Oh, dude - I think we might have found the Sorc class designer.
You thought this was bad class design, but its great class design if you can only be convinced to hit 1 button and you dont care if you die.
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you absolutely do when your flagship IP is getting dragged by nearly everyone but the white knights. Their entire business model with this game is “player engagement” that is the metric pitched to the shareholders. When your game sells millions of copies, and 3 weeks into the inaugural season you have less then 300k players, people like you are the minority. it means everyone rolled 1 main character, completed the season, and left. no alts chars, no continuation to grind for better gear, and negative engagement.
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Yeah, people saw this for the shallow unfinished cash grab that it was and left after the first character. ARPGs are about alts and making different builds. No-one bothered here except the streamers with a lot of time on their hands and the eternal blizzard fanboys.
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Here’s the issue. You have no reliable way of actually knowing this number. None of us do. Most of my friends who got the game are still playing the game. I’ve seen no mass exodus. It could be that I’ve got a super unrepresentative friends list, but I’d wager that the forum population is more of an outlier than the random assortment of personalities that I’ve added to my Bnet over the past 15 years or so. Also, most people don’t play ARPG seasons for more than a few weeks in any game. If anything, D4 is a bit of an outlier in that regard because of its status as a recently launched title. As time wears on it will become easier and easier to max out quickly, which will lead to very reliable peaks and valleys.
dude - keep drinking the koolaid. And here is a can of rustoleum to keep that armor nice and shiny.
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It does explain a lot. They seem to think everyone is that casual playing the 4th game in a franchise. For many this isn’t the first ARPG we have played or the first Diablo game. Some have been around since Diablo 1. There is a huge disconnect between the players and the devs. Who the hell are the devs designing this game for? It’s definitely not the players.
They are showing that this is the supposed “game level” that they think players have. It matches the depth of this game. Season 2 will be introduced as “Diablo IV - Please come back”
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I still have no idea the market for this video.
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LOL - I always find it hilarious when you clowns denounce anecdotal evidence… Like “300k players” and deny that with your own anecdotal evidence. I SWEAR TO GOD EVERYONE STILL PLAYERS THE GAME…
Na… This game is already dead. They cant even fix it because its fundamentally broken between itemization, paragon and general lack of content. If you think this game has retained even 50% of its players base then you likely rode to school on the short bus.
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Unsurprisingly given your behavior, you misunderstand the distinction. The 300k figure is not presented as some sort of anecdote or a guess. When people cite these numbers they are stating them as data, but data they are not. My personal anecdote is most certainly that, an anecdote. It strikes me as odd that most of the people on my friends list who bought the game are still playing it if it’s dead, but it’s entirely possible that my personal n of 20 or so Diablo players is unrepresentative. If you state a game is dead without real data, no thinking person is going to take you seriously. Anecdotes are all we have in the absence of those data. Mine tell me the game is very much alive, while those of others will be discordant with that observation. And no, of the total number of people who purchase the game, I’d be surprised if more than 10% remain long-term, because that’s how things go. Feel free to continue with the insults though if that’s how you get your kicks. 
I remember there being some guy awhile back saying that he did his research and had a Ph.D. in statistics (or physics, I can’t really remember). Anyways, he went on to talk about how his research (which apparently took him less than a day to do) proved that Diablo IV was effectively dead even though his data sets were incomplete and biased. It was very humorous watching him throw out these big terms as if he knew what he was talking about.
If data analytics were as easy as everyone here thinks they are, we’d all be data analysts working for major Fortune 500 companies.
Then bro go play Zelda or some adventure puzzle game to feel clever and get a cookie…
Cuz like the devs, You dont play ARPG
A = Action (fast killing mobs)
R = Role (choices matter)
P = playing (with D4 you sleep)
G = game (D4 is a snore fest for shareholders not gamers)
Arpgs are games with fast combat killing hordes of mobs, feeling OP (power fantasy) mashing buttons (no mmo CD bs)
Bonus: If you think about saying the difficult excuse the answer is play a souls game ARPGs were never about difficulty
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These trash players also happened to be the “designers” of the game. That’s the takeaway. How can the people who blizzard claims designed the game be so bad at the game they designed?
Makes you wonder if someone’s lying about their role in development. Or maybe they count the in-game shop as game development?
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Yeah, I learned a long time ago to not trust hardly anything you read from some rando online without detailed receipts, especially if they go the credentialist route, and that even people who have credentials are very frequently wrong despite them. I’m a genetics guy but I’ve taken a few stats courses, and if one thing became apparent, it’s that most people left those courses still not knowing what they were doing and still having a bad head for stats.
For what it’s worth though, I DO wish Blizz were transparent with their player metrics. It’s rather annoying that we only ever get any usable figures when their quarterly reports come in. They’re definitely guilty of obscurantism. I think that if the forum rhetoric toned down and people could just cool off and get outside their emotions, we could find a lot of productive agreement about various issues with the game and Blizz generally, less all the mudslinging and insults. 
I agree, but at the same time, I get why they do it. I think it was Josh Strife Hayes who made a video about it, but he said something that I believe rings very true of player metrics for online games:
The moment your game has a dip in player counts is the moment people begin calling into question your game’s longevity and ability to retain players. It begins a snowball effect because people don’t want to engage or put their time and money in a game that’s allegedly “dying,” effectively exacerbating the declining playerbase.
It’s great to have transparency, but what does it do besides stoke fearmongering attempts for people who are desperate to think the game is bad and dying? A very exemplary game of this problem was WoW. It’s still the king of MMOs and likely retains a higher subscription count than any other product on the market, but when the decline started happening during Cataclysm, people were very quick to assume that the game was dying and there was no way it could be saved.
A more recent example of player counts being weaponized is with Halo Infinite. People constantly call attention to its player count on Steam, failing to recognize that the majority of players are probably on Xbox since the game has historically been an Xbox game, and/or the Xbox app for PC.
All this to say: While I wish there was more transparency in terms of player engagement, I don’t think raw player numbers really helps and is more frequently used as a tool to denigrate a game’s declining interest.
that in no way makes it accurate. sometimes people scream because its the only way other people will listen, but snowflakes will always direct their attention to “tone” first. Listen the first time, and people don’t have to “scream.”
This post hits hard. I’m getting to the same point. Three months for a seasons seems a bit much for something with so little content. How can you have an entire season based on Malignant hearts? Also the battle-pass items excite me not. I understand the desire not to have flashy items to keep a more realistic aesthetic but let’s be real, who gets pumped for brown leather or… brown leather dyed green!
We live in a time with tens of thousands of games at our finger-tips. The “new hotness” only lasts so long. After that, you need something that keeps someone hooked other than the sunk time fallacy.
I absolutely agree with you. Well said.
The quarterly reports are cherrypicked stats to encourage investors. Most major analysts see right through their bs reports. It doesn’t matter now. Microsoft was dumb enough to purchase this company that has ruined every IP they have.
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1155 yeeeeeeeeeeeeeee my boy!