Vaelflare shares Blizzard's view on why there aren't as many "easy" fixes out there as players would like to see.
Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.
The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way. Design takes time, Coding takes time, art takes time, QA takes time: you name it. There are also multiple steps in the pipeline for each and every proposed change and bug fix, no matter how minor, and what issues are being worked on in what order and by who can and do change as new matters arise. Sometimes extra testing is also needed for bugs that come back broken and need to be retested, because we didn't want them to go live with a bad fix.
While there may indeed be a list of known issues and bugs that run alongside some patches, for every one you are aware of, there can be dozens or hundreds being worked on behind-the-scenes that you likely never be aware of. We do things just as quickly as we can, but even then, it’s a process that takes time.
The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way. Design takes time, Coding takes time, art takes time, QA takes time: you name it. There are also multiple steps in the pipeline for each and every proposed change and bug fix, no matter how minor, and what issues are being worked on in what order and by who can and do change as new matters arise. Sometimes extra testing is also needed for bugs that come back broken and need to be retested, because we didn't want them to go live with a bad fix.
While there may indeed be a list of known issues and bugs that run alongside some patches, for every one you are aware of, there can be dozens or hundreds being worked on behind-the-scenes that you likely never be aware of. We do things just as quickly as we can, but even then, it’s a process that takes time.
Poll: Do You Participate in Public Test Realms?
Public Test Realms are a crucial part of patches. More testers usually means better results. Do you participate?
Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Public Test Realms are a very valuable tool for our development teams. They allow players to test out the latest game changes before they go live and share their feedback, which in turn helps us squash more bugs and ensure that the patch we release is of the highest quality possible.
Patch 1.0.7 is currrently available for testing on the PTR, so for this week's poll we want to know what you think about the Public Test Realm process. Do you enjoy getting the opportunity to play through content that isn't yet available? Do you prefer to wait until the patch is live? Have you ever participated in a PTR? Let us know!
Patch 1.0.7 is currrently available for testing on the PTR, so for this week's poll we want to know what you think about the Public Test Realm process. Do you enjoy getting the opportunity to play through content that isn't yet available? Do you prefer to wait until the patch is live? Have you ever participated in a PTR? Let us know!
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Why Demonic Essences Aren't Orange
We like the idea of the the Legendary ground effect being reserved for Legendaries and Set items. Otherwise, we feel it would be a bit emotionally draining to see the effect but discover that instead of getting a Legendary item, you only got a crafting material. (This is actually why we chose to make it a Rare item rather than a Legendary item.)
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
The Achievements That Are Still Bugged
I just wanted to jump in really quickly to let you guys know that the issues with these achievements are definitely on our radar. We’re currently working on bug fixes for some of them, and we’ll let you know just as soon as they're ready for primetime. We know that many of you are eager to complete these challenging achievements, but they won’t be ready for the initial 1.0.7 PTR build we have coming out, and we don't have a current ETA for when the fixes will be implemented. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Proc Coefficient
Thanks for taking the time to write this up. We agree that there’s not a lot of visibility in the game into how proc coefficients work and integrate with item affixes, and we’ve discussed possible ways to improve that. However, I wouldn’t say that they should simply be removed from the game. Proc builds with proper gear can be pretty awesome, but (as the OP noted) for balancing reasons it’s very important to have a scaling proc coefficient. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
We like the idea of the the Legendary ground effect being reserved for Legendaries and Set items. Otherwise, we feel it would be a bit emotionally draining to see the effect but discover that instead of getting a Legendary item, you only got a crafting material. (This is actually why we chose to make it a Rare item rather than a Legendary item.)
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)The Achievements That Are Still Bugged
I just wanted to jump in really quickly to let you guys know that the issues with these achievements are definitely on our radar. We’re currently working on bug fixes for some of them, and we’ll let you know just as soon as they're ready for primetime. We know that many of you are eager to complete these challenging achievements, but they won’t be ready for the initial 1.0.7 PTR build we have coming out, and we don't have a current ETA for when the fixes will be implemented. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Proc Coefficient
Thanks for taking the time to write this up. We agree that there’s not a lot of visibility in the game into how proc coefficients work and integrate with item affixes, and we’ve discussed possible ways to improve that. However, I wouldn’t say that they should simply be removed from the game. Proc builds with proper gear can be pretty awesome, but (as the OP noted) for balancing reasons it’s very important to have a scaling proc coefficient. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Archon InfernoFriday: First Impressions on Dueling
Archon InfernoFriday brings us a small preview of dueling straight from the PTR, alongside his personal thoughts on the subject and some PvP Wizard tips.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013..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.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013-
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Posted Jan 20, 2013-
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Posted Jan 20, 2013Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
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Posted Jan 20, 2013I can never truly believe how the truly ignorant choose to talk as if they know something.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013It'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.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013-
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Posted Jan 20, 2013Perfect 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.
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Posted Jan 21, 2013Sorry, software fixes are a bit more complicated than the fixes you're used to, such as "flip the hamburger so it doesn't burn"
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Posted Jan 21, 2013Nice 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.
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Posted Jan 21, 2013-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.
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Posted Jan 21, 2013-
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Posted Jan 22, 2013-
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Posted Jan 22, 2013Then 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.
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.