I’ve realized that mostly what we do on this forum is waste our time. At most feedback is aggregated, as stated by a “blue”, one of the so-called community people. There’s little to nothing individual posters contribute beyond a tally mark. So your individual feelings and thoughts don’t matter - they literally do not get transmitted. To make matters worse, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, the mass type of feedback that does reach the developers and potentially translates into implementation does not end up doing the game that much good - it tends to be rather trivial in the big picture. This shouldn’t be terribly surprising as almost by definition aggregated feedback is lowest common denominator feedback.
The big picture can be reduced all the way down to whether a player is having fun. Developers have to in part be players in order to be able to judge their product. Few people seem to have the talent to be able to accurately understand the essence of a thing from the side. So, are the developers having fun playing Diablo IV? Do they get to play it enough to judge it like a player, a consumer? We can’t reach the minds of the developers; if this game is to have any sort of notable future the developers themselves have to experience their product and decide if it’s fun and worthwhile, and if it isn’t, what they can actually do to modify the essence of Diablo IV - its fun quality - as opposed to keep fondling the edges of the game. If the developers don’t directly feel the frustration and underwhelment of players it’s abundantly clear nothing much will happen until one day maybe it’s time to give AI the reins, along with the employment.
The devs don’t play this game, everything is pushed into D4 from the whitepaper drawn up during meetings because if it looks good on paper it must just work, right? There is no way they are playing if builds, classes, and skills are this severely imbalanced…lets not even get into Sorc, that speaks for itself.
It was fun watching a couple of the devs pretend to play the game during one of their campfire chats though. Getting whipped on a starting world tier was embarrassing, and hilarious.
That was hilarious. However, I think they were exclusively art devs, and ironically that’s the actually successful department from our perspective. Incredibly ironic when you think about it because that video was something else. Anyone have the youtube link?
I am literally facepalming at the notion that this game is developed on the basis of metrics… let alone if you’re on the mark in terms of what the metrics actually are. Horrifying. I would like to meet the God forsaken nerds responsible for this sort of thing.
I realised they do not play when a.fletcher didn’t know what weapons necromancer could play. It’s ok, he’s the community director but he’s one of the fews posting about how he had fun playing “this” or “that”. But that’s ok, it’s just marketing.
Even if they did play D4, do u think they’re gonna tell us they’ve messed this up?
“oh, gosh, you were right guys. this is beyond ridiculous, we are gonna fix everything. brb”
No. And I don’t think they even care, they’re paid to develop something, following chiefs orders based on what Blizzard wants to achieve. That’s all I guess.
Blizzard is not able to make the right conclusions out of feedback, that is the main issue.
What i mean is.
When you complain about a thing, for example. My car is to loud when i go 200 MPH.
Then there are actualy several solutions. The best thing would be to make the car produce less noise on 200 mph. Which is a very resource demanding and time consume process. Expensive.
There is another solution. I call it the “Blizzlike” solution. They just limit your car to 50mpH. Tada. Problem solved.
See what complains did we had.
The game is boring from start to endgame.
Good solution. Make it interesting.
Blizzlike solution. Shorten the early/mid game.
The Loot is overconvoluted and bad to compare.
The good solution. Make interesting but easy to read stats.
The Blizzlike solution. Toss out 50% of the stats, reduce the stats per Item and make it basicly boil down to a handfull important stats while the rest is trash.
The game lack challenge and overall balance.
The good solution. Bring all classes close together and make a coherent challenging endgame.
The Blizzlike solution. Make several difficulty lv that basicly all have the exact same gameplay with different numbers via scaling.
They get the feedback. I swear to god blizzard is listening to people, they get all the feedback. They are just to god damn … To make any logical usefull conclusion out of it.
Its funny how you claim that feedback doesnt get transmitted, or “that they dont listen” to feedback.
the diablo 3.5 we got right now is EXACTLY due to feedback of whiney people not getting what they want on day 2 of a season.
I can only congratulate every one of our “forum developers” who keep talking about “bad game design” whenever they eventually have to farm for something for more than 60 minutes.
yes, actualy that is exactly what whiny people do. It is a strategy for lazy people to get what they want, if they wouldn’t stop the complaing after they get what they want people would not give em what they want.
Their startegy relies on annoying people enough to guve em what they want. It wouldn’t be in the interest of whiney people to keep it going after they got what they want.
exactly, and once they got what they want and their “strategy” worked out, they will keep doing exactly that and find the next best thing to cry about.
There is a not a single live service game in existence that does not have a forum of complainers on it. Pop over to POE2 forums right now and look at all the negative. WOW has had complaint threads since the game launched 20 years ago. No game is immune from this.
Yes. 100%. Why is that so? Cause peope complain about “EVERYTHING”.
That is why you cannot go and say the game is the way it is cause of the “complainers”.
That would only work if the “complainers” would be a coherent mass.
There are a lot of people that complain that the game is too easy. Do they make the game harder. No. Cause they do not follow the complainers. Blizzard does what they think is right and it has not much to do with “complainers”.
oh they probably will. Of course not inside the season. Then the circle starts anew and people will complain how hard stuff is, and that this game is not casual friendly
Well if the forums are to be believed, devs don’t play the game. On that note, I don’t think you play the game either from our past conversations, or rather you are unable to at the moment. Any plans to get a new system so you can play video games again?
The complainers are just a symptom. The sickness is blizzard’s lack of vision. They weren’t trying to make a game. They were trying to make a money printer. They were trying to emulate the formula of other games that are successfully selling gobs of skins at stupid prices. Then it didn’t work out the way they wanted, so they started “listening” to ideas from users and then trying to implement the lowest effort ones in a way that aligns with their goals/metrics… and then they just kept doing that while also looking around to see what they could borrow from other games and/or their own ideas. They still can’t get D4 to print the amount of money they want, so they keep floundering in one direction and then another and wondering why they can’t get it right.
oh i agree, but thats something we have to finally accept. Blizzard isnt a small company anymore, making games by gamers for gamers. This “living in the past” wont change anything you know.
