That’s the thing right there.
PTR town lives matter. We didn’t fight Shin there, and didn’t know she was sitting on an egg. Now both Shin and Son of Shin have come for Tokyo in Season 5. And Son of Shin is 1,000 times worse than Shin. All we had to do before was end Shin with a single bullet and then discover the egg she was sitting on that the Son was in. But we waited, because we didn’t care about PTR town, and now we are in big trouble.
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The PTR is so broken, the testing can’t be tested.
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That is something I agree about. I am about to generally skip and drink…
Bro don’t let D4 be the reason you pick up drinking.
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i was replying to the silence on bug fixes, problems, and the plans. Having meetings about meetings, discussing other meetings, but not resolving anything.
I’m sure most of you can relate to that. Walk into a meeting to discuss a plan and then one of the people in charge goes on a martyrdom rant and then starts showing pictures of his family on vacation. I’ve walked out of many meetings asking ‘What was the purpose of that? At least I’m getting paid for it’.
don’t drink, but you should watch Shin Godzilla!!!
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I am allergic to any profession that has a said meeting mechanic.
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This is funnier the more I read it. Funny but has a lot of heart in it.
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I would have thought Blizzard working overtime to get more balanced PTR out before the weekend. But apparently… they are only working overtime on the expansion and Season 5 is already a L.
how can we even really push builds/test when things like crown of lucion remains unfixed? they need to punch out as many hotfixes as possible in order to get on top of these issues or the whole process is just a huge waste of time! ugh.
yep.
but i have figured it out now!
Its a Server to test our patience. thats what it is.
The line between comedy and tragedy is very thin.
For those of you that want some serious thoughts on how to improve product quality, Google kaizen, which has been implemented most notably as the Toyota Way.
The Toyota Production System is known for kaizen, where all line personnel are expected to stop their moving production line in case of any abnormality, and, along with their supervisor, suggest an improvement to resolve the abnormality which may initiate a kaizen. This feature is called Jidoka or “autonomation”.
This where we disagree. I think it is realistic to expect that of them, and I do demand it. I have this privilege because:
- Why 1: I paid for the game, and am taking time away from whatever I want to do to give them my bug reports.
- Why 2: Finding of bugs is important, and I want a quality Diablo IV product (and I believe so do they).
- Why 3: They do want me to buy the next expansion, the next few season passes, and the next expansion after that. They are getting paid to meet my expectations, and their livelihood depends on my continued support.
- Why 4: They have been shattered before being rebuilt. This should doubly motivate them to not get shattered again. They should work reasonably hard during the PTR to demonstrate their commitment to earn my support.
- Why 5: Commitment to quality requires a quality control process. A quality control process prioritizes repair of defects as they are found. This takes precedence over production schedule. There is a cost associated with a quality control process, but there is also a cost associated with poor quality and resulting rework, and that is usually greater.
In the spirit of kaizen, I posed my response as the 5 whys. This usually helps to get to the root cause of a problem. My first time doing this, so please don’t roast me if I did it wrong.
Oh wow… This is going to be a long reply. Though, mostly because of quotes for context and the Linux distro versus game development point of views 
Oh, I am not a professionel game coder; far from it! All my experience is purely from hobbies. With quite some help, I have created and maintains full web systems with RPG elements (which sounds a lot fancier than it is) and I have designed tests to gather feedback on these, and while I have some professional experience as a tester, my main experience for the feedback mentality comes from being a voluntary tester and seeing how companies react (or do not react) to my feedback through gaming- and operating system feedback programs.
So, to be clear, I am sharing my point of view based on my own personal experiences and I tried and try to avoid writing things as fact. In all likelihood, you have more professionel coding and/or project design experience than me, being a civil engineer 
Darn, I did not mean to write in a way that would just categorise hotfixes during PTR as nice to have =/ I think the problem with hotfixes in a 1-week PTR are much more complex.
I agree that bugs that causes feedback to become unvaluable requires a hotfix. But I guess that it is ultimately up to the developers.
Since the Diablo team does not share their goals, just their hope for the kind of feedback we provide, we can only theorise what they deem necessary to fix during a PTR 
Now to reply on your thorough examples:
I agree, that should be fixed, if they decide they still need the feedback on that. We don’t really know. They said they wanted it, so we can assume that is still true, but maybe something during the PTR changed their focus and they decided to re-prioritise?
I think the official correct drop rate is whatever feels fun
But you are correct, we do not know. The most efficient testing would be to know all criteria beforehand or at least be able to ask and get an official reply within the time limit of the PTR, but I do not think it is within the limit of work they put into a PTR. I think that is for internal development cycles only.
In the past, if they agree that they need more feedback, they have initiated additional testing (prolonged deadlines, most often)
They could do similar here, but I guess it is not feasible because the window for PTR-feedback is only one week, of which most of it will likely be swallowed by weekend =/
I agree that quality should come before features but I fear the devs think that will not be enough for player retention, so they keep pushing changes. I also feel they design the PTR just to get enough feedback but does not care about the quality so much.
To summarise: They listen to those that scream the loudest and not whomever has the best points.
I personally feel overwhelmed as a casual player, but I think the majority blazes through a season like meat through a grinder and skips nuances unless many people notice a certain design flaw in the game, so they need to have these, in my view, break-neck development cycles to appease most gamers, and I think that is why hotfixes during a PTR is not a daily thing.
I think it is unhealthy for many reasons, but I also know my feedback will likely drown in the cacophony of screams
That’s great feedback 
You should definitely share that in an existing thread with the same topic or if it doesn’t exist, create a new topic for it
Absolutely, but I think they are afraid of breaking something else and make players even more upset. Since many of their QA testers were let go in, I think it was the beginning of the year, they are more likely to introduce bugs than to fix them, if they rush them. But these are just assumptions.
I think the dev team often has a different way of looking at the state of the game than we do, and I think the players and the dev teams often disagrees on what needs fixing here and now. For example, I see many players complain about class balances are not getting enough love, but the devs have clearly stated that 1: This is not the focus of the PTR, 2: these unbalances are hard to get right when new big changes are still in the works.
I think it makes a lot of sense I don’t think Blizzard currently has the power to properly fix these underlying issues for feedback. Microsoft has an unhealthy way of handling support, which is… to outsource it 
.
As far as I know, they did exactly that to most of support staff (including those that runs the forums) shortly after the acquisition was finally approved, so I think this has further damaged Blizzard’s ability to be able to handle the community well.
Very well
In short: The Linux “industry” has a healthy relationship between the user and the developer, the gaming industry is stretched thin from demands from players.
The longer version
Open-source versus proprietary code
As far as I know, Linux are open-souce projects.
All the games Blizzard has created so far, have always been based on proprietary code and thereby the opposite of open source.
As far as I know, everyone is welcome to come and help improve open-source projects like Linux distros.
For Blizzard, only employees can help with the actual coding and only inside the same team. We know that someone (I forgot whom) has said that you have to be accepted through a new job interview if you want to switch teams and go help on another game project inside the company, which is a far cry from how relaxed open source is managed
The motivation to create great things
I have this idea that the people that works on Linux distros does so with a passion so strong that they also use their spare time on it.
By contrast, more health issues are popping up in the gaming industry as games are pushed harder and harder and quality dies in the attempt to feed gamers that are used to, and I believe it is fair to say, demanding having something new to play all the time.
The result is that it is a de-moralising environment where only few has any motivation left to work voluntary on something.
While both industries offer users to improve the product in some way, one is very open and one is likely only doing it because they need it in order to survive, but does not have the motivation to implement it optimally and certainly not as fast. And because of burn-out, maybe because of poor upper management during the last decade or so, they are more likely to make coding mistakes.
Finally, users in open-source communities seem to be good at showing their appreciation.
By contrast, players of games sets demands and needs fixes ASAP and they rarely stop to show their appreciation when the developers try their best to improve the game based on their feedback.
(
Stop for a moment and appreciate how much support Diablo IV has received compared to Diablo II classic and Diablo III. We sort of got World of Diablo, we got, not a remaster, but at ReMake! of Diablo II and we even got a mobile edition of Diablo - for better or worse, but the franchise as a whole, which most presumed dead, has received so much love these last five years, which by the way included a pandemic.
)
We should welcome disagreements as they are opportunities to broaden our insight on a subject, so by all means, feel free to disagree
In stead of setting demands because I paid for something, I believe we have to look holistically at a gaming company in order to properly manage our expectations. The fact that we spend additional money on it, rarely seems to make the product better these days. It is a sad fact, but it seems that only money spend on the original game and hopefully plural of expansions, seems to actually reward the player directly. DLCs on the other hand seems only to feed Greed goblins
No, all we can do is, to be supportive and try to foster a healthy relationship between developers and players for as long as the game is being developed. In turn, we can hope this will create a place where the devs dares and feels the motivation to return to a dialogue with players instead of a controlled information stream.
There is fundamentally something wrong with a community, if you have to fear getting roasted for constructively sharing your opinion 
Do you mean it is your first time writing your opinion in a long, well thought manner, or maybe you meant sharing the kaizen method (is it right to call it a method?) or maybe something else entirely?
Either way, you should not have to fear getting ‘roasted’. It is wrong to treat anyone with disrespect for constructively sharing their passion for a game and spending time to write well thought-out ideas 
In closing, thank you for taking the time to read what I spend half a day writing/replying to 
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Thanks for sharing your opinion. You have given me a lot of things to chew on. Great job.
thats asian ways of operating software dept/firm.
in bliz they use scrum practises. however i / we cant notice the performance.
They don’t have the ability.
It’s obvious the code and structure is a mess which causes major merge issues between main, S5 and expansion which is why we get lots of bugs and no quick updates or fixes.
Some dude used the wrong Seasonal Server for the PTR.
It’s true, if Lucion is buggy, how do you give him feedback? They’re just looking for feedback on bugs or how this is good or not for the game. After the bugs are fixed, there may be other bugs…so the season starts with bugs. As has happened in all seasons so far. If you can’t test it, delete the item. Until it can be tested again.