Everything is broken

PC General Discussion
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Hello, long time Diablo player,

I have played this game a lot. At times i have been top 20 of helltides well into the season multiple seasons. I quit diablo s12 because of some serious issues with server lag, borning endgame, and no meaningful progression.

I was NOT hopeful for lord of vengeance. I was planning to skip entirely. But About a week after release i decided to try it since they were extending the difficulty level, adding crafting, and what seemed like an endless cycle of farming either veiled crystals or obducite, and chasing perfect masterwork crits.

Now we are several weeks in. I rolled paladin blind. What a mistake that was. The progression was fun, and the push to t12 was definitely the most fun ive had and biggest challenge in diablo ive ever had.. But soon learned that was pretty artificial, since paladin is criminally undertuned this season (great). So as soon as i got to t12 and paladin’s only t12 build was a slow and no clear build called clash, i power leveled a spiritborn (my usual), and the meta build is amazing.

The problem? Every part of this game is a nightmare. Everything is poorly tuned. There are so many bugs, server lag is worse than ever, etc…

And heres the real issue- Ive been playing my spirit born at t12 for about a week now. Literally farming warplans NON STOP. I have cleared pit 128, and all content i am smashing thru with no resistance at all. Yet my warplan activities levels are around 4 or 5. The tree of whispers is at 7, but the rest are severely behind. So i have outscaled all the content before i have even come close to having my activity tree benefit me in any way? Some of these have 3 levels left, and i am already wanting to tap out.

Pit being capped at 150 and having several broken classes makes far progression meaningless. The game’s difficulty went from like pit 60 to pit 100… and there are people doing 150s in a couple minutes… and then some classes cant even break 145.

Then, every single class ive played so far, or what ive seen, has only one build that can reasonably do t12 content. Whereas before you could make almost any build with enough investment comfortably farm t4 in VoH. This makes playing your main a total drag, i want there to be build variance. Instead you have to play the most over tuned meta build to do anything worth your time in t12. I want speed farm builds, i want OP damage builds, I want to have to swap builds on a session to do different content.

The worst part, none of the content has actually been reworked. It has a new ui and system of “upgrading” rewards, but the game is literally the same. I do not find being forced into doing specific activities for the war plan to be fun. If i could i would never ever step foot into undercity. I cannot stand it. I would maybe do an infernal horde once a day at most…

And all of these could be ammended and changed to fit the scaling class power, but instead its just the same old same old.

Blizzard did an amazing job of reworking the classes and talents, and the gearing and crafting system are great. But this is almost meaningless when the content itself is the main issue with the game. And from what ive seen so far, even with monster power, its severely lacking depth, and scalability.

JUST MIX IT UP AND TURN UP THE DIAL PLEASE!! FIX SERVER LAG

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play poe2, simple… that way you will stop suffering.
and despite this if you keep playing this game despite your complaints, then YOU are the problem.

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Reading you post, it seems that “Everything is broken” is limited to class balance/progression, the end game, lag problems, and bugs (but you don’t name any).

Balance and progression:
With the exception of the Warlock, every single class was significantly altered, almost to the point of being brand new themselves. That means that performance/balance is starting over, also brand new.

Thus, it needs to be observed, metrics collected, iterations proposed and tested, etc, all in a cycle until something appears viable. It’s not a knee jerk process, it’s often done slowly and in baby steps to avoid large swings back and forth.

Network:
Just using S13 as a starting point, I’ve had two play sessions so far that were laggy. All the rest, all, have been smooth. If it was solely due to the game servers, there’d be a constant deluge of reports.

Bliz owned systems are a tiny fraction of the total hardware and software of the internet. Statistically, an issue would be in the 1000’s of miles between you and Bliz. Even the two laggy sessions that I had can’t be exclusively pinned on Bliz, because I didn’t run any connectivity tests at those times.

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Seems like there is/has been a memory leak issue. I don’t think it’s connectivity lag that everyone is experiencing. Mine is ok, but my play sessions are shorter. A buddy of mine consistently plays 4+ hours a day and his game runs really poorly after an extended play sesh.

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Yeah, there’s something up with memory leaking. The number of reports has dropped off since D4 launched, so i appears that some work has been done on it.

Personally, I don’t experience it. But there seems to be remaining fringe cases. It may be proving difficult to stamp out for all system environments.

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Are you serious? There was obviously 0 QA or testing on most of this. So many bugs on every class. Been playing Rogue and so much stuff bugged on that class it’s a joke. Umbracrux was disabled cause of bug, reenabled, and it’s STILL bugged! 3 min 150 clears since day 1 (on multiple classes cause bugs btw) so the tower is a joke and everyone using it has 150 glyphs and huge advantage. Entire set for rogue is bugged and doesn’t work(imbue). Rain of arrows build bugged and doesn’t work. Tons of shadow clone bugs. I’ve played 4 classes and ran into tons of bugs on all of them.

Also the balance and tuning is a joke. Just look at everyone stacking resolve cause they didn’t take 2 seconds to think about how broken and bugged it would be before reenabled Glynn’s Anvil. Barb has a glyph, a single glyph, that gives over 2000% damage. Druid has a ring that gives like 800% MORE damage. Played like 200 hours and don’t have enough gem fragments to make 1 single horadric gem. Complete joke!!!

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Unfortunately, that’s not something the inexperienced can claim. There very obviously is testing/QA. If you consider all the code the makes up the client and the service, the vast, vast majority works as intended.

The problem with complex code is that small, in-house testing will never be sufficent. Studios don’t have the virtually limitless system configurations that would be needed to uncover every bug.

The only way that can be done is by using the nearly limitless systems themselves: the playerbase. Plus, because of deadlines, it’s a common practice to release software with fully known bugs to be dealt with at a later date.

The common expectation that things should work (to individual tastes, no less) at release is just not rational.

Yes, that’s to be expected, again,

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Do we have any confirmation about requirements on AI usage? I know microsoft (who now owns Blizzard) has been pushing copilot down most of their operations.

AI coding has caused issues, Amazon had to implement a mother hen policy iirc, as the vibe code they were implementing lead to many outages.

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Are you an AI or work for Blizzard PR department? What are those insane replies? I don’t literally mean 0 testing, it’s an exaggeration obviously. What I mean is an unacceptable level of testing and polish. Path of exile is a MUCH more complex game and is never this buggy. This is not up to standard or acceptable, and trying to defend it as such is unhinged. Either they have insane spaghetti code that’s impossible to work with, or they don’t test nearly enough. We are literally beta testing this stuff. It’s not acceptable and I’ve quit the season 100% because of bugs/tuning. Game is fun but not when stuff is this broken.

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I don’t know about Bliz’s coding process. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that some is used. It’s getting more common in the industry every passing day.

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Neither, Altaris. Simply not liking what you’re being told doesn’t immediatetly equate to AI or PR.

I’ve only explained some of the realities surrounding your complaints.

Both zero and your unacceptable level get the same response: there’s limits to small, in-house testing.

Gameplay complexity and codebase complexity aren’t necessarily mutually inclusive.

Again, not liking what you are told doesn’t immediately equate to defending.

I haven’t defended anything. I haven’t said anything is acceptable, or good, or proper, or that it should be this way. I’ve only explained how some aspects of development work.

Right. That’s the gist of what I’ve been explaining. That’s the only way if one ever wants new content to be released. Otherwise it would be in testing indefinitely.

It’s your prerogative to take it or leave it.

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Actually what is top 20 helltides?

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My bad, I forget this is a small indie team without the resources for extensive testing like that huge multi billion corporation GGG…

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:thinking:

I wouldn’t say you’re defending it, but you’re being reductive regarding the poster’s complaints and being incredibly fair and some might say hand wavey towards Blizzard. Obviously the OP was being hyperbolic and I’m certainly not defending that, but let’s not pretend you’re some bastion of unbiased fairness here.

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As far as the “lag” is concerned, it’s been an ongoing issue for me since S0. Some seasons work great, other’s near unplayable. Entering a new zone, going near other players, game freezes. The start of this season was by far the worst I’ve seen. But now it’s completely fine.

Sometimes it works fine, then there’s a patch and it goes to crap. Other times it’s crap and after patch and it works (like this season). This has been a very common complaint since S0.

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Resources? Millions of systems all configured differently?

A multi-billion dollar corporation isn’t going to have that anymore or than a small indie company.

Explaining how something works with no favor or lean or preference isn’t bias. What you’re implyimg is that when someone feels slighted and doesn’t like the explanation why, the explanation is biased. That can be true depending on the intent, but I’m careful when picking words for explanations so that I’m not.

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This is a live service game. The issue is the service fee is paid upfront. Blizzard just wins in this approach. I dont know of the correct term to describe the loyal fans that have to defend every post. Blizzard provides zero communication. Your loyalty is one sided. Good for you.

The minimum expectation of a live service game is that skill/effects function as intended and gameplay for the most part is smooth. That is what testing/quality control is for. Hotfixes and patches are deployed to fix unexpected situations or minor/major over estimations. The concern is that it is not an exaggeration that 50% of such interactions are bugged. This is not the intent of hotfixes or patches.

In my own opinion, I will say there are enough positives to enjoy a good portion of the expansion. However, reality will eventually catch up.

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You debate well and have sounds arguments/opinions but if you really think about it, everything is broken according to the direction. We just went thorough an entire “reduction” of #’s across the board a few seasons back….and now Qud’s of damage are common place once more.

So in that regard, yes, everything is broken.

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I illustrated how you very clearly showed bias towards Blizzard. There are many other games, some in the same genre even, that have fewer bugs and/or respond to bugs at much faster pace than Blizzard does. Your “explanations” ring very hollow because of this.

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You didn’t because I didn’t present any.

In fact, much of what I said applies outside of Bliz, so it can’t be bias towards them.

The best you can claim to show is a bias toward reality, which I’ll never deny.

I can respect that. I’ve been trying to get into this new version of the game, but I’m having difficulty. I’m not finding it as fun as it used to be. I definitely haven’t been liking the new direction.

1 Like