And about your meeting… anything to tell us? We are waiting for a good feedback from you. =]
A lot was discussed, but details are still forthcoming. I don’t want to give you guys half-baked information. Once I have solid stuff to share, I’ll let you all know. Will probably make that a separate, stand-alone post here on the forums for visibility.
It's not quite that simple. Every blog has a process that has to go through multiple hoops before publishing:
While some of these things happen in tandem, others have to follow an order and bottlenecking can, and will, happen.
Delays in this case happened because of me, and I take ownership of that. I didn't ask for more help when I clearly needed it, and bit off more than I could chew around BlizzCon. I'm working with my team to rectify that and trying not to punish myself too badly for being overly ambitious. After all, it got me sick. :| I can do better, but that has to start by taking care of myself first.
Do you start a season on anything but a Friday?
We tried, once, to launch a Season on a Thursday instead. We received immense amounts of community feedback that that was not optimal; many people like taking the day off for the Season start, and that’s a lot harder to do on a Thursday than the end of the week.
We went back to Fridays and haven’t tried to mess with it since.
RT @KazulGFox: @Diablo Most vicious? The goatmen of course! https://t.co/28EOtTxY7v
@fitipaldi93 🖤
@ImSedated How about now? https://t.co/lwv4aqkaud
@LanoomAES They do. https://t.co/Zx1SW3uAum
The following creature families would like to sacrifice, kill or enslave you. #Diablo4 https://t.co/WNnffnOWLC
Thanks for the feedback. This just begs the question though; will there be further tweaks before the next season comes out?
Possibly. I have a meeting with the team later this afternoon, and if something comes out of that, I’ll be back to let you all know.
It won’t be this Friday, and I’d like to take a moment to explain why.
Early during Patch 2.6.7’s development, our engineering team raised concerns about the extremely small window in between patch launch and season launch. In short, they were concerned that, as often happens in software development, if something critically breaks with deployment of the patch, they might not have time to resolve it before the Season launches globally. Three days isn’t very long to create, test, and deploy a hotfix, assuming we receive reports of it quickly enough (and it’s actually less time - it’s closer to a little more than 2 days as the season launches at 5PM Friday in each region, and that occurs on Thursday our time for players in Asia).
We decided the compromise was to have at least one week downtime between patch deployment and season start. That gives us a more forgiving window to address critical issues, should they arise, and we plan to continue using this format moving forward to ensure we’re launching each Season in as strong and stable a state as possible. It also allows us to provide a more reliable Season start date going forward.
Communication this time around was lackluster, and that lands on me. I overestimated the amount of work I was capable of getting done in a very short, inflexible window. For that, you have my apology, and my team’s already making changes and adjustments to better address that for future Seasons.
The Season preview blog is coming tomorrow, come hell or high water, which is what I’m currently putting the finishing touches on. That will include the Season start date. In the future, that blog will ideally land before patch launch (as it has in the past), which should give most of you a larger window for planning your Season start plans like taking time off or scheduling play time with a group. I’m taking ownership on and improving the things I have control over, and trying to plan better around those I do not.
I love my Diablo community, and will always strive to do whatever I can to improve things for everyone.
I imagine some of you have seen it already, but a new letter from our Game Director, Luis Barriga, is now available to read. Take a moment to read it if you have the time, and I’ll pop in again with our next update once David Kim’s blog publishes in the near future.
A Letter from our Game Director – BlizzCon 2019 Read: https://t.co/V1qOh6ArBu https://t.co/ihLzPReDs7
You might not have seen yet - but bazooka Wizard did get nerfed. The decisions made in patch notes are rarely about one individual change, but the entire batch as a whole, and I do think this is an important consideration to the overall picture.
We actually just pushed out the hotfix for this, and I’m in the process of updating the known issues list now. It’s very likely you will need to log out/back in to receive the wings if you haven’t done so already.
We thought this would potentially take longer to resolve, but were able to turn it around a lot more quickly than anticipated.
Probably the last post I'm going to make on this because, despite those who are presenting their points positively and constructively, there's still a lot of toxicity I have to sort through to get to it and I'm recognizing pretty quickly the toll it's taking on me.
With deployments on PTR, we would rather overshoot than undershoot and then adjust accordingly. When deploying to live, however, we'd much rather do it the other way around. Real talk: no one likes being nerfed, even when it's warranted (and I'm not saying that's the case here). It's much, much harsher for a larger percentage of the community to accept a reduction in power on their tangible, "real" character as opposed to one in a test environment. We try, as much as possible, to avoid situations where we need to nerf what's on live.
It's possible we've undershot as a result of the Lamentation change. The testing we've done internally, combined with large amounts of data and feedback we acquired during PTR (including accounting for outliers like players with extraordinary amounts of Paragon levels), doesn't indicate it will be as severe as what some of the theorycrafted results are anticipating.
I'm not saying we're infallible. That's why we made the change the way we did; because it's easy for us to go back and change again later. We're still actively working on the game, and we have a lot more to go (including a patch that will have more focus on Barbarians with their new class set).
I think there's some additional context missing from the conversation that I'm in chats with my development team about putting into a more formalized blog. I'm setting up meetings today to discuss it, and I'll try to execute on that as quickly as I can. We're not going to make everyone happy 100% of the time, but I do hope we can make our reasoning a little more clear.
Diablo III Patch 2.6.7 | Notes: https://t.co/KPx9sjw00y ▪️ Season 19: Season of Eternal Conflict ▪️ Pandemonium Buf… https://t.co/kKL6GoXLzb
Patch 2.6.7 is now live in all regions. For more information about this patch, please view our Patch Notes here.
Below is a list of currently known issues in Patch 2.6.7. We are aware of these cases and actively working on resolving them. Once a resolution has been deployed, we’ll update this thread accordingly.
General