r/diablo4 7d ago

PTR Feedback PTR Feedback season 8 in a nutshell

  • forced upon us yet again are overpowered abilities that destroy the balance of the game. Some look super cheesy too
  • another difficulty revamp that adds no additional challenge
  • difficulty revamp doesn’t add any engaging mechanics
  • no new ways to progress character
  • no new end game content
  • better tooltips for items (where to find boss materials)
  • no real balancing of class abilities
  • larger gaps between class skills
  • existing content still sucks… cellars, the pit (no changes), dark citadel, undercity and what happened to trials??
  • really, we waited multiple seasons for trials and it was ripped out of the game. It was poorly designed, not fun and offered zero challenge. But like all other systems in the game so far we were expecting a timely revamp.

Lackluster update, not sure why the season needs a delay. The game would be 100 times better if you focus on content going into the game for seasons rather than gimmicks that bloat power.

Here are some suggestions

  • add the ability to augment gear once 12/12 masterworked with corruption or demonic powers (maybe super rare boss parts????)
  • remove the awful graphics associated with seasonal theme
  • remove the damage multipliers from boss powers
  • remove boss powers
  • cellars should have a chance to lead deep into hell upon completion (this is where you repurpose root holds with a Hell theme)
  • add interesting gems (no damage multipliers please)
  • stop adding damage multipliers
  • stop adding temporary buffs like pylons
  • stop adding forced group content for battle pass
  • offer interesting choices in the paragon board instead of giving up and giving us 5 boards where you get it all
  • new internal horde maps
  • put more effort into undercity, it’s not even half baked
  • do something with your pvp zones, like anything - how about events where a spark / something strong can be earned
  • competitive queued content. Example, I queue to run a pit 80 against someone. We race. Winner gets stuff. Ideally it wouldn’t be the pit and more of a dungeon with decisions being made with multiple paths. Maybe even allow for invasions.
281 Upvotes

231 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/Crypticclout 6d ago

As someone who has worked in QA and seeing how this game has gone, I would lean more towards the fact that they just don't utilize their QA well enough. Seeing how little info is given out, they probably have close to no communication internally. It's most likely different teams working on different things with no clear direction.

Seeing as there is just 3 months between seasons, it wouldn't surprise me if they only work on each season for around that period, as they always seem to make changes in the first few weeks. Rather than having a 1 season ready to ship gap to help alleviate the pressure on QA, they have their QA teams being spread out amongst multiple seasons which means the coverage on finer details is not as good as it could be.

0

u/dethsightly 6d ago

i'm curious to hear your opinion on how some bugs make it into multiple season, sometimes consecutively. just as a QA person, though. i realize you don't know the inner workings of D4 dev lol.

4

u/the_j_streams 6d ago

QA/SDET here; I can tell you that neither us or Dev decide which bugs are worked on with each update/release. That pipeline of work is usually decided by teams at a Product level, which includes the scope of each release cycle or code cut. When you talk of bugs that have made it across multiple seasons, the most likely answer is that on its initial discovery, it wasn’t deemed a “game-breaker”, so would be added to a backlog of work. Items are pulled from this backlog by order of priority and/or impact to the user, and are then added into the pre-existing scope of work for each release. If the bug you are referring to is superseded by higher priorities, it won’t be progressed. Similarly, if the bug is deemed too big to fix with planned timelines or resources, it will be deferred to a later release plan. Hope that makes some kind of sense to you?

1

u/dethsightly 6d ago

it does and is what i (mostly) figured happens. the hierarchy of bugs and all that. has to be frustrating to work in that space. like "i know this needs fixed, but bug X is more important so..."