Diablo 4: Season 14 and Blizzard/M$ Layoff Fallout Musings

I haven’t been blogging lately mostly because of being engaged in a creative writing project that has consumed me. I’ve addressed that aspect in a Bluesky post I made. But it’s impossible to avoid the various complaints over on reddit and to a lesser degree on Twitch regarding the disastrously received Season 14 of Diablo 4. Most of the problems are pointing to the Mythic 3.0 updates but there’s been arguments about how things should work, etc. where I could’ve easily have stated “I told you so.” But my form of “I told you so” has been simply to avoid this game and waiting it out until an actual season deemed worthy of playing shows up. However, the XBox big boss had did a massive cut in Microsoft for the XBox division for one reason or another (i.e. greed) and it’s hard not to glance over at the Diablo 4 team and wonder if they will be under the gun too.

First, let me say that the current season honestly offered nothing interesting to me when I first saw it. Even though there is a new season mechanic and boss, the bulk of it looked far undercooked or with little to no meat on the bone. What I saw was mostly a ton of nerfs for no real good reason outside of this being Blizzard’s typical inability to balance anything without providing a counteroffer. No new real builds, items, skills, etc. However, they did change one aspect that probably didn’t need an update: Mythics.

Calling the change “Mythics 3.0” the game turned the idea of Mythics into a quality attribute similar to primal ancients from Diablo 3. There were going to be a few catches here where you could only craft a single mythic and that the mythic drop rate would be abysmally low (probably around 2% or less given Diablo 3’s drop rates). The thing would be how using the materials to upgrade an item would reroll the item but give it perfect stats or how you would find an item of mythic quality that would provide the aforementioned stats. This would be slot based but class related to narrow the outcome.

I can’t tell you just how stupid this idea is.  Why would you add an additional RNG layer upon something that requires a good deal of RNG to find? I’ve said that a huge problem with Blizzard is the sheer amount of dependency on RNG as a way to provide a veil of content and progression. But it’s just a sheer waste of time. You should be rewarded for finding the super rare thing and being able to get the results you want once you farmed it. Why add another layer of frustration?

Again, I point to the idea that the game and Blizzard has a terrible abusive psychological relationship with its remaining player base. I mean if you really look at what’s going on here, this system is meant to inspire and play into a gambling addict’s wet dream. People who have severe mental illness for this type of addiction and abuse are going to love it. But the vast majority of players have decried it as being nonsensical.

I know the current director for Diablo 4 called for the need to have what people are describing as “aspiring content.” While I get the idea, I feel this idiot is merely parroting what a few streamers have being reiterating without providing actual concrete examples of how this ought to be implemented/executed. This to me is NOT aspiring content. It’s just lame, lazy and brain dead. They talk about how these changes are good for the health of the game. It isn’t. It’s an unhealthy, manipulative way in creating an abusive relationship with the player base. I wish more people realized this aspect and call Blizzard out on this problem.

Part of the reason I’m writing this is because I’m pretty infuriated about various posts that I’ve read on reddit. One idiot started knocking people about having 9 kids, 35 jobs, etc. I imagine this goof is some obese motherfucker with broken glasses, buckteeth and a nose nine feet long and whose odor can be detected from a galaxy away. But he’s also probably got mental problems because he enjoys the abuse like some Stockholm syndrome victim.

Another post started talking about how the core problem is itemization in the game. While the revamp back around Season 4 did move itemization in a better direction, there were very clear issues with the implementation. The biggest issue for me with itemization in Diablo 4 is that the affix pool is simply too big. There’s a lot of very obvious useless affixes that pollute the pool. I think because you can have up to four slots, you end up with this horrible large number of combinations that when you examine the math behind it, basically forces players onto a hamster wheel trap. Of course, prior to the revamp, the original Diablo 4 itemization already was quite iffy with the poorly conceived “damage ’til Tuesday” conditionals. But I would argue that the update only removed the conditionals but kept the volume of affixes.

But I think it’s worth cross examining Diablo 3’s affix system vs the one implemented in Diablo 4 to show why Diablo 3 was far less frustrating. Diablo 3’s itemization revamp made it so that most items would have four affixes, with a few guaranteed for legendary items and two secondary affixes. Specific resistances and less useful affixes were placed into the secondary pool and the main pool were kept reasonably clean such that each slot had specific purposes. In addition, having 3-4 guaranteed extra gear slots meant you could have more breathing room for spots to help fill out areas like critical strike chance without feeling hampered by breakpoints.

Then if you take the primal ancestral aspect, Diablo’s items generally would have the bulk of the things you needed where the Enchantress’ reroll system would get you pretty close to the ideal item. Also, with Kanai’s Cube, you could either reroll a specific item if you had the materials in the hope of upgrading something into a primal ancient or use primordial ashes to have the guaranteed upgrade. In both cases, the upgrades were mostly worth it and you felt rewarded.

On the other hand, Diablo 4 simply says fuck you because our developers are assholes. We have zero respect for the time and effort you put into our broken ass, lame, second rate, uncreative implementation of a game where we, as fanboiz (and grillz) of the D3 system have almost no lineage nor idea how to make this game great because of corporate overlords are holding a Magnum to the back of our skulls with a KPI mandate to demonstrate vanity numbers in the form of the ethereal notion of engagement. Whether or not that engagement will lead to actual purchases of our soulless transmogrification system or the equally worthless Battle pass system that everyone and their mother in the industry has these days is irrelevant in the scheme of things. But it’s a way to hide the general incompetence behind an effectively dead company living off the legacy of previous generations and a nostalgic brand name.

Did I just go scorched earth on this whole thing?

Here’s the deal. I’m frustrated. I’m not the only one but I can see a bad deal a mile away. I purposefully avoided the current season because I knew it would be a waste of my time since the developers decided let’s pull the plug on these people now that they were suckered into the expansion. It’s really bad will especially when the amount of content to compensate is so small and repetitive. I get more joy from a mobile game that has a 80s art format and is turn based more than I can from Diablo 4 at the moment.

When I look at what the expansion provided, I think it came out real lean. We got two new classes, a new zone and rehashed old content from previous seasons in the form of limited modifiers. The story itself was also abysmal and far too long and self indulgent. The final boss ended up being a god awful boss because they handed it to someone who probably works on WoW mythic raids and has no clue how to handle an ARPG boss. Fishing was just a bore. The cow level quest only would lead to a single transmog. The only thing that was semi decent was the Horadric Cube. But even then I think it was done poorly compared to Kanai’s Cube.

Here’s the reality. The game was thrown a life line. The itemization was still fucked up after the initial revamp because Tempering was too RNG based and Masterworking was lame. Most people ended up hating the direction seasons were moving because of the “Green Helltide” meme alone with the seasonal powers, which honestly were really good since they altered your game play and made playing a season worth it. But the thing is that they refuse for whatever god knows what reason to reincorporate these mechanics back into the game (probably game balance where these jokers can’t figure out how to balance anything). So the game has been the fucking same thing every season without really growing beyond a few mixed core changes.

But they can’t figure it out. They have no idea what to do and only have been looking at Diablo 3 to pillage and rape whatever dignity it had because the Diablo 3 team is creatively (and possibly morally) bankrupt at this time. They couldn’t even get the goddamn killstreak right. Just how idiotic are these people? It really shouldn’t be this hard.

They added SSF to the core game which probably was the only thing that was a decent option. But again who is the target audience? I think the problem, which I’ve stated multiple times over, is that there is a stupid, hidden mandate within that company to have an esports function in each game. That’s why this stupid game sees all these timed events and gauntlets. The leaderboard with the Tower made the game far worse because now people are going to complain even more about it. As a result, Diablo 4 will never be balanced because they have no idea how to test the mathematics properly, the multipliers are out of control and the sheer amount of RNG make it infeasible to make this game work. It’s basically going to be a perpetually broken game.

But let me further add to what I see as the problem. The idea of adding Torments was something almost everyone decried because it’s really a meaningless game mode when you think about it. Because the game was designed as an open world setting, splitting up players further by tiers defeats that purpose. Also, in certain circumstances, people can exploit this design (see the normal mode farm for season 11). I think the idea of having these Torments was to create a risk/reward system. So if you wanted a better reward, you needed to take a higher risk and push yourself.

I think when they added more Torment levels they simply created more work for themselves since now you’re forced to balance for various difficulties, which is almost impossible to do with the way the game is setup. I think what they really needed was more customization in terms of various settings like monster difficulty, loot amount, etc. that gave players more agency in their experience with the game. Maybe some of this would be prohibitive in terms of player interaction like perhaps players who chose certain high loot settings should not appear on leaderboards in a kind of opt-out choice. Or maybe some players prefer dealing with dense monster zones. But I dislike how these options never were really provided and that they tried to give a blanketed type of difficulty across the player base. Even harder than balancing a game is trying to appease a wide range of people. Their current methods though simply aren’t working and they need to look at that aspect badly.

Going back to the mythic 3.0 update, it’s fairly clear that it can’t stay. I think they need to rollback the change completely and go back to the drawing board. The PTR itself wasn’t enough to indicate how badly this update was to be received but for a thing of this magnitude, they really needed it to be a seasonal mechanic rather than a core change. More than likely, they’ll probably end up readjusting some parameters like increasing the drop rate, which really doesn’t resolve the core problem of how badly this new system is fucked up. And you know that I’m mad because I’m cursing here.

But that does turn my attention to the pitch forks and torches being raised at calling for the heads of those reprehensible for this update. A lot of players are vehemently against this change to the point where they want this individual and/or team to be wiped out. Considering that the layoffs just happened and that the head of the XBox division just made it clear that they’re looking for more heads to cut, these people should be worried about their necks. Now, I don’t know if this was a calculated internal strategy on their part to continue this schizophrenic, abusive type of up one season, down the next season delivery. If it is then they should be pushed out because the culture has to change in terms of this cycle.

I know some people are more compassionate than me in this regard but it’s really hard to feel sorry for people who intentionally waste your time and add frustration to your life for no reason. They have to be aware that these changes aren’t what people want and that they aren’t doing anything to really add new content to the game. It feels more like optics with the way they are pushing out changes to show management that the game is being iterated upon. But it’s impossible to offer praise when you see say GGG push out a league with loads of changes and with less funding but not point to that and say, “How come they get more with less?” (btw, I don’t play Path of Exile 1 or 2 but even a blind squirrel can find a nut as they say).

Ultimately, the thing is that I still want the game to do well but my patience with the developers, the game and Blizzard itself has dwindled to almost nothing. I’m at the stage where I kinda wish they’d just fire the whole Diablo 4 team, offer a massive refund to anyone who bought the game and the expansions, then put all the effort into improving Diablo 3 because it’s less of a broken game that still feels unfinished but more satisfying. Now, if they could only get rid of those shitty Challenge Rifts and Mastery Dungeons….