Evidence of Whirlwind Dust Devils causing complete game lockup from 9 months ago, AFTER the “performance fixes” for WW:
How many times have you seen Blizzard or player sentiment arguing that they can’t buff an item, set, or issue because of server performance? The argument goes, if they buff some of your favorite gameplay styles, the servers can’t handle it.
A good example is Whirlwind. They don’t want people pushing with WW builds because it stresses their servers. Or Firebats or Spirit Barrage.
…And? You’re the developer, not us. Fix your mechanics issues. You have access to the game code and server infrastucture. Fix your game and stop punishing players out of their preferred playstyles just because you refuse to tackle the real issue.
Figure out where the problem is and fix the skills if necessary. If Whirlwind Dust Devils is causing issues, change it. If Witch Doctor attacks too fast, change it.
For christs sake, you are game developers. It is absolutely insane that you are steering GAMEPLAY away from what people enjoy in your game because of SERVER issues you are unable or unwilling to address. That is the real reason you never buffed Whirlwind properly.
The following is from your own “Developer Chronicles: Wrath of the Wastes” blog post written in 2016. THREE YEARS AGO!
Straight talk: Whirlwind causes performance issues. Many of you may remember performance issues during Patch 2.1.0 and 2.2.0. We have been (and will continue to be) making performance optimizations with each patch. However, our initial investigations identified Whirlwind as one of the skills that caused heavy strain on our servers. The more people using Whirlwind, the more it exacerbates the issue. This means we don’t necessarily want everyone using Whirlwind—at least, not until more server optimizations have been made.
I can actually imagine that it’s not easy, especially for such an old game like D3. But where did they say that? I only remember they say they can’t give more chest pages because of that.
I guess the fundamental thing is that D3 mechanics. One reason I guess is that , there are huge amount of “multiplier” depends on how many mobs. Then, for most skills dmg output is not O(N) but O(N^2) for WW O(N^4) (if my calculation is correct). There are a lot of problematic lengendary powers introduced.
I can’t post links but Google “developer chronicles: wrath of the wastes” where they said:
Straight talk: Whirlwind causes performance issues. Many of you may remember performance issues during Patch 2.1.0 and 2.2.0. We have been (and will continue to be) making performance optimizations with each patch. However, our initial investigations identified Whirlwind as one of the skills that caused heavy strain on our servers. The more people using Whirlwind, the more it exacerbates the issue. This means we don’t necessarily want everyone using Whirlwind—at least, not until more server optimizations have been made.
Thanks for the quote. That was long ago, and there is a remade of WW set after that so I believe this has been fixed or mitigated. They’re not using the same excuse recently, or do they?
I think that’s just because WW is a large AOE, triggers area damage, and has very quick attack speed. There is nothing else in the game like that. IMO they have to remove the small whirlwinds and buff the damage, or there is no way to fix the performance issue. However many barb players won’t like that…
I don’t play barb ever but I thought this was addressed recently? Not sure if it did in fact do anything or not.
I know a couple patches ago people in groups were telling me and the others to take off all their area dmg items and AD from paragon because it caused too much lag.
That’s kind of ridiculous to gimp yourself but if it stops lag in groups then have to make do.
Not sure if this is still an issue or not anymore.
Did this not all start when Wall of Fire WD were destroying the servers?
I guess because they do not generate a monthly income servers are too expensive.
I do hope they will have an in game shop in D4 to stop this from happening again. Tired of builds being ignored because they stress the servers too much.
Yes, I’m aware it used to be a problem. Hasn’t been a problem for me in a while though. Their fixes a while back fixed it for most players. Not sure why ya’ll are still having issues.
WotW Whirlwind is nowhere near as popular now as when it was freshly buffed, i don’t think you have any grounds for complaining about that now. In fact i’m not quite sure what your trying to say with your OP, it all seems to me to be a bit of a conspiratorial post. They are not:
nor
The reason WotW Whirlwind was temporarily causing server problems was because it had just been buffed and had become a new, viable strong build to play. Which meant that it became very popular for a short time and is one of the more taxing skills to the server, as your quote says, so it caused server problems for a little while.
I don’t know how you got from that to your “Blizzard is sabotaging their own game” theory. WotW Whirlwind is still very much available to play in it’s buffed form, without the server problems it was causing at first because optimisations have been made and it’s not as popular now as when it was new.
If you may know D3 can only leverage a single core on your CPU. If the server program didn’t consider multicore either from the very beginning, adding more servers won’t help improve the performance of a single game.
BTW they do have the in game shop in D3, but they didn’t enable it. In Chinese server they sell wings and maybe flags with it. And if you still remember, you used the ingame store to enable your Nec DLC.
Yes i think pretty much any build that involves many calculations being made while gathering up a huge number of mobs will cause server issues.
Tbh you cant really expect a game like D3 to have the same quality of servers that subscription games have.
Maybe soon we will find out that D4 will require a monthly payment, then we won’t have to worry about server issues while playing it.
