cooldown with Charges, or halving the damage on a skill rune while doubling the damage multiplier on a correlated legendary.
These things can be easily done, which was I tried to show with the picture of the spreadsheet.
I also never mentioned increasing a damage multiplier from 500% to 5000%. That was brought up by someone else.
Yes, I know. There also was this issue in D2 that when your life or mana went over iirc 64.000, it would be displayed as a 0 on your Health/Mana Orb, etc, but here in D3 we are not talking going any further than GR150, so it would be balanced around that and some builds are already at that level.
I understand that, but you are talking about very different kinds of changes than I do.
I don’t think that for certain changes, like reducing Teelorts Cooldown from 11 to 8 or 6 seconds would require a QA Test first. Increasing the size of the inventory, etc, sure, but not everything.
Frames? What do you mean by that? That an increased attack speed might not lead to the right amount of attacks?
Okay, that can happen, but imo the question remains if this is something that would create a critical error and therefor would require a QA Test first.
I am also not sure what exactly you are trying to get at here, but I speculate that you are referring to the interrupt frame that some procs cause?
It does not even has to cause an interrupt frame when you trigger a proc with an Internal Cooldown, just look at Etched Sigil and Tal Rasha, so I don’t really see much of an issue here.
I am sorry, no offense, but I also do not know what you mean with that. You had to elaborate further.
I stated it somewhere above in this thread iirc, but Jay Wilson said in an interview about PvP that skills have different values for PvP and PvE, and that all they had to do to change certain things like the damage of a skill or the stun duration or the cooldown of a skill, was to change a certain number of one of these spreadsheets.
Someone with more knowledge on the issue of calculations than me explained to me that the problem is not by default the length of the damage number, but rather the amount of calculations that have to be made per second.
It does not matter to the game if you deal 255 damage to an enemy or 23536775656853434 damage or whatever, because the 255 might translate into:
while the 23536775656853434 number may translate into:
110110100111011110011100111010101111101111111001111
So the damage or health numbers only become an issue one it exceeds the capability of 36 or 64 Bits calculations, at elast according to the person who explained it to me.
What is more important is the amount of these calculations that have to be made per second, especially with Area Damage in D3.
I’ve been saying this for a while: even minor tweaks need to go through a workflow process internally before they ever make it to PTR. I’m guessing that process is jammed up due to the disaster of a Season theme and the 4th Cube slot.
Still, I completely agree with the sentiment expressed in this thread, which is: “What the flip is going on?”
So many community members, myself included, have politely posted questions asking for bare-bones clarification, and in almost every case, we’ve been met with total silence. What a mess.
While I also would like to know more about what is going on there, I strongly assume that there are understandable reasons for why even minor changes take a very long time and that there are also understandable reasons for why they are not giving clarifications for why.
Look at some of Bellular’s recent videos of the last week for example.
He is a reputable source and knows people who are working in Blizzard on various projects, and he recently said that Activison takes over more and more of Blizzard and the closing of the Blizzard place in France is “just the tip of the iceberg” according to his sources.
In many previous videos he stated that his sources have told him that working conditions have changed into a more negative direction (especially for lower level devs), and that has been going on since years and is a continuous process.
So the reason for why not much is happening to D3 and also for why they are not saying anything for why that is so, has probably something to do with that and the higher-ups telling them to not talk about it… or something like that.
I can understand that they might not be able to say something about what is going on.
The more interesting question is imo “why does every minor change has t go through a QA Test first?”.
Things like reducing the Cooldown of Teleport could be done easily without much effort or the concern of introducing a serious bug.
Maybe it is because the higher-ups demand it, to not accidentally mess up the game, which would be bad for their reputation.
But that is just a theory.
Yeah, sure, I also would like to know more specifics, but I can also only speculate…
It probably has something to do with the things I mentioned earlier.
Absolutely. CM’s have to jump through hoops to respond to tough questions, but I assume they have the leeway to answer questions about questions. For example, I’ve asked FR to clarify the point of this patch, and whether there are any plans to do the proposed “balance patch” down the road, because, as one can easily see, only certain classes are addressed in this patch (and some, like the WIz, aren’t addressed very well).
So, yeah, there’s something going on there, and it doesn’t bode well.
You’re correct. A studio closure is a big deal to a company like Blizzard.
Ah, here’s something I do know. The tech upon which D3 is based isn’t from 2012, or even 2010. It’s much older. Parts of the game engine date to shortly after the release of D2, and some of the architecture (that may not be the right word, but you get the idea) of the game’s engine and code is ancient. Simply put, the current state of D3 has pushed the engine to its limit–at least according to my inside sources–and even the smallest tweak, say, to an existing number, could have massive ramifications for the rest of the game.
Maybe they are not allowed to talk about this, for example, because it would reveal that there is nothing or just little coming (maybe to to the virus thing or other things) and the higher ups have decided that such knowledge would be bad for the company or one or more of their products.
oof, that is interesting…
I always thought that after D3 was rebooted, they redid everything…
Thanks for the info.
I would be interested to see how this looks like.
As I stated above, i modded Diablo 2 and you have spreadsheets there that look a bit like this one (very, very over-simplified):
I maybe later can post a screenshot of an actual spreadsheet of D2’s patch files, but for now this will do.
When modding D2, you easily could change values like resource costs, casting delays, weapon damage multipliers on skills, base items, uniques, etc, even add weapon damage to spells and flat damage bonuses to physical based melee and ranged attacks, without causing much trouble, so it just would surprise me if it would be harder to do some minor things in D3 or that minor changes even could create huge issues, especially now when you say that D3 is partially build on an engine that was made by the D2 devs.
a few days ago i also did some research on the company’s current status. You don’t have to search long …
the fact that d3 was immediately given up is nothing new. only that savings are made everywhere and that 30% of the old team is used is awesome. Above all, high quality coders are supposedly fired non-stop. i also noticed that because a lot of players have been complaining about ridiculous content in wow for years. only there is subscription sold and there are also “addon” costs.
it’s really all about making money at any price and with minimal effort.
top contributions from very good authors are not simply ignored. I even found many posts from 2019 here in the forum … and everything is described simply and in detail … how to ignore something like that …
and who will buy d4 afterwards …
