Yeah, imagine a company supporting a game that tens of thousands play still to this day!
And this game, within the biggest ARPG franchise in the world wide is called Diablo!
The fact it cost me to mow the lawn, but ppl who might want to buy my house are pleased at the overall look, and this is big money in my bank.
Not every aspect of my business must individually bring me loads of cash.
Some things support the other and are important.
Yup. It’s about keeping people on that Blizzard platform so they can pull in their friends and buy new Blizzard products.
that’s cos GGG cares about their game and actually understands it. Blizzard’s attitude is “just add another 0 to the damage and they’ll be happy”.
Actually it’s more that GGG’s backend isn’t on fire with the players pissing what amounts to jet fuel into the already raging inferno. Right now we’re looking at the perfect storm of corporate shakeup + varioius detritus from the lawsuits + legacy code turning D2R from powerhouse release into a Humpty Dumpster Fire™. I would not be surprised in the least if they were pulling a lot of folks, including some of the Battle.net staff whom specialize in databases, off to help with that mess right now. That would also delay a season 25 launch for D3 because most season themes thus far have also required some backend work on the Battle.net side to bring API support up to snuff for launch.
We’re just going to have to wait until Blizzard has some semblance of a chance to make some sort of announcement, meaning they first have to have something concrete to offer us going forward and have it far enough along to give us a preview.
But that is solely Blizzard’s fault.
Poor game design.
Poor internal staffing behaviour, almost certainly led by poor management. Monkey see, monkey do.
Lawsuit is a result of their poor treatment of women in their organisation. I have ZERO pity for Blizzard. Not sorry.
Not listening to customers.
Poor QA testing. You know, I’ve done beta and bug testing in the past (y2k testing for the largest computer system in Australia, and probably the Southern hemisphere back in 1999), and beta testing for Libranet GNU/Linux (v3). Blizzard’s “beta” testing was anything but beta testing. Beta testing for D2R should have been the full game, full difficulties, online saves (to stress test the server & dbase infrastructure), etc. Blizzard didn’t, they did it dirt cheap cos their marketing team said "we can’t reveal the entire game or full functionality in a beta test!).
The blame is entirely on Blizzard - they have made poor decisions, and those decisions have had a knock on effect. Don’t you dare pin the blame on the consumer. We are 100% not responsible for any of this mess.
Blizzard has probably been developing D2R for at least 18 months - they have had plenty of time to do a good job. I guess if they hadn’t been too busy going on booze ups in the office, harassing women and having a bludge, the game would have turned out better.
I make, and will not make, any apologies for my seemingly harsh words. You make your bed, you sleep in it.
The particular issue plaguing their global database couldn’t have been caught with even a stress test during beta as that was a singular region, not the entirety of all regions hitting the database at once. They have server capacity, but unwisely chose to try and scale a twenty year old database structure to 2021 global gaming levels. Obviously that blew up in their faces, and ours too for that matter.
Vicarious Visions is the studio that developed D2R, not Blizzard proper. Vicarious Visions’ studio is located in New York, whereas Blizzard’s campuses are in Irvine, CA and Austin, TX (the latter is where the bulk of their TS/CS resides). VV is entirely separated from the shenanigans that happened at Blizzard. Blizzard’s role with D2R is in being the publisher and being responsible for the Battle.net backend infrastructure. So none of what we found out about this year had any impact on D2R’s development.
No, I’m pinning this entirely on ABK, the holding company. They forced Blizzard to release D2R well before it was ready just so they could make an attempt to buff their Q3 earnings report. Big mistake. I’ve only seen a couple launches go this badly, and the most recent one was Cyberpunk 2077. I’m actually surprised MS and Sony didn’t temporarily delist D2R while the global database issues were resolved. The players only did what players do - play the game. Or try to anyway.
The one part I can pin on Vicarious Visions is the AVX issue they created when they introduced drastic optimization changes to the code after the beta. The kind of changes that warranted an additional beta test to ensure the code worked properly. Usually those types of changes don’t get past QA, so it is likely they fell through the cracks and the equipment they had on hand to test against wasn’t of a wide enough variety to catch the AVX incompatibilities. Overall they’ve done a decent job of getting age old code to work on modern OSes. None of us expected a bug free launch when release was so soon after the beta where we told them the game didn’t have the polish expected in a release. But we didn’t expect literally everything that could go wrong would go wrong either. Corporate greed and being too heavily “crunched” combined to make a disastrous launch experience that mostly persists a full month after release.
Management failed. It’s their job to set things right again.
This one has just about everyone baffled, given that the game, meta builds, and full blown strategies have been known for 10-20 years. It’d be like modernizing the original FF7 to run on Windows 10 - everyone knows how FF7’s story went and what the gameplay was like. So yes, we’re in complete agreement here. The entire game should have been tested, and for a much longer period. I had to squeeze two separate, but [u]full[/b] functionality reviews into two separate three day periods that were less than a week apart. I didn’t enjoy the test because I had to literally laser focus on how KB/M mode and controller mode (especially the latter as I never got into the tech alpha) performed. To say that wasn’t end user crunch would be disingenuous.
This all resulted in one of the worst game launches I’ve ever seen. I’m not happy, nor is virtually anyone else. That includes the poor buggers that have to now fix the problems the game has while both being on the clock and doing so in a live environment. I don’t envy them in the least.
On this topic, it wasn’t just women that were harassed. Some men were too, particularly those who are LGBTQ+ and POC. It ran the whole gamut. That’s all I’ll say on that though as it’s been discussed in detail elsewhere on this forum.
I don’t think ABK told them to keep entirety of the 20 year old code in the database but “get it done”. If there’s any heavy crunch and pressure from ABK, whose idea was keeping 20 year old code for handling online interactions?
Purist fans who wanted everything the same? I’ll go with that.
Blizzard got the anger of fans by overhyping a phone game after chip bans and remastering a beloved RTS game that most “refunded”, they decided to play it safe. Sure, it was Blizzard’s game at the end of the day and it’s easy to communicate with VV to make them keep old code in for cutting corners.
Because it wasn’t entirely serious that people losing their level 10 characters that they work only for a day, original game was deleting them after months of inactivity. Cyberpunk 2077 got delisted from the Microsoft and Sony markets because it was full of bugs and soft locks in the campaign due issues in the algorithm of artificial intelligence, rendering performance and world outlay.
Why would they reveal the entire game with the risk of getting pirated? Server structure has nothing to do with the game’s beta version content but the burden of active player base.
You’re dreaming things if you think otherwise.
Thats because PoE and D3 are 2 completely different games with 2 different development strategies. It’s actually mind blowing that people still don’t get it. Development of D3 has been closed long time ago. It’s done… over… finito… It was never meant to have microtransactions like PoE (thank god for that).
Now please, cry a river… build a bridge… AND GET OVER IT
The crunch caused by ABK was the forced release date they set. Anyone that paid attention to the D2R client during beta knew it wasn’t entirely ready for prime time. It had core functionality but that was literally it. No social features, no proper lobbies, and unfinished UI elements. The intent to use as much original code as possible was Blizzard’s directive so as to try and keep the game as close to the classic 1.14 version as possible. They just had no way to know whether or not it would handle modern concurrency, and it didn’t with regard to the global database (Note: the regional databases functioned perfectly fine).
They weren’t doing it to cut corners, they were doing it to be as authentic as possible. Their intentions were good, but we know all too well what the road to hell is paved with. 
I would say the inability for the majority to get into an online game at a time of their choosing puts that pretty much on par with the CP2077 launch. And none of the clients on any platform was, and still aren’t out of the woods with regard to crashing. They’re better, but still unstable. That I have confidence they’ll fix in short order.
There was no reason not to beta test the entirety of the game as there were no spoilers to be had after twenty years. Also, the technical alpha was pirated (hacked) to allow the entire game, including all classes, to be played. That incident is why TCP/IP is now gone.
My original post has gone sideways!
but that is what always happens, so be it! 
Stick to the original topic or GTFO. Reported for attempting to derail the thread.
It’s marginally related to why Blizzard isn’t announcing anything about the end of season 24 and if it’s because of D2R.
Reported which post? Are people supposed to guess what you’re talking about.
Okay, let’s go back to original topic. S24 apparently still have one more month, looking at how they didn’t tease PTR yet. That will help two things; more time to deal with D2R issues and hopefully a collection of data for implementing stronger items in D3 at a foreseeable future. As a side effect, this is also plenty of time for anyone to finish the Ethereal Recollection achievement.
when you beta test, you test all functionality. You’ve obviously never worked in the IT industry have you?
NO. Blizzard has been terrible with D3 (and D2R). They deserve all of the criticism that they receive.
EXACTLY.
I disagree here. 20 year old code isn’t going to scale well. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that. Worse, they didn’t even test the code in beta testing. That’s true incompetence.
And reported for swearing.
He or she is just throwing mud around sadly.
and it’s already long overdue to finish. Worst.season.ever.
People who still white knight for blizzard astonish me…
YUP. In fact one of the bugs that was most reported on during the beta (the one where the game thinks the character is still logged into a game preventing people from using it) was still a major issue at launch when people could actually play.
Reported for Trolling.
People who don’t allow others to have opinions do the same for me.
Same to you.
Who’s stopping you from having an opinion?
Nobody, but since you speak about white knighting just cause he has an opinion.
If you really want to get an answer just try asking under their twitter posts. Success rate is much higher there.