I can’t believe that “omg… You still don’t get it” is the entire premise of your thread. Who is saying that?
And here you are again implying that if they don’t do what you want then they have no pride in their work. People who want something different in the game treat that as the game being broken. It isn’t broken.
There are bugs that they are fixing, but none of them break the game. There are balance issues that they are fixing, but none of them break the game. There are microtransactions and battle passes and a $70 price tag, and some people hate that too, but it doesn’t break the game.
The game not being what you hoped it would be is not some crime the devs committed, and so disagreeing with your development priorities is not “defending the devs.”
You (and many others) come in here like your particular disappointments with the game are universal and of the highest priority and only a team of amateurs with no sense of pride could possibly have failed to correct them before launch. Then anyone who disagrees must be a paid shill. And yet, whenever a thread asks people for specifics about what they would change, everyone chimes in with wildly different answers (including the so-called “white knights”). No one says, “nothing needs to change,” and there are no changes that get universal agreement.
So, the devs do things to improve the game. They have plans to continue doing that, but they must balance their own plans against the desires of the players and the reality of what is happening in-game (based on telemetry data). They (unlike people on this forum) have to get over their own egos and sometimes take the L, then find a different way to accomplish their design goals.
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This is the crux of it all.
Maybe run your business into the ground was too emotionally charged, but searching for the best/low cost product or service leads to some businesses going under without so much as a bat from an eye from a consumer.
Dangling the the threat of taking business elsewhere to get more value, or just actually taking business elsewhere, hurts a business. There isn’t always ill intent behind it, I’d say most people aren’t even aware of it, but the results of actions like these is that it pushes businesses closer to the point where it isn’t sustainable to stay open.
Of course, this is par for the course in capitalist society, freedom and all that stuff. Which is why I say it is the consumer’s right.
Everything that’s BOE or tradeable (especially rare pets/mats) is a lot easier to get through trading than grinding/finding yourself. Just like in d4 and in basically every game where you can trade worthwhile things. I hope you weren’t trying to compare BOP with BOE for some weird reason.
And yet all the issues you point to are balance issues. They all come down to two things: (1) at a certain point it is too hard to find upgrades; and (2) legendaries should be more exciting to find than rares.
The first is a balance issue that they are working on. The issue is this: people want a specific 4 affixes on their gear because those affixes are way stronger than other ones, regardless of rolls. Therefore you need to find only items with those affixes and then gradually upgrade your rolls. This is extremely difficult, primarily involves sorting through a pile of trash, and is therefore not satisfying.
So you say, “remove all the BS, make it easier to reroll, make it easier to get high rolls, and make even higher rolls come from harder content.”
But the right solution is to make it so that more than 4 stats are desirable, so that there are actual interesting gearing choices to be made, not just sifting through the garbage for the diamonds, and so that you can target farm the stuff you want more easily. The devs are fixing the actual problems (though what they are doing in S2 likely won’t be a complete fix).
If all they did was make it so that there are 6-8 highly desirable stats per item slot for each build, with some overlap between slots and builds but also some diversity, it would almost instantly solve the biggest issue with “itemization”: the difficulty of finding good drops in the late game.
For point (2), they haven’t said anything yet. I agree it’s a problem in the late game, but there’s a long stretch where finding legendaries is still quite exciting because you don’t have good rolls on all the aspects you want. I don’t object to your suggestions here, I just don’t think they are the biggest problems with items. In fact, a bigger problem is being able to get and use uniques. Having a system
to make use of duplicate uniques would be good, but target farming is the most needed thing, so it’s good they are addressing that first.
IMO, the blacksmith upgrades are another issue, because they are capped and they don’t require anything but some easily farmed mats and are therefore barely an investment. Upgrading uniques infinitely by melding in duplicates would be a great way to improve that. Same with upgrading legendaries by using legos with the same aspect. And they should really just swap around the way imprinting works: instead of extracting the aspect once and sticking it on a rare, you just overwrite the legendary base with the stats of a rare of the same item base type. So you can use the aspect infinitely as long as it remains on the same item base. This would also make it feel more like you are getting a legendary to keep and the rares are the upgrade materials. I hope they will look at ideas like this, but it isn’t fundamentally broken.
In the beta I thought DIV would be a mix of Lost Ark, DIII and PoE, but with one chest slot per character I quickly started playing PoE again. And I figured I didn’t have to start over every three months. I’ve never played past World Tier 2. Could have used the hundred euros for Starfield or a new graphics card. The way it looks now, I’ll probably check back in three years.
Haha basically. At this point I just check the forums every so often to check and see if the devs finally admit they don’t know what they are doing and the laugh at the people who are defending this trash.
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It isn’t always that a business can’t sustain a low cost that drives them out of business. Maybe the service was terrible or maybe their product was terrible. Some businesses don’t deserve to stay open.
“one of the things we recognized early on was that we had made some sort of mistake in managing expectations. It was hard because we felt like what we were doing for the game were the right things to do.”
we expected you knew it was going to be a bad game! Come on, its us its ACTIVISION-blizzard. what where you expecting!?
Pretty good article. Rod is correct, have to manage expectations. UPOD… Under Promise Over Deliver! I had a wonderful corporate career for 20 years (until I retired) doing this concept.
Well, we all learn from experience, and we learn by failing and learning from it.
Have a good one.
From the link: S2 “looks set to exorcise one of Diablo 4’s most tedious grinds”
Exorcise. Let that word choice sink in. Oof.
Im saying duplicated stats are worthless, f.e. “damage to crowed controlled” is enough, we do not need every single one of them seperately (fe. damage vs slowed). This goes for alot of stats and also includes stats that arent even usable for certain classes, but you cant avoid getting them. This lefts the impression of intentional gatekeeping.
This also brings us to another topic which is, that you can easier find better loot with other classes than the one you are playing because of alot less possible rolls on certain Item slots. (21 affixes vs more than 30 on Rings?)
Which is impossible to achieve because of math, some combination of 4 stats will mathematically always be the best choice for the damage or toughness of a build, like it or not. This cant be balanced, especially not with the low effort of it in Blizzard Games.
Every Stat that isnt “BiS” will always be a compromise, not a choice.
There is alot more “balance issues” but who am i to point everything out step by step. i gave my feedback and im done with it, im not trying to teach a chef how to cook, just saying the food doesnt taste good.
If there is so many issues with the most important and crucial part of a game in this genre im calling it broken, there is more done wrong / badly thought out than good. But what annoys the most is that this game is straight p2w if nothing changes. They cant control trading, and being able to trade the best items in the game apart from uniques (which most of them will forever be useless). Is a huge red flag.
Upgrading Materials have some unintentional bottlenecks. F.e. Silverore, they couldnt even get this right.
New stuff is coming out. I can’t stomach another play through. Maybe another time.
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That is a lot of acknowledging they did!
Did they atleast acknowledge they made an unfinished game and charge 70 eur/usd for it? Or should I be managing my expectations?
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To be honest! Diablo IV would never have been out now because there are alot issues. It is too later now! I dont know why Diablo IV is unfinished product!
Amen, just shows how tone deaf yet again blizzard is.
they had to sell before microsoft takes over.
I read that article too. It’s ridiculous to say that “expectations weren’t managed properly” when what they advertised was not what they delivered, not even close. I’ve heard people call it “tone deaf” but frankly it’s worse than that. It’s sheer incompetence that’s beyond the pale. At this point the entire leadership in charge of D4 needs to be removed. The game is not just bad, it’s so bad it needs to be taken offline until it’s actually playable and everyone’s money refunded.
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Man its intentional, they dont care about the players, they just went for the fast money because they dont fear consequences, the company is sold. They released what they had ready… to get the money out of their work.
Imagine as Bobby saying “yo guys release it within x amount of time before all our money goes to microsoft, i need another yacht”
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Exactly. That’s why the patches seemed so strange. Now when we look at the big picture we can see X buff led to Y nerf led to Z buff - though a net loss, it was part of a larger plan.
They basically have players on a Roller Coaster 
with all these patches but aren’t giving us a damn ROADMAP of their intentions and short-term & long-term GOALS!
They have to do what they did with D3 - Tell the players straight up: “Ok. This is our PLAN. This is where we’d like to go and some things will be rolling out slowly, others quickly.”
Even share some idea with the community and take feedback on them(looking at you QOL for example).
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