Tomorrow, Blizzard will release a patch to allow people to salvage their Uber Uniques into special crafting materials to create the actual Uber Unique they’re hunting for (if they’ve been unable to find it). At the same time, they will be updating the drop rates of Uber Uniques for content outside of Duriel runs. However, the specified number of what this actual percentage will be is unknown. All this reeks of desperateness on Blizzard’s behalf as Diablo 4 continues to bleed a player base while other games like Last Epoch gains significant momentum with far better game play.
This blog post is going to talk about the utter failure that Blizzard has locked themselves into with what I call misguided KPI/accounting driven development. One of my beliefs is that Blizzard has a molasses level slowness for their feedback loop. By the time they’re ready to react, the problem already eats into their reputation as one of the premier game studios in the world. We can see some of these issues manifest in the way they’ve been designing the game as a FOMO style environment that has bad conventions reutilized from other games (like World of Warcraft) without really understanding how they were originally successful. These techniques in developing their game content continues to alienate their long time hardcore fans and made cynics of many of us, especially as they keep bouncing from owner to owner like an aged old whore just ready to spread her legs for the next buyer.
First, let’s start with the current season 3. Initially, it was continued a massive failure because the trap mechanic was utter bullshit (no one asked for traps) and that the follower felt impotent compared to the far more impactful vampire abilities of season 2, which had a higher player retention rate. While Blizzard did amend their stance on the two issues by effectively nullifying the annoying and pointless trap mechanics through allowing players to bypass it as well as buffing the mechanical companion significantly, the season pretty much is dead for the most part except for loyalists and those who just want to work on characters (like me). But the draw of the game on a longtail dependency through a misguided belief that was founded upon Diablo 2’s successful item grind in the form of highly desirable but virtually unattainable chase items has made the game taxing.
Personally, once the trap nullification went into effect and Vaults became actually enjoyable (especially because you don’t have to deal with a stupid end room boss), I find the most of the current content reasonable. My goal has been to try the new builds and main season mechanic. So in that sense I’m accomplishing that aspect. Where the game starts to fall off for me is when that stupid item hunt begins. I’m not even talking about uber uniques but even regular uniques that effectively define your build. While I’ve managed to find a lot of normal uniques in Vaults, it’s the ones from Duriel that are the ones that take your character to a whole new level. And that’s when I generally end up quitting because I simply get burnt out doing the same routine.
Let’s talk about the wrong psychology involved here. Previously, I described Blizzard’s RNG/carrot-on-the-stick philosophy for item hunts being the equivalent of Bozosort; it’s effectively, the least efficient way of doing things. Here, it’s more of an equation of believing that the game’s life can be extended through a rigorous item hunt defined through low effort using RNG rather than developing some new methodology to engage players or make the game more enticing in a creative fashion. They think this idea works because supposedly it historically had worked for them during peak World of Warcraft.
But those days are long past. Back when World of Warcraft came out, the company wasn’t as constrained as it become. Although they didn’t invent the MMORPG, they perfected the offering to the casual player base. That success inversely had been Blizzard’s ultimate downfall because it gave the company too much of an unhealthy ego and the influx of money slowly transmogrified the once quality first gaming company into a KPI/accounting driven firm. They’ve done it with Diablo 3 with their Auction House before that got out of control and probably was borderline illegal. Then you had one of the worst gacha games around in Diablo Immortal. And now they’ve done the same thing to Diablo 4 and it’s clearly killing the game.
The idea of having an anemic economy as well as irrationally minuscule drop rates for a game that has 3 month seasons make no sense. Most players probably will give a game like this a total of a week, maybe two at best total (meaning man hours where 40 hours is the equivalent of a week). You can break that down over time but I think I’m being very generous here. So what I’m getting at is that if this drop rate is anything less than 20% over a span of 80 hours, then this game is in serious trouble and the player base will call out Blizzard again.
But let me take a step back and talk about the whole 3 month season aspect. Let’s be real and admit that the game doesn’t have enough content to drive a whole three months for most people. And the end game can’t be just boring Duriel or Malphas runs just to get the best loot. That’s not fun. Especially when you have to just do boring content with no significant power gains to even reach Duriel or Malphas. Instead, you start to question your sanity and figure it’s not worth the effort and give up until Blizzard loses a huge chunk of their player base and/or get called out so that they’re forced to address the issue.
They did try to make somethings right in introducing the Malignant Powers from Season 1 as unique rings that you could farm from the Echo of Varshan. While the idea is correct in trying to take part of what was popular and making it semi-baseline is correct, the problem is that you’re going back to farm a single boss for an item. That’s not very creative. Since the vampire powers of season 2 were popular, does that mean that they’ll just be reintroduced as uniques? That’s my fear.
The real solution to the game here is to do what GGG did with their leagues and simply add them as content after a season finishes. I think I suggested this but it’s clear as day that the game needs Season 2 as part of the baseline moving forward. Similarly, I like the new Vaults and the little companion. You can half the power but still allow these things to be semi-useful. If anything they give us more activities, which this game desperately needs. That way when Blizzard fucks up massively like they did with this latest event for the Chinese New Year thing, at least there’s just more things to do.
But I think part of the problem here is that Blizzard can’t balance the game. They’re too afraid of giving too much power to the players, which is nonsense. They already fucked up World Bosses for season 3 in removing their higher item level aspect. That basically means that there’s less motivation to do them over time. It’s not like all the items were always great either. Since the stats for items are fucked up and require a whole season to address, World Bosses at least was able to help amend the end game hunt for better stats just a little bit. But you had that moronic community manager “complaining” that his character upon reaching WT4 able to do a World Boss and get item level 925 gear. Yet he completely missed the point in just thinking of the item level being the important aspect as opposed to the fact that the stats most likely would be bad.
I’d prefer to let the players be supposedly OP and be able to create more builds and not putting any effort into balancing each build vs just killing enthusiasm for the game because some idiot in the community or a no life encounter developer were butthurt that a boss was taken down in a second. People are still going to take down bosses in a second or will find out how so that’s a futile effort in preventing it from happening. It’s more important to make the game at least interesting so that players are motivated to play in providing a variety of content that allows players to feel that they are constantly progressing. Any other mentality will kill off the game, which is what I think is happening right now. But Microsoft did make a hefty cut into Blizzard. If another cut happens, I really hope that it comes out of that evil accounting department first.