Diablo 4, Season 14: Plague of bugs”
D4 Season 14 officially has another title, can’t remember, can’t be bothered to look it up, what it will be most remembered for is the bugs and Blizzard’s initial dismissive response.
But HUZZAH! They released 3.1.1 and a hot fix, and an update to fix the patch, and then another update to patch the patch of the patch…
If you watch the video, or read the patch notes, it’s all good stuff – that should have been done at the start of the season – but there are still several issues that made me quit and not want to play the game again.
1) getting mythics is not hard, it’s just time. I had well over 100 even before the 3.1.1 fix, or this, above.
The first problem here is that 99% of them are garbage. The majority are for builds or even classes you aren’t using
The second problem is that even if it’s the right item, most of the time they will have 2 or even 3 bad affixes and you can only change one, so it’s just another salvage.
2) There is almost zero balance in the game, so this season Paladins are hitting an unpassable wall around pit 120, while rogues and barbies are blasting through pit 150 while chatting about the weather.
If you are not pushing the envelope, it doesn’t matter, but if you are, well, it’s a kick in the teeth. This in turn creates a cascade of issues:
Either you quit in frustration.
Or you push on and end up hating the game.
Or you make another alt, this time in the “S-class”.
I imagine, Blizzard being the donkeys they are, see this and say, “Oh look, everyone wants to be a barbarian, let’s buff barbies next season…” And the gits take the nerf bat to every other class!
The game is then overrun with one or two specific uber builds – not because they are the most fun, or they work for how ‘you’ play but because they are tanky and destroy everything.
To my thinking you stop playing ‘your’ game and are playing a template. Their temple (or maxrolls, some theory crafted perfection that relies on… grind and RNG. SO MUCH RNG, upon RNG, upon RNG, upon RNG).
Now, let’s assume you are OK with this. Needs must and all that.
3) Given the game supports 16 alts, the storage is next to zero. So you end up making alts to be banks storage. That lack of storage deters making more alts to play with.
4) Their frankly evil obsession with RNG and grind to the point way past toxic and into psychologically warped sadism (IMO). I have long believed they have a mantra (in Blizzard and across the industry) of “Keep them playing to keep them paying.”
The grind is not game design, it’s psychological mind games. The mythics raining down is just a dopamine fix to keep you playing. If they are useless, they are as much salvage dross as all the other stuff you leave on the ground, hmmm.
Say I have 20 generally useful mythics – including the grandfathers, all with willpower. I give in and make a whirlwind barbarian. And now need to farm more Grandfathers ‘cos wrong stats, I need strength, not willpower. They could make main stat dynamic, but they won’t, ‘cos they’d rather you grind.
That alone I find deeply objectionable.
But I’ll soldier on. I’ll make that barbie if it kills me!
It just means grinding Glint of Hope back up (fine).
Oh and getting glyphs to drop and back up to 100 (fine)
Oh farming charms and talismans again.
And then farming a million more charms to salvage so I can reroll the affixs ‘cos the build demands it.
I am not OK with this!
Oh and doing the last month’s progress all over again to get the war table back up.
I am NOT OK with this. The war table needs to be account wide.
The only reasons I can see for it not to be so are:
a) they are sadists
b) they are actively deterring you making a new alt
c) Keep ’em playing to keep ’em paying.
More exposure to the game increases the chance of shop sales. (If you are weak-minded, perhaps!)
I have 5 mythic talismans. All useless. Two because they are of the 3 unique charms equippable variety, the other three because they are for the wrong class or subclass. This is just bullshit. You should be able to reroll the talisman the same way you can reroll charms, and it should preserve its level (i.e. if you put a 6-socket talisman in, you get a 6-socket talisman out).
I don’t mind the grind, or the time sink, I had Insane in the Membrane in WoW back when it was still hard, had over 99 exalted before even BfA hit, but – increasingly – I get the feeling that Blizzard are taking the proverbial and laughing at us for being so stupid as to keep playing. I have a degree in psychology, I know exactly what they are doing in general, but when you get the feeling they are laughing at you, it’s time to leave. WoW is riddled with items with names and titles like “Insane in the membrane” (apt), “Waist of Time” and “Chestguard of Cognitive Dissonance”
Blizzard are notorious for never admitting they are wrong, and I’m actually gob-smacked they backed down this season – or did they?
It’s all down to conditioning, from dodgy ethics proposed by John Watson (who came up with the idea of candy by the tills) to BF Skinner’s operant conditioning, which, sadly too much modern gotcha game design is based on. Like a rat in a cage, as long as those mythics keep dropping, you’ll keep pressing that button. What’s less well know is what happens when they nerf them again, which they will. In the case of rats and pigeons, they have been so conditioned – brain-washed – to press the button they will literally starve to death pressing it and hoping for the drop – that’s been turned off.
Do not make the mistake of thinking Blizzard are suddenly the good guys and are listening, they only care about the metrics and the store sales, not the players!
RNG and Loot tables
Forget for a moment, contributory factors like higher difficulty equal more and higher level loot, bugs, or the likes of Blizzard’s FUBAR of, “LOL, we forgot to put mythics in the boss loot tables for our epic Mythic 3.0 season”. (WTF!)
RNG, Random Number Generator. In games like Diablo 4, this, well it’s a tad dishonest. There are so many levels cascading from this I can hardly count them all.
Let’s assume I want a mythic two-handed BiS sword, with strength, crit chance, crit damage and max life.
The chest opens, the boss dies, and loot spills out all over the floor, sometimes too many to even see. Every single item is then generated – rolled on the spot.
The first table is for the class being played (not sub class, that would be too easy)
Next it’s the number of items dropped
Then base item quality (e.g rare)
Then, if applicable, the number of affixes (e.g if rare roll, roll for range 3-4)
Then it will roll for each affix from a table of a dozen or more variables.
And each roll will have another roll for affix strength (e.g. health 1100 to 1500 to GA (greater affix).
And they you have whatever.
But it does not end there, in Diablo 4.
You can change one affix with the occultist, and you can pick, but the result is random from a table, with a range roll that cannot be a GA. You can lock that in.
Then you can go over to the Horadric cube and gamble by adding and removing affixes. So many more levels of chance and while great things are possible, you cannot lock any result down, so it’s a gamble, and another time sink. To keep you playing.
A better system would involve you saying I want: [this] and the game sucking air thought it’s teeth like some back street auto repair shop and saying, “Expensive job that, mate, I’ll need…” So off you go to play the game and gather ore, wooden, dragon’s teeth, gems, whatever.
But they don’t want that, they want gotcha! They want you to be exposed to players with wings (£21), a new mount (£21), a new pet companion (£21), a new…