Kind of amazing how badly Blizzard has been torpedoing their own games here this summer between Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4. First it was them announcing that their PvE plans for Overwatch 2 were being majorly scaled back, PvE of course being the main reason for Overwatch 2 to exist a sequel instead of just updates for Overwatch 1. Now, they have managed to torpedo Diablo 4, with what is one of the worst patches ever released for a game, filled with poorly thought out rebalancing that hurts the 99% of normal players while not touching the 1% of players at the top using the very best builds. I've seen former Blizzard devs calling them out for how bad the patch is, including Mark Kern (lead producer on Diablo 2 and lead director on Vanilla WoW), and the game's user review average has plummeted to 2.7/10 on PC and 2.5/10 on PS5, down from apparently about 5/10 before the new patch. Xbox sure does have their work cut out for them repairing both Activision and Blizzard after the acquisition closes.
I've seen this before. Devs will be too data focused, watching the analytics and falling into the fallacies of survivorship bias and other errors.
— Grummz (@Grummz) July 20, 2023
You CANNOT just look at the analytics, you must take player feedback into account to really understand the numbers.
We didn't have…
While making Diablo 2, we used to say “balance is overrated.”
— Grummz (@Grummz) July 20, 2023
Diablo was fun because of all the unbalanced crap you could pull off.
Diablo 4 should not try to overbalance everything to spreadsheet accuracy.
It’s not that type of game, and just results in clinical sterility.
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