Introducing your new Diablo Immortal Community Manager

General Discussion
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Greetings Adventurers,

I am GhostSignals, the newest addition to the Diablo Immortal Community Team!

I am so excited to be joining the team here at Blizzard, but even more so, I am excited to be joining this community of passionate Diablo Immortal fans.

I am here because our amazing Community Team, which works across all of the Diablo games, has been stretched pretty thin. There’s a lot of work that goes into bolstering and building the communities of a game, and with the addition of a CM dedicated only to Diablo Immortal, we can give you all the attention that you deserve.

My mission as your dedicated Community Manager is to help this community thrive and grow, and to work with you all to build spaces like these forums and other community hubs into a place where players can come together to connect over their shared love of Diablo Immortal, help each other get better at the game, and stay informed with all things happening in-game.

A little bit about myself:

I’ve been working in Community Management for about 10 years now, specifically on Mobile and Free to Play ges with passionate communities, like yourselves.

I believe in meaningful communications that keep players informed and prepared. This means that I will always do my best to answer questions, and deliver timely communications and responses, but that doesn’t mean that I will be able to answer every question that is posted, and especially not when they are specific to individual players/accounts. I unfortunately am not the best person to reach out to if you need one-on-one help.

In striving to respond to things in a timely manner, my writing style tends to be pretty matter of factly, or dry. This means that the inflection/emotion behind those words might be left to interpretation, but I ask that you try and read them as neutrally as possible.

I think that player feedback is one of the greatest, most powerful tools to improve a game, and I will always welcome feedback, but it needs to be done constructively. Be passionate about what you have to say, but let’s keep it professional. If you don’t like something, you need to tell us why so that we can address the root cause of the issues. Insults and rants tend to derail your feedback, and I don’t want that to happen. However, player feedback is not the only metric on which decisions are made, and we should be honest about that. Sometimes, decisions that are unpopular will be made for the sake of the long term health of the game, and sometimes player feedback just doesn’t fit into the future plans of the game.

I will not be able to respond to every post, bug report, or question. Remember, these spaces are mostly a space for you all to come together and discuss the game with each other, but I and the rest of the Community Team, as well as a lot of our game team themselves, will be here reading your posts, responding where we can, and passing on your thoughts and feedback to the teams that need to see them.

I am still learning the game. I’ve just started and have a lot to learn, and would love to lean on your expertise to help me improve. It’s important to me that I can learn this game and get as good as (some of) you! Right now, I’m sitting at a Paragon Level 24, and am still working my way through the storyline, but I keep getting distracted! This is all to say, if I don’t totally understand what you’re saying right away and have questions, please give me a little grace as I get up to speed. If in 6 months, I still don’t understand the game… then you can make fun of me :stuck_out_tongue:

I am dedicated completely to Diablo Immortal. There are no other projects on my roster, and you guys are my number one priority. I’ve worked on many games before, sometimes working on multiple at once, and I really appreciate the opportunity to just focus on one-game again.

I know there’s a few major topics of conversation within the community right now, and I assure you, we have already passed them on for conversation. Game development isn’t quick and easy, so changes and sometimes even responses to concerns, can take a while. We plan pretty far ahead, and work is done waaaay before you might ever even hear about it.

Now, it’s time for me to hear from you! Please, let me know a little about yourself, what brought you to Diablo Immortal, what you love about it, and what you wish you knew when you were just starting out (so I can steal that knowledge for myself and get better at the game!), and tell me your favourite Diablo immortal content creator (videos, websites, fan art, etc.)

You can also follow me on Twitter/X here! Feel free to tag me in your posts, and share your thoughts and feedback with me! It’s not the best way to report Bugs, but I am always watching my Mentions and am happy to connect with you all!

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Been playing a fire sorc Diablo since 1996. I have way too many hours in D2, mostly mods (See: Eastern Sun). Played a lot of D3, even though it was disappointing in many aspects.

What brought me to D:($) was the wait for D4. I went with it because I was sick of running grifts in D3, and I wanted something to play.

2 years on, I am a clan leader of a small mostly f2p clan & am still having a blast. It scratches an MMO itch I never knew I had. D:($) is everything D3 should have been.

What to know:

  1. Dust is your limiting factor for upgrading your gear. Anytime you see anything that can get you more dust, drop what you are doing & do that mission (side quest, haunted chest, etc).
  2. The best place to farm for materials is a toss up between the Accursed Towers & the Ruins of Secheron.
  3. Do your shadow tasks early in the day - otherwise you will never climb the shadows leaderboard. This includes the Path of Blood.
  4. Pace yourself - it is really easy to burn out.
  5. If you are below server paragon, don’t expect a Helliquary carry on Monday or Thursday - people are getting theirs done, and they will be available to help on Tues & Saturday. Don’t be afraid to ask for a carry, we were all carried at one point & 99% are more than happy to help.
  6. The battlegrounds are not, nor will they ever be “balanced”. This is a function of the player pool (self-selects and most players ignore the victory conditions), and the fact that NetEase has no intention of addressing fundamental PvP issues (i.e. infinite crowd control & endless cheat death mechanics); although if you could get that fixed, we would really appreciate it.
  7. When you have multiple missions in the same exploration zone, the priority is - Shadow Task, Side Quests, then bounties. If you do them in this order, they go quicker.

Things I would like to see going forward.

  1. Address the Lag issue - This is the current #1 problem - too many people are getting jacked up in PvP events because of lag.
  2. Address the Gem duplication issue - Currently, the economy of the game is broken due to the dup gem exploit & Susan Express. I am guessing NetEase is behind Susan Express. I recommend a hard cap on how many regular & legendary gems can be sold per week. This is causing people to leave the game.
  3. More exploration zones - PvE is important to me; I want to visit Caldeum, and every other zone in both D2 & D3. We need more than 1 exploration zone per year - I recommend 2 zones per year. A deep, 12 level dungeon every March like in D3 would be good too.
  4. More shadow tasks - each exploration zone should have 3 tasks (take some pity on poor Labib). Wortham should be the training area - every new event should have 1 instance there.
  5. Too many of the shadow rank bonuses only apply to clans that can participate in the Rite, which leads to people not doing the vault, which cripples smaller clans.
  6. Either drop the crew served (chests that require 4 people to open) or make them worth opening. No one fools with them, because the rewards aren’t worth it.
  7. The Battlegrounds - change the current format to hot, warband-on-warband action. We can have both leagues & leaderboards. Added bonus - this would give warbands a reason to exist.
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Welcome to the team, Ghost.
I grew up playing the OG Diablo and D2 title on release, and their expansions thru college.

Enter the career, girl and family, I stepped away from gaming and consoles, and I totally missed D3. Now my tech investment is mobile devices, and mobile gaming. Over the last 12 years Mobile gaming has been my entertainment.

A common thread with the games I stayed with, you join for the IP, and commit to the community. Immortal offered both out the door. I have been an active member of the Discord and Reddit, shortly after it was announced. Since testing, I’ve been connected with Number of Diablo Immortal Partners, former and present; along with Diablo Partners across the whole Diablo universe.

I’ve been in game since Alpha and Beta, played all the classes pre-launch. But committed the first 23 seasons to Monk. Only recently have I switched to the Tempest. I remember the pre-IAP game; but know why IAP had to happen.

The community that you are responsible for is passionate, diverse, committed, and ever flowing. We all have the best intentions, lots of complaints, and hopefully some actionable ideas.

Cheers, and best wishes
~RedOctober

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A Warm Hello to the New Community Manager!

I am very pleased that you are now part of the Diablo Immortal community. Your arrival gives me a spark of hope that things might finally change. I have been a loyal Blizzard fan for over 25 years and have played and purchased almost all the games. I also played Diablo Immortal with great enthusiasm for a long time.

Unfortunately, I am currently unable to play Diablo Immortal because I was banned. To this day, I do not know exactly why this happened. I have invested more than €10,000 and feel cheated as no reason was given to me.

However, with a new Community Manager, things can only get better. It is the right step to strengthen the community and address issues. Maybe you could browse through the forum and look at the various posts. There are many players who have also been banned and do not know why. Most suspect it was caused by using an Xbox controller, but only Blizzard can find that out.

Despite everything, I am glad that something is happening here, and I hope you will have a lot of fun and bring strong nerves – you will need them here! A bit of hope is kindling in my heart. It’s great to have you here!

mfg Gamp

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Can you tell the developers to fix the lag in the SEA region? KION has been lagging since the major patch update.

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Hello and welcome,

It’s a fairly nice introduction. It’s good to see how a community Manager is actually playing the game. I am interested to see your thoughts behind it all. Perhaps you can provide a game overview here at some stage as your progress further and deeper.

I have played this game since it’s launch. I am leader of a large clan in Oceanic region who have experienced both shadow and immortal side. Our small community is small but we pack a fair bit of enthusiasm across the board.

I would like to see your perspective whether you’re a F2P, small, medium or a whale. It is a pay to win game but then that’s the business model.

Overall, the game has great dynamics and fluidity to it. But I assure you that as you play you’ll soon discover problems for yourself. I believe this game can become the number one seller if, blizzard actually puts a lot more focus on it.

As you progress you will soon learn how much or thereof lacking information there is for this game and what can be improved.

One thing I implore you to take on board is to actually put the same information on the Release notes as the Chinese Patch notes. I believe that should be in your remit. You would be surprise on the number of times there is huge information missing in the English patch notes and frankly I am tired of using google translate to discover more information.

Anyway as a new player, Here are my tips for you.

  1. Play a fast class like sader or barb to catch up quickly to the current paragon.

  2. You need an active warband. Try and do dungeons and many other activities with your warband to progress on levels and gear. This way you get warband points and chests.

  3. You need an active clan. This is so that you can partake in a lot of the games activities.

  4. Save your gold till you get there. You’ll need a fair bit to unlock familiar slots, ranking item levels etc etc. There are no Greed mechanics besides Vanquisher Paragon tree to get gold. It’s still a lot of effort.

  5. I suggest turning world chat off as you will be spammed by gold sellers. Yes it’s a big issue that is hitting Blizzard bottom margin and crashing the games economy.

  6. You will soon see the botters in open world farming standing still hitting the air, or just go for a visit to Kulkiro Rapids. There will be players hitting air as well.

  7. You will soon find how hard it’s for a new player to start this game. Although some aspects has improved, I believe there isn’t enough to get a new player to start. For example, you will find it very hard to grind is legendary items blacksmith levels. It adds combat ratings unlocks reforge family bonuses. It is a very long process but it’s worth it.

  8. You will find that iben Fahd/Sanctum is also heavily gated by a daily progression. Meaning you will never catch up to someone who has played the game for a very long time.

  9. Pick up a cute pet with Salvage perk on it. You can give them a name. Mine’s a cat (Duskprowler called Taylor as I am a Swftie)

  10. It’s going to be a hard road to get secondary gems. Prioritise gear with blue socket > Yellow > Red.

Armor Pen and Armor gems are king, followed by Potency and Resistance, Red gems are the least of the desired type.

The lack of some secondary gem will make you wonder why? Depending on your region you may not have blue gems at all available in your marketplace.

Plat in this game is precious so you will want to spend it wisely.

  1. Legendary Gems - 5 star gems are the best but it’s heavily pay walled. It will take years as a F2P or low spender to obtain 5 star gems. I have a friend who grinds this game as a F2P who has just hit 4K resonance but it’s a massive grind. Good luck on this and I am not going to suggest anything here besides the most optimal thing to do is to get your legendary gems to rank 5 so you can awaken them. This will give you skill bonuses such as cool down reduction or more dmg.

  2. I suggest you don’t play using a Microsoft owned controller as you may get banned and not be given an explanation for your ban. As posted by several players who love the game and were banned. This happen to a dear friend of mine a couple of months ago. Forum has a few post. I did hear someone get unbanned but there is a large portion of honest players who have remained banned.

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Hello and Welcome!

You might be just what this community desperately needs. DI has many problems atm, but imo the biggest one is lack of communication between players and the devs. For the past 2 years we’ve felt like being completely ignored and I think minimal communication will be better than none. I wish you the best and let’s hope it’s a step in a good direction for this game.

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With a bit of luck you won’t wake up to a permabanned account a month after you start playing like I did.

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I’ve also been playing Diablo III since 2012, i.e. over 12 years at this point. I remember the D3 Community Manager - Nevalistis - promising improved communications, multiple times, over multiple posts, over multiple years. What we got was a lot of promises of improved communications. What we got did not match those promises and, indeed, they just got steadily worse.

Diablo Immortal is a good case-in-point. Have a look at the forum’s Blizz Tracker and see just how infrequently we get any communication from Blizzard, other than season announcements. We’ve only ever had four Blizzard posts in the Bug Report forum, for example, and three of those were announcements.

So, you’ll forgive me but I’ll treat your promise of improved communications with a healthy dose of “show me, don’t tell me” due to over a decade of being promised what you just promised and it not being delivered.

At Paragon 24, your hero will be receiving a massive +XP bonus due to being so far behind the Server Paragon level. I believe the maximum bonus is +1500% XP which means that you’re earning sixteen times the normal rate of XP. A Battle Pass week allows you to earn 2400 BP points. For each 180 points you gain a BP level, which grants you just under 1 million XP. That means you could earn 13 BP levels (more with in-game events that grant bonus BP points) per week. That’s 13 (BP levels) * 1,000,000 (XP per BP level) * 16 (XP bonus multiplier) = 208,000,000 XP. Each paragon level takes 3,500,000 XP. So that’s 208,000,000 / 3,500,000 = 59.4 paragon per week, just from your BP levels. Add in all the XP you’d get from dungeons, elder rifts, raids, battlegrounds, terror rifts, and so on, and you could easily get 75-100 paragon levels in a week.

In other words, if you max’d out your BP each week, within 3-4 weeks your hero would be at, or very close to, the Server Paragon level. If you envisage it taking you six months, you don’t know enough about the game you’re apparently championing. Also, once you’ve caught up to paragon levels, you’ll then realise all of the other hard, time-gated limits that you have zero ability to catch up on that prevent you from having enough Combat Rating to be effective…

Yes, lag and long-term unfixed bugs.
Some of the bugs I’ve personally reported have been in the game for over a year.
Some of your repeating events have never worked correctly since they were introduced.

Seemingly, neither is the Bug Report forum, as there are so many reports of bugs that have been outstanding for weeks / months / years.

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Welcome there are definitely some stuff that needs fixed but overall a ok game.

1 lag / bugs
2 Spamming bots / Susan express
3 New shadow contracts/ activities ( shadow cloak?)
4 market fixes / changes

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Please review my post thread, 1 day 1 suggestion series and the rest of the posts. I’m up to post 1 day 1 suggestion number 65 now.
It seems like it’s going to be a lot of work for one CM to grow your character and handle a lot of feedback from the community. Good luck.

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respect the transparency, but u should’ve just left that part out. by choosing to be candid, u unknowingly buried yourself.

hear me out. it’s a hard sell for a dedicated game community to accept a “community” manager whom, for all intents & purposes, doesn’t play the game.

what it looks like is blizz just ran outside & pulled in a rando off the street who has no specific knowledge/expertise to lean on aside from commenting/ managing message boards on forums or tweeting about it.

THIS is the optics & it feels disrespectful.
there are many of us that would do your job for free, meanwhile the new hand-picked community manager keeps getting “distracted” from delving into the game he’s being PAID to manage exclusively.

u have your work cut out for u. starting with building trust with the playerbase, (not the ppl who sign your paycheck). we’re gonna have to see u as more than an admitted rookie to take u seriously. otherwise ur just a guy filling a seat.

OR! all you’ve been tasked to do is lend your ear to the members of the diablo partnership program as a proxy for the sentiment of the gamerbase. and take that as gospel (it’s not).

time will tell which “miike” we get

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Good luck. I’ve given up hope on DI and all you need to know is I was 8.5K reso. The game should be called Immortal Farmer because that’s all you do. PvP is now unplayable, whale clans lockdown Immortal status, the microtransactions are out of control, and there’s zero way to make platinum in any significant amount because the market has crashed. On the plus side the combat mechanics are better than most PC games as well as the flexibility to change classes, but not gem builds (this did get better last resonance change). Finally there are very few content creators for this game because of the predatory microtransactions. Most content creators won’t touch this game. Overall the lack of support, which Blizzard used to be the gold standard for in gaming, and predatory nature of the game’s microtransactions have soured my opinion of Activision-Blizzard. Again good luck.

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Welcome GhostSignals!

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The best way you could help the legitimate player community to thrive and grow is by immediately banning all the cheaters that exploited the bug. Actually enforce your EULA. Heck, you’re not even taking away the rewards the cheats obtained by exploiting!

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To be fair it’s not the players’ fault that greed spoils times were accounted in the leaderboard. No one had to do any exploit for this and I’m pretty sure that most players hadn’t even known about this bug until they saw their time on the leaderboard. It’s not like deliberately bugging elevators or boss spawns and you also can’t unmake your timed run.

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No, it’s the player’s fault for exploiting a bug to get an otherwise impossible time.

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What would have you done if you hadn’t known the bug when the greed spoils dungeon show up? Leave and restart the dungeon even though it the description and patch notes mentioned that those will not count? And if you decide to run for the rewards (which most players would obviously do) and than your time shows up on the leaderboard is it really your fault? Even if some players knew about the bug and exploited it how would you prove that it was intentional?

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How is it an exploit to go on and kill the boss in a greed spoil event? What kind of exploit do you need to do for that?

The patch notes stated that spoiled dungeons won’t count and I also didn’t state that no one knew it.

Also can you please quote where I stated that they should keep the bugged times and not fix leaderboard? What I initially replied to was a request to ban all the players whose spoiled time were added to the board and I still think that shouldn’t be done.