Did you ever spin the narrative to suit how you feel about D4 atm 
Um, what?
This is no different than having a group of people play the game and gather data asking basic things like âwhat do you like and donât likeâ
Why wouldnât we as gamers/consumers want them to do this?
OP points at lack of love at the developers. He does not say they should not look at factual data.
There should be love and passion in a product, and metrics can be a hint in what works well and what not.
The devs seem to lack love and passion for the product, have lost contact with the fans and player base, and now their only thing to steer by is their metrics and their company goals.
That is why we get the developer videoâs of lately that are complete tone deaf to the fans, or non-whopping 25% bonus XP weekends instead of a hundred possible easy to fix game improvements.
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They are just people that you wonder how they are able to get up and dress themselves in the morningâŚ
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they need analytic data to dress them and what to eat too
I guess their decision making, based on data, goes so well that they have to make Motherâs Blessing ââweekendââ that lasts 5 days lol
This game is currently dead to me. When I saw the patch notes for the 1.1.3 it just made me laugh as they failed to deliver on things promised in 1.1.2 (no guaranteed drops after certain lvl from bosses and goblins) Makes you wonder where are they getting their coders from⌠woodworks?
And consider of all the lack of data for things that players are asking for but they are not in the game.
Please read the Esquire article on the games development. Everyone should. Ferguson and crew were brought in as yes men to finish an out of control, and fractured project. Conveniently the article came out several weeks after the release of the game.
So yes, they only care about metrics. Itâs literally what they were paid to do. Reign the game in to make it ready for launch, and even then they werenât given all the time they asked for to finish the game. It was to be rushed out in May 2023. They asked for an additional year of development time and received one month.
Did they push back? No. They ate it up like good little yes men. Now we have this kiddie pool depth of a game that hardly anyone wants to play. Theyâre desperate to get players back to improve their metrics, but the game just sucks. They would have to be paying people in real extra gold to get most to come back at this point. No one cares about a slight XP and gold boost when the base gameplay loop is a lullaby.
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Well Iâd say the âlosersâ are the ones who fail to understand the limitations of the statistics and data. They fail to understand how to use it properly.
Morons donât understand this.
Agree 100%.
I really enjoy playing the game! and I have spent more $$ in the shop to support the game than I care to admit. I have also quit playing because the game is now a constant cf disconnect fest⌠every stability fix these j@ckbutts implement make it worse not better. The actions of blizzard employees appear to be getting more desperate and deservingly so.
And many devs who never created games before
So ⌠yeah
GG
So Scopes, how would you summarize PoEâs metrics? or Last Epoch?
I mean PoE is the gold standard. I watched Darth Microtransactions gush over it this week (I played PoE up until 3.14). Go to Steam Charts and look up their All Time concurrent, They lose 85% of their player base 6wks into a 3 month season consistently EVERY season. The game is deep, has tons of end game activities. Explain the metrics?
Last Epoch has tons of end game and canât hit 1K concurrent consistently, Why?
Over 10M bought this game. We canât see concurrent player metrics on the 3 platforms, but I am guessing 10M didnât just put it down. Could you come up with 100K complaining (I bet you could not come up a fraction of that) in the various forums and SM outlets? What % of the 10M would that be
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Thats like being the Manager of All Things Diablo but not having the foresight to ask the other Diablo teams about how to progress this IPâŚ
So smug lol.
Nah, the devs wouldnât be panic-making videos every other day trying to explain the mass exodus from this game and they certainly wouldnât be knee-jerk tossing out patches that break more than they fix, if only 1% of the playerbase left like you ignorantly suggest.
They wouldnât look like beat dogs in every campfire like joe shelly.
Nah, theyâd be touting their massssssssssssssssssssssive success and theyâd be all smiles in every video.
In reality, thereâs 10k to 20k people who still play this game on a daily basis.
A massive flop.
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Again, you want to put the onus on players. It is not the responsibility of the players to like a bad game. Toss out any ARPG name for a comparison, as if theyâre all the same.
PoE is free for one, itâs also extremely old. I played it for around three years consistently, never even bought stash tabs.
Diablo 4 is a game that launched in June 2023. Yet it runs on the engine of the previous Diablo game, and lacks many simple common features of other ARPGs.
Metrics are whatâs killing this game. Theyâre responding to player vs content, instead of player fun and satisfaction. The first patch instantly made it a devs vs player perception. Players arenât stupid, they can tell when a game is being artificially lengthened due to a deep lack of substance.
Those that didnât uninstall after that slowly faded off due to boredom over a shallow game. Many players are angry about it, judging by all the posts, but I see that it was just a bunch of yes men doing their job. This whole mess is on the C-suite at ActiBlizz, Bobby Kotick made his bank. Yet here you stand, shilling for the ultra wealthy that wouldnât care if you were dead in a ditch tomorrow.
Have some self respect.
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You are not wrong about that but in online service games most companies use metrics and analythical data for the game. I think a much more of a problem is that they hired so many âgreenâ people. I think they donât even understand why Diablo 4 its more boring than diablo 2 and 3 at release.
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I play EVERY aRPG, been hooked on them since the mid-90âs. I literally max out my character cap in ALL of them. Hell, I Have 8 in Wolcen (as bad as the game was) at max or with in a couple #'s of 90.
I watched the RTS genre die. aRPGs were never meant to be deep on content, seasons were the only thing that even kept them relevant. I donât believe the genre is well-suited long term to have sustainable deep content that satisfies that casual base as well as those that can no-life the game.
I donât believe any have an answer for it hence the reason GGG will have PoE & PoE 2 will be standalone iterations in the IP running 3 month seasons with 6wk alternating starts.
As far as metrics go, they need all the help they can get. I would want to know what NMDâs people are running, what ones are getting salvaged like crazy (why? What can we do to improve, etc.)
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I totally understand. I went back to Diablo 2 between every MMO I ever played and got bored of. For years and years after its release I would go back and have a great time playing it.
Please donât misunderstand me, I definitely want Diablo 4 to be a good game. Hell I paid $100 bucks for it, or whatever early access (four whole days!) cost.
I agree about what metrics they should be collecting. Unfortunately all they care about is unique user hours in game. Weâre looking for hack and slash and build a character, theyâre looking at how they can keep people in the game longer. Not through fun, because they cannot currently provide or guarantee that. So they have to use subversive tactics to artificially extend play time.
With all your ARPG experience you have to see just how shallow this game is. Itâs a scratch off ticket in a world full of buried treasure.
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3 off the 4 of us guys that have played on the weekends since mid 90âs were doing some runs on Saturday.
We were on Discord and one of them commented at the end of a NMD and said. âI think us playing V-Rising is more fun than thisâŚâ. And heâs not wrong.
One of the best bosses in D4 was Nilcar in Kor Dragan SH. His 3 phases were great. How did he not make it into an NMD and we get the likes of Tomb Lord???
Someday would love to see them do something like Grim Dawnâs: Shattered Realms, but go with an infinitely scaling dungeon with an all-time leaderboard and a seasonal leaderboard. 
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This is taken from the Washington Post article on the Diablo 4 development:
"I just went to work every day and got angry,â said a female former Blizzard Albany employee. âEither because the tools were slow or I didnât like the game that much, to be totally honest with you. The quality of life to actually enjoy what Iâm working on and see a path forward with it was way too important to stick around for the equity.â
Another:
Several former employees alleged a lack of career progression. They said when they asked for raises, some managers would suggest they apply for jobs elsewhere, leave Blizzard and return one day for higher pay, which encouraged many of them and their peers to quit.
The project was doomed from the start:
Employees said the culture of the Diablo team was shaped at the top and that team leaders had trouble making decisions and standing by them throughout development. They described, in some cases, a siloed culture where it was hard to know what other people were experiencing.
âDiablo IVâ initially began development over five years ago. Under the leadership of director Luis Barriga alongside lead designer Jesse McCree, employees described a sense of inertia as large parts of the game would be worked on and then revamped and decisions stalled out. A battle royale mode for the game was discarded early on. McCree and Barriga did not respond to a request for comment.
Some employees attribute delays to McCree, who they say had a tendency to micromanage and a scattered approach to development. McCree would grow intrigued by different aspects of the game and then lose interest and hand it off to other people without finishing what he started. Employees said once McCree was fired in the wake of the companywide lawsuit, after the initial shock to the team, they reverted some of the changes he had requested.
"You could tell that they [McCree and Barriga] werenât very confident, there wasnât a lot of vision for the game,â said a former Blizzard employee. âThey were changing their minds a lot, sometimes without even giving things a fair shot, like over the weekend. This started to really slowly start to burn people out.â
Thereâs a ton more, and I apologize for not putting them in proper quotes. Iâm on my phone right now and the interface isnât great for it. Thereâs a ton more in the Washington Post and Esquire articles. There was a lot of turnover at several points, no one knew what was going on, things were constantly changing. It must have been a terrible project to work on, itâs no wonder they had to ship⌠Well, this.
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D4 team should talk about Diablo with ChatGPT4. This single idea can solve a lot of their problems. For ex. if they lack confidence or creativity/insight, they can almost âoutsourceâ it to the AI. That AI can improve this game in record time. It can help with EVERYTHING: design, coding, art style, quest ideas, expansion ideas, fixing mechanics, QoL features, project planning and management. They should talk with ChatGPT4 ALL THE TIME while working on this game.
ChatGPT4 can even help with community management, marketing and HR. Itâs THAT powerful.
This AI is EXTREMELY effective, especially when team members lack experience or confidence. Thatâs because it has MASSIVE knowledge and decent intelligence and can be an excellent advisor to more junior team members. Project leaders can also learn a lot from it, because it has HUGE knowledge from very diverse disciplines which can aid DESIGN and MANAGEMENT a lot.
Data-driven design is a âbottom-upâ approach. D3 needs a more âtop-downâ leadership and this can be VERY effectively delivered by using ChatGPT4, because it can deliver countless ideas and insights which can be easily inferred from the analytics. Simply combine Agile methods with some Waterfall methods. This game needs a strong VISION and DIRECTION which are often lacking when going full Agile.
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