While I agree 99% that "easy fixes" aren't actually that easy..

..if it wasn't that easy to fix the problems of mobs required for Champion's Collection / A Rare Phenomenon /  A Unique Collection achievements either not spawning, or not giving credit, then they damn well should have just removed them from the achievement, which would have been an easy fix.

Blizz: "Wahh, wahhh, this is hard work! We can't do fixes that every other game developer can do within a week. Stop complaining, you're hurting our feelings!"

Ryude, on 21 January 2013 - 12:46 AM, said:

This exactly, typical and keeping with the Blizzard direction, simple, obvious fixes are ignored for 2 years before being addressed...not in the best or easiest way but by removing them altogether and simplifying the game to ignore the problem.

OHHHHH right, nice excuse. THERE CAN BE. They never say there ARE hundreds, but in a seemly smart way leave in the air the POSSIBLE reason, without asserting it EVER.

Sorry for the language, but BULLSHIT!!!! Anyone can enter Diablo 3 credits and see there aren't MANY people involved with the troublesome features. There is an entire ARMY involved with superfluos stuff, but the significant stuff is the work of 20 lone rangers.

This thread is already shaping up to be as LOL worthy as the bnet thread on the same topic.

I can never truly believe how the truly ignorant choose to talk as if they know something.

I'm a recent computer science graduate with a minor in mathematics. I've been involved in a few different upper level software engineering courses which usually involve creating a peice of software from the ground up the way the "big boys" do it in the real world.

It's not an easy process, and what the blue poster said is spot on the money. While their are a lot of "easy" fixes to the game, they are not easy to implement. A lot of different things have to be taken into consideration aside from the actual software engineering work that goes on behind the scenes. Just think about this:

Usually a peice of code needs to be put through unit testing and integration testing just to get an idea of where the software "doesn't perfom as intended". Then once the developers have an idea of where things went wrong, they need to develop a solution. That solution needs to be implemented, documented, tested and reviewed. There is a lot of paperwork and documentation that needs to go on for each step. At any point in the software new errors can be discovered, more previous errors can surface and so on.

It's a process that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Sure its easy to say that throwing in a ladder system and starting everyone fresh would fix everything, and its reasonable to think both things could help but those are not "easy" fixes.

As someone who studied to be a software engineer, I know that they aren't just pissing in the wind here. If you ask my opinion, blizzard made a real mess of diablo 3 and it seems like they are working towards making the game better... it's just not something that is going to happen over night.

Removing ID on Rares. Easy fix. They changed the time before, just change it to zero. No excuses.

Benegesserit, on 21 January 2013 - 04:23 AM, said:

Perfect example of ignorance.  OK, so they change the variable that defines the time required to ID a rare to zero.  That means that you click on it, and zero seconds later it is ID'd.  Guess what?  That still means you have to click on every single rare to ID them, it's just that there is no progress bar to have to wait for before they are ID'd.  Actually, there is still a progress bar, but it moves infinitely fast.  And this all assumes that changing that variable to zero doesn't cause Inf or NaN variables elsewhere in the code that then have to be fixed.

Presumably what you actually want is for rares to no longer require identification at all.  That requires changing a whole lot more code that one variable, which requires time to code, time to quality test, time to debug if not working properly, time to alpha and beta test, time to fully document and pass on to the CMs who write patch notes, etc., along with many other things I'm certainly overlooking.

And then guess what?  At the end of that entire process, some fraction of the community throws a giant hissy fit because identification of items is a core part of the Diablo gameplay, and removing it is clearly ignoring and disrespectful of the history of the franchise.

Ryude, on 21 January 2013 - 12:46 AM, said:

Sorry, software fixes are a bit more complicated than the fixes you're used to, such as "flip the hamburger so it doesn't burn"

So many kids bought d3 on mothers money i see. CM are describing every word, but someone just can't understand, that game is not wand creation, but work of army of people, and one programmer can't write  some change and toss it into the game.

chelate, on 21 January 2013 - 06:58 AM, said:

Nice post chelate, it added a lot to the discussion and showed that you are very mature.

@topic
Blizzard already lost a lot of time developing features that never showed up in the game.
- Savage/Sell button on character.
- Rune changes.
- Team Deathmatch mode.
And there are some changes in patch 1.0.7 that should have come out already in a smaller patch.
- Boost of xp on MP
- increase on range of gold/globe pick-up
But they implement fixes for bugs that get midia attraction in a very low time, and always release a patch calling attention to it to try to block attention to other games, like TL2 or PoE.

"Fixes aren't that easy"

-RMAH exploit, bug, or error is fixed within 24 hours
-Broken skills take months to fix
-TYPOS in a skill description take months to fix

Yeah, blizz isn't full of it, at all.

Thing is, they may be right about the difficulty of these changes but there also are lots of solid reasons to be tired of their excuses:

- It's been eight month since the game is out. Many of those "easy problems" were spotted a month after release or sooner.

- The game has been in developpement for six years. Many of those "easy problems" shouldn't have been here in the first place.

- Those "easy problems" may be hard to fix for some random game devs; but Blizzard have the means, and they should use them since they gave up a bit on the gameplay to make more money in the game's design

- Last but not least: we can't deny they made change. Interesting changes since launch. Lots of changes. But those weren't the most important changes to do. And they f*cked up on pvp. And the next patch in sight still doesn't fix itemisation.

Seriously : legendary overhaul was a bandaid half assed change. It made things worse itemisation wise. Some legendaries are most have bis - others are completely useless and there are too few in the middle.

Parangon lv was bandaid change too: just to give the feel of xp when you're already done leveling and caping MF

The only change I was really impressed with was MP, until I found that MP1 was the most efficient way to farm and that being able to farm MP4 and aiming for higher wasn't really interesting.

I played every Blizzard's game. Every last one of them. And I must say, they have a history of delivering on patches. A major patch in any other blizzard's game I have played was always a game changer and a good reason to come back - If you ever have left the game in the first place.

But also, those were always smart improvements. Following a logic. Each patch paving the way to the next.

But with Diablo 3 it's like they are undoing with one patch what they have done with the other. It doesn't seem smart at all. I can't see the pattern or figure out where the game is going. Legendary best in slots to fix crappy itemisation, just after they said they wouldn't want legendaries to be BIS. Then Bound on account items in a game ruled by an auction house. Crafting that makes all other plans obsolete, but bump up plan drops.

And excuses.

Really, I have a hard time believing it's a Blizzard game. I've never thought Blizzard would ever stoop so low. For my favorite franchise of theirs to boot...

I hope I'm wrong and all of this will make sense in the long run. But I fear they don't have any real plan to fix the game in depth until first xpack.

Sure, I'll agree that seemingly easy fixes aren't always easy.  However the amount of work on the game that still has to be done is just testemant to how much the game should not have been released.  It's quite disturbing that they their excuse for not fixing things is something along the lines of, "fixes take a long time and we have a lot to do".  If they had done the work that should have been done for launch, they wouldn't be struggling with fixes now.

Most posts that i see are "cry-QQ" posts...Seriously people...Ok.The gane had huge problems at the beginning but now most are fixed...Also it seems people had forgot how crappy D2 was before MANy fixes came up and most of em came with an expansion.But i never saw anyone cry back at the time(well the playerbase was lower but more mature).By the way if so many people say that it is "easy" to fix,why dont you go to blizz yourself and fix them eh?
Also,they fix something,people qq's about it.They dont fix something that doesnt need to be fixed,people QQ again......there is no pleasing...so much greed from little kids.....that is all i see

Maybe if the game wasn't online-only we wouldn't have so many complex problems to fix.

RMrulz, on 21 January 2013 - 04:56 AM, said:

Then change the cast time to .01 seconds. I firmly believe the only reason they haven't done anything else is that they refuse to get off their pedestal on how they want us to play the game. They think a mild compromise is a fix.

If they didn't code items to have a simple 0 or 1 flag on if it requires an identification, they've ultimately failed on the backend. If this fix isn't easy, it's the fault of horrifically bad coding.

Miltiadhs1989, on 22 January 2013 - 06:03 AM, said:

And yet Blizzard has the D2 expansion to learn from their mistakes. Vanilla D2 was better than D1. D2:LoD was better than Vanilla D2. But D3? Worse than all of the others at any point in their existence. They're making all new mistakes because they did things to the series that no one asked for and hasn't improved the quality of the game one bit. They left out so many of the positives LoD brought to the series. This Diablo team chose not to learn from the past.