The majority of the changes that have come to this game have been requests from the community: The faster leveling, adding WASD control options, the itemization changes, dungeon changes, the new bosses, the raid etc have all come from community feedback. The only changes I can think of that wasnt asked for was the change to the character select screen and the difficulty changes. Everything else was reaction to the complaints this forum use to be littered with…
Why is combat so boring?
Why is the grind so long?
Im tired of always backtracking in dungeons.
Please fix damage on tuesday itemization
Please respect player time.
Im tired of being one shotted off screen
Im tired of mobs CC me all the time.
So now we have a really easy game that doesnt present much challenge until you hit the last torment levels.
Bingo. Even the most recent tempering scroll and changes so that GA = more tempering attempts. Although when some one doesn’t have their ‘zomg amazing idea’ implemented, it’s an attack against them instead. Thousands of ideas running around on here, and if they implemented them all we’d have Minecraft with a Diablo paint job.
Let’s say that in this forum alone across all categories there are only a mere 600 users.
Imagine for a moment that you have 600 people talking to you all at once saying any number of things, many contradictory, not waiting any turns as a constant chorus of statements which are often based on information you have that they do not.
If I turned around and said “This person is not hearing me!” would that be surprising?
But what is fun today is boring tomorrow and fun on the next day. There’s no constant state of “fun” and it certainly doesn’t depend solely on the thing you’re interacting with. “Fun” is this elusive force that isn’t even generated by a person’s desires. You yourself do not know why you find things fun. You do know, at times, what you find fun.
I think one of the hardest things about design is that most people don’t know how design actually works. There are people on the planet who find Hell Divers 2, an amazingly popular game, boring. There are people on the planet who find Idle Plant Clicker enjoyable. The goal is to make something functional with the potential to engage in a way that is enjoyable; whether someone likes it or hates it is beyond your control and that’s something you have to embrace.
This is extremely untrue. No human needed to play Candy Crush for 3,000 levels to be able to judge that it was a psychologically addictive match 3 game. All they needed to do was put it on the market. Vampire Survivors was stolen verbatim from a mobile game called Magic Survival. Basically the beginning and end of a developers / product creators interests lie in the market rather than in himself.
This is true of anything. If you make a song and everyone but you likes it, well, f- you, you’re the idiot here, sorry. This happens. Some people think they’re making a little cute game like Stardew Valley and it blows up. Virality is not predictable so the developer being vested as a player is, outside of testing, usually not that good of an idea. Yes, you read right, the goal is not to make a game you want to play but a game others want to play if you intend to go to market so you have to set aside the idea that you, as a player, matter.
You end at “Functional”. “Fun”? Well, no one cares if the dev/musician/artist/producer likes the product. Not even you.
I have to insert it again:
I believe the majority of players (of most games, but D4 specifically) could not build well enough to get to the community benchmarks that have been set by the “better” players. This matters because the game is underwhelming not because of development alone but because of player behavior.
Imagine being given a JRPG for free but one the condition was that you had to read a guide, and test on that guide 100%, to play the game. You had to know what was going to happen all the way through, how to solve all the puzzles, and how to beat all the bosses before you picked up the controller or touched the keyboard.
That might have an effect on whether you want to play the game or not all the way through, no? It turns out that MaxRoll is the equivalent; you can completely destroy the game for yourself by looking at everything before you start. There’s nothing left in the game if the whole game is known to you before you play it, yes?
So part of it is that even if the Developers played the game (and they were top players) the community is already tearing the game apart at the seams. This is all games by the way. There’s a day 1 guide to every game that has released with any level of popularity in 2024 bar none. Posted within 24 hours. If there’s a PTR or test realm? Even earlier.
Don’t believe me? Monster Hunter Wilds is not even out yet and there are guides. Seriously. Since January at least.
I didn’t want this to get this long so TL;DR: Developer’s interacting with the game doesn’t fix the game because players don’t behave as developers do in the lab.
What I was thinking of when bringing up that the developers do act on lowest common denominator feedback are the sort of items others have brought up. A number of those things were necessary or good to implement, yet they didn’t affect the essence of the game much. You are right that there is other, more qualitative or general feedback about the broad state of the game usually in the form of complaints. The problem there is that there is often an absence of quality ideas and evidently the developers don’t know how to or are restrained in tackling the bigger problems that may not even be conceptualized. Meaning, developers love doing “easy” work that is readily definable and translatable into action while shirking away from let’s call it creative work that may be much more significant but not as approachable. My point is at some point they need to stick their heads out of the corporate dirt and play the damn game. The most disturbing thing may be the continuing presence of season-defining bugs indicating that the whole development team is rotten and that in reality they just can’t do much of anything aside from trying to survive. I was pretty stunned to hear recently that the Gauntlet has been discarded. They don’t add much content to begin with, now they’re even discarding it. Lack of direction, lack of capability, even if they wanted to it’s just too much for them to do anything.
I’ll give you my Paypal if you have $7,000 to give back. I have been playing some games, namely Warcraft III Reforged and Diablo II Resurrected. The former, especially when you get to what I presume is an expansion with the night/shadow elves, demonstrates that back then Blizzard did not shy away from difficulty appropriately implemented under the “hard” setting. The latter I played for a bit, it’s a bit primitive although interestingly with up to 10 rather than 6 bindable player actions. Didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to die, lost all my stuff, and haven’t bothered since. In both games I did see where frustration comes from in comparison to today’s “friendly” designs, but you don’t throw the baby out with the bath water lest you end up with mind-numbing crap. It’s sad what has happened to gaming, rather than continued gameplay development there has been a regression, or going in a stupid direction. That’s what money and people who care about money first and foremost can do. People without passion. The “free market” is kind of like a tanker in dramatically changing course with all the critters it carries… so… let’s start with the developers playing their own game like players do. What is their honest opinion of the product they created?
You don’t need $7K to get a decent system to play video games on. I could easily make you one for about $1k for the system alone. Assuming you have a keyboard/mouse still, and a monitor or two, that’s all you need. If you need the other hardware, that’s maybe an additional $400-600 depending on what you want, if you know where to find the right deals.
Now it won’t have the latest and greatest hardware, but it’ll run any modern game out there on medium to high settings. If you want something beefier, you’re looking at $1500-2000 roughly. If your current system is still useable, but certain parts are not, we can easily rectify that and see what it can handle.
Those can definitely be costly depending on what you’re looking at. 27" - 32" 2560 x 1440 180mhz monitors can run you roughly $200-$400. Normal or Curved, would run you roughly the same price. So two of those, $400-800, give or take. They’re not honestly that bad.
If you give me exactly what you’re looking for I can easily find something for you. If you’re going to insult me at every turn, while I’m trying to be helpful, this conversation is done.
I don’t own a potato. My $2k monitor broke and I sold my 4080. And no, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of explaining the anger. Also, you might find yourself less depressed and sleeping more if you don’t play video games, though more bored.
That’s why I didn’t bother responding to it.
