New RWs confirmed in patch 2.6

The D3-ification of this game is happening—this X% chance for Y major non-skill effect buff to happen at random (vs. on strike or when struck) or inventing new long-winded names for special effects on a timer crap.

The tooltip for Metamorphosis is insane. This game wasn't designed to be this complicated.

I'm impressed at how poorly managed the game assets are that in one patch, they will have both copied and pasted runewords as well as mashed the functionality of what should have been two different runewords into one. It's a damn spaghetti code buffet over at ATVI.

Snakecharmed wrote: 1 year ago

This game wasn't designed to be this damn complicated.

That...I mean...D2 is one of the most complicated spreadsheet-heavy way-too-complex-to-fully-understand games ever invented.

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

That...I mean...D2 is one of the most complicated spreadsheet-heavy way-too-complex-to-fully-understand games ever invented.

That's true, but those calculations didn't bleed over into item mechanics and present the casual player with more complexity.

What they're doing now is adding more complexity and putting it in the UI, and I can almost guarantee something's going to go wrong with the items when players have to test these damn things in PTR, because why wouldn't that happen?

Snakecharmed wrote: 1 year ago

What they're doing now is adding more complexity and putting it in the UI, and I can almost guarantee something's going to go wrong with the items when players have to test these damn things in PTR, because why wouldn't that happen?

Isn't the point of a PTR to test things and see if things go wrong?

Oh, something's definitely gonna go wrong.
And players will find it and tell them.
And then they'll either ignore it and leave it broken or break it even more in a failed attempt of fixing it.

That's how it usually goes.

But yeah..sometimes, I think the only reason tooltips are as "simple" as they are (occasionally already a book), is because back in the day, they genuinely couldn't fit anything truly worthwhile and accurately descriptive. Hell, imagine tooltips actually listed out if/when/how stuff worked...

"+x max dmg..to the weapon base, not final..not to spells, physical attacks only!..but not all of them, doesn't work for

Smite or most kicks or ...."

"prevents monster heal..except not heal but only passive regen..and only if the monster isn't an uber..and only if this isn't used on your merc but you yourself hit with it..and only if you hit with the actual weapon, no use for spells"

You get the idea..

It's funny to read comments representing both 'meh, not gonna farm' and 'blizz breaking the game omg'.

Internet people love to complain about stuff they love!

SeanWhatsleft wrote: 1 year ago

Internet people love to complain about stuff they love!

What? you're telling me people on the Internet have controversial or just generally opinions??? Why is this the first I'm hearing of this?
LOL

SeanWhatsleft wrote: 1 year ago

Internet people love to complain about stuff they love!

I reread every post, and I may be mistaken, but I believe everyone who is complaining is complaining about the current state of Blizzard which they hate not Diablo 2 which is loved despite the current state of things.

JulieP wrote: 1 year ago

Isn't the point of a PTR to test things and see if things go wrong?

I'll start by saying I'm fully aware of how outspoken I am about these matters to a fault. I've worked on software teams across several different industries over the years, including some teams that were chaotic and dysfunctional, but never like this. The practices that have been accepted and even normalized in the game industry by both game studios and players alike disgust me. I'm glad I never worked in the video game industry. All it's good for in my book is polishing a résumé, because the work experience is often not good. Whenever you occasionally read articles about how burnt out people get in this industry, it all kind of makes sense.

PTR is a stupid idea and a lazy crutch for ATVI not having proper QA staff and dev and user testing procedures. If you poll thousands of users if not more for unstructured general feedback, you're going to get a ton of noise. The public does not have the capability or knowledge to perform or follow standardized/documented testing procedures, nor test against a controlled environment. Their only criteria is oftentimes whether they "like" something, which is completely separate from considerations such as the fundamental integrity or consistency of a new feature within the game's ecosystem, or actual bug testing.

Generally, maintaining the vision of the game should be the responsibility of the product manager, except in this case, the people who held the original vision of the game are long gone and you have a bunch of hacks who have more experience with D3 and DI and zero appreciation for D1 or D2 in charge now.

PTR also opens up the door for design-by-committee, which is already the bane of every creative director or product manager's existence, but now the committee is your entire player base, whom you will never be able to fully satisfy.

Furthermore, the PTR and production environments do not have the same controlled variables. IIRC, sunder charms were dumped into the player's inventory on PTR, which caused them to completely overlook the horking bug. No PTR environment would have caught that, but it was a comically predictable debacle on launch. Even putting a 50 life PComb grand charm in the hammerdin's inventory was a bad idea, because now you're doing the impossible and creating confusion, distraction, and speculation.

If your own internal QA is worth a damn, then the public is no longer your guinea pig (whom you also frequently ignore despite their sometimes valuable feedback amidst the noise). Nor should they be.

I've been a programmer most of my life, and I agree with most of what you say, but I would like to point out that no quality assurance at any software developer is really worth anything.

The point is that it isn't just game developers at fault; bad quality assurance is almost as much of a foundational aspect of software development as "Hello, World!" is to software development.

I'm not saying though that great quality assurance doesn't exist anywhere in software development.

[Edit]
To be honest, I think I'm just cranky because of how many software developers are seemingly in a hurry to break things, one way or the other, for no good reason. The kind of breaks that stall entire systems. The kind of breaks that could be caught by any real quality insurance stack. I could, but will not, talk quite a bit about how much developers, who I will not name, have broken over the last few years because some nutjob thought a new whizzy feature was more important than stability of the system.
[/Edit]

I get that with QA sometimes, so on some level, there should be people outside of your organization involved in testing. However, the way ATVI runs it (an unstructured PTR) to the number of people eligible to take part in it (the entire player base) is just as unhelpful. I also can't speak to whether they have any UX researchers working there (highly doubtful) to interpret the user feedback without the bias that a manager or developer would have, because that is a challenge unto itself: not just reading what a user says, but interpreting what they really mean.

As for as test sizes go, I was reminded of this while writing my last post:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-many-test-users/

Quality over quantity matters. Seeing how divergent opinions are for any game or other property across the entire userbase, it isn't that surprising that PTR is effectively useless with the flood of data from people who don't have a clear understanding of what they're supposed to be testing. But yeah, the main takeaway I want to convey is that the public should not be your guinea pig. I would be horrified at letting the general public pick apart the apps I've worked on in a public beta. That is an irresponsible and negligent practice.

That was a pretty good article, and I hard agree on "quality over quantity" when it comes to quality assurance.

A few users with a clear test strategy is better than hundreds or thousands never coming near the test strategy.

To be fair (not that that makes it any better) it isn't just a matter of QA being bad.

Having worked on plenty larger scale software projects as well, I can't help but echo the sentiment. QA and QC tends to be underwhelming across the board, to put it mildly. That's not an isolated thing to gaming. Beyond that however, so are all of the other departments involved in it. The simple sad truth is that most people work solely for a paycheck and not because they are in any way passionate about what they do. As a result, they typically scrape by with the bare minimum and that's it. Pretty much every company I've ever worked with or for has knowingly tolerated that behavior, depressing as it is for us few people with actual work ethics.

Adding to that, large parts of the world have more and more shifted to "quick and cheap" over "good" as a general approach to life, amplifying the issue on a company and industry level.

So as a result, where you used to be able to buy a polished, full fledged game in the past, you now tend to pay full price for some half-built bug-ridden beta-quality-at-best thrown together PoS and are expected to then buy expansion over expansion to slowly build it up to the content level of a full game while introducing even more bugs with those each time.

That whole phenomenon is essentially why the only game I am still genuinely looking forward to is Star Citizen because quick and cheap has gone out the window on day 1 there, since it truly is CR's no-compromise Passion project. Given, it may well take another 20 years to get done and may never truly get done as in turn the feature creap and ambition are just bonkers. But if and when it ever does...it shall be glorious. Hell, even what it is now is better than many a "full" game. Either way, I can't help but support projects with an actual priority on scope and quality and have already thrown significantly more money their way than I've probably ever spent on all other games in my life combined. Blizz in contrast will more likely than not never see a single cent from me ever again, with the only possible exception being my caving to "couch lazyness" and getting a console + console version of D2:R or D2:VR in 10 years as the nostalgia of D2 still outweighs the hate for Blizz (for now..).

I somewhat disagree on PTR solely being a crutch for bad quality departments though. No matter how good your quality department may be (spoiler alert: it never is), they are still inherently and largely rightfully focused on the functional correctness of whatever needs to be tested. "Does it do what it should do without blowing anything up?". If your design team didn't think through every Edge case - and that one is on occasion forgivable for something of significant feature scale - and you end up implementing something that in conjunction with these 6 long forgotten other things leads to some random new possible build combination that ends up being completely broken, you need true hardcore player nerds to figure that one out. And the best way to get those in tends to be via a PTR. Except you then also need to a) figure out how to sift nuggets out of noise and b) actually act on the worthwhile feedback.
Plus a (well built..typically not the case here) PTR does allow for true, reflective real world load testing which for large scale projects tends to also be something that your testing department simply will not be able to ever achieve and should not be expected to achieve.

Real user feedback is a valid, reasonable and valuable tool in software design and testing. One merely needs to also figure out how to differentiate between valuable feedback and QQ bullsh!t. Real world example:
"I know you don't know this (and you shouldn't) but for me to do that part of my job, I have to do this one thing about 100 times a day and the way your team built this, it takes an endless chain of clicks, navigation, filtering and loading to get there to where this alone will cost me my entire workday"
vs.
"I WANT THAT BUTTON TO BE BLUE!!!!"..."sorry mate, design adheres to company branding, can't make it blue without deviating from that"..."BUT I LIKE BLUE MORE!!!" (yes, that was an actual discussion I had with an 'expert').

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

yes, that was an actual discussion I had with an 'expert'

The word "expert" here does not have enough sarcasm marks.

The Death of expertise is actually a pet peeve of mine so I'll just say one thing related to the current state of academics: the ability to effectively apply a little bit of knowledge is far superior to "knowing" a great bunch of random b******t.

phantomotap wrote: 1 year ago

The word "expert" here does not have enough sarcasm marks.

The Death of expertise is actually a pet peeve of mine so I'll just say one thing related to the current state of academics: the ability to effectively apply a little bit of knowledge is far superior to "knowing" a great bunch of random b******t.

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

yes, that was an actual discussion I had with an 'expert'

I'm sure you guys are all too aware of this thing. It has a permanent spot to sit in in my brain.

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

I somewhat disagree on PTR solely being a crutch for bad quality departments though. No matter how good your quality department may be (spoiler alert: it never is), they are still inherently and largely rightfully focused on the functional correctness of whatever needs to be tested. "Does it do what it should do without blowing anything up?". If your design team didn't think through every Edge case - and that one is on occasion forgivable for something of significant feature scale - and you end up implementing something that in conjunction with these 6 long forgotten other things leads to some random new possible build combination that ends up being completely broken, you need true hardcore player nerds to figure that one out. And the best way to get those in tends to be via a PTR. Except you then also need to a) figure out how to sift nuggets out of noise and b) actually act on the worthwhile feedback.
Plus a (well built..typically not the case here) PTR does allow for true, reflective real world load testing which for large scale projects tends to also be something that your testing department simply will not be able to ever achieve and should not be expected to achieve.

I agree with what you said, and to better clarify myself, I didn't really intend to universally dump on PTR as a concept. However, the way ATVI uses it for D3 and D2R isn't effective. Its scope is too broad and unfocused. And yes, QA testing is indeed different from playtesting for sure, as the latter is more akin to UX research. I should have made a clearer distinction regarding that in previous posts.

Having gone through the Qualtrics survey for the 2.5 PTR, I don't see how they can effectively sift through the data that they collect from everyone. Now, they could perform more targeted research and probably have been to a degree with the streamers who have been introducing these runewords, but those streamers are inherently biased with a monetary interest in being able to produce unique or exclusive content for their channel, and they still won't be able to make up for the questionable decisions of those who actually work for ATVI.

The end result of things often not working properly despite lengthy PTR previews in previous patches doesn't give me any confidence that what they're doing is even remotely close to being on the right track for customer satisfaction. I might have a different opinion of PTR if ATVI were to pitch it as a preview platform rather than making it seem like they're soliciting feedback on a new feature and giving the impression that there are more things in scope for public evaluation than not. They do not need feedback from thousands of players. They need feedback from a select few players who represent a good cross-section of the player base and actually listen and act on their feedback in a meaningful manner. How they identify and communicate with those players for research and feedback is another story altogether, if they're doing it at all.

As for the other stuff about passion versus a paycheck, I agree that's an unfortunate reality of many things today as standards for a deliverable product have changed. Thoughtful innovation these days typically isn't going to come from an AAA game studio that knows the safe formula to making money. True dedication to a craft seems to be more strongly associated with independent outfits (and only occasionally from the larger ones when they're willing to finance it), but these independent outfits may not always be reliable enough to deliver on their vision—thinking here of failed Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects that eventually get labeled scams when the owners disappear after failing to deliver on what may have started as noble intentions.

Perhaps D2R isn't that unique in this regard compared to other contemporary games, but it also has the complicated distinction of being a remake of a 23-year-old game that advertised nostalgia and then tried to deliver changes that do not resonate with the player base that bought the game to specifically be an HD remake and throwback. All of that is in opposition to the more recent entries in the franchise, all while being managed by the people who are also responsible for the more recent entries in the franchise.

Queegon wrote: 1 year ago

phantomotap wrote: 1 year ago

The word "expert" here does not have enough sarcasm marks.

The Death of expertise is actually a pet peeve of mine so I'll just say one thing related to the current state of academics: the ability to effectively apply a little bit of knowledge is far superior to "knowing" a great bunch of random b******t.

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

yes, that was an actual discussion I had with an 'expert'

I'm sure you guys are all too aware of this thing. It has a permanent spot to sit in in my brain.

A classic.

Though I can't help but go "that's some lazy expert" every time I see it. :p

7 red lines? easy
In transparent ink? easy..I dare say every ink in existence is at least semi-transparent and doesn't cover 100% of the surface area..semi-transparent is still a kind of transparent
In green ink? easy..there's no requirement that prohibits color-changing ink. draw in green, room temperature turns it into a red line
Perpendicular? easy..the expert is the one who introduced the "to each other" requirement so just shut up and ignore that or at that point, go all advanced physics.."oh, they're perpendicular..in 7 dimensions..you just can't see the last 4 cuz you're a silly hooman"
In the form of a kitten? easy (artistic qualifications permitting)..a line that isn't straight is still a line
Balloon in the form of a kitten? outsource that part to literally any clown doing kids parties

Do you think we can expect more RWs or is this more like all that will be added?

Was expecting at least a couple more but I guess some of the pet youtubers may have

Fallen out of favor with actiblizz and have instead resorted to just scraping together some summary videos copying the other ones as they otherwise basically all do so..maybe not.