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!

[Lissa]

Mongo, you're evidently forgetting things because SF was capped before LoD (either 10% or 25% across all levels). I remember the cries about the change on the forums as you literally could not SF to kill everything anymore. And likewise, never trust patch notes to cover everything the patch "fixed". If I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone find something that wasn't listed in the patch notes, I would have several thousand dollars. So, unless you stayed off B.net prior to the SF cap, you're not remember things are you think.

No, Lissa. Again, I actually played a SF/Orb sorceress obsessively for almost a year. People complained when the distance formula was fixed. Do you remember how the distance formula had a sign error in it that created a four-pointed star shape that reached across most of the screen with only a single point (plus maybe a few +all skills points) in it? When they fixed the sign error, the distance seemed to shrink to a comparatively miniscule amount, so all those sorceresses who were used to killing screenfuls of mobs while running around with 1 point in Static Field suddenly found themselves in trouble. In my case, it didn't really affect me, because my sorceress was already at a high enough level that I didn't know what to do with my extra skill points anyway, so I just threw them into Static Field to raise the radius back up again and I continued to level like nothing had happened. The damage was not capped until LOD came out.

(I do have a vague memory that perhaps they did fix something so that lightning resistance affected static field, which meant that it took an extra second to kill Diablo in 8-player hell).

As I said, they capped it early on. It wasn't just fixing the bug with the shape of SF, but there was a cap to the maximum out of life it could take off and they capped it initially through a hotfix. So yes, they fixed the radius issue and they capped the maximum damage it could do, it was just that that cap was the same across all difficulties and then they increased it to 33% and 50% respectively in Nightmare and Hell.

This is why I think Blizzard's QA is worse. They had a lot of time to look at things and they didn't.

You have to complete the sentence: Blizzard's QA is worse than... what? In this thread, you were saying that Blizzard's QA was worse than it was at the time of the launch of D2 and LOD, and I think I can speak for the majority here by saying that we are laughing wholeheartedly at such a ridiculous notion. If you are now saying, "Well, Blizzard's QA is worse than Bioware's QA at the time of the launch of ME3," you're starting a new discussion.

So, I take it you completely missed this comment:

Likewise, and I've been looking for the post Bolty made, D3's framework has been finished for over a year and half as Blizzard was letting people play in Act 3 and Act 4 at various tech conventions back in late 2010. Blizzard had a year and half to sit down and QA a lot of the game as they worked out various potential blocks (such as the one South Korea had setup stating that D3 was gambling and that was against either the law or some societal norm in South Korea and was delayed until Blizzard worked that out with the South Korean government). The beta of Act 1 ran for over 9 months before it was finally released (and yes, there were some changes made, but not much). Blizzard had a lot more time with D3 to QA it inhouse before release then they ever did with D2 (remember, D2 came out 3 years after D1 where as D3 came out 11 years since LoD and they announced D3 in 2008 and the graphics in game show it's probably using technology from 2007 through 2009).

So, here we have a game that they've basically had finished for a year and half where they could QA in all this time and yet a bunch of things slip through. Does that really sound like their QA is on the ball compared to where they've had shorter QA times for their other games (even including D2)?

I made to You, Quark, and GG on page 6 of this thread. They had more time to look things over in D3 and still let things through. Nevermind that D2 was done in a shorter period of time with more things to check than they had to do with D3. So, yes, having less to check, more time to check it, and still letting some glaring things through (even if fixed quickly) shows a worse QA situation.

[Roland]

As I said, they capped it early on.

No, it wasn't. It wasn't capped until the release of the expansion pack.

Edit:
In fact, Bolty noted it in his post entitled "Beta Report #5" on June 1, 2001. Unfortunately, that part of the Lounge is long lost to history, but a little sleuthing was able to dig up a cached search of it. (Link)

Anyway, I'm done arguing over this point. Ignorance is bliss, after all.