Blizzard developers know their Diablo IV patch was bad and say they’ll do better

three directors working Diablo IV Held campfire chat livestream Saying yesterday they would change the way patches are rolled out, an incremental version 1.1.0 patch for the game suddenly disrupted players’ builds (via) IGN, And they promise that such updates will not happen in the future – at least, not in the way that happened this week.

In the livestream, associate director Joe Piapiora, game director Joe Shelley, and community head Adam Fletcher acknowledged complaints about the patch, which massively reduced player power for some builds. Fletcher said of the cut that, “We know it’s bad, we know it’s not fun,” and added, “We don’t plan on ever doing a patch like this again.”

In the short term, there’s at least one quick fix coming after the 1.1.0 patch to rebalance things. Piepiora stated that the team felt that the Nightmare dungeons in the game had been “dramatically changed” and that the Tier 100 Nightmare dungeons were “excessively difficult” for most classes, resulting in players having to create very specific builds.

That was never the intention, Piepiora said, and the team plans to reduce the difficulty of those level 100 dungeons by about 30 percent “via a hotfix later today” to balance things out. In other words, it will not restore the player’s power to the previous level, but rather make it a little easier to deal with the game world.

Shelley said that the version 1.1.1 patch will further balance things out by adding more monsters to the Nightmare dungeon and some Helltide events, among other changes, so that higher level players can have fun chopping up monsters as they progress through them. In its next Campfire Chat on Friday, July 28, Blizzard will talk more about the patch, which Fletcher says will be coming out “in a couple of weeks.”

Shelley stated that the team is changing its approach towards game-balancing updates, particularly updates related to reducing player power, adding that it would not do so again without offering “some compelling options for players to pursue”. Instead, the team will allow those builds to remain empowered until they fit more neatly into the overall changes. That said, the team will also introduce those updates predictively, such as at the start of a new season.

Ahead of future patches, Fletcher said Blizzard would introduce patch notes the week before a release explaining the changes.