I can’t even call that a ‘low bar’ for gauging their response. That’s way lower than a low bar. “He’s a great guy - he doesn’t hit his girlfriend!”
I do agree with you that personalized attacks are not something I agree with. And I am sure the devs play the game; of course they do. But they’re showing every sign of making significant development decisions based on spreadsheet metrics alone; they convey this weird and disheartening sense of being very disconnected from the heart and soul of what made Diablo such a great franchise, and I am not convinced they really understand the qualities that kept so many of us playing.
I’ve been a customer and a fan for a couple of decades and am not at all prone to negativity or forum rants. Heck, I even liked D3 a lot. I’m currently back to playing D2R.
I looked forward to DIV for years and years and hoped to be playing the game for a very long time. But I haven’t logged in for a couple of weeks and it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that I’ll ever return. This livestream did nothing to change my perspective - and I WANTED to change my perspective. Maybe the magic of Diablo was lightning in a bottle and won’t be captured again. I hope that’s not true - but right now that’s what I’m seeing.
Yup. Or even other arpgs. It shows in their item design. Too many multipliers. They borrowed heavily from d3 instead of better arpg itemization like d2 or even PoE/Grim Dawn.
Why you’d use the worst arpg in the series to model your item design off of is beyond me.
Why is it taking months to adress some of this stuff? Other game companies would have solutions to these problems implemented in weeks. Blizzard is ridiculously slow to implement changes comparatively. Look at how slow Overwatch 2 development is for example.
They still haven’t adressed the bad itemization issues and class balance is still the worst it’s been. They have actually moved backwards on spec viability since the beta lol.
It’s very strange you pick a cisgender, straight white man who’s middle aged as some sort of “DEI” hire. I bet you scream about “critical race theory” too huh.
I don’t go around looking up the histories of game developers. It was just my initial impression of the guy based on his speech and body language. Nothing else. That’s why I said “To me it says…” with the ‘says’ part being his aforementioned body language.
This 100%. I was working on a post that addresses this a couple weeks ago with solutions. If I can finally get a day off from work, I will finish it up this Sunday and post it. Hopefully I can get some support so that the devs see it. It will not be a bashing thread on the devs but instead be some solid ideas that not only help stabilize the game but help the devs with a path forward from here. I want to the game to succeed and help them accomplish that.
The development of Diablo 4 passed through at least 2 different directors and restarted development at least twice since 2014.
Many of the current developers are new ones who joined the team after the original Diablo 4 developers quit, that’s why this game is a mess of various disparate parts that make no sense but are forced to fit together to rush the release.
You can read all about this in the December 2022 article from The Washington Post.
It tells you why Diablo 4 has such nonsensical systems and broken features, because the developers changed the game faster than they could spend time testing it, and also due to bad communication between teams, where each team did their own thing separately without consultation with one another.
All he said was that he isn’t 100 percent sure on exactly how many different types of treasure goblins d3 has because it’s been a while since he looked at that particular data file in the world editor…
To be fair… there may be a reason for that change that he can’t speak about e.g. something to do with defeating bots. They can’t talk about it, because that would mean talking about other things they can’t talk about.
I’m just guessing. It could have been fatigue and hubris as well.
Do note this, they were replacement and not the original developers. It is obvious both previous and current developers seriously do not know what they are doing.
It was clear to me that Joe Shely just wasnt prepared at all.
Common courtesy to prepare for a meeting. He was stumbling around and it was super awkward to watch. Lucky he had the other Joe to pick him up and help out.
The camp fire was overall just ok. I guess the proof will be in the next few weeks.
Best part was when he was talking about the power leveling, having one person do all the work “is not fun” he clearly has never been power leveled or power leveled anyone.
That was another one of the bizarre comments to come out of the Campfire. I don’t believe he believes that. It sounds to me like some nonsense explanation that someone in the team came up with to justify their removal of powerleveling. It was cynical spin.
And that’s my problem with the entire thing. We are being “handled” and our “expectations managed”. It was disingenuous snake oil.
They dodged the question. There was no answer from the Devs on that.
It is certainly anti-fun so there has to be a reason besides making speed run players unhappy. I can take some guesses though.
server/instance stability?
some sort of anti bot/automation thing?
Oh he knows full well what power leveling is and why people do it. If I had to guess, that whole statement was a pointed jab at paid power leveling services. Quite a few changes they made seem to have an impact on power leveling vs players actually playing the game for themselves. I think it was an attempt (somewhat poorly) to make a policy stance without coming out and just saying “we don’t want massive power leveling in our game”.
I think they just don’t want to publicly address the third party sites, RMT, paid power leveling, etc. Probably legal reasons for the devs staying out of some of that comment wise?
Quite a few game changes (in games overall) come down to “people are using this to cheat/bot/exploit/paid services” and instead of banning the users, they are changing the game to prevent it at the core level. You can’t bot what does not exist right? They did the same with D3 and WoW. Sometimes things that don’t make sense, make sense in the context of preventing behavior they don’t want.
Of course, people will have different opinions on if allowing cheating/botting/power leveling is good for the game or not.
Lol, the devs not playing really hurt you. I mean, you making up the stupidest excuses to not blame them and instead blame the community. Your line of thinking is really pathetic