Patching 1.0.2c -- potentially nerfed mob damage

[TheDragoon]

Because the company I worked at for 2 years was a software shop for developing software for some of the Natinonal Institute of Health programs and when they did QA, it wasn't, "OMG, find bugs and fix!" it was, "how do we make the software better for the people that are using it?"

And I expect you're completely correct for a wide range of software fields, but not for game development. I'll point to my experience in aerospace as another example where we have the same sorts of broad definitions of Quality Assurance that make it clear that EVERYONE is participating in it. However, our Quality Assurance people are generally not looking to make things work better unless they find a problem with whatever they are measuring (which, depending upon the test, could be just about anything) to show that it is meeting its spec requirements.

I would say that the same sort of thing happens with other broadly defined areas, such as Safety. Everyone is responsible for safety in aerospace, but when it comes right down to it there are some particular people who are designated as Safety representatives (of a variety of types) who have a particular specialty or area that they look at. So would you say that everyone is doing Safety engineering or just some people? You could argue it either way but when it comes right down to it only some people have the job title and the specific responsibilities that come with that job.

So my 2 cents is to say that things can be very broadly defined so everyone is doing it and then more narrowly applied to only include certain jobs by a given industry, and it sounds like Software QA for game development is one of those.


Back to the real topic at hand I feel like Diablo 3 is a very polished game at release. It is definitely more polished and balanced across most of the game than most video games I have played near release. All classes are viable through Hell with many, many variations of skill choices and play style. Some skills will likely get rebalanced to flatten things out a bit more, but I feel like it's still pretty decent, at this point. The fact that Inferno was not particularly well balanced is not very surprising given the way it appears to have been somewhat tacked onto the game at the end, and I'm sure that is where the focus of Blizzard's revisions in future patches will resolve those problems. And the bottom line to me is that the game is a great deal of fun to play through the end of Hell and the bonus difficulty that is Inferno seems ok for Act 1,a s well. When they get the rest of Inferno balanced to a more reasonable level, I think we will definitely have a fantastic game on our hands!