Rob Pardo is sad about the community reaction [Jays departure from Diablo III]
- Thread starter maniac-kun
- Start date
Duxxy3
Member
oh man
Between that and the end of Starcraft 2, like, I never thought Blizzard were master storytellers, but that stuff. God damn. Future writers at Bioware.
maniac-kun
Member
The staff at Blizzard isnt used to make bad games. They have to adapt.
I think they are taking this more seriously because it was Diablo. They had the legacy in their hands and screwed up big time.
The gaming commnity will not forget about this trainwreck for some time.
It's a loot game. They screwed up the loot.
There are other issues too (and lots of debate over the pros/cons), but that's the big one.
Agree
Jay Wilson really did himself no favors, especially when you consider just how aggressive the official Blizzard general forums are. People went too far, attacking his weight and wishing even death on him, which is insane.
Tough there has been some great constructive threads even on those forums and on D3 Reddit, the game needs help
la flama blanca
Banned
The game was god awful for Blizzard standards. Fuck that game, seriously.
Blizzard has never really dealt with this before.
Eighty Deuce
Banned
Diablo 3 would have been a great game, if it wasn't named Diablo 3.
And reading how SC2 at a big finale with Dustin Bowder and Morhaine sitting there at the peak of the match and connection broke down and people yelling WE WANT LAN!. I know it is kotaku but hey just to give a example why this 'always online drm' is just so bad.
We want LAN!
There look on there faces...priceless!
Tokyo Rain
Member
This just in: Blizzard has hired Yoshinori Kitase to save the Diablo franchise.
Teletraan1
Banned
Meh. Game was disappoint incarnate. They put this guy out as the lightning rod and then moved him off the project before they were talking expansion to draw people back in who saw it as his mistakes. It wasn't just him. I seriously doubt one person could make all those bad decisions and still have a job.
I don't believe this is true. If it wasn't named Diablo 3 it would not have sold as well as it did.
HocusPocus
Member
I only have one problem with the game. That's the loot system for the game for Inferno. I don't know why they can't fix it. You have to have so much magic find to have any chance at anything worth using, and the game doesn't seem to favor drops that you can use over ones you can't.
If you have no magic find good luck finding loot in Diablo 2. Diablo 2 didn't favor drops that you can use over ones you can't either.
SneakyStephan
Banned
edit: you are right, I am blind and deserve what I got.
RMAH should never ever been in that game. You want better loot? Buy it with gold or real money. If this game was about loot then i would farm a lot of hours in it. But no i got most of my gear from the AH and that is just bad.
Why?
And reading how SC2 at a big finale with Dustin Bowder and Morhaine sitting there at the peak of the match and connection broke down and people yelling WE WANT LAN!. I know it is kotaku but hey just to give a example why this 'always online drm' is just so bad.
We want LAN!
There look on there faces...priceless!
Thank you for that one. Haven't seen it.
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
Lol. Forever haunting him.
I have warned it,read the line before quoting.
R
Retro_
Unconfirmed Member
I completely disagree
It only got away with the design decisions it made because it was Diablo 3
No new IP would have sold for 60 dollars being designed around a RMAH and always online DRM but a sequel to diablo 2
Not even Diablo 3 got away with it. It only cost them all the customer goodwill they've developed with the brand over the years
Tokyo Rain
Member
The RM market for D3 Items exists. They chose to regulate it. This is actually a good thing. The problem is that it led them to make many choices which had a negative impact on the game.
Feels longer than that tbh. I kinda feel their problems with mostly started with the release of Starcraft 2. What happened in the years before that is that they went through a really long period of many years where the only fans they were directly accountable to were the WoW fanbase. It was sort of insular because everyone who kept playing WoW was already paying for it and had invested much of their money and time into the game. Once they captured the entire MMO market, unless they really fucked up it would be kinda hard to lose the majority of support.
With Starcraft 2 that all changed. It was the first new game they had released in ages, and one without a subscription, and with single player content. There were new expectations, the fanbase had to be won over and most of the expectations were based on memories of ages past. They dropped the ball with Battle.net there, and there was substantial backlash. But they played it pretty safe with regards to the overall product, so Starcraft fans were generally satisfied in one way or another.
Diablo 3 was every problem they had with Starcraft 2 amplified a thousand times. This time they tried to be more bold, and there were attempts to reinvent what Diablo was. There was also the matter of Battle.net still being kinda shitty. Then the always online thing put even more focus on Battle.net's reliability. The auction house made people question Blizzard's intentions before ever playing the game. The Real Money Auction House pushed that even further. It just all snowballed into one PR disaster after another.
To make things even worse, while all this was going on, there was no other positive PR blanket for the company to fall back on. The Starcraft 2 expansions weren't coming out, WoW subscriptions started dropping off as the genre started moving into new directions in the industry. Titan isn't ready to be shown. So all the emphasis was on Diablo 3, 24/7, and when most of that is negative, it can really kill motivation within the company.
When people feel that all the hard work they put into something is being challenged and destroyed by others who might or might not be making unfair comments, they start to go on the defensive, and some people can handle that easier than others. When you have a big company, it's hard to control what each person will react. I feel that the team probably wants to be professional and not piss on their fanbase, but they're also frustrated and tired, and so they got more insular and started to see things from a "us versus them" mentality which resulted in stuff like the "fuck that loser" debacle.
It has been over 2 years of Blizzard going from one of the most respected developers in the industry into one of the most defensive ones always having to respond to one negative thing after another in the press, and that's honestly been pretty sad to see as a huge fan of the company from the old days. Yet at the same time, I can't really say I feel much pity for them, because when you're at the highest level of game development, people expect the most out of you. It's important to be able to manage that, and sometimes lower expectations a notch.
it was funny when it was in the jay wilson thread, but isn't here.
Very good and totally spot on post!
Mihos
Gold Member
For me, the game quickly devolved into nothing buy an auction house, then even that was ruined since anything of 'real' value would be put on the real money auction house. The whole end game seemed like nothing but a cash grab.
I didn't have a problem with any one person, but I have to admit this pissed me off:
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Diablo-3-Jay-Wilson-Tells-Diablo-2-Designer-Fans-F-ck-Off-45895.html
edit: oh yeah, fuck battlenet
I didn't have a problem with any one person, but I have to admit this pissed me off:
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Diablo-3-Jay-Wilson-Tells-Diablo-2-Designer-Fans-F-ck-Off-45895.html
edit: oh yeah, fuck battlenet
Burgerface
Neo Member
Perfectly sums up everything that's happened, does anyone have any hope that heart of the swarm will make up for any of this? Feels like they need to show off something great to make up for all this but it seems like Titan is not ready.
They've burned all their goodwill with me. It's going to take a huge discount and a tonne of good word of mouth for me to ever pick up one of their games again. I have absolutely no interest in WoW or the SCII expansion they are putting out this year. Hell even a god damn F2P game made by a small studio has managed to be more engaging than Diablo 3 for me so far.
Air Zombie Meat
Member
He was already taking a lot of heat over D3 and with that loser comment he doubled it.
TheProphet
Banned
i would be pissed if he worked on warcraft 4
They have gone from listening people to listening shareholders.
They changed art style of diablo errased all satanistic content, completely overhauled history of diablo to fit their new nephalim world of power rangers.
Starcraft to Starcraft2 is like War and Peace to the sun newspaper change.
Diablo 3 in 3 minutes (hilarious)
Rob Pardo is doing the right thing, sticking by his employee. Jay Wilson should drop the whole surprised act, though. He knew what heading up Diablo 3 meant, or he should have. This isn't just some game, this is the next installment of Diablo. Expectations were through the roof. Get it right and he's a gaming god, get it wrong and well here we are.
I'm still interested in Heart of the Swarm, and I certainly hope the campaign is as fun as Wings of Liberty. My massive disappointment at how Diablo 3 turned out doesn't have much bearing on that.
I don't think that they need to show off something "great" to make up for all the stuff in the last 2 years. I mean, certainly that is one option if they can pull it off, but there's another solution. They can reinvent themselves in the face of consumers. If we look at the history of fanbases, Valve is a great example. For the longest time the only thing anyone wanted from Valve was Half-Life. If they spent 6 years working on HL3 and releasing nothing else after Orange Box except for updating TF2, I think they might well have met the same fate as Blizzard if HL3 failed to life up to expectations.
On the other hand, they dropped HL as a core focus entirely, and worked hard to show people that Valve can be more than just Half-Life. They explored other possibilities and took risks which had a lower threshold of expectation, and people were pleasantly surprised. To this date, post-Orange Box, Valve has not given their most hardcore fans what they want. But at the same time the company is viewed in extremely positive light for their other contributions to the industry and to gamers in general.
This means they no longer have to really worry about spending a long time working on a follow up to a mythic franchise only to disappoint. If HL3 eventually comes out, and it isn't the best fucking FPS every made in human history, there won't be as many meltdowns as there would be if they had tried to focus exclusively on it. And it wouldn't destroy Valve as a company because they have diversified their value to their fanbase instead.
I think it's an interesting comparison.
jim-jam bongs
Member
I skipped D3 so I can't speak to its quality or otherwise, but I do think Blizzard games have among the worst communities in gaming, and I include COD kiddies on Live in that comparison.
CarbonatedFalcon
Member
The comparison to Valve and how Blizzard's path has diverged from them (at least in terms of PR) is quite apt. I still consider both the last bastions of the old guard of premiere PC development. Newer studios have popped up in recent years (e.g. CD Projekt), but having lasted longer with a stories history, people expect more from Blizzard and Valve.
Don't you think a big part of that is related to Blizzard's own output? When you build a huge developer around essentially 3 franchises which get major numbered releases every 5 years or so, it means the people who follow the company the closest are also going to be extremely hardcore and fanatical. It can certainly help you if you continue to give those people exactly what they want and live up to their expectations, but it can also hurt you greatly.
spindoctor
Member
The 'backlash' against Diablo 3 is the single point case study in why no one should ever take 'gamers' on the internet seriously. There were death threats for crying out loud. Because they didn't like a video game. Yea. Be proud of that one 'gamers'.
It must be said clear and straight that most of us people who played Diablo 3 were initially positively thinking about Diablo 3 changes and AH and RMAH implementation.
Most of us after playing it know already that those systems are simply bad. And we posted many things about it as feedback on D3 forum.
What Jay should do was simply to acknowledge problems, say: "Sorry, it failed" and " But we will redo out systems to at least D2 ones"
What he did was completely opposite. Bashiok delated thread after thread with people feedback how bad systems are and developers were keep playing everything is cool.
Final push what community needed for full rage was "fuck that loser" and full retard mode from other developers.
Complete lack of work with community is key to this whole fiasco. They only recently acknowledged that something is wrong and they didn't even said anything about those problematic things like itemization or character progression.
This is also why PoE is so good.
When you ask dev on PoE forums about some problems like problems with certain skill, or that some of attack animations are not fun or don't work like intended to or are just straight bad they will respond. They say we will look into it and after a while they will came with solution.
People simply rage that Blizzard devs are blind and they are killing their favorite franchize, completely ignoring help from community.
What does that even mean ? . Many developers would die for fans like D2 or SC have. Diablo3 sold only because of those fans and their world of mouth.