Bliizard take notes from a Real AAA gaming comany

PC General Discussion
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As the title says, take notes blizzard, this is how you should be, yet fail miserably. This from larian to their player base over a bad hotfix and how they talked to and treated everyone.

Blockquote

Hello everyone,

Yesterday we had to rollback hotfix 4 because of a rare compiler issue. To avoid this from happening again we’re changing the way we deploy patches.

Players who had downloaded hotfix 4 were unable to continue from their hotfix 4 saves once we had rolled back the patch. While this is not ok, rolling back the patch in order to diagnose the problem and limit those exposed to it was the lesser of two evils. We truly appreciate your patience & understanding while we worked to understand the problem.

This situation is remedied now with the re-release of hotfix 4 but we recognize the frustration caused by this and want to apologize. That’s why we’re changing things up.

All of you should now be able to continue your adventures, but essentially, here’s what happened:

Hotfix 4 went through a rigorous QA pipeline and was confirmed as a candidate for release yesterday. However, we triggered a rebuild of the version relatively last minute to change the version number. The version that was cooked was unfortunately plagued by compiler corruption, which was causing certain exceptions that normally wouldn’t cause crashes to - you guessed it - cause crashes.

Since compiler issues like that are extremely rare, we weren’t prepared for it. We should’ve been. We messed up.

It didn’t help that it happened at the worst possible time of day but luckily we have studios in multiple countries. Overnight (for Europe), our teams in Canada and then Malaysia worked to diagnose what went wrong, so that work could begin on redeploying a fixed version of the hotfix

Blockquote

To avoid this from happening in the future, we’ll make sure that any change made to future version candidates - no matter how small, or innocuous - will always go through our full & comprehensive QA pipeline, which include a global in-house QA team, automated testing, unit tests, and save-game compatibility testing.

This, that’s right THIS! Is how you should be interacting to your player base. But you cannot be bothered to do so, nor can you be bothered to fix anything. Blizzard you’ve failed at the most basic level of your entire reason for being a gaming company. Offially becoming one of the top 10 worts gaming compaines in history. Hope that’s what you goal was, because tbh that’s right were you put yourselves.

Blizzard is no longer a AAA company, just another dumpert fire like kakao/gamingo. So sad, that you can’t even be transparent or sincere with your customers. Just keep blowing smoke up everyone’s backsides…

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For starters, Blizzard would actually need to have a QA pipeline. If they’re actually testing new patches, they’re doing it poorly. They’re QA needs QA. Fury Against Fate has been “fixed” a few times now, which means nobody checked to see if it was actually fixed.

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3

if blizzard caused people to lose up to 10 hours of time no apology would have been good enough.

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4

Do you remember D2R? I remember.

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Did people go ballistic? i don’t remember all that happened at d2r launch

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I don’t think Larian is a AAA Studio, they’re Self Published.
Doesn’t stand Indi for Independent from outside sources like Publishers and Investors?

p.s.
Hadn’t time to read the whole post, i’m in a hurry and about to leave. waves

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7

Just going to play devil’s advocate here… BG3 is an offline game with optional online play. It’s not a live service game with cross-play across every platform. It’s much more difficult to QA / do rollbacks on the latter.

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People lost their minds on the D2R forums after every rollback. It happened several times. The servers would crash and ppl would lose hours of progress.

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9

I’m just gunna be straight with you because I’m a mod dev in their discord and talk with them, admins and the modding community. Larian has ADD when it comes to their projects.

If you turn back the clock only a few years. Larian has ignored critical bugs and engine flaws, never released an updated editor like they said and bugged the hell out of their GM mode never to be fixed.

Comically some of the engine bugs are also in BG3. You might have seen one. It’s an issue with UI two step string links. In BG3 it shows up as $$$Empty. In DOS2 it shows up empty without text.

There’s also a bug where if you die effects stop working. It doesn’t show up in Vanilla Divinity because it’s hardly used but it comes up a lot with modding the game. Now it shows up in BG3.

At any rate. I’m done talking flaws. Point is, what they do is just what normal developers do. It’s not some gold standard. Gamers just have stockholm’s at this point which is why I hope they set, or should I say, re-set the bar back to where it used to be.

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The thing is, look at the resources both studios have.

Blizzard has even boasted “A staggering 9,166 individuals have contributed to the development of Diablo IV”

And then a “small” indie company comes and puts everything they’ve done in the past years to shame.

I can turn a blind eye to imperfections in a game I enjoy, made by a studio that I respect, but this well, once filled with patience and dear memories of games that I grew up with, created by Blizzard in the past, has run bone dry.

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11

Yeah Blizz management and devs gotta learn this 2 principles if they want to go far - ownership and resonating with player base. Be genuine to your customers.

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Pre Launch or Post Launch?
Was there for Post Launch and I remember the forums getting reset after the game released.

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Oh, I know all too well the difference between passionate devs and placeholder devs.

A passionate dev will be thinking about their project even when they’re off the clock. It can’t be helped. I have to manage myself on projects or I will do nothing but that every single day.

D4 was Blizzard’s last chance with me while I will continue to mod BG3 and Divinity 3 when it’s out. My community is buggy the hell out of me already and I’m like, I need to play the game a few times guys.

Problematically BG3 is not finished. Not in the same way as D4 but in various class features. The game is tragically unbalanced in it’s build / class options. Things will potentially be fixed so it’s a waste for me to fix.

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If you think blizzard is the worst gaming company in history then you lack the knowledge about what you’re talking about.

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They literally had a campfire chat where they said they screwed up and certain parts of the patch were supposed to be readu but werent. Things like… yeah we nerfed you all, but we were supposed to nerf monster health by like 40% too.

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Sure… but I don’t think that’s what you should take from the post.

Aside from the technical stuff… they’re COMMUNICATING. They admitted they messed up, they explained how/why to their community like they’re grown adults… and they outlined the steps they’re taking to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future.

Mistakes/bugs etc happen… but their response is about as much as you can hope for when they do.

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You’re looking at it the wrong way, this isn’t Diablo 4… BG3 is based on DND 5e… DnD isn’t about “balancing build/class options.” You’re thinking like a meta gamer and that’s just not what DnD is about. Some builds will always be objectively superior to others… And that’s ok Because the game isn’t just about “what’s the maximum amount of damage I can do in a round.” If that’s something you want to pursue, sure you can do that. But if you want to play a weaker character, you can do that too.

Complaining about build/class balance in DnD is just entirely missing the point…

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Meanwhile the description of the latest hotfix from Blizzard:

Continuing the discussion from HOTFIX 1 - August 18, 2023 - 1.1.2:

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Yeah on that note now I know why I had way more disconnects than I normally do today… off to play Elden Ring… D4 is not playable like this

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I remember this, so many youtube videos, lots of hate toward blizzard in general, total chaos, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.

Jokes aside, it was pretty bad, people would complete Act 1, get halfway through Act 2, disconnect, come back and they were back in the middle of Act 1 again, all collected items, progress, completely gone.

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