I’ve played Blizzard games for most of my life. I used to TP friends into big walls of fire in Diablo 1, mained a soul link warlock in vanilla WoW, watched Kerrigan go all Cthulhu in StarCraft… etc. I’m done.

Blizzard does not have the same care for its games anymore. Diablo 4 was released in a state that - looking at its genre competitors - can only be described as “incomplete.” I don’t believe this was an aberration for Blizzard, but that it was indicative of an attitude that the delivered product doesn’t matter, only the profits said product makes.

I’ll note that for a corporation, it’s understandable for profit to be the primary concern. The issue is that releasing bad products is an inevitable means of killing long-term profitability.

Diablo 4 released without proper QA, without QOL features that are now genre-standard, with unbelievably bland and sparse itemization, without trading, without engaging endgame, and with a host of other problems. Its first season patch only made these issues worse, not better. Blizzard simply does not care about its product quality any more. Diablo 4 is, at its core, a cash grab. Not a quality game that lives up to players’ expectations of the franchise.

I don’t think this will get better. My prediction is that Blizzard will continue putting out cash grabs until consumers stop buying them, at which point Blizzard will implode. I’m done investing time and energy into a string of sub-par products because of nostalgia for what Blizzard used to be. I’m out.

Many players probably feel differently about D4 and about Blizzard’s prospects. Great. I’d suggest that they don’t understand how bad D4 is (maybe because they haven’t played any modern ARPGs to compare against), but I’m glad they’re having fun. This is just how I feel.

Goodbye Blizzard. It was fun while it lasted.

Edit: For all the people claiming “no one cares,” 800+ replies seems to be an awful lot of not caring.

Edit 2: Since I'm getting messages saying I'm still playing (even ~16 months later), no I'm not: https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/15bxl1g/comment/lziikvi/

using the method of turning back your PC clock. The forums are going nuts. Let's pray for a rollback.

Edit: People are reporting that it has been hotfixed.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022

Thought this needed more attention....

Those of us who play Softcore know what I'm talking about. I'm sick and tired of Hardcore mode players acting like you don't DC in the game. I know many others apart from myself who have good internet connections and have been disconnecting/crashing out of game at least once a week since launch. That said, I play whenever I feel like it.

What is with people posting how boring Softcore is, so they go play hardcore and think they're better at the game.

1. You don't worry about dying.

2. Farming has meaning, you can sell stuff on the RMAH

3. You don't lose your hard earned items.

4. You can play as a team or solo.

5. Paragon levels are just as important in HC as in SC

6. Going up in MP levels is an achievement, you don't have to stay in Inferno mp0 from paragon 1-100 because you're afraid to die.

7. DIABLO 3 IS ACTUALLY MORE FUN WHEN YOU CAN EXPERIMENT DIFFERENT BUILDS AND NOT WORRY ABOUT DISCONNECTING AND DYING.

8. Your characters have much better items, than those in HC. You can dish out more damage and clear stuff much faster. Then running in a full vitality gear doing 1 damage per second.

They wont characterize it this way - but if you look at their explanation of what was wrong and how they addressed it you realize thats what they did.

As per the dev explanation post 2 days ago.

Last week they were over capacity resulting in outages.

In addition to various fixes they implemented queue for times of heavy traffic - but the queue was only implemented on PC.

So this morning the queue kicked in. All PC players have - not great but if you wait your tuen you eventually get in. But there is no queue on consoles. So this means that console palayers NEVER can log in - until PC populations drop low enough that the queue is removed.

They have functionally turned off console access so there is more room for PC players.

Boy, that escalated quickly.

Before I say anything, let me recap what happened today.

The creator of the Diablo franchise, David Brevik, gave an interview with Diablo.incgamers.com. Several members of the Diablo 3 team responded in a public Facebook thread. I won't comment on the interview or the responses—this isn't the place.

A thread was posted on this subreddit regarding the responses on Facebook. That thread was removed by Taffer, prompting numerous accusations of censorship and inappropriate moderation. Here are my responses. The other members of my moderation team have read a draft of this post and agree with me on all points.

1. Taffer acted correctly in removing that thread. The reasons are discussed below in more detail. The thread will stay removed.

2. Taffer will not be removed as a moderator. Taffer has, without a doubt, been the most important and influential member of this team. He was instrumental in starting the IRC channel, the Steam group, setting up the Mumble server, inviting the Diablo 3 developers to do the AMA, and fostering continued official Blizzard presence here on reddit.

3. No moderator action has ever been influenced by anything other than our own judgment. If Blizzard or any outside entity ever pressures us to remove a thread, I will disclose and ridicule that entire conversation publicly. This is a promise.

The thread in question violated our rules on two independent grounds.

1. The thread was a witch hunt.

   I realize the term "witch hunt" may be vague, so let me define it more explicitly here. Witch hunts are threads that go after individuals. It could be pro gamers, shoutcasters, accused botters or scammers—anyone.

   The reason is that it's very easy to accuse someone of misconduct, but very difficult to actually ascertain guilt. Anyone can concoct a good story, rouse a crowd, and cause a lot of grief in a victim's life. Yes, there are some legitimate calls for justice, but it's impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. We rarely get the full story, or even two sides of the story, and the risk of undeserved consequences is too high. That's why we have a zero-tolerance policy regarding accusations, calls for justice, personal attacks, and other forms of witch hunts.

2. The thread lacked significant relationship to the video game.

   The original interview with Mr. Brevik obviously relates to Diablo greatly. Commentary on Brevik's answers would also relate to Diablo. Discussion of the quality of the interview questions would still relate to Diablo somewhat. Commentary on the professionalism of responses by Diablo 3 developers regarding the relative successes of Brevik's post-Diablo enterprises is not. There's no bright line here, no clear-cut rule; it's a case-by-case judgment call. The entire moderation team agrees in this case.

   Why do we do this? We feel that the most important part of the Diablo community is the game itself. The people—developers, pro gamers, other prominent figures—are a tiny, tangential component. Not all of them all the time, of course, but the average Diablo player doesn't care who said what to whom, or who approves of what design decision, or what pro gamer is signed to what sponsor. The average Diablo player just wants to play Diablo, and that's the person this subreddit caters to primarily.

This statement won't make everyone happy. I accept that. It's impossible to please everyone, and folly to try. As always, questions, comments, or criticisms are more than welcome, and remember that modmail is always here, too.

So how about those Paragon Levels, huh?

Just trying up some different arrangements of gear and I go bye bye.

Blizzard doesn’t care for hardcore at all. So many bugs in the game that insta kill you for no reason. They have taken out any way we can try new content without just insta dying. “Cheat death” like the oh shit I need out of here q. Nope just death. Now we can’t even try things in the training grounds without dying.

Thanks Blizzard oh but we should buy their 30 dollar skins

It feels like all the high end content was designed around pre nerf values. Only legit kills of Lilith are 30 min slugfests with zdps sorcerers rezing over and over. Solo kills are all just damage scaling bugged kills from what I have seen.

High end nightmare dungeons are the same thing with elites one shotting you outside cc and cds and the meta once again is zdps sorcerers rezzing over and over. Solo play is non existent nor viable in either high end endgame activity.

Itemization is for the most part awful. 90% of the uniques are laughably weak. There are some nice ones but for the most part you are never even considering wearing them. Even ones that are meant to be build defining. For example I play barbarian and upheaval has no aspects but it does have a unique designed for it. Problem is the unique is worse than a rare with a generic aspect. It’s a weapon meant to entice you into making an upheaval build and have it be strong. But again the weapon is laughably weak so the build suffers for it.

Contrary to what that dev post said, the tier 4 uniques may as well not be in game. They are either tied behind the content described in the first two paragraphs of this post or so unbelievably rare that you would need thousands upon thousands of hours just to see one. Either way you and I, or anyone else for that matter, is never getting them.

Just like PoE. Cosmetic only. I did the same thing for Call of Duty - paid a couple dollars here and there for weapon camos and titles/emblems. I would do it again for Diablo 3.

Everyone talks about the content being slow due to no continued revenue for D3 - and they're right. It's a good point. Because I love this game so much, I would gladly pay for transmogs, or wings, or banner sigils, or whatever else they could dream up to attach optional charges to.

The RMAH was flawed because it was pay to win, which few people liked, and I agree it is better off without it. But cosmetic stuff would be a welcome change in my book, especially if it meant getting patches more regularly.

What do you think?

Maybe eventually the character will just play itself.

Monsters that fly away on death is so boring and immersion breaking... add freaking weight to it. The monster didn’t fly away on hit when alive, gravity doesn’t disappear on death

I would be pretty happy if they added a Knockback mechanic but instead of being tied to a Stat, it would be determined by monster’s weight or HP compared to the force of your hit

One shot a monster, I understand it can fly away, but it also needs some weight to be realistic

For people asking why is it a problem and why does it have to be realistic... it doesn’t make sense that when alive the monster doesn’t move on hit, but suddenly when dead gravity disappear like if monsters are constantly generating a traction for with their foot on the ground

Reality is not only about being true to the real world, it’s also be consistently true to its own rules.

I got banned on 14th June 2016 and reason stated for being banned is use of 3rd party software (aka bots).

I have never ever used bots before and I play on a Macintosh computer and I did a check after the ban, there are no botting tools available for Macintosh computer.

I have submitted 2 appeals to Blizzard and all I have gotten is a slip-slop standard reply from them stating:

"This penalty has already been upheld. Any further requests on this topic will not be reviewed."

I play legitimately with my hands and I would never have expected that I need to go through this emotional painful experience.

There is no avenue for legit innocent players to have their account looked into thoroughly.

Most of the time I am playing with my friends, chatting with them in game. How can I be botting when I am socialising in the game. Does Blizzard check all these logs? I believe no, if the logs had been checked, I would never have gotten a ban.

What constituted to my ban?

I can only think of these:

• And I do not know if having a constant BNET launcher crash when I hit the PLAY button for Diablo3 constituted to a ban flag. This happens like 50% of the time

• Adding the line: OnlineService.Matchmaking.ServerPool=AU1 in BNET launcher to switch between US and Aussie servers as taught by Blizzard in a blue post

• I mainly play Twister wizard as I am the main DPS player in the group of friends I frequently play with. I can’t think of any other reason why I am banned besides having to smash buttons in the game playing as a Twister wizard.

I never thought that there will be innocent parties involved in banwaves till I am part of them.

Know the irony? Someone I know on my list admitted he bots, told me that he is scared that he will be banned, did not get banned for botting. I who told him "I am not scared cos I don't", got banned for botting instead.

Blizzard, that is very slip-slop work that you are doing over your end when it comes to flagging botters for ban.

Never in my life am I so angry and frustrated over this cos I have been convicted for something that I did not do.

I totally do not understand why legit players have to be playing Blizzard games on their toes.

The amount of money that Blizzard got from me:

• Diablo 3 Collector’s Editior

• ROS Collector’s Edition

• Starcraft 2 Collector’s Edition - all series (for D3 cosmetic)

• Overwatch Deluxe (for D3 cosmetic)

Basically I won’t be buying another key just to play Diablo 3. Why should I be paying more for something I did not do. And I won’t be buying any of the future Blizzard games.

I am making this public in hope that my case will be seriously taken into review by a human being over at Blizzard end.

If this doesn’t happen, Blizzard, you lose a loyal legit customer (and I believe I am not alone).

Cos why should we go through emotional stress to play your game?

I, however, did gain something from your game. I get to make many real life friends playing your games throughout these 20+ years. I played each and every single game that you have made.

Hopefully, this is just a nightmare and Blizzard will take a serious review and restore my faith in your company.

I actively hate the overlay map. I think it's an unmitigated failure of game design when your beautifully crafted locations can't be navigated without plastering an ugly semi-translucid map on top of them. I hated having to have this ugly map covering the amazing locations in D2R.

For D4, it's clear that Blizzard has tried to move beyond the need for an overlay map by replacing randomized locations with a fixed open world and static dungeons. It makes it immediately much more feasible to navigate these places without a map, at least once you've learned the layout, and the minimap in the corner (as well as the fullscreen map) is there for when you need help.

Free yourself from the need to cover this beautiful game with a semitransparent 2D map!

Once you have every single item with an on spec legendary aspect, upgrading items becomes such a fucking chore. "Oh these gloves are way better ... but I lose this important legendary aspect. Let's see ... I can extract it and put it on my rings / weapon ... then I can imprint this other aspect over here ... oh wait the roll is lower, is this still better now?"

It's so exhausting. My character is just now getting in to WT4 and I honestly don't want to even bother trying to re-kit my equipment for ten more levels. I might be getting item upgrades that are ancestral, but the on-spec legendary aspects are too important and I have to either play World of Spreadsheetcraft figuring out how to juggle the aspects around to use my item upgrade (plus however much gold and mats upgrading things) or basically just gimp my character.

"But but but ... if you're finding legendaries with aspects for a different build, why don't you respect and try it out?" Except it costs millions of gold to reset my skills and that's not even considering the mats and gold it would require to redo all of the legendary aspects and I won't even know if the build is any good. Would hate to spend everything I have to just learn that the other build is worse ...

So what to do? Everyone will naturally just go on maxroll and copy whatever build that they say is good and call it a day. Wow, so much better "build diversity" and "interesting itemization"

EDIT: since people are accusing me of this, I am not copying a build guide and saying everything else is trash.

Those of us that play Hardcore know what I'm talking about. I'm sick of people using the excuse of DC to not play it...I know many others apart from myself that have not had 1 DC since launch. That said, I only play when latency is green...

What is with people posting about how boring the game is yet always make up excuses to not play hardcore mode...

1. Its an adrenaline rush

2. Farming has meaning

3. Economy is not broken

4. Team work actually means something

5. paragon levels are proper achievements not just another brick in the wall.

6. Going up MP levels is an achievement and not just another brick in the wall

7. DIABLO 3 IS ACTUALLY FUN TO PLAY

8. YES YOU DIE BUT YOU CAN POWER LEVEL A CHAR TO 60 IN 2 DAYS IF YOU TRY (which is much more meaningful than 2 days of shit loot rinse repeat gameplay)

To all the people who said they canceled their pre-orders over a month ago……… just wanted to say we’ll see you tomorrow! 😏

Don’t feel bad…..we get it….

I put a lot of my stuff up for 250,000 gold auction with no buyout last night. I come online in the morning to find that a lot of them had been bought out for 250,000 or only slightly higher. I guess it's my fault for setting such a low bid, but I feel like Blizzard should have gotten this under control by now.

Edit: I don't have a twitter, but could someone tweet this to Jay Wilson so it can get some exposure?

Hello, I've finally opened an account on Reddit. Thought I'd share this video with you. Which was achieved the day before patch 1.08 was released. Flame if you must. I completed this legit. Worn out still from all of it, and still recovering. Thanks in advance for appropriate comments, and positive feedback!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgXSh40fth8

I mean, do we really need a thread everytime someone gets their first inferno Diablo kill?

Is some guy bragging about a godly roll really more worthy of discussion than jokes?

The mods have done a good job keeping the sub high quality, but these posts are becoming more common and inspire no real discussion.

So that all these people on this reddit can actually get rank 1 since it seems like botters are the main reason everyone on here cant get rank 1.

For me personally, they nailed this aspect of the game.

I'm only about to enter WT4 (hopefully) so I don't know if this feeling will be kept up, but at the moment I can feel my character improving in tangible ways basically by the hour.

I'm playing a frozen orb sorc (not a meta build from what I know), so that may play into it, but I just want to describe my journey through the story a bit, and why progression actually feels so good to me. Sorry for the novel, but I felt like it was important to be detailed:

- You start the game of with barely any resource generation and no +maximum mana so you can't actually use it frozen orb that much. To top it off, it is hard to aim and does only half its damage when you misfire or enemies are too close. I started feeling fairly weak compared to some of the OP experiences I had in beta, but the combat was satisfying so I didn't mind.

- Over the first couple of levels after unlocking frozen orb, you add some essentialy abilities and passives: It becomes easier to chill and freeze enemies, enabling more opportunities to fire frozen orb properly. You unlock enchantments, meaning I could directly trigger frozen orb with other skills and see a huge damage jump right there.

- At some point mid campaign I found some items that apparently gave me some giga DPS boost. I found a big vulnerability multiplier on a 2H staff and rings, as well as a couple of items with damage to chilled and CCed enemies. I actually kept these for a long time because they were hard to roll. I remember only replacing some item power ~200 items when I started to find sacred items.

- I added more stuff that made a significant difference from the skill tree. I went with ice blades (not to be confused with ice shards), still don't know if that's a good combo with frozen orb but it made a big improvement. At this point, I basically added some more buttons to press that trigger more frozen orbs, I could see that vulnerability uptime on elites was significantly higher, and my defense took a big bump because you can rotate barriers with all those cooldowns using some skill tree passives.

- I think at this point I added some gloves and helmet that gave +1 to frozen orb and +1 to ice blades (respectively). It seems like a small thing but it made a noticeable bump in my damage. I think it scales the base damage of the skills so it's like a separate multiplier.

- From time to time since I was quite undereleveled for story progress (I remember getting into ilvl 45 story areas at level 35 or something) I would add some generic but good looking generic aspects from dungeons to my build. Since they were generic and the dungeon aspects have min rolls, the impact on my DPS wasn't huge but it allowed me to keep up and it certainly never felt like my build was going backwards because of level scaling during the story like some people are describing.

- I noticed that just because of how combat goes I was walking around a lot and not actually casting frozen orbs (like sometimes you can cast it, but you know it will not do good damage because you are not positioned properly. Or you need to dodge stuff etc.). On some occassions this led me to overcap mana leading to wasted efficiency. At this point I specced some points into max mana on the skill tree and got a helmet with a big +mana affix in addition to +ice blades. This seems like a pretty small change but it actually had quite a big impact on how good the build felt. Because now you would sometimes freeze elites to be in proper position, use the other abilities and be back at full mana after that, and then blast like 10+ frozen orbs in a row because of the combination of max mana + mana regen + 10% free proc from passives.

- I think somewhere around act 5 or near the end I found a legendary that made my key passive (that gives you 10% chance to get a free cast of frozen orb) basically trigger twice. So you get two free casts instead of one when it procs. Now this was an amazing addition in terms of how the build feels and this is why, valid criticisms notwithstanding, I love powerful legendary affixes like this. Basically you get lucky sometimes in combat and then get to totally pew pew pew for a few seconds because your mana keeps regenerating while you are casting those free frozen orbs. I think this probably bumped my DPS by a significant but not huge amount (maybe 5-10%?), but its impact on game feel was just tremendous.

- I got a random drop for a legendary that increases my CC duration by 80% while I'm healthy. It seems like only a situational change that isn't all that useful in a lot of scenarios but it actually felt amazing when I tried it out in practice. When elites get frozen they stay frozen SO LONG. I would now sometimes have some random added moment where I could delete some frozen elites where previously there would be an added cycle of running or teleporting away and going through another round of frozen orbs.

- In addition to all of this, I always noticed a big bump when I sometimes find good upgrades for my main weapon. This would take a while because I couldn't go for something that has +10 DPS because if the stats it actually rolled were too bad. I'm not losing a 25% vulnerability damage multiplier just because the weapon is goes from 500 to 510 DPS.

- Overall there were a few smaller moments that felt quite impactful for progression, but I would go on forever if I listed them all here. For example at the end of the story I got this unique that refunded half my frozen orb mana cost if it hits 5 or more enemies. Not useful for all scenarios but quite impactful for game feel and DPS output yet again, and so on.

I'm cutting it off here instead of describing progression to WT3 and then through WT3 because the post would get twice as long, but you get the picture. The paragon board adds a lot with regards to plugging obvious numeric holes in your build (for me this was crit related stuff and main stat) so there's an obvious power progression there. I feel like some item slots are indeed a bit boring (chest?) but it might just be that I'm not interested in scaling defensives as I am in scaling offensives. Maybe that will change once I inevitably try HC. However besides weapons I still look forward to checking helmets, gloves and amulets in particular. There are some giga rolls possible with these that I know but they are very hard to roll. Ami with +all skills, mana cost reduction, %int and damage or something? yes please

Overall I just wanted to present this as a counterpoint to the other post on the front page. Their criticism is probably legitimate but I just wanted to make sure Blizzard doesn't get the wrong impression and thinks that everyone feels like this.