Yeah...rumors have swirled that this Tuesday will see the patch go live. But no notes have been released and that's a strong sign that this Tuesday is off the table.
I doubt the patch is more than 3 weeks off. The natives are growing restless.
They haven't implemented Act 4 density changes yet, so 1 more week minimum. Granted that probably won't take too long since there are really only four total areas you can farm in Act 4: Gardens of Hope 1 & 2, Spire 1 & 2. My guess would be that feedback on density in Acts 1-3 will just be applied to those four areas, tested briefly, and then things go live. May 7th or 14th would be my guess.
It's not a trolling title, I can't understand how these minors (yes, minors) changes are taking so damn long.
What I've seen looks rather drastic. They've massively expanded the density of monsters. Something that should wake this game up quite a bit. There are serious coding issues as well as making sure to get it right so they don't have to go back and nerf/buff/nerf...players hate to wait, but they hate the back-and-forth far more.
You would be picking a great time to come back. Things are looking up and after 1.09, we should be well on our way to having a far more dynamic experience.
I can understand why its taking long. They're are already numerous areas they have to adjust due to too low density, not spaced out accordingly, or some areas which are already being exploited for crazy exp gains. These things are why they were a PTR in the first place when people were complaining about having a PTR.
It's not a trolling title, I can't understand how these minors (yes, minors) changes are taking so damn long.
Are you (or do you know) a professional programmer? If yes, do you (does he) know the Diablo 3 coding inside out to be able to understand how much work it takes to "tweak" those minor changes? Are you (or do you know) a professional game developer in a huge company with high quality standards? If yes, how many meetings does it take to make decisions on skill balance changes? And how many people have to be working on that? What's the ideal development time for these changes?
How many people do you think are working on patch 1.0.8? Everyone from the D3 developer team? How many are working on an expansion already (and trying to solve some of the big "problems" that people have with the game as well as coming up with new, interesting content)? How many are instead working on the itemization patch, or legendaries?
I can understand why its taking long. They're are already numerous areas they have to adjust due to too low density, not spaced out accordingly, or some areas which are already being exploited for crazy exp gains. These things are why they were a PTR in the first place when people were complaining about having a PTR.
Really? Blizzard isn't able to create a WW barb and test the zones to see if it's fine or not? I always find it hard to believe that Blizz has less tools than people like Moldran that use simple excel sheets to determine zone efficiency (monster density). It sounds like the devs create the patch and noone at Blizzard ever plays them. I mean one area has 9k lifetime kills per hour and the other has 3k.... how can Blizzard not know that without "feedback" lol it makes them look so dumb imo.
You're looking at it all wrong. Of COURSE they have the tools, it's called a calculator, to figure out how much XP a zone can have with X amount of spawns.
What's taking so long is it isn't as simple as putting in a number into the engine and having a set amount of spawns, and everything is dandy. It requires a LOT of testing, code writing and re-iterations to completely overhaul a zone with monsters. How many, where they spawn, what their random spawns are, what shit is broken when XYZ spawns here and there, ect.
Blizzard isn't a two-bit company looking to quickly try and make a buck by pushing stuff out the door. I mean it's a good thing, but it's also funny how people already forgot how long it took to bring D3. Remember EVERYONE bitching at how long it took? While QA testing is never 100%, and neither are betas, the longer they are in that process the better the product. Get mad at D3 all you want if you're frustrated at the itemization / loot / skills, but realize the base of the game - arguably what's most important because you need it to build a great game from - is intact, working as intended and actually really awesome. The changes coming in 1.08 and beyond are possible because it took them so long to build the base of D3. Entire engines don't need to be overhauled, just new systems developed and plugged in.
TLDR; It's a much deeper process than pressing 'insert X amount of monsters here' and shipping.
It's not a trolling title, I can't understand how these minors (yes, minors) changes are taking so damn long.
Are you (or do you know) a professional programmer? If yes, do you (does he) know the Diablo 3 coding inside out to be able to understand how much work it takes to "tweak" those minor changes? Are you (or do you know) a professional game developer in a huge company with high quality standards? If yes, how many meetings does it take to make decisions on skill balance changes? And how many people have to be working on that? What's the ideal development time for these changes?
How many people do you think are working on patch 1.0.8? Everyone from the D3 developer team? How many are working on an expansion already (and trying to solve some of the big "problems" that people have with the game as well as coming up with new, interesting content)? How many are instead working on the itemization patch, or legendaries?
Not a trolling reply - legit questions.
This is what i wanted to say... from a guy who works in a software company i can say that it takes months to iterate over new ideas, flesh them out and polish them. Even if the idea is just a minor coding effort, it still has to go through levels of development, QA and meetings. This is just how big companies work.
I'd like to come back to D3 after months of not playing.
You can come back any time.
The game is still basicaly the same though, so dont get your hopes up too high. If you didnt enjoy endles farming before, you wont enjoy it after the patch either, and no piece of software can change that.
It's not as simple as changing this "x = 100;" to this "x = 356;" It's a lot more complicated than just changing a variable to the amount of monsters in the bounds of that area. They have to have set spawns, and they have to be able to move and interact with all the structures in the area not to mention the other monsters, and sometimes shit just breaks. Changing one variable for act 1 could make act 3 fail and crash if they're in the same file. Sometimes coding just says "FUCK YOU!" and you have to change a lot more than that simple variable which i'm guaranteeing is not what they have to do.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Not even Death will save you from Diablo Bunny's Cuteness!
It's not a trolling title, I can't understand how these minors (yes, minors) changes are taking so damn long.
Maybe if you didn't throw a tantrum and leave the game you would have more of a clue as to why these fixes take so long. Maybe pick the game back up and play the PTR to see just what is being done. Then you could see just why it takes the time it takes...
I think we're all guessing. No one knows if it is trivial to alter mob density, nor does anyone know if it's difficult either.
The frustration lies in Blizzard's intransigence at recognizing D3's massive design defficiencies despite the howls of protest from their own community. Patch 1.08 only addresses what Blizzard's customers have been demanding for months. Blizzard should have been working on these changes a long time ago, so that any patch that contains an "id-all" and mob density can be rolled out a lot faster.
And lets not speak about Blizzard having high standards. If they did have such standards, D3 would have been delayed well beyond its May/12 release date.
Too many people. Too many people with their hands on everything.
Based on my work experience, I can tell you that Zero(pS) is asking all the right questions.
If the team was unbridled, independent, small and agile, they could iterate over these issues rapidly and release them just as quickly. This is not a small, agile team. It is a department of a massive international software company.
When people refer to "the programmers", the group they are actually addressing are coders, analysts, testers, QA teams, managers, architects, web developers, and many more, just on the software side. There are also technical writers, translators, community managers, customer service representatives, and many more just from a communication / documentation standpoint. There are infrastructure managers, server administrators, network specialists, release managers, database administrators, and many many other on the hardware side.
Each person has an important moving part that must hit a moving target at the same time as all other members of all other teams for a release to happen successfully.
I think we're all guessing. No one knows if it is trivial to alter mob density, nor does anyone know if it's difficult either.
Bingo! Speculating about things that are beyong our cognitive limits mostly leads to frustration.
When are humans going to travel through time? When will we be able to travel through space (teleport)? When will God take a human form (if you believe in God) and come solve all earthly problems? Is there life after death? Do we reincarnate? These are all waaaay beyond our current cognitive and scientific capabilities.
The frustration lies in Blizzard's intransigence at recognizing D3's massive design defficiencies despite the howls of protest from their own community.
The "howls of protest" say they should keep WotB as it is. They also ask the AH to be removed. Some of them want a full overhaul of the game back into its D2 state, or to have features from other games copied into D3. It's not as simple as people make these things appear to be.
And lets not speak about Blizzard having high standards. If they did have such standards, D3 would have been delayed well beyond its May/12 release date.
I obviously meant "high programming standards", as in double, triple-checked for bugs. Let's not confuse conscient design decisions that took years of iterating (and that some people don't like) with "quality programming standards".
Still, they could release the mob density as it stands now by itself, and then release 1.0.8 later on with the tweaks and other patches. For having played the public test, it is clear the mob density change does not break or crash the game, and even if it did in maybe two or three rare circumstances, it would be better customer support and better for the game in the long run to release as is. People are right to criticized Blizzard for their long and slow iteration and patching process, but my guess is there are probably 2 or 3 people, 5 at most, working on patching and improving D3, so much for the hundred of millions of dollars they made, they would rather cash that out than investing a big effing 2 million dollars on 20 people to work full time on D3. But I guess that's just me, I would care if I made a game and be grateful to those who bought it.
It's like WoW, when you weight the money invested against the money they make, you can ask yourself if Blizzard is planning on buying its own country.
It's not a trolling title, I can't understand how these minors (yes, minors) changes are taking so damn long.
Are you (or do you know) a professional programmer? If yes, do you (does he) know the Diablo 3 coding inside out to be able to understand how much work it takes to "tweak" those minor changes? Are you (or do you know) a professional game developer in a huge company with high quality standards? If yes, how many meetings does it take to make decisions on skill balance changes? And how many people have to be working on that? What's the ideal development time for these changes?
How many people do you think are working on patch 1.0.8? Everyone from the D3 developer team? How many are working on an expansion already (and trying to solve some of the big "problems" that people have with the game as well as coming up with new, interesting content)? How many are instead working on the itemization patch, or legendaries?
Not a trolling reply - legit questions.
Yes, I'm actually a software engineer, and if they did their work properly, they should have a nicely done map/mob editor showing every single piece of data they could ever need to make their balances now and in 10 years from now.
My guess is, they rushed the game in a way that not only the game was flawed, but the codebase too, and now they need to refactor a lot and build tools that don't even exist, like a map & mob editor.
It's not a trolling title, I can't understand how these minors (yes, minors) changes are taking so damn long.
Are you (or do you know) a professional programmer? If yes, do you (does he) know the Diablo 3 coding inside out to be able to understand how much work it takes to "tweak" those minor changes? Are you (or do you know) a professional game developer in a huge company with high quality standards? If yes, how many meetings does it take to make decisions on skill balance changes? And how many people have to be working on that? What's the ideal development time for these changes?
How many people do you think are working on patch 1.0.8? Everyone from the D3 developer team? How many are working on an expansion already (and trying to solve some of the big "problems" that people have with the game as well as coming up with new, interesting content)? How many are instead working on the itemization patch, or legendaries?
Not a trolling reply - legit questions.
Yes, I'm actually a software engineer, and if they did their work properly, they should have a nicely done map/mob editor showing every single piece of data they could ever need to make their balances now and in 10 years from now.
My guess is, they rushed the game in a way that not only the game was flawed, but the codebase too, and now they need to refactor a lot and build tools that don't even exist, like a map & mob editor.
You do understand the mobs are random, right? It's not like they can just open up an editor and say "mob packs go here, here and here." It's impossible for us to know how much work it actually takes to make those changes without inside knowledge of their systems. More importantly, choosing the best mob density is a difficult game design problem that requires iteration, as we've seen. Things would be very different if they had one dude who knew what was best and everybody else just had to listen.
My intent was solely to have people reason about their emotion-based statements before throwing them out there.
You are spot on. I was just trying to strengthen your point. There is much more to be accomplished by a software team than the end user will ever know. That's sort of the point.
I can say this much. The members of the Diablo 3 development team are just as frustrated with the speed of progress as you are. Believe that.
At the end of the day, the developers answer to management, the management answers to upper management, the upper management answers to the executives and the executives answer to the ... shareholders!
TL,DR:
The developers are not in charge of their own destiny. In every software company, there are inevitably obstacles beyond the control of the development team that block productivity. [Sources:] (1) every Dilbert comic ever (2) the movie Office Space (3) every joke I've ever heard about middle management (4) my life
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I doubt the patch is more than 3 weeks off. The natives are growing restless.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
Also can we not have a trolling title?
What I've seen looks rather drastic. They've massively expanded the density of monsters. Something that should wake this game up quite a bit. There are serious coding issues as well as making sure to get it right so they don't have to go back and nerf/buff/nerf...players hate to wait, but they hate the back-and-forth far more.
You would be picking a great time to come back. Things are looking up and after 1.09, we should be well on our way to having a far more dynamic experience.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
How many people do you think are working on patch 1.0.8? Everyone from the D3 developer team? How many are working on an expansion already (and trying to solve some of the big "problems" that people have with the game as well as coming up with new, interesting content)? How many are instead working on the itemization patch, or legendaries?
Not a trolling reply - legit questions.
You're looking at it all wrong. Of COURSE they have the tools, it's called a calculator, to figure out how much XP a zone can have with X amount of spawns.
What's taking so long is it isn't as simple as putting in a number into the engine and having a set amount of spawns, and everything is dandy. It requires a LOT of testing, code writing and re-iterations to completely overhaul a zone with monsters. How many, where they spawn, what their random spawns are, what shit is broken when XYZ spawns here and there, ect.
Blizzard isn't a two-bit company looking to quickly try and make a buck by pushing stuff out the door. I mean it's a good thing, but it's also funny how people already forgot how long it took to bring D3. Remember EVERYONE bitching at how long it took? While QA testing is never 100%, and neither are betas, the longer they are in that process the better the product. Get mad at D3 all you want if you're frustrated at the itemization / loot / skills, but realize the base of the game - arguably what's most important because you need it to build a great game from - is intact, working as intended and actually really awesome. The changes coming in 1.08 and beyond are possible because it took them so long to build the base of D3. Entire engines don't need to be overhauled, just new systems developed and plugged in.
TLDR; It's a much deeper process than pressing 'insert X amount of monsters here' and shipping.
This is what i wanted to say... from a guy who works in a software company i can say that it takes months to iterate over new ideas, flesh them out and polish them. Even if the idea is just a minor coding effort, it still has to go through levels of development, QA and meetings. This is just how big companies work.
You can come back any time.
The game is still basicaly the same though, so dont get your hopes up too high. If you didnt enjoy endles farming before, you wont enjoy it after the patch either, and no piece of software can change that.
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Twoflower-2131/hero/47336841
Maybe if you didn't throw a tantrum and leave the game you would have more of a clue as to why these fixes take so long. Maybe pick the game back up and play the PTR to see just what is being done. Then you could see just why it takes the time it takes...
The frustration lies in Blizzard's intransigence at recognizing D3's massive design defficiencies despite the howls of protest from their own community. Patch 1.08 only addresses what Blizzard's customers have been demanding for months. Blizzard should have been working on these changes a long time ago, so that any patch that contains an "id-all" and mob density can be rolled out a lot faster.
And lets not speak about Blizzard having high standards. If they did have such standards, D3 would have been delayed well beyond its May/12 release date.
No, but I have a pretty good idea. It's a lot.
Yep.
Meetings. So. Many. Meetings. So many.
Too many people. Too many people with their hands on everything.
Based on my work experience, I can tell you that Zero(pS) is asking all the right questions.
If the team was unbridled, independent, small and agile, they could iterate over these issues rapidly and release them just as quickly. This is not a small, agile team. It is a department of a massive international software company.
When people refer to "the programmers", the group they are actually addressing are coders, analysts, testers, QA teams, managers, architects, web developers, and many more, just on the software side. There are also technical writers, translators, community managers, customer service representatives, and many more just from a communication / documentation standpoint. There are infrastructure managers, server administrators, network specialists, release managers, database administrators, and many many other on the hardware side.
Each person has an important moving part that must hit a moving target at the same time as all other members of all other teams for a release to happen successfully.
It's a miracle anything ever gets done at all.
Bingo! Speculating about things that are beyong our cognitive limits mostly leads to frustration.
When are humans going to travel through time? When will we be able to travel through space (teleport)? When will God take a human form (if you believe in God) and come solve all earthly problems? Is there life after death? Do we reincarnate? These are all waaaay beyond our current cognitive and scientific capabilities.
The "howls of protest" say they should keep WotB as it is. They also ask the AH to be removed. Some of them want a full overhaul of the game back into its D2 state, or to have features from other games copied into D3. It's not as simple as people make these things appear to be.
I obviously meant "high programming standards", as in double, triple-checked for bugs. Let's not confuse conscient design decisions that took years of iterating (and that some people don't like) with "quality programming standards".
It's like WoW, when you weight the money invested against the money they make, you can ask yourself if Blizzard is planning on buying its own country.
My guess is, they rushed the game in a way that not only the game was flawed, but the codebase too, and now they need to refactor a lot and build tools that don't even exist, like a map & mob editor.
You do understand the mobs are random, right? It's not like they can just open up an editor and say "mob packs go here, here and here." It's impossible for us to know how much work it actually takes to make those changes without inside knowledge of their systems. More importantly, choosing the best mob density is a difficult game design problem that requires iteration, as we've seen. Things would be very different if they had one dude who knew what was best and everybody else just had to listen.
You are spot on. I was just trying to strengthen your point. There is much more to be accomplished by a software team than the end user will ever know. That's sort of the point.
I can say this much. The members of the Diablo 3 development team are just as frustrated with the speed of progress as you are. Believe that.
At the end of the day, the developers answer to management, the management answers to upper management, the upper management answers to the executives and the executives answer to the ... shareholders!
TL,DR:
The developers are not in charge of their own destiny. In every software company, there are inevitably obstacles beyond the control of the development team that block productivity. [Sources:] (1) every Dilbert comic ever (2) the movie Office Space (3) every joke I've ever heard about middle management (4) my life