(06-15-2012, 10:17 PM)Gnollguy Wrote: I give them a pass for Inferno too, that wasn't really a QA issue that was a management decision that didn't work well, but Normal through hell was significantly better off than anything else they have had on release day with the exception of the very well done SC2 single player campaign.
I think Inferno was a response to the screams of "Too easy!!" that Blizzard has heard for the past several years from various directions. I think it's very plausible that a conscious decision was made to make it harder than they thought it should be, and then nerf it to the proper level when the players hit it. If they did it the other way and made it too easy, then toughened it up, they'd take flak on that, too. No way they could win on it.
Remember that Jay Wilson said they doubled it? Yeah, sounds like a decision to make it too hard, then fix it when the players got there. As some have said, it was also a great opportunity to find the loopholes and OP skills, too.
You can talk about QA all you want, but Blizzard knows from seven years of WoW that their QA team can't come up with all the stuff multiple millions of users can. So, they let users do some of it this time. Of course, I'm sure someone will criticize that as releasing a beta to us, but...as I said, Blizzard can't win on this. They just have to pick a strategy and do it, and ignore the BS.
And yes, D2 and D2:LOD at launch were way less polished and ready than D3 was, and it took a lot longer to fix. A calendar month ago was launch, and they've already had a bunch of hotfixes and three small patches, with a bigger one including inferno tweaks due in the next two weeks. D2 wasn't patched that quickly that I remember.
--Mav