WHAT??? Diablo 2 code wasn’t organized or efficient by any means, as I recall.
We test it with a slight hope that the changes will make something good to the game. we are testing and its bad, imagine if we just recieved it at season 23 birth without any test, oh my god 
But the video and image are from Diablo 3. It seemed very easy to change values for a skill. I doubt they wouldn’t use the same system for items.
The video was in 2011, with Jay Wilson. Anything Jay Wilson says can be safely ignored as being unhelpful. If things were so easy to change, why did it take them 3 years to fix most of the game’s problems with Itemization. Like sure there are still issues with it, but it is at least playable and fun atm. But if things were so easy to change, when they had a full development team working on them, why did it take changes so long to take place?
Because vanilla itemization was intentionally like that. In Jay Wilson’s mind there was no problem.
But the fact remains, even if you don’t like him, the system the game was built on is still there and allows for customization without too much hassle. I really doubt that the team who took over destroyed that and made crappy code, making their lives harder in the process.
Assuming that a multi-billion company would make a game where it would take you more than 5 minutes to find an item to update is just plain silly.
If everything was so hard as you say, there wouldn’t be any patches after the team left RoS.
If customization could be done with little hassle, then why are patches for seasons so small? Blizzard has known for years that items like Wrymward are crud and no one uses it. So why have they not done a minor change to it. So the current effect is:
25-35% chance of stunning a target with Lightning Damage for 1.5 seconds.
Why not modify that to:
65-85% chance of stunning a target with Lightning Damage for 1.5 seconds.
That is a simple change that would massively make it a more reliable item, and worth building a build around it. If customization was so hassle free, why not?
The fact is that people only make crappy code because they don’t plan ahead. If you plan ahead, and know that eventually you’ll be coming back to it, you make sure to put the time in to make it easy enough to understand. But in AAA, even if people do want that, they never have the time to do it. If you don’t believe me, and want to read some really hard and poorly documented AAA code, take a look at UE4’s source code.
I doubt the team that took over destroyed anything, but rather continued to code in the same spaggetti code style that the previous coders did.
Happens all the time in multi-billion dollar companies. CryEngine, UE4, Frostbite, IDTech and even Unity, are all spaggetti coded systems… and these are the five big names in the game engine industry. It stands to reason that D3 code is on a similar level of disorganization. Even in smaller indie games, you see it frequently, if you go to mod them. Skyrim, the biggest moddable game in the industry, is filled with spaggetti code. Take a look at any of scripts in the CK, and you’ll see what I mean.
It is as hard as I say. But just because it is as hard as I say, doesn’t mean they won’t do it. If they refused to do patches, their stock price would drop and the management team would fire them. They find a way, but its tortorous. That is why so many developers get burned out from AAA work, as 80% of their work is fixing bugs created by adding new code to the existing code.
I still don’t think this would be a viable item. Too many DRs on CC - there’s even more now with followers doing more. A better solution would be lightning spells cost more resource, but deal more damage, perhaps. With the Emanate power, it’s a flat buff to Lightning skills.
Well it would be at least more viable than it is currently. Especially if it was paired with another lacklustre Legendary: Ancient Parthan Defenders (Each stunned enemy within 25 yards reduces damage taken by 8-10%). If those were taken together, then you would fairly consistently earn a lot of damage reduction.
It sounds like it’s not the code that’s the problem, but their reports which are. If you don’t have good data on what needs to be fixed, then you don’t know it needs to be fixed.
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