06-14-2012, 06:06 AM
(06-14-2012, 05:13 AM)Elric of Grans Wrote: Blizzard commented that they tested Inferno and tweaked it until their testers said it was right. They then doubled all the numbers, assuming their testers were not as hardcore as real players, and did not test the changes. If you halve everything, the curve across Inferno difficulties is probably smoother.
I think a lot of the issue that comes up with this is purely a marketing mistake.
The brutal over-tuning of Inferno upon release serves many purposes for Blizzard and offers them tons of information about the game and it's systems that aren't available until you have 6+ million people banging away on it. Are there ways in which the game is broken at the moment? Definitely. It's been my experience that many of the complaints, however, are premature and those complaining often haven't even gotten to the point where things really begin to break down. But that's all moot because Blizz has already begun making a lot of changes that should start to resolve these issue with a little luck.
By over-tuning Inferno they can filter out abusive and broken skills or builds that may have slipped through the cracks very quickly. They will also find the places where people can abuse farming (IE goblins, Chests) very quickly. These are things that can, and often do slip through even the best testing environments. They also get a lot of information and can better guarantee the ongoing health of the game economy, which now that they have brought in-house is the greatest thing they have to focus on to secure the long term health of the game.
Getting back to the marketing mistake. They released that statement during the beta when a lot of people were complaining about how easy the game was. I'm sure it looked like a good publicity statement to come out and say "Hey, this game is twice as hard as our hardcore testers can handle!". Unfortunately that statement has a lot of negative connotations as well, as has been noted. They would be in a much better publicity stand point at this moment had they not made that statement and could now state that they intentionally overtuned it early so that they could weed out issues early. Would that make the very high end of the game less frustrating during these first months? Nope, A3 Inferno on is stupid broken. But I personally can shoulder that for the short term knowing that it will most likely mean a much healthier game environment moving forward as things are tuned downward. Having said that, the sooner 1.03 comes out the better for them. If things are still feeling rough around the edges a few months from now it's going to be hard for them to live down.