At long last, running 8 months behind schedule, a mere 16x
longer than estimated, the 1.13 Patch hits the PTR and what it tests better
than anything is player patience.
Forums are billowing with outrage over the lack of new
content.
This is what we've waited
for? This is what we get for all the
thoughtful, well-researched, well-written patch suggestions that Blizzard asked
of us? This is what you killed the
ladder economy for? This is what you
skipped a reset for? This is what you
taunted us, month after month, with "soon" for? Copy/pasted patch notes add insult to injury.
It appears, however, that they did have good reason to
postpone the ladder reset. Patch notes
claim and reports confirm that they have indeed..
- Fixed an
item dupe epidemic bug.
For players, the best news out of this patch is that an old
dupe method that had been causing a lot of realm instability and lag has been
removed. A reset would have been
meaningless with duping run amok. Of
course, by launching this change on the Player Test Realm, they've given dupers a cue to ramp
up production and build stock before the patch goes live on the standard
realms. So, if the realms have been
especially unstable since the PTR launched, you know why.
Probably the most troubling news, that Blizzard hasn't let
on, is that they've known about this dupe method for a very long time, and they
let it go unchecked. They haven't wiped
any accounts or deleted any items or banned any IPs. Why patch it now? Was the dupe fix originally part of the patch
or did it only get incorporated recently?
We may never know, but it is the only meaningful change in the patch so
perhaps fixing the dupe method was its primary purpose.
On the other hand, the method has seen an exponential growth
in use over the past year, which may have finally helped tip the scale from
acceptable to not. I speculate that when
the patch was first discussed 8 months ago, someone who held the dupe got spooked
and decided to sell it around in a last minute effort to squeeze a few more
dollars out of it, not expecting the buyers to have more than 2 weeks with
it. Whoops!
Duping isn't the only thing that's been on the rise over the
last 8 months though. It's almost like
once Blizzard got started on this patch they forgot about everything else. It's been over 9 months since anyone has been
banned for game spam and I can't remember the last time they really laid the
smackdown on people using 3rd party tools/hacks/bots either.
People have proposed CAPTCHA and other methods of foiling bots but Blizzard already
has a powerful tool it's not using. Warden is active but it might as well not be
as it doesn't start testing a character until it's been in a game for 45
seconds. If you can finish your run or
spam in under 45 seconds, you're home free.
Drop this delay to a few seconds to make farmbot runs impossible; require a correct response to Warden before a player can
speak to mute spambots.
Another thing I don't get is this increased stash
nonsense. Above and beyond an increased
stash, by far, the most requested 1.13 feature was bug fixes. New content is great, but you've got no
business going there when you haven't fixed stuff like TPPK. How about you get the game we've got working,
then think about expanding? A stash
increase would have been the icing on the cake--if you had a cake. Right now you've got something like a shitty meatloaf. Don't put icing on a shitty meatloaf.
Now, about this increased drop rate for high runes... Let me put this in to perspective. I recently spoke with someone who'd
previously been involved in a mass botting operation. This is a direct quote: "I did a year of Pindlebotting and got 2
Zods from 150 bots over millions of runs."
So, guess what? You still won't
be finding any Zod runes. I'm not going
to get too far into itemization here.
Suffice it to say that when duping and botting are endemic to your game,
you need to design with that in mind--especially when you aren't doing anything
much to combat them. Does it matter if
the drop rate for Zod went from 1 in 10m to 1 in 1m if you can buy them
anywhere for $0.25?
What Blizzard has produced looks like not more than a week's
worth of work. I'm holding out hope
though--hope that not everything is being tested on the test realm. I'm hoping that things that shouldn't need
testing, like new items, will greet us when the patch goes live on the standard
realms.
I'd like to know at what point Blizzard knew that the patch
was going to take 8 months to complete.
It is hard to imagine with what they've delivered so far, that this
patch was ever more than 1 week from completion. Did it take them 7.5 months to get
started? Did they devote 1 day a month
to it? I don't believe that it ever
touched internal QA given the quick player discovery of a big, and obvious
problem with skill respecs--the largest feature of the patch.
Players are feeling especially burnt because they reasonably
assumed, when Blizzard asked for patch wishes, that new features would be in
addition to the long-outstanding, well-documented, highly demanded, severely
detrimental bugs that they've known or should have known about for years.
"One problem
we're running in to with some reports at the moment though is that people are
using slang terms for issues because they've been around for so long. We still
need detailed steps on how to reproduce all bugs, especially long standing
issues." -- Bashiok
Are you for real?
You're really having a hard time understanding people because they're
using Diablo 2 slang? D2 is still your
game, right? Last time I checked, it was
still $40 retail for a set of Classic + Lord of Destruction. Now, I've owned my copy for 9 years.. I feel
like I've gotten my money's worth. I
just feel sorry for the guy who bought the game yesterday and paid new game
price for something that is essentially unsupported. Look, you could hire 1 guy for 5 hours a week
to keep up with everything that's going on in Diablo 2. It wouldn't be that hard. Or, you could just read your own forums once
in a while. Notice that 99% of the bugs
that people are bringing up aren't new bugs that exist only on the PTR? They've all been posted, in detail, in plain
English, on the Bnet forums before.
Just as I was about to post this blog entry, I read this:
"To give you a
small hint, nothing is going to happen or be decided until after the new year." -- Bashiok
I really don't get how you can announce to dupers that
you've fixed their method, knowing full well how many problems it creates with
the servers, and then just let it keep running on and on. Wouldn't a better strategy have been to
simply patch the dupe outright without warning, and then take your sweet time
running the rest of the changes on the PTR? I do appreciate you giving me enough notice to make plans for the holidays though. When you launched the PTR I canceled everything, thinking the patch would be launched earlier, as a Christmas present.
and this:
"I also want to impress upon
everyone that 1.13 isn't and never has been intended as a final patch for
Diablo II. I realize with the long delays in getting it to PTR, and longer
stretches of time inbetween patches that it seems like it's necessary that 1.13
encompass everything because, well, there's just no guarantee that anything
will come after. Or in a timely fashion. But, there is a solid long term plan
of action for future support of Diablo II. There's obviously plenty of room for
skepticism, and I can't blame anyone for that. But even with that skepticism I
hope that we can get the message across that we have no intention of stopping
here." -- Bashiok
Damn right there'll be skepticism. It sounds like you've
basically set what's
known as a 'soft cap' on patching. If it
took you 8 months (and counting) to get out a patch representing 1 week's worth
of work, can we really believe that there will be any meaningful patches in the
future? Perhaps in another 2 years we'll
get another patch representing 3 weeks worth of real coding. Oh, but by then Diablo 3 will be out so why
even bother? I'd really like to hear
what this long term plan is for Diablo 2.
Let me pose a question to the community:
Since it appears that the 12m WoW subscribers are barely
keeping the company afloat, how much would you be willing to donate to Blizzard
toward a Diablo maintenance fund? Call
it the No More Excuses Fund. Let's say
we could get 20,000 people to each donate $5/yr. That'd be $100k/yr--enough to hire a decent
programmer who could work on Diablo 2 full-time; who could read the forums and
understand the slang; who could do a week's worth of work in less than 8
months; who wouldn't have to stop patching a dupe method to work on warcraft
sound effects. Count me in for
$100.