I feel sorry for the devs, but I also just don't get it

PC General Discussion
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I was watchig the campfire chat yesterday and I was still very curious, because they sometimes seem to catch what the community demands, but the whole progress is still a black box. I still have no idea how to enter questions for them, I often feel they don’t address some of the most important issues/topics and even tho I appreachiate their idea to explain their vision, but it only answered a small portion of the open questions and the direction.

Yes it’s not simple to create such a huge game and players have different demands and ideas how it should work. Seeing how some people behave is really hard, but to some degree I can understand why it heppens. Best example is the controvercy, that some say D4 is too easy, some say it’s way to hard - It’s simply nearly impossible to please both factions, so you need to go for the majority. And that’s not easy. Who is the majority? Probably casual players, that can’t effort to play 4 hours every day for months to reach level 100.

// Start EXP rant
No one asks to create a new character, go outside of the town, kill a squirrel and jump to level 100. But it’s also just a chore to play multiple hours a day and to grind against a wall. It took me 1 Month to Level 100 in Eternal, when Game was released (Started early and played every day, sacrificed some sleep, to be able to) and only thanks to the NM Dungeon EXP Buff I made it in a month. Yes, we are only one week into the season, but I hoped to reach Level 100 faster now, but it does not feel like this at all. One thing I loved about Diablo 3 was, that you could play the season and have everything done after 1-2 weeks and then go back to RL things, jump in again at some occurence and be good. In D4 I feel obligated to play every day to get everything and it starts to become unhealty and it’s very likely not only me. “BuT tHerE aRe StEamErS, wHo ReaCh 100 iN a DaY” - Yes sure, there are always people who can nolife this kind of games, who uses tricks, groups, power leveling, exploits etc. to do so, but I don’t care about those. If they do that and run out of things to do, they still can play new chars, other builds, hell even other games. But that should not affect all the normal players. You can still find ways to please those heavy players, by adding additional difficulty sacling, while maintaining same loot and stats where they can compete against each other in a leader board. That’s incentive for those heavy players enough and it has nothing that other players might feel obligated to have to do. But that’s too simple, I guess? So nevermind.
// EXP rand end

I just don’t get, why Diablo needs to be so tuned down. Yes powercreep becomes an issue, if the numbers turn to D3 like set boosts, dealing trillions of damage… But still it fullfills everything the ARPG Genre is about, exteme power fantasy, fighting through hordes of monsters, rolling that slot machine to may get a cool/better item. Why do we have to wait for cooldowns? Stop fighting and throwing some slow auto attacks to regen enough resource to cast again, why do we have to walk through dungeons, backtracking to this one guy you didn’t saw initially that needs to be rescued, only to walk back to the door to continue afterwards… Movement Speed needs to be upped to at least 150%, why can’t we be fast? Cooldowns needs at minimum a 20% reduction across the board for everything, needs to be removed from mounts and the characters dodge all together. Why should anyone like pressing a button and nothing happens? Where is the power fantasy here? It just feels awful. I don’t even start to talk about balance, this is something that needs time, but QoL hits in an instant and helps everyone, so those should have the biggest focus, especially if it’s a simple demand.

But somehow Blizzard manages to be that evil Jinn, that grants you a wish, but finds a twist to ruin it again. You want all girls to fall for you in an instant? Sadge, you’re gay now. You want to be able to reset your paragons with one button? Sadge, here’s your scroll of amnesia, that you can only get a single one of in the hardest tier of the season journey… I mean what the heck? Is it really too much to ask to have a merchant selling you this scroll for 15 Million Gold or for 1000 obols?! Come on!

Things like this gives me the feeling they are purposly failing at this point. Like there is someone telling them: “Make sure you don’t allow the players to have any kind of QoL and also make sure only a small portion of players will ever be able to obtain it”. Just why?!

There are so many things in this game, that just punches your face, it’s way too much to post it down all at once, but everyone knows those things. At least to some degree and I really can’t understand how those can not be a priority.
I know how development works, I know how hard it is to prioritize and spend the resources (devs) efficiently… But guys please, make this game less of a chore, you know the issues for sure, if you’re playing the game actively…

Thanks.

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I agree with most said as I’m in the same boat. I’m around 65 now and I’m asking myself every day, “Why do I still keep doing this? I level with the monsters, I don’t feel more powerful, it feels the same”

Unfortunately, I’m afraid D4’s problems are bigger and more core-related. Seems they are very limited in what they work with, anything from increased mob density, camera zoom, hell even extra stash tabs significantly affect performance. Feels right now that it won’t ever be something much better than what it is now, and that’s software / engine related.

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I find it very hard to play more than 15minutes.

Every other 2023 game out there feels more fun.

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1000% … the funny thing is they had to know what would cause the powercreep and they still went to production with this game.

Reliable sources of vulnerable. Each class has pretty much one way. The classes that are better at it are on the “S Tier” list.

They then stuck it to the casual gamer by making everything more slow, more challenging … because streamers and powergamers.

This game is not built for people who just purchased the base game and are happy with that. They want to make it a chase of some type… $$ is the only motivation I can think of. The whales can’t get bored. We’re not happy with people just buying a game once.

It’s no longer about making a good game it’s about how to extract as much money from people as possible.

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Yes this is the trend.

Look at all of Activisions content today.

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At least diablo 4 is pretty effective at being a sleep aid.

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The journey to 100 is the game. This was their stated goal. They wanted everything to feel meaningful. If you bought the game after they said this it is your fault. If you have a desire to be max level and go brr in a matter of hours, they have a product for that, it seems like they plan on further support for it.

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I hear this mentioned a lot… what issues? I had the most fun in D3 out of any RPG. I think adding MMO aspects like world bosses, and a shared world is the dumbest thing blizzard has done.

After watching the exilecon streams, I cannot wait for POE2 its everything D4 SHOULD have been… basically D4 have 1 year to fix the game before it dies.

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That’s what confuses me the most. Who gives a bleep if players are generating millions on damage stats? It’s a SEASONAL game. Take risk Blizzard! Let people go wild.

They’re trying to balance this like it’s static WoW. No one gives a damn. If something goes sideways during a season … let it … the next one is a full reset!

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This is also a criticism I have of players. Yes, it’s seasons. Go grind out your reputation without complaint.

The message to Blizzard remains – take risks! Let people HAVE FUN.

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what content are you referring to? (sorry i thought it was another poe2 day on twitch so i dunno what youre talking about)

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The issue for me is its not fun to grind out rep. Its not fun to spend 70% of the playtime traveling. The builds and moment to moment gameplay are mediocre at best.

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Thank you everyone for your answeres! :slight_smile:

Until last Campfire I was pretty confident, that the game base is solid and it’s only a matter of balance, number tweaking and adding in UI and new content to improve over time… But after the tweets about why stash increases are problematic (They literally load every players Profile, Gear, Inventory, Stash in the city hub, which explains a lot why even my highend gaming rig is lagging out as soon as I port back into town) and their statement on monster density increase and zoom out being limited due to resources of what players systems might be able to do, I am also afraid of the future… I mean for sure it’s possible to sort all those potential bottlenecks/stoppers out over time, but that directly makes is a way more far away chance. It’s not unusual for a big project to have such technical depts, especially after such a long development and changing staff inbetween, but it’s indeed a little scray what limits it will bring us in regards of advancing the game. And the thing is, we can’t fully blame the current team, because they are the ones who would absolutely love not to have this situation all together and most likely are only partly responsible for it. Nontheless, we can just hope they will figure out good solutions and let Diablo 4 shine to it’s true potential it still definitly has!

This also indeed made me grin a little. When the class designer spoke about the idea, that overpower, dot, crit, vuln should have been different kinds of choices to get some extra power - Not only that they should have been aware of it (There was alpha and beta feedback about this) that there is a mechanic that work so much stronger due to it’s multiplicative nature, that a revisit before release would have been highly beneficial, it’s also a nice dream having players to chose if they want to multiply by A, B or C and not endup with players just stacking all togethe to have AxBxC :smiley: It’s fine that they take care of vuln and expand on those systems for sure, but this is only one aspect of the 1.1 patch. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, if they only tuned down vuln. Bigger problem here was they tuned everything down across the board…

Both can be true, so you can create a very good game and it can earn more money even after launch, the better the game is, the more people are fine to invest some more dollars to improve their visual experience - If the game is bad or not as good as it could be, it will still earn some money, but it could and partly will lead to less purchases. So overall I don’t think that’s in the overall sense of everyone, but of course if they can save a lot of money for development and still enough people buy stuff, it might even out and it leads to less incentive to invest more into the game development. Still I think the latter is the worse choice.

Actually I also don’t think big numbers are an issue, actually for most players it’s probably even more desireable, because it makes you feel even stronger, and if we are honest it just doesn’t matter if you hit with 100 Damage on a 3000 health boss or with a 2 Trillion hit on a 60 Trillion boss health bar. So it’s basically just a matter of how much you want to tune the numbers, but it doesn’t really change much of the gameplay itself.

The bigger issue was, regarding D3, that those numbers emerged from set bonuses that boosted specific setups beyond everything, while non affected skills became even more useless. So I for myself so desperatly watned to create a viable chain lighning mage build, but Delsere magnum opus buffed all core skills, but chain lightning… And the set less option was just not strong enough to play the high content, for some exceptions where legendaries had other absurd high percentage numbers that allowed the WD Barber Build for example. So while high damage numbers isn’t really an issue, only having a few skills buffed to high numbers is. So I am fine if they want to keep numbers lower to have a better overview as long as it fits into the gameplay. It still can lead to feeling powerful and if it helps to balance out all other options as well.

For me it’s all about playing a fluid, fast paced game, where I can feel powerful, fly over maps and through tunnels, send hordes and hordes of mobs back to hell and grind for those nice gear pieces to do all that even faster, harder, better as an result. And as soon as I am bored, go to another build, class or mode and do the same with a new look and feel - That’s what an ARPG is about for me :slight_smile:

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If you have to build your game around what players are demanding in the moment you’ve already FAILED. It’s their job to have a vision and execute it. It’s not the player’s job to tell them how to design it.

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The core systems of the game still do not work. I don’t get it either.

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I’ve felt like this since 60 and I’m about 70 now.

The absolute lack of a meaningful end-game, nothing to chase (uber lillith drops…nothing special and only rewards players with a sense of pride and accomplishment), and continue design decisions that both actively contradict stated goals and make the game less fun/more of a chore to play (world scaling and XP changes) leave me wondering why I should even continue playing beyond “it’s fun” which yeah, combat is fun! But I need a bit more than fun combat as I’ve got tons of other games I want to play that are also fun, too.

And with how the developers speak of the genre I continue to wonder if any of them are actually ARPG fans that play the broader genre or even deeply play D2/3. Because they continue speaking of the genre as if it’s new to them and making mistakes that any longterm ARPG player would have called out instantly. I still can’t believe they shipped the game with multiplicative vulnerable mods weighted at equal value to additive mods like holy heck did nobody even do a basic math check?

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Stats, mods, item design, etc. can change, they can fix this - the same happened with Diablo 3, which was also a mess item-wise at launch. I’m 100% sure that they actually will, it will just take time.
What scares me is all of those limitations related to engine/software., like significantly higher mob density will make the game feel like a slide show (they even said it during that campfire talk), they don’t even want to touch the camera distance issue (I wonder why), the game already has some lag spikes when outdoors, leaving or entering towns, etc. Yes, some optimizations probably could be done, but there’s a limit for those also.
It feels like they work with what they have, and what they have is very limited.

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I just want my unique while im still leveling, I’ll never play another season again until thats addressed.

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They forgot the journey part. Glad BG3 came out.

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True, I had extreme much luck lately - Rolled Druid for S1 and found Tempest a few days ago, yesterday I got the Greatstaff of the Crone with a 150%/9 Ranks Claw at level 77 - You can’t imagine how fun that was and I can only imagine the level of frustration, if you’re looking forward to play a build and not get the desired items, like at all.

It always was a thing, that RNG slightly dictates what you can play in that Moment, and it worked okayish in D3, since you found a build definin item and you just switched to it - In D4 however this is pure pain, you just can’t adapt to your drops, because (even after the nerf to costs in upcoming 1.1.1) it will remain tidious to respec towards a different item, since it will still be expensive and time consuming as hell. I am running Pulverize right now and even with a BIS Item I am heavily thinking if I should switch now, because of all the cumbersome lackluster that is involved in doing so… Stop Leveling Glyphs, but Level others, respec over one hundred Paragon Points one by one? It drives me crazy.

So there are 2 things that have to change:
→ We need loadouts, where we kinda can put a build in parallel to prepare a switch and as soon as we want we just swap over to that build from our armory
→ A way to have a more distinct way to find build defining items, so they either rework those items and move them to a different system that we can unlock more targetted and items remain as more common power buffs that can be used across builds, or they allow us to really target farm for specific stuff, because otherwise it will be impossible to work towards a specific build, especially over time, when they increase the loot pool more and more…