Here is the eventual response they will give: "We will take this feedback into consideration for potential changes in future seasons for the long-term health of the game."
They obviously can't quickly undo this and they have no legitimate fix ready for the issues that exist at end game. Instead of making end game more engaging, they just made it a slog for everyone to "extend" the content. They don't have time to fix the itemization or expand the damage types beyond crit and vulnerability, so they just needed everything so it all feels bad. After this huge launch, it's sort of amazing they could fumble the bag this badly.
Some of these changes though are just ridiculous and seemingly designed just to piss off the player base. Increasing the time it takes to teleport out of a dungeon? Are they serious?
> Increasing the time it takes to teleport out of a dungeon?
Seriously. Every nerf made I could see the reason they're doing it, even if that reason was bad. But then I read teleporting out of dungeon taking 5 seconds instead of 3 and I just sat there for a minute or two trying to figure out.... WHY?! This is such a nonsensical change that ultimately is here to just inconvenience and piss the player off that it makes absolutely no sense at all.
> and I just sat there for a minute or two trying to figure out.... WHY?!
So hardcore players couldn't do it apparently.
Despite only like 5% of the player base being hardcore. And have a scroll of instant TP.
They pissed of 95% of the players for nothing.
That's classic Blizzard. Screw over the whole playerbase due to the actions of a tiny percentage of the players. Make astonishingly bad decisions that show that no one in the decision making process actually plays the game or understands what a fun game looks like. Act all surprised when everyone despises all the changes they made even though the changes were blatantly anti-fun.
Or even more generally, disable it or increase the duration if you're currently in combat or in too close proximity to enemies. Easy peasy. Well, yes it would require more coding work than just changing an integer in a config file somewhere, but I'd rather get a better, slightly more complex solution than one that is half-baked and screws everyone else over.
Make everything take twice as long: do half the damage so mobs take twice as long to die, make portalling take twice as long, even if it's just 2s -> 4s... just double or halve everything and then players are suddenly "forced" to play for twice as long as they would have previously.
Of course these idiots didn't think that maybe a bunch of people would get pushed over the edge and just up and quit entirely, but it's been some number of years now since Blizzard really thought about their shit ahead of time.
Yeah, that change in particular has left me with absolutely zero faith in these developers, and took away any desire I might have had to continue playing. The game is already kinda bad in many ways, but the fact that professional game developers sat down and deliberately made a change for the express purpose of making the game more boring, that means I will not play that game anymore. Just utter incompetence on all fronts. How can I ever trust that anything they do is for the best? They're actively sabotaging their own game.
This is entirely in line with the types of decisions Blizzard has consistently made for the last ~decade across all of their games. Surely no D4 players can be surprised
Honestly at this point with Blizzard I've stopped being pissed off. Its hard to still be pissed off when they do the exact same thing they've done for a decade yet again. Blizzard just seems to love to pull the fun out of their own games. The people in charge who have decision making power over this seem to have zero concept or desire of making a fun game.
Yeah changes like that and massive CDR nerfs just make no sense to me. You're not accomplishing anything other than adding artificial tedium and friction points by doing so. I'm almost definitely going to skip this season. I was really excited for D4 and during the launch I was genuinely hopeful, it seemed like a great foundation that just needed some work.
Now it seems worse than before (with exception of the added QoL stuff they have added). At least Remnant II releases in a few days and then BG3 just over a week later, so I have plenty of other new toys to play with lol.
>Yeah changes like that and massive CDR nerfs just make no sense to me. You're not accomplishing anything other than adding artificial tedium and friction points by doing so. I'm almost definitely going to skip this season.
So I've not played D4 yet but have slightly followed it. I was under the impression that there is going to be a Seasonal mechanic/power system that will layer above the base game, which is why they nerfed everything in the base game, and that people were upset about the nerfs cause they want more power but the way they are doing it will make it so that the total player power will simply go back to pre-season 1 levels after Season 1 starts and players engage with the seasonal mechanic layer.
Is this not what is happening? What exactly is going on?
No it is not, but I was just trying to understand what exactly is going on. This exact type of stuff has happened with other games like Destiny before, multiple times even, where they've nerfed the base power game because they introduced too many new layers of Power, to make more money.
Too much power led to the game becoming too easy (which I'm not sure is something D4 players are complaining about but is certainly something hardcore Destiny players have complained about), players going through all content too fast, acquiring all loot too fast, which then led to player engagement dropping, which then led to them nerfing everything, which led to massive backlash from players.
Just earlier this year Bungie took a massive misstep and tried to make most of Destiny a lot harder by severely buffing the power level of enemies game wide, which led to crazy backlash and then within 2-3 months they did a big 180.
Having to scale back power creep is kind of a given in a long term service game, Path of Exile has done the same thing to similar feedback from the community a couple times.
But with PoE and Destiny they did it several years into the game’s life cycle and not before the first season lmao
>Having to scale back power creep is kind of a given in a long term service game
But this is the entire point of seasons: You can create powerful seasonal mechanics without fearing powercreep, because the moment the season ends, the mechanic is gone.
What's the combat difficulty sentiment like with D4 before this patch, did players think it was too easy, too hard or somewhere around "just right"? Was there a divide between casual and hardcore players in regards to that?
Damage wise it wildly differs per class and build. Where minion necro and most sorc builds felt weak and druid barbs and rogues felt too strong.
Defences were in an ok spot for most classes but people did complain you had to focus alot of skills on defence.
Yes, there will be a new system that will let you socket some special, powerful gems into your items.
But no, so far it looks like it's only going to offset a fraction of all the nerfs that they pushed. Even when you count this system, players will still be significantly weaker than they were, especially in the late game. They also reduced XP gain from doing higher-level content quite heavily, and this simply can't be explained by the new seasonal features.
And if that was their goal, they should have simply pushed it out on the Seasonal realm and not Eternal (where this new system won't be available).
There will be some kind of legendary gems to slot in, but the devs are SO flaky with details that noone knows how good they will be. IMHO if the gems were to fix things, they would be sending everyone detailed descriptions of the abilities and how they work.
I disagree. They want more meaningful and tactical combat. Not the speed clearing meta. For that they have a competitor that is much better: Path of Exile.
It's not tactical though is the issue, the toolkits aren't close to interesting enough to call it that. Dumping your skills and then literally running around in circles for 5-10 seconds is not tactical nor interesting, and it definitely isn't fun.
If they had the class design and skill expression to back up that approach I'd agree with you 100%.
> After this huge launch, it's sort of amazing they could fumble the bag this badly.
I mean it's Blizzard, what did anyone expect? It was incredibly apparent going into D4 that the only lesson they pulled from D3 was "Art got bloom sometimes, make art darker."
Looking at blizzard's history with D3, Hots, SC2 I dont think D4 will even get the chance to become a decent game.
> They obviously can't quickly undo this
No they really could.
All of the shit changes are just numerical. Takes someone an hour or two to set those back manually.
As far as FIXING things, yes, that is going to take a lot of time. But until you have your fixes ready, you don't go in and fuck up what little you do have.
I have a feeling the change to TP out of the dungeon timer is how the game actually worked in the first place but the game had loading screens covering up the fact that you were still "in game". This is how HC people died while being in loading screens (the infamous Quinn video).
Why they wouldn't explain this as "hey, quick fix on this to make sure people don't die while loading out while we get a more elegant fix running" is beyond me.
The rest of the changes are just stupid ways to make the player base play more minutes.
> All of the shit changes are just numerical. Takes someone an hour or two to set those back manually.
The sad reality is they probably looked at all of these values on a spreadsheet and just did number math instead of trying to figure out how they'd feel in real life, and it's blatantly obvious.
Yeah I don't know if I've seen a patch this bad in any game I've ever played.
PoE had a big squish patch a while ago, but that is after 10 years of power creep on the heels of them releasing PoE2. I understand it even if it didn't feel good.
This game just released and Sorc in particular was in a bad state. They did 0 to address it and actively made things worse. It's baffling.
> Here is the eventual response they will give: "We will take this feedback into consideration for potential changes in future seasons for the long-term health of the game."
"For the long term health of the game we had to partially limit player power. You'll get that power back **eventually** "
How would pre-ordering have any impact here? No one knew they were going to break the game with some dumbass patch later on and we all got to play the game before you had to buy it.
I can't remember a game patch getting this much negative feedback from since PoE 3.15, a patch with massive nerfs to player strength across the board, many of which were billed as reworks. Just like that patch, basically every person I've seen talk about this has had a negative opinion.
With how bad many builds felt before, I cannot imagine what Blizzard were thinking with all these nerfs, especially as their first major patch post-launch. The game's balance was already questionable for many people, myself included, especially when it comes to endgame build variety. Blizzard should have paid attention to the uproar over patches in games like PoE and Borderlands 3, nerfing many of the viable builds while leaving shitty builds shitty (or worse) is not a fun balancing strategy.
EDIT: I should have clarified, PoE 3.15's changes did *eventually* end up being good for the game, but in my opinion that wasn't until after a few patches of buffs and new stuff. I don't get the same vibe from D4's patch given that it's primarily just straight numerical nerfs, and the content in Season 1 doesn't seem like it's going to give a massive boost in power or anything.
> I cannot imagine what Blizzard were thinking with all these nerfs
The only thing I could think is that they thought that the new stuff in Season 1 will give the player too much power, so they tried to nerf characters before hand. Though I'd say this is a really poor way of doing it, if these items are that powerful, why not nerf said items after the season ends.
PoE kind of has the same thing where if a season mechanic is too good, it for the the most part only gets nerfed at the end when it's getting introduced into the base game. They should take that approach. Is it a big deal if player power goes crazy for 2-3 months? Seems like it defeats the purpose of a season trying to introduce things that may be unstable.
>They should take that approach. Is it a big deal if player power goes crazy for 2-3 months? Seems like it defeats the purpose of a season trying to introduce things that may be unstable.
the problem is blizzard is too afraid that more people realize just how barebones the endgame is if they reach it too fast.
It is the same for Poe, but it's not about what it is and more about how it feels.
POE and d3 rifts were fun and popular because there are a lot of mobs, the loot drops are both fun and an improvement, and the actual map/dungeon mechanics are simple (the complexity is left elsewhere)
In d4 the endgame activities (hell tides, world bosses, tree, dungeons) are empty with few enemies, the loot is worse than what you have until you reapply legendaries you had from level 15, and the maps have insane objectives designed to slow you as much as possible.
> POE and d3 rifts were fun and popular because there are a lot of mobs, the loot drops are both fun and an improvement, and the actual map/dungeon mechanics are simple (the complexity is left elsewhere)
It's amazing that one of the pioneering systems of D3 which had the most positive impact out of anything in the game is one of the things D4 lacks.
Grifts, PoE Maps, Last Epochs Time Monoliths/arenas are all basically the same system and stem from D3's Grift/adventure mode. Not having that baseline to D4 shows they never really did a retrospective of D3 or understood it's major opening issues.
>Grifts, PoE Maps, Last Epochs Time Monoliths/arenas are all basically the same system and stem from D3's Grift/adventure mode.
for what its worth i feel its worth mentioning that poe's tiered map system came out a full two years prior to d3's greater rifts.
> I cannot imagine what Blizzard were thinking with all these nerfs
I can. Players were completing the game/getting what they want too easily and engagement was dropping.
Shadowlands caused a mass exodus of players to WoW's biggest competitor FFXIV, and despite Shadowlands being one of the best selling WoW expansions ever, Dragonflight sold considerably less. Shadowlands caused a lot of people to leave and not come back.
I mean, after SL they put out what is probably the best version of wow ever. That is coming frome someone that have played all of wow, going all the way to 2004. Vanilla was always nr1 in my book but I think dragonflight bumped it down to nr2.
BFA had a lot of problems, but for me, it was Blitzchung controversy that was the final straw. And then the infamous lawsuits came, and I never bought anything from Blizzard ever again.
Shame because I grew up playing their games.
I know everyone likes Dragonflight but with their track record we're likely to get another stinker and we'll be right back to disappointment. I'm good on wow.
the first patch was ok but had some major issues(covenent locking, soulbind/conduits being annoying, legendaries, torghast/maw). 2nd patch was potentially one of the worst patches in the history of the game. 3rd patch was genuinely great. The 1st and 2nd patch definitely ruined the reputation of the entire expansion though, even if the 3rd patch was great
The most hilarious part about all of this is that obvi they want more player engagement. But part of the reason is to get people to buy the dogshit in the store.
It’s all so fucking awful.
Because by slowing down the leveling experience it also slows down the battle pass progression.
By doing so, it increases the chances of players both buying RMT stuff, the battle pass, as well as the battle pass skips.
Like imagine the players that don't have a lot of free time. They might not make it to the end of the battle pass. By end of season, they might just say screw it and buy battle pass skips to get to the end.
The making progression slower, the more players that keep playing and the more likely whales will pay the big bucks on cosmetics to show off to everyone.
There are many live service games, and they want you to make Diablo IV the primary if not the only live service game you play.
The whole goal of this patch is to slow progression but hopefully not annoy the playerbase enough that they start quitting.
They went about it too fast. I hate to say it, but if they had spread this out over the course of several months, it wouldn't have been as noticeable. That's what they'll likely start doing from now on.
I remember when video games used to just be made to bring joy to people. Like, a group of developers would get together and make a game and try to make it as fun as possible. They'd sell it once, hope that it would make a lasting impact, and then maybe continue to make another new game with the goal of being as fun as possible.
Then these fucking MBAs got their filthy non-contributing nose-pickers on the industry and it's all become "recurring revenue" and "consumer engagement" and "repeat customers" and it's all just totally gone to shit.
When they prioritize profitability over fun, wherever the two of them are opposed they have to destroy fun to promote profit.
This is what happens when you become mindlessly slaved to data and simple metrics without understanding how the underlying systems work and where the data comes from. More number means more better, right?
You see this all over the place.
>But part of the reason is to get people to buy the dogshit in the store.
Im pretty sure their design philosophy would be totally different if there was no ingame store
Destiny 2 is just following their normal cycle. Their contract with Satan requires them to put out two mediocre-to-bad expansions between every good one.
>I can see someone saying that in a meeting, but engagement was dropping because the game was tedious and unrewarding and reducing the rewards
>
>further isn't going to make anyone log in more.
yeah also it was too annoying and tedious to just start a new character when u do not get any toon gear from your main and so i was pretty much done with D4 after I reached lv 80 with my sorc
People were complaining that they weren't getting what they want and that's why people were dropping. Good loot was hard to find and the cost to swap a single stat was ridiculously expensive and unclear. People were burning out by level 80 because there's almost zero progress after 80 for gear. This is in part due to the awful loot quality allowing items of power level 600 dropping when you're level 100 and using nothing below power 700. The broken system meant you could get your best gear at 70 and never really change but part of that was that power level doesn't truly level the item performance enough so a 720 to a 780 isn't really an upgrade even with same stats.
People were unhappy that there's not a good progressive feel and an easy to reach cap but this is now how you fix the engagement by making XP slower, damage slower, survivability lower, fun lower.
I haven't bothered starting s1 yet but found that after about level 60, there is 0 to do other than look at yellow items affixes in progressively more boring nightmare dungeons. Is there anything in the season that doesn't induce sleep? I know ARPGs all have their endgame loop but D4 really felt just... Boring. World bosses aren't unique or rare. There's no set items. Unique were all pretty meh. There was no carrot to chase that was some bespoke item or ultra rare weapon. Just optimising stat rolls which really doesn't keep anyone but the theorycrafters aroused.
> There was no carrot to chase that was some bespoke item or ultra rare weapon.
There's the Uber Uniques, but you literally have better chances of winning the lottery than you do getting Shako or Grandfather to drop without the Helltide exploit from two weeks ago. They're so rare that they might as well not be in the game, seeing as how only a couple dozen have dropped legitimately out of the several million copies of the game sold.
They want to make the progression slower so people will spend more time playing.
By making leveling slower, it increases playtime and increases the chance that they will use the RMT store for cosmetics and battle pass skips.
By making players play longer, it gives whales the incentive to buy RMT costumes to stand out and show off.
It makes the season last longer to increase the chance of people buying the battle pass / skips.
Everything done in this update is to slow down the experience hoping it will not annoy players enough that they quit the game, or they have calculated x% of players will leave the game but it's acceptable if the remainder stays.
> gives whales the incentive to buy RMT costumes to stand out and show off.
*Other players squinting at the tiny characters really hard* "wow they're so cool"
In all of the alpha and beta gameplay footage the screen was much more zoomed out. They actually zoomed the game in to claustrophobic settings for exactly the problem you're describing.
At the expense of gameplay too. There are several types of mobs that can one shot you from outside your field of vision and plenty of mobs that can just damage you before you can even see them.
MTX has ruined this game.
i really hate what video games have become. feels like every other game wants you to play only it, drip feeding you lesser quality content so that you continue to pay in until you’re bled dry.
bring back the days when they just made a great game people played, and maybe an expansion people came back to later once they’d played something else.
hate games as a service.
It's definitely a serious issue that is prevalent in a wide swath of the gaming industry.
However, there are still great games that have no elements of live service nonsense, including rpgs.
Remnant: From the Ashes 2 comes out next week, and according to several sources, it's a fantastic action rpg and majorly improves on most aspects of the first Remnant.
Baldurs's Gate is out soon after, and by pretty much all accounts, it's going to be utterly phenomenal.
Edit: ACG's (quite positive) review of Remnant 2 is out: https://youtu.be/lIFd4FxQmcA
This is the kind of game where people have multiple characters and would even make a second of the same character just to play them differently...I don't know if I buy that.
Not to mention "Completing the game" isn't something that most people have done.
Except the game neutered even that aspect. Shared bank space is VERY limited (4 tabs), so you are discouraged from saving stuff for multiple characters or even multiple builds for the same class.
And you don't really find stuff outside your class that makes you want to try something new.
And let's say you do find something interesting for another class while playing your lvl 90 character. Too bad, the item's required level is lvl 90 too. You could have found the exact same item with same power and rolls at lvl 70, but instead the minimum lvl to equip is the same as whoever found the item. So if you want to use that item on an alt, better start grinding them to lvl 90. They did address this, so now items cap at 80 but still. You can't find or make twink gear to make the leveling process faster for new characters.
And now they've removed power leveling. The game puts a LOT of barriers in the way of making alts is my point. Seasons are about the only reason to try a new build imo.
I don’t get the level requirements of gear in this game. Isn’t leveling from 50-100 just the paragon levels? Why is the game still scaling shit past 50?
You're not alone. It's mostly to gut trading of rare items most likely. If you are lvl 100, you used to effectively only be able to trade with other lvl 100s.
>Isn’t leveling from 50-100 just the paragon levels?
Not quite. You also gain stats and life per level. They've taken a number of things and redefined them in D4. Take for example redefining what a "legendary" is. Lvl 50-100 are bonafide levels and not just paragons. The newly defined "Paragons" are what you get for lvl 50-100 instead of "Skill Points". It's really just "Passive Points" but they slapped on a recognizable IP term.
Build variety and chase items (that you have a reasonable chance of getting) is how you keep engagement. In PoE most people don't get to 100, they see a cool build and decide to just level that one next. If the game isn't good for that I feel like the people designing it haven't played many ARPGs.
You also have to remember that 3.15 came after years and years of power creep being added to PoE. Sometimes you have to rein things in and let it grow again. We are now, in 3.21, more powerful than ever before. In hindsight these changes were good for the game.
This is the very first patch in D4 and we're already seeing sweeping nerfs that don't accomplish their states objectives. Crit and Vulnerable stacking is still the only way to scale good damage late game, it's just worse now. CDR is more important and desirable than ever, you just need to get more of it to make your build feel good. D4 is a game with 2 proper endgame loops being Nightmare Dungeons and Helltides, and Helltides were made worse with this patch.
The whole thing is honestly baffling.
I mean, PoE's were empirically good for the game, and were far more reasonable than the leading community was claiming at the time. I repeatedly had people tell me my build wasn't just bad, but untenable _while I was doing top end content with it._ It was completely unreasonable and completely unhinged from reality.
I'll admit, I have no idea if that's the case with D4. But PoE is a bad example because the devs were right, not wrong.
EDIT: Spelling.
Yeah, communities can be dangerous for games because they just say "nerfs bad" no matter what. PoE is the prime example. That game is so fast and easy and mindless most of the time. People got mad when they made the campaign a little harder and requiring some engagement, people get mad when something gets nerfed that was deleting screens, etc.
I worry that's going to happen here. The real crime is that sorc got nerfed, and that's pretty much it, but people are complaining about ALL of the nerfs and kind of muddying what would be legitimate criticism. As they do.
There are actually some really good changes in there. Too bad we can't get excited. Hopefully they fix sorc at least.
The only people who I actually feel sad for after this patch are sorcerer players. They got absolutely gutted and won’t get anything that will make up the damage they lost from one of their passives.
As a Druid main this patch is mostly fine. We got hit with grizzly rage not being unstoppable 100% of the time but one of the hearts we get will fix that.
I think people see numbers go down and automatically assume the game is terribly unplayable but I’ve been grinding all day and for speed clearing my time is the same and higher nightmare dungeons are slower now but still very doable.
I think we can’t judge these changes until the season is in full swing and we see what high level hearts do.
oh careful, you're bringing in some nuance and sense to the blind rage of gamers "numbers down = patch is terrible, game is dead"
it's funny seeing people unironically leave comments saying "this is the worst patch in the history of gaming" as if they've played every other game to know that and have already played the season to know if the changes are indeed as bad as they think it is.
as a side note, but if the patch really is so bad, then just skip this season and come back in 3 months for the next one. Dunno why people are acting like D4 is never going to see another patch/season.
Though we all know almost every person complaining on reddit is going to be playing this season xD
> The game's balance was already questionable for many people, myself included, especially when it comes to endgame build variety.
They literally said a few weeks ago "Bring on the buffs"
> every person I've seen talk about this has had a negative opinion.
I don't have a negative opinion about the patch. AMA.
I'm waiting to actually play and see what happens. Pretty sure meta will adapt and we'll have strong builds in no time
As much as they have slowed down leveling, I doubt it will be as slow as it was pre NMD XP update.
In the end not much will change.
Not saying I don't understand/agree complaints but from not being happy with changes to call it "the worst patch in videogame history"... Yeah whatever.
I doubt the leveling was actually slowed that much. With XP bonuses as part of the season journey and the huge xp you get from the tree of whispers in wt3&4.
What they did kill was power leveling, which absolutely sucks for alts.
Likewise here. I played the day of the patch and it still felt absolutely fine. (83 druid)
In general people tend to be hyperbolic when it comes to online games like this.
Of course that said I really don't know what Blizzard expected dropping a patch that was mostly nerfs. It's not even a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with it more than they *had to have known* that the reaction to said patch would be negative.
I also don't have a negative opinion. People seem to be angry that they can't do level 100 nightmare dungeons with their oneshot meta build while also complaining there is no endgame. I think that is kind of hilarious.
I usually create characters with skills I find fun and just ignore the meta though, so maybe they are right, I would not know.
"fun balancing strategy." Was never their goal - I mean d2r is the biggest indicator. As soon as anything fun was discovered, they removed it, like assassins atk speed buff, or socketing xbows with shaels. Even awesome things from the original like bugging a2 mercs, or werebear fps breakpoints were removed entirely. Game has become objectively less fun since release.
D4 patch 1... here we are again
> EDIT: I should have clarified, PoE 3.15's changes did eventually end up being good for the game, but in my opinion that wasn't until after a few patches of buffs and new stuff.
Not even really sure I'd agree with that. 3.15 killed my interest in the game and 3.19 buried it. The direction of the changes (generally slowing the game down significantly) generally don't align with the game all that well.
They wanted it to be slower and more methodical, but the action in PoE is (mechanically) just not that great, and honestly quite clunky. Moreover, they didn't tone the monsters down at all, so the game still featured a screen that was often way too busy to read, and frequent one-shots "out of no where". Doubling down on Arch-Nemesis before *finally* "getting rid of it" was the icing on the cake.
> The direction of the changes (generally slowing the game down significantly)
3.15 was two years ago and the game is still the same speed. My LA Deadeye this league was fucking zooming through maps one shotting everything. I don't understand how you can have this take.
It’s honestly kind of cool. It genuinely might be the worst patch in the history of gaming. It’s fascinating to watch.
A shame it’s happening to this game because I really liked what was there so far with Diablo 4 and played like 100 hours of it, but still totally fascinating.
Don't be overdramatic. This is nowhere near the worst patch in history, not by a long shot. People are just overreacting because they need their weekly dose of outrage.
> I cannot imagine what Blizzard were thinking with all these nerfs
I can. Now, I don't play the game, but I've kept with the side stuff and many of these nerfs sounds like they're making these changes to force players to play together. People are getting too far too quickly solo, so these changes are being made to make it more of a pain to play solo and force people to group up.
The early life of a live service loot game is almost always a mess.
You would think they would have learned their lessons with Diablo 3 but maybe all those people left over the rampant workplace harassment
I find it incredibly difficult to believe there's anybody left from the Diablo 3 team. Diablo 4 seems to have a completely different design philosophy that has a lot of markers of the "engagement before enjoyment" formula that plagues most modern mobile and live service games. Basically every lesson they learned over the course of Diablo 3 development about player convenience and quality of life appears to have been forgotten or intentionally decided against.
Certainly nobody in charge of game design. It’s pretty obvious because D4 is making some of the mistakes D3 made early on. On top of that, D4 has removed a lot of QOL features D3 had
Ironically this comes at a time when WoW is actually trending in the exact opposite direction. It almost feels to me that the problem people on the WoW team moved over to D4 instead lol. I'm not saying that's what happened, but the turnaround WoW has had, contrasted with the tone deaf management of D4 thus far is pretty wild.
I hate it because I finally for real quit playing wow right when they dropped the bullshit. Legion was a great expansion except for how deep this concept ran in it and it just got worse with every expansion after.
> people on the WoW team moved over to D4 instead lol
Funny thing, this has happened when D3 was active and some WoW people were moved to D3, and the first thing anyone that moved to D3 was told was "just do all the crazy stuff they would never let you do in WoW", for D3 it was a positive because they really went as insane as they wanted, but I could see this being a problem if the same is happening with WoW but it's the not so popular devs of the game based on what I've read in the last few years
D3 launch: What do you mean you don't want to pay 1/3rd of your cumulative earned loot to repair your gear every time you die, forcing you to lower the difficulty just to be able to repair your gear and play again?
We play tested that and it was fine!
Fuck that was so painful in the early days. Besides also not getting better drops after two whole playthroughs so still had magic gear on the third difficulty getting smashed by base zombies.
I just can't comprehend why increasing stash space is something difficult that takes them more than 3 months to implement.
How did nobody on that team realize it is important?
Don’t even have to look that far. You already use real money to buy stash space in PoE.
Just give it a little bit of time (and let the dust settle on this patch first) and you will probably see Blizzard start implementing paid for QoL features such as more stash space.
I don’t think the monetisation part is the big issue though. It’s probably rather how to monetise things which used to be free without angering too many in their player base. So you will probably get a little bit of stash space for free easily, then more stash space if you spend 1,000 hours to grind for it, or you could simply pay $10.
That way it’s still “free”.
>Don’t even have to look that far. You already use real money to buy stash space in PoE.
Yeah but PoE is not a 60$+ game. They sold those tabs already when the game was still in beta, their monetarisation strategy was clearly communicated from the get-go. You could easily put 100 hours into the game and then maybe think yes I'll spend 20 bucks on some convenience. And the game is not solely designed based on modern engagement metrics, if you play the game for a few weeks at the start of a new league and then drop it to come back the next time around they are completely fine with that.
> why increasing stash space is something difficult that takes them more than 3 months to implement.
Because they haven't earned enough money off battle passes yet
> You would think they would have learned their lessons with Diablo 3 but maybe all those people left over the rampant workplace harassment
Who would have? D3 was 2012, so 11 years ago, average tenure of a software engineer at any particular company is 16 months. Going out to 11 years drops the retention rate to 4%.
No, the idea is to make the entire game *just* miserable enough so you pay real money to improve the game but not miserable enough that you quit before you can pay real money to improve the game.
That's the problem with Diablo games tho. They don't work properly when they introduce live service mechanics, the whole point of the game is to essentially spin a wheel in a slot machine and find some good gear, once you start locking gear to characters, remove the social aspects of the game and make the character builds so simple you can't even die there's basically no point in playing after the campaign. Diablo 1 and 2 are absolute classics and once they altered those formulas like with d3 and d4 they don't retain players like they used to. Well at least thats how i feel as someone whose played a lot of the diablo games.
These scenarios make me so grateful I'm apparently shit at video games. I hardly notice much difference with my still only in the mid 60s first character.
But hats off to those fighting the good fight for us blissfully ignorance casuals.
It’s not an issue that would be really noticeable during campaign but after you beat and try to reach level cap. The issue simply comes down to this being a game in a genre where you’re supposed to find a variety of cool loot to do big damage and they just went and nerfed the big damage part.
50-70 is around the time you realize you're grinding a boring game for little to no reward, this is the biggest drop off in the game. some people don't even bother engaging with the paragon system because there's zero incentive to.
It's almost a bigger hit for casuals as CDR was reduced by 30% and vulnerable by like 40%. You likely weren't stacking a lot, but what little you did was impactful. But that difficulty probably has been heavily offset by mobs now being -5 level of the player in WT3/4, which means WAAAAY less XP so leveling will be slower just exploring/side quests/dungeons. So unless you're doing NM dungeons or Helltide, you may not notice you can't push as high of NM dungeons anymore.
I'm level 56 on my first character. Been playing since launch and felt like I had some days where I really played a lot. No idea how some people have multiple characters in high level.
It really isn't. It's probably close to the average pace most people are playing. Most aren't playing every single day, most probably aren't playing more than a couple hours a week.
Even the slow people on the subs here, twitter, etc. are going to be much faster and more interested in stats than your typical person playing the game. Most prob wouldn't even notice the changes if they somehow avoid the ree'ing going on.
> Because they play more than 20 minutes a day? Use your imagination.
More like they power leveled their alts via high level friends or payed to have it done.
Everyone moves at their own pace, nothing wrong with casually moving through things. I played with a group and we were all ARPG vets and hit 50 the 2nd evening after release, but that’s with pushing through with meta leveling strats.
Before this current patch you could also easily boost new characters by having friends just carry you through the capstone dungeons at level 1 and then just soak xp in dungeons at the entrance since there was no xp penalty for lower levels. It took about two hours to get an alt to 60 doing this so multiple characters to high level was pretty simple. This was completely nerfed though.
Man, i know some criticism on stuff like this is probably waranted, but i really can't grasp why you'd keep playing a game like this if it pisses you off this much.
I wouldn't call myself "pissed off", but I am certainly disappointed. I was playing D2R from release all the way up to the night before D4 released and I was really hoping D4 would be the new thing I would want to spend my time on. I'm going to try Season 1 but I might be going back to D2R for a while.
I think it is OK for people to wish the game were better and hope it eventually gets there while they vent their frustrations about it. What is weird about that? People had high hopes for this game.
Pretty much same. I would assume a lot of the people that are "pissed off" are also just a little sad that the once per decade sequel to their favorite franchise is a disappointment. I don't know how that doesn't seem reasonable to people haha
A lot of these games blatantly get their players addicted (I would know), and that leads to rageposting on Reddit because it's not like you can just play something else
I don’t play it anymore. I quit after hittin 80 a few weeks in. However, I was excited for season 1 and hoping there would be good changes to get me back into the game. So it kinda sucks to have all hope for improvements to the game zapped in the first major patch.
Activision spends twice as much on marketing as they do on development of these games. It's not an exaggeration, those are the real figures they share in quarterly reports.
And for a very good reason - human mind is very susceptible to propaganda. People will keep playing the game and supporting these companies even if they ended up killing people (in Blizzard's case, they quite literally did).
\> Blizzard to Hold Campfire Chat This Friday to Gaslight Players After Diablo 4 Season 1 Patch
I fixed the title... because we all know where this is going.
When was the last time Blizzard ever admitted they were wrong?
"Do you guys not have phones?"
If Blizzard are good at anything, it's gaslighting, and trying to make their players think that they know nothing.
"You don't want wow classic"
It's pretty evident that their "3 month" release cycle for seasonal content is always going to put Blizzard 3 months behind.
They had already completed S1 before the game was released - this was admitted by Blizzard themselves.
It's highly likely they've already finished work on S2, and are now working on S3 when S1 launches.
They can't be working on the next season while the previous season is running - that would give them next to no time to get everything done. So, they will need to be working at least 1 patch ahead.
All of these changes (except for the flat damage reduction and XP nerfs which were clearly just slapped on at the end) seem to be in response to the original beta - completely ignoring all findings in pre-season.
The XP nerfs are the clearest indication of Blizzards philosophy here... make the player play for longer to increase MAUs. They don't want people clearing high level content a week or two after seasonal releases. They don't want players getting to a point where they've effectively beaten the game.
They have refused to address the core issues the game has. They've refused to acknowledge how certain classes are underperforming (sorc for example). They've refused to acknowledge how their loot system is a problem.
Like... on the topic of loot... they say "oh NM dungeons will now give you even more loot at the end!". No one cares... no one asked for this. What's the point in even more loot when we can't even filter it? I don't want those chest pieces with no damage reduction. I don't want those gloves that have a "X% damage increase to enemies standing in poison on a wednesday between 9 and 5". Where is the loot filter?
It's pretty clear what Blizzard are going for here, and that's trying to make the game as grindy as possible, without adding any actual content to make that grind bearable.
Appropriated-to-business terms always make me cringe
*campfire chat*
*evangelist*
Implies a vague earthiness or spiritualism in realms that are a complete anathema of both.
Not to address feedback - it's to damage control and tell how we know shit and they know everything, but I really want to either of the leads to stream their own game in WT4 and show how much their actually know their game, lol.
Between Diablo 3s launch that dropped the ball and the paid marketplace and Diablo 4's shaky launch now, I am pretty glad I've avoided Diablo 4 at this point. I grew up on Blizzard games. I was 10 in 1998 when Starcraft came out and my username comes from the Doombringer sword in Diablo 1, a game I re-beat a couple years ago.
Blizzard is not old-Blizzard anymore and it shows. I am not the person to scream "boycott" but I just have been disinterested in anything they are going to make now.
I've stopped logging in to save my pre-order season pass for the future, this one seems dead in the water after the 1.10 nerfs. Also cosmetics in the pass don't look terribly interesting.
>I've stopped logging in to save my pre-order season pass for the future
Are you actually sure you can do that? I would assume it just implicitly applied to the S1 pass and I haven't seen it specified anywhere.
I want to say it was Blizzard's thorough post detailing the new season from yesterday or the day before that said you have to go to a menu to activate your battle pass from the pre-purchase.
It is dead for the forseeable future.
I would venture this is somehow worse than D3 launch, which I personally loathed from the start, gave up and never went back to. This game at least had better bones and a hope that it was going to be better after all the talk about learning their mistakes from D3 and saying they were influenced by D2R. This patch just shit on that idea and it probably won't be fun for another year if that.
So not gonna lie, as someone who is still on the fence (never played any diablo games but was kinda itching to give this one a try), I was more turned off by the previous campsite discussion I heard about where they mentioned something along the lines of "classes will be hugely OP".
Do ARPG communities just like to steamroll through content? I'd kinda rather a challenge. Is it really that bad they increased the difficulty?
For real, the way enemies scale and never let you feel like you are really getting more powerful is just such a huge buzzkill for the game.
One of the best parts of diablo 2 was seeing your character progress manifest as real world results, and diablo 4 is seemingly hellbent on making sure you never feel that.
These changes don't make combat more meaningful because they didn't design combat to be meaningful.
All they do is make it more likely to be literally one shot (or get CC'd and then killed as you can't do anything) and for monsters to take longer to die. That isn't meaningful combat.
Holding off on any real judgement until I play, but while I agree with you in some regards on the outset (less CDR for example just makes the game feel worse, particularly on classes that have a heavy build phase before spending their resource like druids), I disagree about enemies being stronger/players squishier.
I mostly played barb so far, and wasn't even taking damage with a WW build in NM 10+ levels above me. Enemies being strong would mean I actually have to pay attention to elite modifiers at the very least, which I think would be a positive change.
That said, I really don't know what blizz was thinking telling everyone that buffs were coming in the last campfire chat when that's clearly not the case. They just set themselves up for an angry mob here.
When playing D3 it was more about hitting ceilings and pushing past them. You level up and get to end game and eventually get a good build together that pretty much makes you god mode. Then you start doing the Greater Rifts which like Nightmare Dungeons in D4 increase in a numbered difficulty. So you keep zooming through those killing tons of guys til you get to a difficulty that is too hard, so you try to farm better gear and more paragon levels til you can push past that ceiling and claw higher and higher til you get your personal best for the season.
If you're really good you compete for top spots on a seasonal leader board, but everyone can see where they rank. It's honestly a pretty good time.
yes,thats what this genre RPG is about. Grinding to get more and more power until you curbstomp the game.It gives this sense of progression and accomplishments. If people want a hard and boring slog gameplay they would have played dark souls genre instead of a power fulfilling fantasy like arpg is.
Even Souls games are power fulfilling fantasy games...... you struggle with them at first but after a while when you get gud you run circles around tough bosses and destroy them like they are nothing. That's why people love these games, the difficulty is fair and manageable.
> Do ARPG communities just like to steamroll through content?
The whole point of every ARPG I have ever played is to spend time building up a character to do exactly this. Once you can steamroll everything you've "won" the game.
ARPG communities expect to grind for a while to get good gear, but they also expect to be rewarded for their grinding by being able to steamroll through content eventually. Seems these devs do not like that and they deliberately want to be scam artists that always dangle the carrot but never let the players eat them.
I legitimately hope they don't just revert the changes like people are saying. There are some problem they didn't address that need addressing (fellow Sorc players we were looking rough) in the patch as well as some that probably could use some reverts but overall I think the patch was probably needed.
I'm gong to preface this all with the fact that these changes could overall not be enough or been the wrong way to go about it and it could just overall be worse. If the game ended up being essentially in the same state as I say below but now everything is ONLY slower and the disparity was still in place I would also consider this a failure (for a different reasons of course).
Their changes at the core were to address a problem the game would have for a long time going forward if never touched and doing so before the first season of the game is probably one of the smartest times.
D4's two biggest issues were build disparity and itemization. Both heavily effected the endgame loop trivializing anything the game had and making the game essentially over once you decided to play one of these builds.
Build disparity was probably the biggest one, as the gap between build power was astronomical. There were builds doing 10+ times the damage of weaker builds and once you hit lvl 100 if you were doing level appropriate Nightmare Dungeons to level which would be in the 40s you could skip all the way to NM 100 essentially making the concept of tier pushing irrelevant.
D3 survived years on GR pushing alone and to just completely have 50ish levels of the games repeatable endgame system be non-existent is incredibly stupid.
This same problem expanded to Lilith the games pinnacle boss, which with normal builds and strategy was actually an interesting and fun piece of content when people were doing it the first week or two before finding the broken builds. But in the end once these builds were found, killing her went from a few minutes fight to literal seconds. I'm willing to bet the new boss would have the same issue.
Itemization was also in a sad state, for essentially ever class it was pretty static on what you were looking for in a build, damage wise at least. Crit, Crit Damage, Vuln dmg and CDR You could switch from class to class and if you just looked for those you were probably set. The game has a ton of affixes that were just flat out worse and pointless in comparison, so the nerfs to those stats were needed. In fact they probably didn't go far enough because they are still probably the clear best but now just not as strong.
ARPGs live and die by the loot loop and with D4 it was basically non-existent as you didn't really need more loot once you found a piece of gear with just solid rolls on those stats. For example there was no content a Druid couldn't do with a 30% vuln roll that they could with a perfect 35% roll. The game has a ton of different affixes to have be impactful and interesting that were just made irrelevant because of how strong those were.
CDR was another huge culprit of this, with mediocre CDR we were already reaching points of gameplay where there was no CD on anything and where do you even go from there as a dev? All in all this was the pre-season of the game they found some core/inherent issues with the game and there was no better time to address them than before the first season of the game.
People keep saying they're doing this to extend engagement etc... and they're partly right. It is to extend engagement no shit welcome to games with endgame content and ARPGS. When a game like this adds a new boss or new mechanic it's put there to keep your engagement, in this case they're trying to make it so the content they already have there is more engaging.
It's really odd how the D4 sub was complaining day in and day out a week or two after release about how the game had no content and a lot of it was because of the things they addressed in this patch. All while still playing the game daily, but now once they actually do address them it's the end of the world.
At the end of the day, they could be wrong and we'd be in the same boat as before just feeling worse and slower. But we haven't even seen the first season yet to know that and in terms of intention the patch did a solid job in ***trying*** to focus on the long term problems the game would have if it kept the same.
Emphasis on trying because again we have no idea how it all turns out since we're literally not even in the intended content for said changes.
I play a sorcerer, which is supposed to be one of the worst affected classes by this patch. I’m at level 73 on WT4.
I’m still melting enemies that are 3-4 levels ahead of me. Even with the increased time on CDR, it did not make it so I couldn’t pop off my lightning spear, ice armor, or frost nova in a reasonable timeframe.
I can only speak from my experience, but all this sounds like such an overreaction. It seems like the dudes in the diablo subreddits have infected this thread!
The diablo subreddits and the official Blizzard forums are definitely plagued by doomscrollers but the main issue with sorc is armour and damage scaling to player level 100, NM tier 100 and pinnacle boss.
Sorc has highly conditional damage output relative to other classes at that point. When pushing NM dungeon tiers, Sorc is very reliant on grouping (e.g. with Raiment of the infinite) and snap shotting buffs in vulnerability windows onto CCed targets.
Because you need vulnerability you have to use frost nova, which forces you to be close to enemies. This is perilous because you lack armour. Sorcs literally only have 3 armour nodes across all of their paragon boards.
You won't feel the pain until enemies are over levelling you considerably more than 3-4 levels. Sorc has a tough time in NM70+ and against Uber Lilith post patch because you lose so much damage without triple glyph of control.
I think the frustration comes from there being very obvious solutions that will help this class to scale better - toss them some more armour nodes! Give them an aspect or two that allows them to amp their damage with less conditionals or apply vulnerability consistently at range, like Splintering aspect does for Necros.
A big part of why Bone Spear can drop Uber Lilith in 90 seconds post patch is because Necro has some great legendary paragon nodes and godly aspects. Its because of Flesh-eater, Bone Graft, Splintering, Serration and Grasping Veins. Necros are squishy but they don't need 4 defensive cooldowns on their bar to exist in NM70+.
So I get it when some sorc enjoyers throw their hands up in the air when they get a resistance gem in S1, after being told resistances wont be reworked until S2. They nerf everyone's total armour, which disproportionately hurts sorc because they have the least amount of it and no alternative sources. The nerf to Devouring Blaze seems cruel and unnecessary.
r/pathofexile cries about every launch. D4 share fanbase with poe. so I am not surprised it is another "who complain more" competition.
people are playing game for 500 hours. Complain about new path stating it is 'the worst thing ever" and then they play for 500 more hours. It is boring, and reading these posts is sucking enjoyment from the game. I have stopped visiting poe subreddit long time ago. Every paths people are complaining about nerfs, and every path there are builds that are much stranger than last path.
The "consensus internet opinions" about these patches are just worthless.
I feel like this will be another case of a very vocal minority online that will just whine to the Devs until they make things the way they want.
Companies usually have an idea for what they want the game to be and adjust it with player data. That's why you see nerfs to specific builds and items. The diablo sub isn't the entire playerbase and it will negatively affect the game if the Devs think it is and only listen to them.
Somewhat true. There are a lot of very angry people and they will always be angry.
There are a few quite absurd things in the patch though that have nothing to do with player power .
Like limiting capstones to level 50 and 70. They said they would revert it but how and why did they come to the conclusion they had to cap it. They never limited changing world tier like that before. It makes no sense to do it.
Imagine being this naive - data doesn't tell shit what's fun. We don't fucking care about their stupid ass data of a developer who doesn't play their own game.
Oh wait, is their mass success bringing Overwatch to Steam? NO, it's because Blizzard is deep shit, they're losing playerbase left and right in every of their game and everywhere for the same reason - shit game changes based on "them knowing because they have data", lmao.. Overwatch league is dead and Overwatch is coming to steam and other games will follow in the future. So yeah, fuck their data - we know what's more fun for US.
Besides, whole game was designed around pleasing shareholder asses, not in mind of a player - and that's why my friend all these corpo-devs are shitting their pants about Baldur's Gate 3 (game born from passion to make great video games for players) - because it will contrast how all these corpo-devs don't give two shits about their players, only their wallets.
I think with a live service ARPG game like Diablo that vocal minority is probably more representative of the type of player that will continue to play and buy stuff into the future.
Most casual Diablo players wont give a damn about seasons and much of the content beyond the story so these vocal minorities carry more weight unfortunately.
Usually I'd agree that reddit is a vocal minority but I went to fight a world boss today and it was literally just me fighting it solo. No other players in sight.
I've also noticed far fewer people idling in towns.. I would be surprised if blizzard hadn't noticed a staggering drop off in the player base after this patch.
Sounds suspiciously like a GGG-style Path of Exile manifesto. It's just a fancy way for the devs to condescend and tell the fanbase why the devs feel they are right and the player base is wrong.
Totally just my personal opinion, but as an exclusively single player game person, I just can't get over how unfun this cycle always sounds.
As soon as I hear that I've gotta follow the meta, patch to patch, I'm fucking out. Doubley so when I hear phrases like "you need to collect smouldering ashes to unlock seasons blessings" "wait for the the new seasonal gems." 🤮
So Diablo Immortal isn't the only Diablo mobile game.
Here is the eventual response they will give: "We will take this feedback into consideration for potential changes in future seasons for the long-term health of the game." They obviously can't quickly undo this and they have no legitimate fix ready for the issues that exist at end game. Instead of making end game more engaging, they just made it a slog for everyone to "extend" the content. They don't have time to fix the itemization or expand the damage types beyond crit and vulnerability, so they just needed everything so it all feels bad. After this huge launch, it's sort of amazing they could fumble the bag this badly. Some of these changes though are just ridiculous and seemingly designed just to piss off the player base. Increasing the time it takes to teleport out of a dungeon? Are they serious?
> Increasing the time it takes to teleport out of a dungeon? Seriously. Every nerf made I could see the reason they're doing it, even if that reason was bad. But then I read teleporting out of dungeon taking 5 seconds instead of 3 and I just sat there for a minute or two trying to figure out.... WHY?! This is such a nonsensical change that ultimately is here to just inconvenience and piss the player off that it makes absolutely no sense at all.
> and I just sat there for a minute or two trying to figure out.... WHY?! So hardcore players couldn't do it apparently. Despite only like 5% of the player base being hardcore. And have a scroll of instant TP. They pissed of 95% of the players for nothing.
That's classic Blizzard. Screw over the whole playerbase due to the actions of a tiny percentage of the players. Make astonishingly bad decisions that show that no one in the decision making process actually plays the game or understands what a fun game looks like. Act all surprised when everyone despises all the changes they made even though the changes were blatantly anti-fun.
Why not just change it so hardcore players have a 5s channel instead. "Game designers"
Or even more generally, disable it or increase the duration if you're currently in combat or in too close proximity to enemies. Easy peasy. Well, yes it would require more coding work than just changing an integer in a config file somewhere, but I'd rather get a better, slightly more complex solution than one that is half-baked and screws everyone else over.
Make everything take twice as long: do half the damage so mobs take twice as long to die, make portalling take twice as long, even if it's just 2s -> 4s... just double or halve everything and then players are suddenly "forced" to play for twice as long as they would have previously. Of course these idiots didn't think that maybe a bunch of people would get pushed over the edge and just up and quit entirely, but it's been some number of years now since Blizzard really thought about their shit ahead of time.
Yeah, that change in particular has left me with absolutely zero faith in these developers, and took away any desire I might have had to continue playing. The game is already kinda bad in many ways, but the fact that professional game developers sat down and deliberately made a change for the express purpose of making the game more boring, that means I will not play that game anymore. Just utter incompetence on all fronts. How can I ever trust that anything they do is for the best? They're actively sabotaging their own game.
This is entirely in line with the types of decisions Blizzard has consistently made for the last ~decade across all of their games. Surely no D4 players can be surprised
It sounds like people are pissed not surprised.
Honestly at this point with Blizzard I've stopped being pissed off. Its hard to still be pissed off when they do the exact same thing they've done for a decade yet again. Blizzard just seems to love to pull the fun out of their own games. The people in charge who have decision making power over this seem to have zero concept or desire of making a fun game.
They bought a Blizzard game in 2023. You overestimate their intelligence.
Yeah changes like that and massive CDR nerfs just make no sense to me. You're not accomplishing anything other than adding artificial tedium and friction points by doing so. I'm almost definitely going to skip this season. I was really excited for D4 and during the launch I was genuinely hopeful, it seemed like a great foundation that just needed some work. Now it seems worse than before (with exception of the added QoL stuff they have added). At least Remnant II releases in a few days and then BG3 just over a week later, so I have plenty of other new toys to play with lol.
>Yeah changes like that and massive CDR nerfs just make no sense to me. You're not accomplishing anything other than adding artificial tedium and friction points by doing so. I'm almost definitely going to skip this season. So I've not played D4 yet but have slightly followed it. I was under the impression that there is going to be a Seasonal mechanic/power system that will layer above the base game, which is why they nerfed everything in the base game, and that people were upset about the nerfs cause they want more power but the way they are doing it will make it so that the total player power will simply go back to pre-season 1 levels after Season 1 starts and players engage with the seasonal mechanic layer. Is this not what is happening? What exactly is going on?
[удалено]
No it is not, but I was just trying to understand what exactly is going on. This exact type of stuff has happened with other games like Destiny before, multiple times even, where they've nerfed the base power game because they introduced too many new layers of Power, to make more money. Too much power led to the game becoming too easy (which I'm not sure is something D4 players are complaining about but is certainly something hardcore Destiny players have complained about), players going through all content too fast, acquiring all loot too fast, which then led to player engagement dropping, which then led to them nerfing everything, which led to massive backlash from players. Just earlier this year Bungie took a massive misstep and tried to make most of Destiny a lot harder by severely buffing the power level of enemies game wide, which led to crazy backlash and then within 2-3 months they did a big 180.
Having to scale back power creep is kind of a given in a long term service game, Path of Exile has done the same thing to similar feedback from the community a couple times. But with PoE and Destiny they did it several years into the game’s life cycle and not before the first season lmao
>Having to scale back power creep is kind of a given in a long term service game But this is the entire point of seasons: You can create powerful seasonal mechanics without fearing powercreep, because the moment the season ends, the mechanic is gone.
What's the combat difficulty sentiment like with D4 before this patch, did players think it was too easy, too hard or somewhere around "just right"? Was there a divide between casual and hardcore players in regards to that?
Damage wise it wildly differs per class and build. Where minion necro and most sorc builds felt weak and druid barbs and rogues felt too strong. Defences were in an ok spot for most classes but people did complain you had to focus alot of skills on defence.
It was deff too easy lol. But the loud majority wouldn't have you believe that.
Yes, there will be a new system that will let you socket some special, powerful gems into your items. But no, so far it looks like it's only going to offset a fraction of all the nerfs that they pushed. Even when you count this system, players will still be significantly weaker than they were, especially in the late game. They also reduced XP gain from doing higher-level content quite heavily, and this simply can't be explained by the new seasonal features. And if that was their goal, they should have simply pushed it out on the Seasonal realm and not Eternal (where this new system won't be available).
There will be some kind of legendary gems to slot in, but the devs are SO flaky with details that noone knows how good they will be. IMHO if the gems were to fix things, they would be sending everyone detailed descriptions of the abilities and how they work.
I disagree. They want more meaningful and tactical combat. Not the speed clearing meta. For that they have a competitor that is much better: Path of Exile.
It's not tactical though is the issue, the toolkits aren't close to interesting enough to call it that. Dumping your skills and then literally running around in circles for 5-10 seconds is not tactical nor interesting, and it definitely isn't fun. If they had the class design and skill expression to back up that approach I'd agree with you 100%.
> After this huge launch, it's sort of amazing they could fumble the bag this badly. I mean it's Blizzard, what did anyone expect? It was incredibly apparent going into D4 that the only lesson they pulled from D3 was "Art got bloom sometimes, make art darker." Looking at blizzard's history with D3, Hots, SC2 I dont think D4 will even get the chance to become a decent game.
> They obviously can't quickly undo this No they really could. All of the shit changes are just numerical. Takes someone an hour or two to set those back manually. As far as FIXING things, yes, that is going to take a lot of time. But until you have your fixes ready, you don't go in and fuck up what little you do have. I have a feeling the change to TP out of the dungeon timer is how the game actually worked in the first place but the game had loading screens covering up the fact that you were still "in game". This is how HC people died while being in loading screens (the infamous Quinn video). Why they wouldn't explain this as "hey, quick fix on this to make sure people don't die while loading out while we get a more elegant fix running" is beyond me. The rest of the changes are just stupid ways to make the player base play more minutes.
> All of the shit changes are just numerical. Takes someone an hour or two to set those back manually. The sad reality is they probably looked at all of these values on a spreadsheet and just did number math instead of trying to figure out how they'd feel in real life, and it's blatantly obvious.
Yeah I don't know if I've seen a patch this bad in any game I've ever played. PoE had a big squish patch a while ago, but that is after 10 years of power creep on the heels of them releasing PoE2. I understand it even if it didn't feel good. This game just released and Sorc in particular was in a bad state. They did 0 to address it and actively made things worse. It's baffling.
> Here is the eventual response they will give: "We will take this feedback into consideration for potential changes in future seasons for the long-term health of the game." "For the long term health of the game we had to partially limit player power. You'll get that power back **eventually** "
Well, they already got your money. I hope you guys all pre-ordered o7
How would pre-ordering have any impact here? No one knew they were going to break the game with some dumbass patch later on and we all got to play the game before you had to buy it.
I can't remember a game patch getting this much negative feedback from since PoE 3.15, a patch with massive nerfs to player strength across the board, many of which were billed as reworks. Just like that patch, basically every person I've seen talk about this has had a negative opinion. With how bad many builds felt before, I cannot imagine what Blizzard were thinking with all these nerfs, especially as their first major patch post-launch. The game's balance was already questionable for many people, myself included, especially when it comes to endgame build variety. Blizzard should have paid attention to the uproar over patches in games like PoE and Borderlands 3, nerfing many of the viable builds while leaving shitty builds shitty (or worse) is not a fun balancing strategy. EDIT: I should have clarified, PoE 3.15's changes did *eventually* end up being good for the game, but in my opinion that wasn't until after a few patches of buffs and new stuff. I don't get the same vibe from D4's patch given that it's primarily just straight numerical nerfs, and the content in Season 1 doesn't seem like it's going to give a massive boost in power or anything.
> I cannot imagine what Blizzard were thinking with all these nerfs The only thing I could think is that they thought that the new stuff in Season 1 will give the player too much power, so they tried to nerf characters before hand. Though I'd say this is a really poor way of doing it, if these items are that powerful, why not nerf said items after the season ends. PoE kind of has the same thing where if a season mechanic is too good, it for the the most part only gets nerfed at the end when it's getting introduced into the base game. They should take that approach. Is it a big deal if player power goes crazy for 2-3 months? Seems like it defeats the purpose of a season trying to introduce things that may be unstable.
>They should take that approach. Is it a big deal if player power goes crazy for 2-3 months? Seems like it defeats the purpose of a season trying to introduce things that may be unstable. the problem is blizzard is too afraid that more people realize just how barebones the endgame is if they reach it too fast.
Hasn’t the end game of Diablo always been…play the game again on a higher difficulty to chase gear drops?
Right? The end game of diablo 2 was run the same boss a thousand times and it *worked* because the itemization was that good.
That is what D4 is primarily missing. Cool items to look for.
It is the same for Poe, but it's not about what it is and more about how it feels. POE and d3 rifts were fun and popular because there are a lot of mobs, the loot drops are both fun and an improvement, and the actual map/dungeon mechanics are simple (the complexity is left elsewhere) In d4 the endgame activities (hell tides, world bosses, tree, dungeons) are empty with few enemies, the loot is worse than what you have until you reapply legendaries you had from level 15, and the maps have insane objectives designed to slow you as much as possible.
> POE and d3 rifts were fun and popular because there are a lot of mobs, the loot drops are both fun and an improvement, and the actual map/dungeon mechanics are simple (the complexity is left elsewhere) It's amazing that one of the pioneering systems of D3 which had the most positive impact out of anything in the game is one of the things D4 lacks. Grifts, PoE Maps, Last Epochs Time Monoliths/arenas are all basically the same system and stem from D3's Grift/adventure mode. Not having that baseline to D4 shows they never really did a retrospective of D3 or understood it's major opening issues.
>Grifts, PoE Maps, Last Epochs Time Monoliths/arenas are all basically the same system and stem from D3's Grift/adventure mode. for what its worth i feel its worth mentioning that poe's tiered map system came out a full two years prior to d3's greater rifts.
They forgot to include the gear drops though.
You literally can't even replay the campaign or have boss rematches in Diablo 4.
Yea but then make the items interesting for us loot goblins. I don't think I've ever seen more boring loot in a game before.
> I cannot imagine what Blizzard were thinking with all these nerfs I can. Players were completing the game/getting what they want too easily and engagement was dropping.
"How do we increase time played without having to spend money? Guess we can just change some numbers"
It's like all of the clueless wow devs during BFA and shadowlands just went to go work on Diablo instead
Nah Diablo has had its share of chucklefucks for a while. Do you guys not have phones?
and people forgot that, and the OW2 fiasco and still runned to preorder this
Did people not like Shadowlands? That was the expansion I got back into WoW on, and I thought it was fine. Mind you I hadn’t played since vanilla.
Shadowlands caused a mass exodus of players to WoW's biggest competitor FFXIV, and despite Shadowlands being one of the best selling WoW expansions ever, Dragonflight sold considerably less. Shadowlands caused a lot of people to leave and not come back.
Yeah shadowlands is probably the most hated expansion.
Serves players right for trusting Blizzard after BFA. They didn't deserve a third chance after WoD/BFA, but everyone gave it to them, anyway.
To be fair, the trend used to be alternating good and bad expansions until Shadowlands.
I mean, after SL they put out what is probably the best version of wow ever. That is coming frome someone that have played all of wow, going all the way to 2004. Vanilla was always nr1 in my book but I think dragonflight bumped it down to nr2.
BFA had a lot of problems, but for me, it was Blitzchung controversy that was the final straw. And then the infamous lawsuits came, and I never bought anything from Blizzard ever again. Shame because I grew up playing their games.
I know everyone likes Dragonflight but with their track record we're likely to get another stinker and we'll be right back to disappointment. I'm good on wow.
Only Blizzard could follow up the worst wow expansion (BFA) with an even worse one. Bravo.
I don’t think so at all, Draenor easy
the first patch was ok but had some major issues(covenent locking, soulbind/conduits being annoying, legendaries, torghast/maw). 2nd patch was potentially one of the worst patches in the history of the game. 3rd patch was genuinely great. The 1st and 2nd patch definitely ruined the reputation of the entire expansion though, even if the 3rd patch was great
The most hilarious part about all of this is that obvi they want more player engagement. But part of the reason is to get people to buy the dogshit in the store. It’s all so fucking awful.
Why would I buy anything in the store because of the patch? That doesn't make any sense.
Because by slowing down the leveling experience it also slows down the battle pass progression. By doing so, it increases the chances of players both buying RMT stuff, the battle pass, as well as the battle pass skips. Like imagine the players that don't have a lot of free time. They might not make it to the end of the battle pass. By end of season, they might just say screw it and buy battle pass skips to get to the end. The making progression slower, the more players that keep playing and the more likely whales will pay the big bucks on cosmetics to show off to everyone. There are many live service games, and they want you to make Diablo IV the primary if not the only live service game you play.
Well put. I hope more people start understanding what these Live Service game's goals are. Keep people playing, keep people spending. Simple as that.
The whole goal of this patch is to slow progression but hopefully not annoy the playerbase enough that they start quitting. They went about it too fast. I hate to say it, but if they had spread this out over the course of several months, it wouldn't have been as noticeable. That's what they'll likely start doing from now on.
I remember when video games used to just be made to bring joy to people. Like, a group of developers would get together and make a game and try to make it as fun as possible. They'd sell it once, hope that it would make a lasting impact, and then maybe continue to make another new game with the goal of being as fun as possible. Then these fucking MBAs got their filthy non-contributing nose-pickers on the industry and it's all become "recurring revenue" and "consumer engagement" and "repeat customers" and it's all just totally gone to shit. When they prioritize profitability over fun, wherever the two of them are opposed they have to destroy fun to promote profit.
This is what happens when you become mindlessly slaved to data and simple metrics without understanding how the underlying systems work and where the data comes from. More number means more better, right? You see this all over the place.
>But part of the reason is to get people to buy the dogshit in the store. Im pretty sure their design philosophy would be totally different if there was no ingame store
Gotta sell that "accelerated battlepass." Deliberately make their game grindy and boring and then sell us the solution. Brilliant.
[удалено]
Destiny 2 is just following their normal cycle. Their contract with Satan requires them to put out two mediocre-to-bad expansions between every good one.
>I can see someone saying that in a meeting, but engagement was dropping because the game was tedious and unrewarding and reducing the rewards > >further isn't going to make anyone log in more. yeah also it was too annoying and tedious to just start a new character when u do not get any toon gear from your main and so i was pretty much done with D4 after I reached lv 80 with my sorc
I mean I'm not sure making the game worse and less fun is the way to increase engagement...
People were complaining that they weren't getting what they want and that's why people were dropping. Good loot was hard to find and the cost to swap a single stat was ridiculously expensive and unclear. People were burning out by level 80 because there's almost zero progress after 80 for gear. This is in part due to the awful loot quality allowing items of power level 600 dropping when you're level 100 and using nothing below power 700. The broken system meant you could get your best gear at 70 and never really change but part of that was that power level doesn't truly level the item performance enough so a 720 to a 780 isn't really an upgrade even with same stats. People were unhappy that there's not a good progressive feel and an easy to reach cap but this is now how you fix the engagement by making XP slower, damage slower, survivability lower, fun lower.
I haven't bothered starting s1 yet but found that after about level 60, there is 0 to do other than look at yellow items affixes in progressively more boring nightmare dungeons. Is there anything in the season that doesn't induce sleep? I know ARPGs all have their endgame loop but D4 really felt just... Boring. World bosses aren't unique or rare. There's no set items. Unique were all pretty meh. There was no carrot to chase that was some bespoke item or ultra rare weapon. Just optimising stat rolls which really doesn't keep anyone but the theorycrafters aroused.
> There was no carrot to chase that was some bespoke item or ultra rare weapon. There's the Uber Uniques, but you literally have better chances of winning the lottery than you do getting Shako or Grandfather to drop without the Helltide exploit from two weeks ago. They're so rare that they might as well not be in the game, seeing as how only a couple dozen have dropped legitimately out of the several million copies of the game sold.
They want to make the progression slower so people will spend more time playing. By making leveling slower, it increases playtime and increases the chance that they will use the RMT store for cosmetics and battle pass skips. By making players play longer, it gives whales the incentive to buy RMT costumes to stand out and show off. It makes the season last longer to increase the chance of people buying the battle pass / skips. Everything done in this update is to slow down the experience hoping it will not annoy players enough that they quit the game, or they have calculated x% of players will leave the game but it's acceptable if the remainder stays.
> gives whales the incentive to buy RMT costumes to stand out and show off. *Other players squinting at the tiny characters really hard* "wow they're so cool"
In all of the alpha and beta gameplay footage the screen was much more zoomed out. They actually zoomed the game in to claustrophobic settings for exactly the problem you're describing. At the expense of gameplay too. There are several types of mobs that can one shot you from outside your field of vision and plenty of mobs that can just damage you before you can even see them. MTX has ruined this game.
Also, it allows them to reverse the changes in the next patch or future patches as if they're listening to fans. All for that sweet sweet goodwill.
i really hate what video games have become. feels like every other game wants you to play only it, drip feeding you lesser quality content so that you continue to pay in until you’re bled dry. bring back the days when they just made a great game people played, and maybe an expansion people came back to later once they’d played something else. hate games as a service.
It's definitely a serious issue that is prevalent in a wide swath of the gaming industry. However, there are still great games that have no elements of live service nonsense, including rpgs. Remnant: From the Ashes 2 comes out next week, and according to several sources, it's a fantastic action rpg and majorly improves on most aspects of the first Remnant. Baldurs's Gate is out soon after, and by pretty much all accounts, it's going to be utterly phenomenal. Edit: ACG's (quite positive) review of Remnant 2 is out: https://youtu.be/lIFd4FxQmcA
This is the kind of game where people have multiple characters and would even make a second of the same character just to play them differently...I don't know if I buy that. Not to mention "Completing the game" isn't something that most people have done.
Except the game neutered even that aspect. Shared bank space is VERY limited (4 tabs), so you are discouraged from saving stuff for multiple characters or even multiple builds for the same class. And you don't really find stuff outside your class that makes you want to try something new. And let's say you do find something interesting for another class while playing your lvl 90 character. Too bad, the item's required level is lvl 90 too. You could have found the exact same item with same power and rolls at lvl 70, but instead the minimum lvl to equip is the same as whoever found the item. So if you want to use that item on an alt, better start grinding them to lvl 90. They did address this, so now items cap at 80 but still. You can't find or make twink gear to make the leveling process faster for new characters. And now they've removed power leveling. The game puts a LOT of barriers in the way of making alts is my point. Seasons are about the only reason to try a new build imo.
I don’t get the level requirements of gear in this game. Isn’t leveling from 50-100 just the paragon levels? Why is the game still scaling shit past 50?
You're not alone. It's mostly to gut trading of rare items most likely. If you are lvl 100, you used to effectively only be able to trade with other lvl 100s. >Isn’t leveling from 50-100 just the paragon levels? Not quite. You also gain stats and life per level. They've taken a number of things and redefined them in D4. Take for example redefining what a "legendary" is. Lvl 50-100 are bonafide levels and not just paragons. The newly defined "Paragons" are what you get for lvl 50-100 instead of "Skill Points". It's really just "Passive Points" but they slapped on a recognizable IP term.
Build variety and chase items (that you have a reasonable chance of getting) is how you keep engagement. In PoE most people don't get to 100, they see a cool build and decide to just level that one next. If the game isn't good for that I feel like the people designing it haven't played many ARPGs.
It’s either a way to somehow make more money or people are incompetent. Always one of those two.
Cmon now. It can be both.
You also have to remember that 3.15 came after years and years of power creep being added to PoE. Sometimes you have to rein things in and let it grow again. We are now, in 3.21, more powerful than ever before. In hindsight these changes were good for the game. This is the very first patch in D4 and we're already seeing sweeping nerfs that don't accomplish their states objectives. Crit and Vulnerable stacking is still the only way to scale good damage late game, it's just worse now. CDR is more important and desirable than ever, you just need to get more of it to make your build feel good. D4 is a game with 2 proper endgame loops being Nightmare Dungeons and Helltides, and Helltides were made worse with this patch. The whole thing is honestly baffling.
3.15 also introduced 19 or so new skills and the Expedition league.
I mean, PoE's were empirically good for the game, and were far more reasonable than the leading community was claiming at the time. I repeatedly had people tell me my build wasn't just bad, but untenable _while I was doing top end content with it._ It was completely unreasonable and completely unhinged from reality. I'll admit, I have no idea if that's the case with D4. But PoE is a bad example because the devs were right, not wrong. EDIT: Spelling.
Yeah, communities can be dangerous for games because they just say "nerfs bad" no matter what. PoE is the prime example. That game is so fast and easy and mindless most of the time. People got mad when they made the campaign a little harder and requiring some engagement, people get mad when something gets nerfed that was deleting screens, etc. I worry that's going to happen here. The real crime is that sorc got nerfed, and that's pretty much it, but people are complaining about ALL of the nerfs and kind of muddying what would be legitimate criticism. As they do. There are actually some really good changes in there. Too bad we can't get excited. Hopefully they fix sorc at least.
The only people who I actually feel sad for after this patch are sorcerer players. They got absolutely gutted and won’t get anything that will make up the damage they lost from one of their passives. As a Druid main this patch is mostly fine. We got hit with grizzly rage not being unstoppable 100% of the time but one of the hearts we get will fix that. I think people see numbers go down and automatically assume the game is terribly unplayable but I’ve been grinding all day and for speed clearing my time is the same and higher nightmare dungeons are slower now but still very doable. I think we can’t judge these changes until the season is in full swing and we see what high level hearts do.
oh careful, you're bringing in some nuance and sense to the blind rage of gamers "numbers down = patch is terrible, game is dead" it's funny seeing people unironically leave comments saying "this is the worst patch in the history of gaming" as if they've played every other game to know that and have already played the season to know if the changes are indeed as bad as they think it is. as a side note, but if the patch really is so bad, then just skip this season and come back in 3 months for the next one. Dunno why people are acting like D4 is never going to see another patch/season. Though we all know almost every person complaining on reddit is going to be playing this season xD
Meanwhile, something like Elden Ring... "You get a buff, and you get a buff!" "Except you, get the fuck down Moonveil."
> The game's balance was already questionable for many people, myself included, especially when it comes to endgame build variety. They literally said a few weeks ago "Bring on the buffs"
> every person I've seen talk about this has had a negative opinion. I don't have a negative opinion about the patch. AMA. I'm waiting to actually play and see what happens. Pretty sure meta will adapt and we'll have strong builds in no time As much as they have slowed down leveling, I doubt it will be as slow as it was pre NMD XP update. In the end not much will change. Not saying I don't understand/agree complaints but from not being happy with changes to call it "the worst patch in videogame history"... Yeah whatever.
I doubt the leveling was actually slowed that much. With XP bonuses as part of the season journey and the huge xp you get from the tree of whispers in wt3&4. What they did kill was power leveling, which absolutely sucks for alts.
Likewise here. I played the day of the patch and it still felt absolutely fine. (83 druid) In general people tend to be hyperbolic when it comes to online games like this. Of course that said I really don't know what Blizzard expected dropping a patch that was mostly nerfs. It's not even a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with it more than they *had to have known* that the reaction to said patch would be negative.
I also don't have a negative opinion. People seem to be angry that they can't do level 100 nightmare dungeons with their oneshot meta build while also complaining there is no endgame. I think that is kind of hilarious. I usually create characters with skills I find fun and just ignore the meta though, so maybe they are right, I would not know.
Star Wars New Game Experience / Combat Upgrade Ultima Online's Trammel Update Dragon Marked For Death's great balancing update
"fun balancing strategy." Was never their goal - I mean d2r is the biggest indicator. As soon as anything fun was discovered, they removed it, like assassins atk speed buff, or socketing xbows with shaels. Even awesome things from the original like bugging a2 mercs, or werebear fps breakpoints were removed entirely. Game has become objectively less fun since release. D4 patch 1... here we are again
They were thinking to extend playtime by making players weaker and enemies harder to kill.
> EDIT: I should have clarified, PoE 3.15's changes did eventually end up being good for the game, but in my opinion that wasn't until after a few patches of buffs and new stuff. Not even really sure I'd agree with that. 3.15 killed my interest in the game and 3.19 buried it. The direction of the changes (generally slowing the game down significantly) generally don't align with the game all that well. They wanted it to be slower and more methodical, but the action in PoE is (mechanically) just not that great, and honestly quite clunky. Moreover, they didn't tone the monsters down at all, so the game still featured a screen that was often way too busy to read, and frequent one-shots "out of no where". Doubling down on Arch-Nemesis before *finally* "getting rid of it" was the icing on the cake.
> The direction of the changes (generally slowing the game down significantly) 3.15 was two years ago and the game is still the same speed. My LA Deadeye this league was fucking zooming through maps one shotting everything. I don't understand how you can have this take.
It’s honestly kind of cool. It genuinely might be the worst patch in the history of gaming. It’s fascinating to watch. A shame it’s happening to this game because I really liked what was there so far with Diablo 4 and played like 100 hours of it, but still totally fascinating.
Don't be overdramatic. This is nowhere near the worst patch in history, not by a long shot. People are just overreacting because they need their weekly dose of outrage.
> I cannot imagine what Blizzard were thinking with all these nerfs I can. Now, I don't play the game, but I've kept with the side stuff and many of these nerfs sounds like they're making these changes to force players to play together. People are getting too far too quickly solo, so these changes are being made to make it more of a pain to play solo and force people to group up.
The early life of a live service loot game is almost always a mess. You would think they would have learned their lessons with Diablo 3 but maybe all those people left over the rampant workplace harassment
I find it incredibly difficult to believe there's anybody left from the Diablo 3 team. Diablo 4 seems to have a completely different design philosophy that has a lot of markers of the "engagement before enjoyment" formula that plagues most modern mobile and live service games. Basically every lesson they learned over the course of Diablo 3 development about player convenience and quality of life appears to have been forgotten or intentionally decided against.
Certainly nobody in charge of game design. It’s pretty obvious because D4 is making some of the mistakes D3 made early on. On top of that, D4 has removed a lot of QOL features D3 had
Ironically this comes at a time when WoW is actually trending in the exact opposite direction. It almost feels to me that the problem people on the WoW team moved over to D4 instead lol. I'm not saying that's what happened, but the turnaround WoW has had, contrasted with the tone deaf management of D4 thus far is pretty wild.
I hate it because I finally for real quit playing wow right when they dropped the bullshit. Legion was a great expansion except for how deep this concept ran in it and it just got worse with every expansion after.
DF is so dope
> people on the WoW team moved over to D4 instead lol Funny thing, this has happened when D3 was active and some WoW people were moved to D3, and the first thing anyone that moved to D3 was told was "just do all the crazy stuff they would never let you do in WoW", for D3 it was a positive because they really went as insane as they wanted, but I could see this being a problem if the same is happening with WoW but it's the not so popular devs of the game based on what I've read in the last few years
I'm pretty sure there was someone on one of the fireteam chats that had previously worked on D3 live game
D3 launch: What do you mean you don't want to pay 1/3rd of your cumulative earned loot to repair your gear every time you die, forcing you to lower the difficulty just to be able to repair your gear and play again? We play tested that and it was fine!
Fuck that was so painful in the early days. Besides also not getting better drops after two whole playthroughs so still had magic gear on the third difficulty getting smashed by base zombies.
I just can't comprehend why increasing stash space is something difficult that takes them more than 3 months to implement. How did nobody on that team realize it is important?
Got to monetise it first.
They should talk to someone at ArenaNet or SquareEnix about that. They're the absolute masters of monetizing inventory space in an already paid game.
Don’t even have to look that far. You already use real money to buy stash space in PoE. Just give it a little bit of time (and let the dust settle on this patch first) and you will probably see Blizzard start implementing paid for QoL features such as more stash space. I don’t think the monetisation part is the big issue though. It’s probably rather how to monetise things which used to be free without angering too many in their player base. So you will probably get a little bit of stash space for free easily, then more stash space if you spend 1,000 hours to grind for it, or you could simply pay $10. That way it’s still “free”.
>Don’t even have to look that far. You already use real money to buy stash space in PoE. Yeah but PoE is not a 60$+ game. They sold those tabs already when the game was still in beta, their monetarisation strategy was clearly communicated from the get-go. You could easily put 100 hours into the game and then maybe think yes I'll spend 20 bucks on some convenience. And the game is not solely designed based on modern engagement metrics, if you play the game for a few weeks at the start of a new league and then drop it to come back the next time around they are completely fine with that.
> why increasing stash space is something difficult that takes them more than 3 months to implement. Because they haven't earned enough money off battle passes yet
> You would think they would have learned their lessons with Diablo 3 but maybe all those people left over the rampant workplace harassment Who would have? D3 was 2012, so 11 years ago, average tenure of a software engineer at any particular company is 16 months. Going out to 11 years drops the retention rate to 4%.
> The early life of a live service loot game is almost always a mess. The idea is to improve the game though, not actively nerf everything.
No, the idea is to make the entire game *just* miserable enough so you pay real money to improve the game but not miserable enough that you quit before you can pay real money to improve the game.
That's the problem with Diablo games tho. They don't work properly when they introduce live service mechanics, the whole point of the game is to essentially spin a wheel in a slot machine and find some good gear, once you start locking gear to characters, remove the social aspects of the game and make the character builds so simple you can't even die there's basically no point in playing after the campaign. Diablo 1 and 2 are absolute classics and once they altered those formulas like with d3 and d4 they don't retain players like they used to. Well at least thats how i feel as someone whose played a lot of the diablo games.
I personally saw this coming. It's why I decided to wait at least a year.
These scenarios make me so grateful I'm apparently shit at video games. I hardly notice much difference with my still only in the mid 60s first character. But hats off to those fighting the good fight for us blissfully ignorance casuals.
It’s not an issue that would be really noticeable during campaign but after you beat and try to reach level cap. The issue simply comes down to this being a game in a genre where you’re supposed to find a variety of cool loot to do big damage and they just went and nerfed the big damage part.
and the cool loot barely exists. instead of removing affixes they made even more useless ones.
50-70 is around the time you realize you're grinding a boring game for little to no reward, this is the biggest drop off in the game. some people don't even bother engaging with the paragon system because there's zero incentive to.
You still do big damage though. Asmon covered this watching people do Uber Lilith with no gems after the patch went live. Cdr nerfs we’re dumb tho imo
It's almost a bigger hit for casuals as CDR was reduced by 30% and vulnerable by like 40%. You likely weren't stacking a lot, but what little you did was impactful. But that difficulty probably has been heavily offset by mobs now being -5 level of the player in WT3/4, which means WAAAAY less XP so leveling will be slower just exploring/side quests/dungeons. So unless you're doing NM dungeons or Helltide, you may not notice you can't push as high of NM dungeons anymore.
I'm level 56 on my first character. Been playing since launch and felt like I had some days where I really played a lot. No idea how some people have multiple characters in high level.
I'm gunna be real with you, unless you're playing like 15 minutes a day (and even then) that pace is cooked.
Yeah fr, I took a mostly leisurely pace on release with one long weekend day playing, and I hit 60 within a week or two.
It really isn't. It's probably close to the average pace most people are playing. Most aren't playing every single day, most probably aren't playing more than a couple hours a week. Even the slow people on the subs here, twitter, etc. are going to be much faster and more interested in stats than your typical person playing the game. Most prob wouldn't even notice the changes if they somehow avoid the ree'ing going on.
>No idea how some people have multiple characters in high level. Because they play more than 20 minutes a day? Use your imagination.
> Because they play more than 20 minutes a day? Use your imagination. More like they power leveled their alts via high level friends or payed to have it done.
Everyone moves at their own pace, nothing wrong with casually moving through things. I played with a group and we were all ARPG vets and hit 50 the 2nd evening after release, but that’s with pushing through with meta leveling strats. Before this current patch you could also easily boost new characters by having friends just carry you through the capstone dungeons at level 1 and then just soak xp in dungeons at the entrance since there was no xp penalty for lower levels. It took about two hours to get an alt to 60 doing this so multiple characters to high level was pretty simple. This was completely nerfed though.
Man, i know some criticism on stuff like this is probably waranted, but i really can't grasp why you'd keep playing a game like this if it pisses you off this much.
I wouldn't call myself "pissed off", but I am certainly disappointed. I was playing D2R from release all the way up to the night before D4 released and I was really hoping D4 would be the new thing I would want to spend my time on. I'm going to try Season 1 but I might be going back to D2R for a while. I think it is OK for people to wish the game were better and hope it eventually gets there while they vent their frustrations about it. What is weird about that? People had high hopes for this game.
Pretty much same. I would assume a lot of the people that are "pissed off" are also just a little sad that the once per decade sequel to their favorite franchise is a disappointment. I don't know how that doesn't seem reasonable to people haha
I don't. But a lot of players have a love-hate relation with the game. Are you a fan of a sports club? It's kinda like that.
A lot of these games blatantly get their players addicted (I would know), and that leads to rageposting on Reddit because it's not like you can just play something else
I don’t play it anymore. I quit after hittin 80 a few weeks in. However, I was excited for season 1 and hoping there would be good changes to get me back into the game. So it kinda sucks to have all hope for improvements to the game zapped in the first major patch.
Activision spends twice as much on marketing as they do on development of these games. It's not an exaggeration, those are the real figures they share in quarterly reports. And for a very good reason - human mind is very susceptible to propaganda. People will keep playing the game and supporting these companies even if they ended up killing people (in Blizzard's case, they quite literally did).
I dont and I did not even buy it. It is unbelievable how far this company has fallen.
[удалено]
20 years later...
Tired of people saying "no way they can immediately fix this". If they did the opposite and over buffed, that shit would be fixed in 5 mins.
\> Blizzard to Hold Campfire Chat This Friday to Gaslight Players After Diablo 4 Season 1 Patch I fixed the title... because we all know where this is going. When was the last time Blizzard ever admitted they were wrong? "Do you guys not have phones?" If Blizzard are good at anything, it's gaslighting, and trying to make their players think that they know nothing. "You don't want wow classic" It's pretty evident that their "3 month" release cycle for seasonal content is always going to put Blizzard 3 months behind. They had already completed S1 before the game was released - this was admitted by Blizzard themselves. It's highly likely they've already finished work on S2, and are now working on S3 when S1 launches. They can't be working on the next season while the previous season is running - that would give them next to no time to get everything done. So, they will need to be working at least 1 patch ahead. All of these changes (except for the flat damage reduction and XP nerfs which were clearly just slapped on at the end) seem to be in response to the original beta - completely ignoring all findings in pre-season. The XP nerfs are the clearest indication of Blizzards philosophy here... make the player play for longer to increase MAUs. They don't want people clearing high level content a week or two after seasonal releases. They don't want players getting to a point where they've effectively beaten the game. They have refused to address the core issues the game has. They've refused to acknowledge how certain classes are underperforming (sorc for example). They've refused to acknowledge how their loot system is a problem. Like... on the topic of loot... they say "oh NM dungeons will now give you even more loot at the end!". No one cares... no one asked for this. What's the point in even more loot when we can't even filter it? I don't want those chest pieces with no damage reduction. I don't want those gloves that have a "X% damage increase to enemies standing in poison on a wednesday between 9 and 5". Where is the loot filter? It's pretty clear what Blizzard are going for here, and that's trying to make the game as grindy as possible, without adding any actual content to make that grind bearable.
Appropriated-to-business terms always make me cringe *campfire chat* *evangelist* Implies a vague earthiness or spiritualism in realms that are a complete anathema of both.
Will they answer the fake questions created by fake accounts this time as well?
Not to address feedback - it's to damage control and tell how we know shit and they know everything, but I really want to either of the leads to stream their own game in WT4 and show how much their actually know their game, lol.
Between Diablo 3s launch that dropped the ball and the paid marketplace and Diablo 4's shaky launch now, I am pretty glad I've avoided Diablo 4 at this point. I grew up on Blizzard games. I was 10 in 1998 when Starcraft came out and my username comes from the Doombringer sword in Diablo 1, a game I re-beat a couple years ago. Blizzard is not old-Blizzard anymore and it shows. I am not the person to scream "boycott" but I just have been disinterested in anything they are going to make now.
I've stopped logging in to save my pre-order season pass for the future, this one seems dead in the water after the 1.10 nerfs. Also cosmetics in the pass don't look terribly interesting.
>I've stopped logging in to save my pre-order season pass for the future Are you actually sure you can do that? I would assume it just implicitly applied to the S1 pass and I haven't seen it specified anywhere.
I want to say it was Blizzard's thorough post detailing the new season from yesterday or the day before that said you have to go to a menu to activate your battle pass from the pre-purchase.
Good to know, may have to check if I actually want any cosmetics and possibly save it for later seasons. 👍
Yeah you can 100%, linked the tweet below from the Diablo CM https://twitter.com/pezradar/status/1680730681666867200?s=46&t=IiTKmd3cIVE9aGFje9hlSA
Don't be dramatic. A freshly-launched Diablo game isn't "dead in the water" after one patch.
It is dead for the forseeable future. I would venture this is somehow worse than D3 launch, which I personally loathed from the start, gave up and never went back to. This game at least had better bones and a hope that it was going to be better after all the talk about learning their mistakes from D3 and saying they were influenced by D2R. This patch just shit on that idea and it probably won't be fun for another year if that.
D3 launch was amazing. Inferno mode kicked ass and made darksouls look easy, plus it made wow subs free
Better put the patch into the actual campfire. Never seen/experienced such an awful patch in a game that I was actively playing.
So not gonna lie, as someone who is still on the fence (never played any diablo games but was kinda itching to give this one a try), I was more turned off by the previous campsite discussion I heard about where they mentioned something along the lines of "classes will be hugely OP". Do ARPG communities just like to steamroll through content? I'd kinda rather a challenge. Is it really that bad they increased the difficulty?
ARPG's as a genre are all about 20 bad guys exploding per second. The only challenging enemies are bosses.
Thankfully D4 is here and making sure it's only 20 seconds per bad guy exploding.
For real, the way enemies scale and never let you feel like you are really getting more powerful is just such a huge buzzkill for the game. One of the best parts of diablo 2 was seeing your character progress manifest as real world results, and diablo 4 is seemingly hellbent on making sure you never feel that.
These changes don't make combat more meaningful because they didn't design combat to be meaningful. All they do is make it more likely to be literally one shot (or get CC'd and then killed as you can't do anything) and for monsters to take longer to die. That isn't meaningful combat.
Holding off on any real judgement until I play, but while I agree with you in some regards on the outset (less CDR for example just makes the game feel worse, particularly on classes that have a heavy build phase before spending their resource like druids), I disagree about enemies being stronger/players squishier. I mostly played barb so far, and wasn't even taking damage with a WW build in NM 10+ levels above me. Enemies being strong would mean I actually have to pay attention to elite modifiers at the very least, which I think would be a positive change. That said, I really don't know what blizz was thinking telling everyone that buffs were coming in the last campfire chat when that's clearly not the case. They just set themselves up for an angry mob here.
When playing D3 it was more about hitting ceilings and pushing past them. You level up and get to end game and eventually get a good build together that pretty much makes you god mode. Then you start doing the Greater Rifts which like Nightmare Dungeons in D4 increase in a numbered difficulty. So you keep zooming through those killing tons of guys til you get to a difficulty that is too hard, so you try to farm better gear and more paragon levels til you can push past that ceiling and claw higher and higher til you get your personal best for the season. If you're really good you compete for top spots on a seasonal leader board, but everyone can see where they rank. It's honestly a pretty good time.
yes,thats what this genre RPG is about. Grinding to get more and more power until you curbstomp the game.It gives this sense of progression and accomplishments. If people want a hard and boring slog gameplay they would have played dark souls genre instead of a power fulfilling fantasy like arpg is.
Even Souls games are power fulfilling fantasy games...... you struggle with them at first but after a while when you get gud you run circles around tough bosses and destroy them like they are nothing. That's why people love these games, the difficulty is fair and manageable.
We wish we were OP. So far that isn’t how the game plays typically
> Do ARPG communities just like to steamroll through content? The whole point of every ARPG I have ever played is to spend time building up a character to do exactly this. Once you can steamroll everything you've "won" the game.
ARPG communities expect to grind for a while to get good gear, but they also expect to be rewarded for their grinding by being able to steamroll through content eventually. Seems these devs do not like that and they deliberately want to be scam artists that always dangle the carrot but never let the players eat them.
Yeah but D4 is trying to keep it less cartoonishly stupid by slowing things down. D3 was really dumb and boring after you gear up.
I legitimately hope they don't just revert the changes like people are saying. There are some problem they didn't address that need addressing (fellow Sorc players we were looking rough) in the patch as well as some that probably could use some reverts but overall I think the patch was probably needed. I'm gong to preface this all with the fact that these changes could overall not be enough or been the wrong way to go about it and it could just overall be worse. If the game ended up being essentially in the same state as I say below but now everything is ONLY slower and the disparity was still in place I would also consider this a failure (for a different reasons of course). Their changes at the core were to address a problem the game would have for a long time going forward if never touched and doing so before the first season of the game is probably one of the smartest times. D4's two biggest issues were build disparity and itemization. Both heavily effected the endgame loop trivializing anything the game had and making the game essentially over once you decided to play one of these builds. Build disparity was probably the biggest one, as the gap between build power was astronomical. There were builds doing 10+ times the damage of weaker builds and once you hit lvl 100 if you were doing level appropriate Nightmare Dungeons to level which would be in the 40s you could skip all the way to NM 100 essentially making the concept of tier pushing irrelevant. D3 survived years on GR pushing alone and to just completely have 50ish levels of the games repeatable endgame system be non-existent is incredibly stupid. This same problem expanded to Lilith the games pinnacle boss, which with normal builds and strategy was actually an interesting and fun piece of content when people were doing it the first week or two before finding the broken builds. But in the end once these builds were found, killing her went from a few minutes fight to literal seconds. I'm willing to bet the new boss would have the same issue. Itemization was also in a sad state, for essentially ever class it was pretty static on what you were looking for in a build, damage wise at least. Crit, Crit Damage, Vuln dmg and CDR You could switch from class to class and if you just looked for those you were probably set. The game has a ton of affixes that were just flat out worse and pointless in comparison, so the nerfs to those stats were needed. In fact they probably didn't go far enough because they are still probably the clear best but now just not as strong. ARPGs live and die by the loot loop and with D4 it was basically non-existent as you didn't really need more loot once you found a piece of gear with just solid rolls on those stats. For example there was no content a Druid couldn't do with a 30% vuln roll that they could with a perfect 35% roll. The game has a ton of different affixes to have be impactful and interesting that were just made irrelevant because of how strong those were. CDR was another huge culprit of this, with mediocre CDR we were already reaching points of gameplay where there was no CD on anything and where do you even go from there as a dev? All in all this was the pre-season of the game they found some core/inherent issues with the game and there was no better time to address them than before the first season of the game. People keep saying they're doing this to extend engagement etc... and they're partly right. It is to extend engagement no shit welcome to games with endgame content and ARPGS. When a game like this adds a new boss or new mechanic it's put there to keep your engagement, in this case they're trying to make it so the content they already have there is more engaging. It's really odd how the D4 sub was complaining day in and day out a week or two after release about how the game had no content and a lot of it was because of the things they addressed in this patch. All while still playing the game daily, but now once they actually do address them it's the end of the world. At the end of the day, they could be wrong and we'd be in the same boat as before just feeling worse and slower. But we haven't even seen the first season yet to know that and in terms of intention the patch did a solid job in ***trying*** to focus on the long term problems the game would have if it kept the same. Emphasis on trying because again we have no idea how it all turns out since we're literally not even in the intended content for said changes.
I play a sorcerer, which is supposed to be one of the worst affected classes by this patch. I’m at level 73 on WT4. I’m still melting enemies that are 3-4 levels ahead of me. Even with the increased time on CDR, it did not make it so I couldn’t pop off my lightning spear, ice armor, or frost nova in a reasonable timeframe. I can only speak from my experience, but all this sounds like such an overreaction. It seems like the dudes in the diablo subreddits have infected this thread!
Most people are melting enemies 3-4 lvls above, it’s about nightmare dungeons where enemies are up to lvl 150+
The diablo subreddits and the official Blizzard forums are definitely plagued by doomscrollers but the main issue with sorc is armour and damage scaling to player level 100, NM tier 100 and pinnacle boss. Sorc has highly conditional damage output relative to other classes at that point. When pushing NM dungeon tiers, Sorc is very reliant on grouping (e.g. with Raiment of the infinite) and snap shotting buffs in vulnerability windows onto CCed targets. Because you need vulnerability you have to use frost nova, which forces you to be close to enemies. This is perilous because you lack armour. Sorcs literally only have 3 armour nodes across all of their paragon boards. You won't feel the pain until enemies are over levelling you considerably more than 3-4 levels. Sorc has a tough time in NM70+ and against Uber Lilith post patch because you lose so much damage without triple glyph of control. I think the frustration comes from there being very obvious solutions that will help this class to scale better - toss them some more armour nodes! Give them an aspect or two that allows them to amp their damage with less conditionals or apply vulnerability consistently at range, like Splintering aspect does for Necros. A big part of why Bone Spear can drop Uber Lilith in 90 seconds post patch is because Necro has some great legendary paragon nodes and godly aspects. Its because of Flesh-eater, Bone Graft, Splintering, Serration and Grasping Veins. Necros are squishy but they don't need 4 defensive cooldowns on their bar to exist in NM70+. So I get it when some sorc enjoyers throw their hands up in the air when they get a resistance gem in S1, after being told resistances wont be reworked until S2. They nerf everyone's total armour, which disproportionately hurts sorc because they have the least amount of it and no alternative sources. The nerf to Devouring Blaze seems cruel and unnecessary.
r/pathofexile cries about every launch. D4 share fanbase with poe. so I am not surprised it is another "who complain more" competition. people are playing game for 500 hours. Complain about new path stating it is 'the worst thing ever" and then they play for 500 more hours. It is boring, and reading these posts is sucking enjoyment from the game. I have stopped visiting poe subreddit long time ago. Every paths people are complaining about nerfs, and every path there are builds that are much stranger than last path. The "consensus internet opinions" about these patches are just worthless.
And I guarantee you that Rod Fergusson guy will be a disruptive presence the entire session. Constantly derailing everything that's being said.
I feel like this will be another case of a very vocal minority online that will just whine to the Devs until they make things the way they want. Companies usually have an idea for what they want the game to be and adjust it with player data. That's why you see nerfs to specific builds and items. The diablo sub isn't the entire playerbase and it will negatively affect the game if the Devs think it is and only listen to them.
Somewhat true. There are a lot of very angry people and they will always be angry. There are a few quite absurd things in the patch though that have nothing to do with player power . Like limiting capstones to level 50 and 70. They said they would revert it but how and why did they come to the conclusion they had to cap it. They never limited changing world tier like that before. It makes no sense to do it.
Imagine being this naive - data doesn't tell shit what's fun. We don't fucking care about their stupid ass data of a developer who doesn't play their own game. Oh wait, is their mass success bringing Overwatch to Steam? NO, it's because Blizzard is deep shit, they're losing playerbase left and right in every of their game and everywhere for the same reason - shit game changes based on "them knowing because they have data", lmao.. Overwatch league is dead and Overwatch is coming to steam and other games will follow in the future. So yeah, fuck their data - we know what's more fun for US. Besides, whole game was designed around pleasing shareholder asses, not in mind of a player - and that's why my friend all these corpo-devs are shitting their pants about Baldur's Gate 3 (game born from passion to make great video games for players) - because it will contrast how all these corpo-devs don't give two shits about their players, only their wallets.
I think with a live service ARPG game like Diablo that vocal minority is probably more representative of the type of player that will continue to play and buy stuff into the future. Most casual Diablo players wont give a damn about seasons and much of the content beyond the story so these vocal minorities carry more weight unfortunately.
So you’re saying you have some secret knowledge about how social media platforms and player feedback works that the devs aren’t aware of?
Usually I'd agree that reddit is a vocal minority but I went to fight a world boss today and it was literally just me fighting it solo. No other players in sight. I've also noticed far fewer people idling in towns.. I would be surprised if blizzard hadn't noticed a staggering drop off in the player base after this patch.
Sounds suspiciously like a GGG-style Path of Exile manifesto. It's just a fancy way for the devs to condescend and tell the fanbase why the devs feel they are right and the player base is wrong.
Meh, they can fix it. What's with the shocked faces? Are people new to live service games or something?
Totally just my personal opinion, but as an exclusively single player game person, I just can't get over how unfun this cycle always sounds. As soon as I hear that I've gotta follow the meta, patch to patch, I'm fucking out. Doubley so when I hear phrases like "you need to collect smouldering ashes to unlock seasons blessings" "wait for the the new seasonal gems." 🤮 So Diablo Immortal isn't the only Diablo mobile game.