Wyatt Cheng on Diablo 3 Auction House in early day

[naksiloth-1354]

@Beefhammer-1932

Just listen to Wyatt’s design philosophies, they don’t line up with what vD3 was. He had more influence after Jay was removed.

I believe Jay wasn’t the only influence over his creativity, as there are always high chairs demanding and pushing things in a company. His ideas may not make it into the game not because Jay was a bully you imagined him to be but something rather more of a restrictive order such as “budget limitations”. Budget limitations exist, resources are limited and deadlines have to be met.
There are scrapped content in Diablo 3 that never made back into the game such as; Devil’s Hand card game, Talisman working as a charm pouch and socketed armor pieces. Also let’s not forget the PvP that is promised but never properly delivered. There are more than one outer effect when something is not delivered properly in a big project.

Regardless, he’s credited for his work, so I rather that the company’s word over yours. It doesn’t matter if Cheng’s view didn’t correlate at the initial release as they were most likely pushed back for expansion pack but some never made it into the game. Still if he did nothing, he wouldn’t get credited as Lead Game Designer. I don’t get what do you even mean.
There are more than one influence that can dent the progress of game development. With rather limited budget and worked over seven years, it’s only natural. Also separating content of the game to sell it in a later expansion pack with new price tag is much more profitable for the company at long plan.

I hope what I said makes sense, but I don’t exactly care if you think otherwise. Cheng is a very talented game designer and it sure shows. I did nothing but humbly mention his achievements and praised the complexity of his work. However, I don’t have to downplay his colleagues while doing so. Also I gotta ask, do his views have met with Reaper of Souls now? Apparently he had a vision on the free market but it’s gone now. It was a lesson.

@Beefhammer-1932

I cleared all of Inferno with my wife and we never touched either AH.

What class you played? Barbarian?

@Firyadan-2852

He had. He is the one that built the combat system and made the change from potion to health globes, among many other things.

Also this here. Fluent combat was completely Cheng’s view for the game from the classic D3 times. So much that he went for the same fluent dynamic combat with Diablo: Immortal.
Company and corporate life doesn’t really care about individuals but they don’t put two people who can’t stand each other together either.

[BattleTag-14502387]

Not sure if people outside the industry could ever truly appreciate how difficult it is, but those who have lived through a game lifecycle can imagine how hard it would be to defend even a 6 week gap in the schedule where there are no concrete tasks.

In hindsight yes hard, but today it’s not that hard. If planned on the road map at the beginning. Easy to justify, look at how many bad launches exist, and how difficult it is to change trajectory off a bad launch.

Employees write weekly reports during the iterative phase(from beta feedback) and describe what and why changes should be made. Each employee should discuss their report in a group setting, feedback with the most team votes is prioritized. This creates a paper-trail to justify time spent iterating, it also helps keeps employees disciplined, is easy to fall into devhell when there is no accountability or necessary sacrifice…

Regardless, it still irks me when I hear “D3 was tuned around the AH” or “D3 made you use the AH”. I get why people say that, but a more technically correct phrasing would be “D3’s tuning drove players to the AH” or “The accessibility of the AH bypassed the normal reward loop”

Does it really matter what the correct phrasing is? Players believed D3 was tuned around the AH due to design flaws. The intent of the design and the perception of players did not align, it ends here.

[Apache222-1831]

If we had trading our servers would be down all the time like in d2r

[ShadowAegis-1537]

@Kilometer-11340

So how long was the beta testing took? No idea?

Thanks for opening up my eyes, you are right. Now hear this, Blizz needed eight to ten months of 24/7 beta and they would’ve found the problem with a lot less players. Even if the problems with the servers are due to stress.

Come on now I am sure you know that not everyone that would be playing the game on launch day will be in any betas.

And for D4 they would need probably 3 years of beta, after all we need them to be able to catch and fix all bugs to make sure it is as close to a perfect launch as possible.

[Apache222-1831]

Yeah, id pick a pool of 1000 ppl who either preordered, are media, fansite people, etc give them iron clad NDAs and bring them in alpha to start banging away on D4.

[Kilometer-11340]

@ShadowAegis-1537

Thanks for opening up my eyes, you are right. Now hear this, Blizz needed eight to ten months of 24/7 beta and they would’ve found the problem with a lot less players. Even if the problems with the servers are due to stress.

Come on now I am sure you know that not everyone that would be playing the game on launch day will be in any betas.

And for D4 they would need probably 3 years of beta, after all we need them to be able to catch and fix all bugs to make sure it is as close to a perfect launch as possible.

Are you implying that no amount of time on testing their server will make the launch smooth and less buggy (rollback/missing characters) so they might as well launch it at crappy state and fix it on the way even if it took more than 2 weeks or 2 years and more?

Is this whole “releasing crappy/unstable servers or products and the fixing it later” now a gold standard for every game company out there?

[Bravata-11682]

i mean he can try to alter time and reality, but everyone who played vanilla knows drops and such were tuned around the AH… Everything but the story mode was tuned around the AH.

[Shadout-2849]

Always lovely to see devs interact and talk about their experience. So kudos for that.

In Diablo 2 you cannot play straight through Normal, Nightmare and Hell.

Uh, yes you can.

Also, it is a bit laughable that he uses D2 as an argument for D3 not being tuned around trading.
Surely D2 droprates are tuned around trading too…

I spent endless hours playing internal builds farming bosses through Hell and Inferno prior to D3 launch.

This contradicts previous statements that release Inferno was more or less untested.
And of course, without that difficulty (which btw was a good thing for the most part), the need for items would have been lower… so yeah, all in all, his hours of farming in Inferno probably wasn’t worth in terms of how the experience was at release.

First important design lesson is obvious in hindsight – we should have had more public testing. We had public testing available up until Skeleton King which was nowhere near enough.

At least they get this. Though as Wyatt says, it doesnt mean they can deliver on it.

It’s all fine and well that I say we didn’t tune D3 around the AH, but by providing one, players are going to use the tools that we provided (as they should!). Players generally follow the path of least resistance and in D3 that was the AH, your design tuning intent be damned.

Now this should indeed be a life lesson for game designers. It is the good old “players like to optimize the fun out of games”. Which does not mean the players are to blame. The devs are. Adding AH was a mistake. Heck, all trading is a mistake imo.

Regardless, it still irks me when I hear “D3 was tuned around the AH” or “D3 made you use the AH”. I get why people say that, but a more technically correct phrasing would be “D3’s tuning drove players to the AH” or “The accessibility of the AH bypassed the normal reward loop”

While both of those are true, it is also semantics tbh.

@Kilometer-11340

So for those who are following D2R beta, care to tell me how long was the Beta duration again?

Slightly different, when D2R has been in beta for 20 years.

@Shaden-1583

To this day I am still pondering where the good AH items came from if they are so darn hard to come by? Bots, devs ? Why would the regular players sell good items in AH, I wld think they wld rather keep it. sus

Bots sure, but also regular players. I mean, that is what trading is. Someone playing barb who finds a sorc item might sell the sorc item.

@ShadowAegis-1537

So Blizz is both the developer and publisher huh.

VV IS Blizzard.

@naksiloth-1354

I think he went way too far, between those 1000 hellfire rings something must have been useful.

Usually when people claim they havent found anything useful in 1000s of tries, or hundreds of hours farming, in D2, D3 etc. it is due to having insane ideas about what a good item is.
Of course, the reason they have such skewed ideas might be due to the game design; like in D3 where you needed high end gear from act 3, to make act 2 feel reasonable to play etc.

@Beefhammer-1932

As for using the AH, you chose to use it I stead of farming. I cleared all of Inferno with my wife and we never touched either AH.

Yeah, that was definitely doable. Just like it is in D2. Still doesn’t mean the droprates weren’t designed around trading.

@Firyadan-2852

Remember when Jay said “Then we doubled it” ? It was about Inferno difficulty after internal testing.

I don’t have a hard time believing Wyatt when he says he was playing SSF Inferno since players didn’t need as much near-perfect drops then.

Exactly this.

[Beefhammer-1932]

I was a WW Barb and my wife was a WD with pets.

[Beefhammer-1932]

Doesn’t mean they were either. Remember like only 10% or less of the people who played D2 played online. I never went online, didn’t do any excessive farming , and was able to beat Hell. I’m sure they were low to increase playtime to beat the higher difficulties. But to say, even though I believe there is some truth to it, they were low just for trade doesn’t make that much sense since they knew only a small % would play online.

[N4M3L3ZM4K3R-1289]

First important design lesson is obvious in hindsight – we should have had more public testing. We had public testing available up until Skeleton King which was nowhere near enough.

Public testing needed to include more of the content (90%+), needs to go for longer (on the order of months), and we needed to build more time on the development schedule for “soup tasting”.

I’d say that the D3 open beta effectively illustrated the overall experience of the initial D3V release and the need for a certain panache to the gameplay, something that “moar content” wouldn’t resolve beyond the initial playthrough. Maybe a way to raise the stakes and introduce a challenge to the Skeleton King, such as “naked” achievements?..or hey, how about PvP? (Personally I think that a level 10 capped PvP beta would have been rad for what it was…if nothing else it would give a little spice to killing the Skeleton King again and again for the chance at marginal upgrades, for something other than killing the Skeleton King again. See, only the scope was different but everything else was the same as D3V. PvP was the simplest way to resolve this issue, at which point “more content” would suffice just fine.)

It’s all fine and well that I say we didn’t tune D3 around the AH, but by providing one, players are going to use the tools that we provided (as they should!). Players generally follow the path of least resistance and in D3 that was the AH, your design tuning intent be damned.

I think a big reason why AH sucked for a lot of people was the itemization. I don’t think I need to expound on the “mainstat” issue, but then there was the “all resistance” stuff being equal or stronger than individual resistances? Um, ok? I think it all boiled down to the fact that it’s really not much of an “economy” if everyone wants the same things.

At the time we naively thought “We’ll tune the content hard and people who choose to play SSF will find the game challenging and those who want to engage with the AH can do so”.

Personally I enjoyed SSF D3V. Act 1 Inferno was splendid, and Act 2 wasps killed any ambition I had to make any progress. Still, I was satisfied with D3 and to occasionally poke around Act 2 with my ultra-defensive monk to see if I could kill a single monster. I was certainly not keen on farming Act 1 Inferno, for the sole reason that I knew that the drops were inferior to the other acts, and I’m not spending hours & days searching for stuff that I plan on tossing/replacing, and possibly never needed if I get clever enough at the game (except enrage timers say no, so OK I guess I’m done playing D3 seriously). Screw that. I think a reduced drop rate for the same stuff as the other acts would have been better.

@Kilometer-11340

So for those who are following D2R beta, care to tell me how long was the Beta duration again?

Asking this because of the recent D2R server issues that they are facing and I am surprised that they didn’t notice or experience that during the beta testing unless the time to test is relatively short.

D2 design has concluded about 20 years ago. Iterating on the design and testing server stability are two different things. The latter typically does not take months.

[Venaliter-1813]

@Beefhammer-1932

He is the reason D3 had a huge turn around for the better IMO with RoS, and he is the reason DI will be good.

Disagree. Wyatt was there the entire time. Pre-launch, launch, post launch. Don Vu is Still on diablo 3, as far as I can tell. Wyatt is famously attributed the quote: “Who cares, we’ll make the item good one day!” that never happened for like 90% of items.

Nevalistis’s blog post on the “frat boy” culture on Blizzard remarks that the D3 leadership and developers were continually hostile to her input and attempts at promotion; except one. She doesnt say who that was. But I’d bet it wasn’t Wyatt Cheng.

Then she proceeds to go off on Drothvader and myself for saying "No wonder they didn’t listen to us (the community) when they didn’t even listen to her (Nevalistis). HERE–>

https://twitter.com/Dayntee/status/1420812325301342212

Tweeting about “twisting her words” to fit an angry narrative about game balance. Yeah…the only anger there was hers. Maybe she was too emotional, tbh.

Clearly there were multiple failures of professionalism up and down the line.

[Beefhammer-1932]

I’ll bet it was Wyatt. Unless you have anything solid about Wyatt being part of the frat boy culture, I’ll believe he one of the good ones. No one had anything bad to say about him, nor did his name come up. You’d think someone with his prominence at Blizzard would have been outed, at least once when almost every other high rank and file or known name was mentioned.

Back to the games, plenty of items were made better, but just listen to him talk design philosophy. It’s pretty clear he didn’t have much sway outside of what he was responsible or else D3 would have looked very different from day 1.

[Venaliter-1813]

@Beefhammer-1932

I’ll bet it was Wyatt. Unless you have anything solid about Wyatt being part of the frat boy culture, I’ll believe he one of the good ones.

It could have been, but I think someone with his seniority would have had enough power to say something publically to defend Nevalistis, instead of after the fact and in private.

There were more than a few Diablo devs named in the Cosby suite scandal, including some that were made to resign, but I don’t recall Wyatt ever being mentioned, that’s true.

[Travar-1656]

For me, the best version of D3 was when we had AH.

The AH was great.

[Beefhammer-1932]

Nor was he in any pics. Of course everyone in those could have/should have done something. Maybe some did and nothing happened.

[Faith-2661]

“Players take the path of least resistance”.
Guess it is (part of) why botting is so popular.

D2R is already tuned as it is an existing game.
Hence why a long beta should not be needed.

I really do hope the D4 team also learns from the D3 making experiences, do’s and don’t’s.

[Venaliter-1813]

@Faith-2661

D2R is already tuned as it is an existing game.
Hence why a long beta should not be needed.

Haha, this is funny, and sad, on multiple levels.

[Faith-2661]

@Venaliter-1813

Haha, this is funny, and sad, on multiple levels.

Indeed funny and sad how you want -possibly demand- all sorts of changes on a game that has been working just fine and as intended (save for very few bugs, most of those got fixed in D2R) for the past 20+ years.

So yes, the game was already balanced as intended.

Perhaps you should consider sticking to D3, it holds your hand and showers you with end game items.

[Meteorblade-2266]

@Faith-2661

So yes, the game was already balanced as intended.

Where scarcity of in-game drops are balanced by a credit card and a certain website that’s been selling D2 items for a couple of decades, you mean?