Will there be any feedback from Blizzard to the players?

So, the PTR is due to end today.

During the fortnight it’s been running, we’ve had precisely three blue posts. One to announce the PTR starting, one to tell us they had no comment when players were asking for their feedback and one to tell us off for discussing that.

So, is there any likelihood that we’ll actually get some communication about what we’ve been giving feedback about, or will we just have to wait for the final live patch notes for Patch 2.7.0 in a couple of weeks to see how much we’ve been ignored?

[ EDIT ] From General Discussion…

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Sadly, I think we will have to wait for the final live patch notes…

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Like the usual feedback perhaps?

We feel that this [insert set/legendary item] is not performing as expected. Boom nerfed…

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Pretty much everything I’ve seen from Blizzard is making absolutely no change in how they communicate with the playerbase across all their titles, with the occasional statement to the effect that they’re working on that or “insight” where they dictate terms to them.

The dev notes themselves often differ wildly from reality or are humorous footnotes of goals they failed to reach, like the channeling-based Firebird set or the redesign of Rathma to make it functionally identical to other necromancer builds.

Honestly I’m fine without more of that sort of corporate-approved gaslighting. It sounds entitled, but the only thing I want to hear out of the dev team is acknowledgement of issues and clear, concise progress reports on a regular basis. I don’t need them to force uninteresting skills down my throat and I really cbf to have them orate about balance philosophy in the middle of this dumpster fire.

They aren’t my friends so idc about their thoughts and feelings on the game, let alone other issues. Things got very art school around here and I can’t for the life of me figure out why they’d think anyone would care about their ideas when

  1. their ideas have led to terrible results, and
  2. they clearly don’t care about our ideas.

The impression their community interaction leaves is, someone’s sitting at a desk sipping from a mug that says “If I wanted your opinion I’d give it to you in a blog post”. So yeah, they aren’t my friends, and if they aren’t telling the community how they’re addressing their concerns they can fold their philosophy and…well, you know the rest.

Terrible place to be in, and you can call the community toxic entitled manbabies all day long; but this is a product, not someone’s personal art project. If you’re off @#%$ing with it in a corner silently for weeks or months at a time breaking the damned thing, and every time you go back into that corner you just break different things, and all we ever hear are excuses and aspirations that will be forever unmet…

:salt: is what you’re going to get.

You put yourselves in these adversarial relationships with the community when you decided come hell or high water you absolutely weren’t going to give them what they think they wanted, because you knew better than them what that even was.

Hard pass on any more devsplaining until I can find more than a few sets on the entire leaderboard for every class without a filter.

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ya like they listen :rofl:

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We’ve been here before. This is where the rubbish we don’t want goes live and the memes and exodus starts.

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I quoted this part because it made me smile, but your whole post is spot on and well articulated. Unfortunately you come over as intelligent and didn’t cry like a [choose your own woke-friendly insult here] asking for nerfs, so no one but us is going to listen to you.

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Be careful Meteorblade, you’re walking on thin ice here! :see_no_evil: :hear_no_evil: :speak_no_evil:

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My mind immediately went to the “Stay frosty” scene in Aliens.

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ya they don’t like it when you put them in there place lol

It is kinda sad. They could at least try their best to communicate with us in these 2 weeks considering that they won’t talk about Diablo 3 with us for at least 3 months once the season started.

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On review it was a bit off-topic, but I know what they aren’t going to say at this point, and I’ve seen enough specific and actionable feedback get ignored by a revolving door of Blizzard employees that I wonder if we’re literally only on the PTR forums to check their math and vent so they can pretend they listen.

I’ve said this before but we’re basically looking at two options.

  1. The 2.7.0 PTR ends with a whimper. They provide their usual canned “hurdur thanks for playing” and go on their way.

We get 2.7.0 notes that are basically untested tuning changes, and

  • Rathma is a wash, but only anyone who expected anything good to come of it is going to care.
  • Firebirds is a total coin toss whether they render it useless or this tire fire actually rolls out into the street as-is.
  • Demon Hunters may or may not get the tweaks they need to make their set tolerable.
  • Witch Doctors are wondering why they got randomly punched in the face.

They might come out and tug on themselves a little or tell us they hear us or write a blog about the difficulties of being terrorized by such a toxic “fanbase” or some other silliness.

They might tell us they already used the one week a quarter they have to work on the game and better luck next season.

Either way, what you see now is basically what you get.

  1. The PTR is extended. The dev team has been working this last week to try and address some parts of some peoples’ concerns.

This could just as easily be pets casting Bone Spirit when you do, or Firebirds dropping legacy Etched Sigils on Disintegrate crits. I shudder to think what they’re capable of after the last two re-imaginings.

But it would at least be worth seeing and they might even third-time’s-the-charm us all. Plus, they could find another opportunity to nerf witch doctors. Everyone wins. (I assume anyone still playing Witch Doctor at this point just likes the abuse.)

Those are the two poles, though. They trend more toward the former than the latter, but we’ll know before long either way.

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@MB, I think we had 4 blue posts. 1 more thanking Cratic for the Blackthorne’s typo or something like that…

Hate to say it but I think we had more communication when Nev was running the CM desk herself. We now have what? 4 or 5 Diablo CMs and somehow there’s less community involvement? Sigh…

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:rofl: had to give a like for that alone!

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They do a damn good job of deleting posts, I’ll give them that.

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The post about a typo was in PTR Bug Report, not PTR Feedback. That says it all though, doesn’t it? They’ll respond to a report of a typo in an item name and not respond at all about why they’ve gutted DHs and WDs.

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Yeah… Pretty much… Sigh…

It always seemed to me that CMs for most Blizzard titles are basically just grunts combing through the various forums to distill their daily/weekly/monthly reports about the current state of the playerbase for the developers and the sales & marketing team. That’s also the reason why we mostly just get some fluffy joke responses, because anything more than that probably has to be vetted by some corporate PR committee.

In the case of D3 the active content development pretty much ended with the release of the Necromancer DLC. What we get nowadays are mostly just some salvaged assets from the canceled expansion and this weird hobbyist-style fiddling by some dev(s) who seem to change things more for themselves than some larger project plan.

I’m actually surprised Blizzard didn’t completely outsource the Diablo franchise to NetEase since mainland China seems still to generate some money from D3 via its cash shop.

tbh you’d prolly get more traction outside of the PTR forums, at least until your threads were deleted for being off-topic.

This part is somewhat accurate. The CMs can’t talk about anything that has not been approved for public release. Blizzard is rather notorious across all the games for limiting what CMs can say and the Devs tend not to provide statements for them to pass on.

We (players) have been complaining about PTR cycles and the lack of Blizzard feedback on it forever. We get that once the game hits PTR they are not going to make major changes for the current patch. Fine - but maybe at least tell if some of the feedback will be considered for later patches? It is even ok to say that the Devs don’t think X is a direction they want to go. Saying no is fine too. What is not fine is just an empty abyss.

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