Help Me Understand

PC General Discussion
1

I see a ton of people vigorously defending this game, and I’m struggling to understand why. Blizzard has done 12 hotfixes by my count, which in actuality has amounted to 12 nerfs. They had multiple betas, including two open ones. How is it possible that they could ship a game that they are so incredibly dissatisfied with from a balance perspective in spite of the numerous beta’s they had?

Lets take stock of where we are at today, as compared to June 1st.
Hotfix 1:
Nerfed the living **** out of inner sight for Rogue

Hotfix 2:
Nerfed Elixir of Death drop rate to 0

Hotfix 3:
Fixed some broken quest

Hotfix 4 & 5:
Nerfed the living **** out of elite spawn rates

Hotfix 6 & 7:
Buffed Uber Lillith to an absurd degree for free QA. They made her so insanely difficult that only broken builds would be able to initially do her - lets not pretend that was anything else, because it wasn’t.

They also further obliterated elite spawn rates in several dungeons

Hotfix 8:
Even further obliterated elite spawn rates in dungeons

Hotfix 9:
Added back two extremely popular aspects (Edgemasters and Berserk Ripping) that they literally removed from the game for almost a week because they needed time to nerf them.

Hotfix 10:
Nuked the druid’s toxic claws from orbit. Build obliterated.

Hotfix 11:
Fixed an issue that was allowing people to get alts leveled much faster by skipping world tiers

Hotfix 12:
Fixed an issue that has been in the game since launch that was resulting in the druids drop pool being busted for weapons.

Obliterated HOTA from orbit to the point that it is no longer usable

You will notice that nowhere in any of these fixes has there been any quality of life additions.

  • No option to get more stash tabs (even with $$$$$)
  • No adjustment to extremely modest Tree of Whisper rewards
  • No adjustment to sparse density in helltides
  • No adjustment to sparse density in nm dungeons
  • No adjustment to the ABSURD drop rates of wt4 unique items despite hundreds of millions of logged hours of play time
  • 2 confirmed Shako drops
  • 0 confirmed Grandfather drops
  • 1 confirmed Doombringer drop
  • 1 confirmed Andarial’s Visage drop

This type of wild balancing should really only occur during the QA process of the game leading up to release. That obviously didn’t happen, and it has resulted in an extremely tumultuous release that, without any doubt whatsoever, has lost this game a huge number of players that it should have otherwise been able to retain.

People that are playing the game more casually are very likely going to still be really enjoying the game, which is an excellent experience all the way up to level 80 or so. Those that quickly reached the end game after release…we are talking a significant percentage of those players already being in a state of boredom/dissatisfaction with the game. As someone that REALLY wanted to see Diablo 4 succeed in a huge way, this is just very depressing. In some respects, the state of the game right now sort of reminds me of Destiny 2 when it first released. A big, beautiful empty shell of a game. Even if this game gets fixed, the cost of it being in such a rough state so early is that it will never really be able to become what it could have been. There are just too many people that will never give this game another chance, which is a huge bummer.

I don’t understand how the individuals driving the decision making in this game weren’t able to anticipate this type of response. It’s just been one nerf after another, all the while the already very shallow item pool hasn’t been addressed even a little bit. Like…How on EARTH can anyone think it’s good design to have an extremely shallow item pool while simultaneously making the few interesting unique items you have so rare that the math averages out to something in the neighborhood of finding 1 every 40,000 years? How can you think the response will be anything but wildly negative to nerfing something into the ground in every hotfix? I think part of the issue people are having is that there is literally zero reason to have any confidence in the leadership of this game. The changes this game has had since it’s launch of so bizarrely terrible that it is to the point that, if I didn’t know better (and I do know better), I might think they were trying to sabotage the game for some reason.

Just depressing. Confusing, too.

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They also side-skirt any questions about these issues too. I truly do not believe that have any idea of what to do at this point.

The uniques feel like they just wanted to out-do PoE for the rarest items in an RPG and nothing more. It doesn’t matter if they’re in the code, they are effectively out of the item pool for 99.99999% of the player base based on these current drop rates.

Hotfixes are not hotfixes when they are just nerfs. Plain and simple. 12 hotfixes and not a single “hotfix” with a buff.

I am currently not optimistic for the future of this game right now. I’ve put in 9 days of playtime on just the Druid. That’s besides my level 72 Barb and 54 tornado druid.

This game’s only allure right now is doing a build that can cheese Uber Lilith and clearly any build that beats the overtuned boss gets a “hotfix” the next day. Just tired of it. Release WT5 so we can just move on from this QA testing.

I don’t honestly even wanna get into the QoL that exists in other Diablo games that didn’t even get brought over as a baseline to work on. They didn’t even hit the baseline here.

D3 had the same issues, plagued launch, player base fell to 3k players and then, 5 years after release, they finally gave the community a product that should’ve been the product on release.

Very disappointing to say the least. :upside_down_face:

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Thing is I knew what I signed up for. This isn’t quite the sheiss-show that d3 was at launch. It’ll get so much better though I predict eventually I’ll wonder how I played this at launch as well.

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agreed and hearted,

also a lot of bugs still in the game,

like monsters in mesh, world boss vanishing when you go repair in town,
sorc teleport not working correctly.

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5

Sorry OP, I skimmed and missed all that about ridiculous drop rates. I don’t understand that at all, if something is that rare what sane person would even dare hope to acquire it, it might as well not be in the game at those rates. Fix incoming I bet. When, well, I guess we’ll see.

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Because, I am having fun. A lot of it with my friends. Are there issues, obviously but they are on it. And none of the issues have affected my gameplay and enjoyment so far. Well beyond the grind for an aspect locked behind a ring… it’s a pain in the bit but still within what I expected. Blizzard is not exactly known for its perfect releases lol so this was not too bad. I am so looking forward to the new season!

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Personally, then I’m just having fun, and the issues and changes you’ve outlined haven’t really affected my enjoyment of the game. That’s not to say that there aren’t some issues here and there, but none that detract from the overall enjoyment of the game – at least for me.

I think a lot of the gameplay hotfixes Blizzard have made have targeted the extreme outliers, i.e. broken or overpowered stuff. You’re really running into that kind of stuff by accident. It tends to be the “clever people” who search for loopholes and flaws in the design that they can take advantage of to do something crazy or powerful or such. Blizzard tries to nip those cases in the bud before they spread too much.
And on the other end of the scale, then there’s also the case of stuff not working at all as intended and actually hindering the intended gameplay or design. Such stuff tends to get hotfixed as well, because it’s untenable to leave it for weeks or months until a patch.

If you’ve played other Blizzards games, then this is really par for the course. I’d even say that it’s quite similar to other game developers. It’s how it is. No release is perfect, so unforeseen stuff appears, and developers try to get on top of it. I think that’s good.

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I like how you use, “developers try to get on top of it.”

Only thing they are “trying to get on top of” is the interns

And when they’re exhausted - simple is solution:

Breastmilk in the fridge is free game

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The only thing I agree on is that the patch notes so far have been a total joke.

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The developers are busy getting sushi, they “aren’t on top of it”.

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this. it’s also why i haven’t logged into the game since 6/9. i mean, it happened, the game was released in the state that it was released, and so you and me are just completely stuck scratching our heads because - off the very top of those same scratched heads we’re able to think of something better. the list of possible improvements are TLDR. which takes us right back to…how?

they say you should never attribute to malice what can be instead attributed to incompetence. while that may be in this case i’d like to posit that we should - at least in the last decade, whenever a tiple-A studio is involved - never attribute to incompetency what can be instead attributed to greed.

so they ran their numbers and found out that they don’t actually have to finish the game, or even make it fun or ‘sound’ with regard to it’s design or functionality. just get this thing out on 6/6 [this date triggers me too] because that’s…i dunno. reasons that = dollar signs.

oh well.

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I had pretty much chalked pre-season up to completing 100% codex and renown on SC and HC and that was it

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None of those things really impact my life in any way so why would they upset me? There is a big patch coming soon that will hopefully address a lot of bugs and further balance the game and Season one is coming in 3-5 weeks.

Hopefully the big patch and season1 make the game more enjoyable for the majority of people. But I am mostly enjoying myself and realize that the game will change over time but not over night.

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The devs haven’t even bothered to fix the most annoying issue that has been around since the betas, which is clicking on the empty space just below where the resize button of chatbox would be would cause the chatbox to appear and interrupt gameplay.

Almost everyone has experienced this annoyance and it can even lead to Hardcore deaths, unintentionally.

It is super annoying, yet the devs can’t be bothered to fix something as simple and important as this. So don’t expect too much of them.

Also, they can’t even add the simple toggle of having FPS and Latency both displayed at once.

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You have the blizzard/diablo fanboys who will support anything blizzard/diablo.

Outside of them ARPGs tend to attract the masochist type of players who enjoy games that are super punishing and borderline unplayable withing investing hundreds of hours into it. Sadly seems like those players are going to corrupt yet another ARPG.

Id be 100% ok with these sort of giga chase items if this game had a working trade system but it does not so these items should not be so rare that we are only seeing 4 confirmed drops out of millions of people playing.

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I’d agree with you with one exception, and that is that there would also need to be a much more substantial item pool. There are just so few items in this game that it becomes a total slog to play after you have well rolled rares with the correct aspects.

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Your mistake is that you think QA is the same as playtesting. They are not the same. One is designed to check code and interactions of code for bugs. To do that as an example. Say you code WhirlWind. Well, you would load into a production environment and cast Whirlwind. You then look at a console and it says if there were errors. If not move on to the next step of testing. Load some monsters in, and cast WW on them. Check the console again for bugs. Take a report of bugs or not, submit a report, and wait for the next QA section.

Meanwhile, a playtester would start at level 1 and play through the entire game. Ideally, you would have multiple people per class, and their job would be to report any obvious bugs but more importantly to check the overall feel of a game. Something no dev studio wants to pay for anymore, much less in a live service model that takes 100s of hours to get through the full game. Now add that time for each and every possible combination of skill choice and you can see why for a modern game it really is unrealistic for a company to want to do that from a financial perspective. When they know people will buy the hell out of their game at launch where they make 80-90% of their money and they can take their time fixing it later.

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Essentially, too much stick and not enough carrot.

The list of Uniques is abysmal compared to that of D2 on the whole and it isn’t as if there is static loot tables where players can discern what is the best dungeon, boss, enemy type to farm them (while dealing with the monotony of leaving the game to reset). There’s also no trading system for Uniques and Aspects either.

So the few Uniques that DO exist, don’t for the 99.9%+ of players and there is no reason to chase after them beyond leaving a town, killing a bat, Shako dropping and then going to buy a lottery ticket or scratch card because you’re Midas in that moment.

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19

You are merely using semantics here. What one studio calls QA another may call play testing in the same vein that a developer might instead be called a producer, depending on what they are working on. Many of these hotfixes have adjusted how damage multipliers stack and are calculated, which is not something any developers should be relying on their players to find. These types of issues may be reported by internal testers they have hired, but that is still absolutely part of any appropriate QA process. You don’t need to have a QA/QE title assigned to you to be part of a QA process. I should know - I work in the field and we rely on multiple internal teams to help this process. I am not going to our customers asking them to do QA for us. If we ever get in the habit of not finding product issues ourselves and instead rely on end users in a production environment to tell us what is and isn’t working, we aren’t going to have jobs very long. That may seem harsh, but that’s the reality for any decent company.

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QA couldn’t figure out when you put an item on that has 45% fire resist you gain ~2% fire res? If they’re that bad at testing their games they should pay Kripp to tell them what’s broken in their game.