Three managers are working on Diablo IV a contract Live broadcast of a campfire chat Yesterday they say they’ll change the way patches are rolled out, after a surprisingly incremental 1.1.0 patch for the game suddenly undercut players’ builds (via IGN). And they promise that updates like this won’t happen in the future — at least, not in the way they did this week.
In the livestream, Associate Director Joe Bibora, Game Director Joe Shelley, and Community Leader Adam Fletcher acknowledged complaints about the patch, which significantly reduced player power for some builds. Of the downgrade, Fletcher said, “We know it sucks, we know it’s not fun,” and added, “We don’t plan on doing a patch like that again.”
In the short term, there is at least one quick fix coming to rebalance things after patch 1.1.0. Piepiora said the team felt the game’s nightmare dungeons were “too overdone” and level 100 dungeons were “too difficult” for most classes, leading players to pursue very specific builds.
That was never the intention, Piepiora said, and the team plans to knock those level 100 dungeons down by about 30 percent “later today via a hotfix” to balance things out. In other words, it will not only restore the player’s power to previous levels, but will make it a little easier to deal with the game world.
Shely said that the 1.1.1 patch version will balance things out further by adding more monsters to Nightmare Dungeons and some Helltide events, so that players at higher levels can enjoy mowing monsters as they move through them. In an upcoming Campfire Chat, scheduled for Friday, July 28th, Blizzard will talk more about this patch, which Fletcher says will be out in “a couple of weeks.”
Shely said the team is changing the way it handles game balancing updates, especially those related to decreasing player power, saying it won’t do it again without offering players some “compelling alternatives to pursue”. Instead, the team will allow these builds to remain under control so they can more accurately fit in with the overall changes. He said the team will also provide those updates predictably, like at the start of a new season.
Prior to future patches, Fletcher said that Blizzard would provide patch notes in the week prior to a release explaining the changes.
“Alcohol maven. Evil bacon lover. Wannabe social media geek. Travel guru. Amateur introvert. Pop culture nerd.”