Anyone seen latest diablo 4 controversy?

hoho oh well.

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Raycheetah wrote:

The obvious solution, as suggested by Zizaran (and prolly others) would be to delay the race event until after everyone had had a decent opportunity to play the game and "warm up" for the race.

This to me is the best solution.

There's nothing stopping a streamer from giving a specific set of directions of exactly what to do to their friends.

Rush x, get x aspect, repeat this dungeon 27 times until you're level 30, do capstone dungeon, switch to WT3, do this dungeon 75 times in a row until lvl70, etc. Probably impossible for anyone who doesn't have this information beforehand to compete. At least solo.

I don't think there's SSF so a group that takes advantage of poorly balanced mechanics or legendaries could potentially sneak in.

to be fair I usually defend D4, but this such shows how out of touch D4 devs are on the matter of competition
like just delay the race towards season 1 what's the problem smh

Dude/woman/wouldprefernottosay, I have been playing Diablo since the shareware demo. Played the d2 closed beta. And D2 until eh about 2001 I guess when I moved onto more engaging things. They did have ladders and competitive aspects but absolutely no one I knew bothered with them that much. They came after the heyday of the game -- unsurprising, given it's a form of life-extender for stale, played-out material.

And there is the difference. Using a ladder or race mechanic to add life to an old but beloved game? Cool. Forcing it into a new one to promote FOMO purchases instead of letting your game's quality speak for itself? Not cool. The entire notion of racing through a game is the product of familiarity and optimisation, and that is why I said PoE really pioneered it for ARPGs. GGG had racing for its first two acts before release, and at the same time were extremely early adopters of twitch integration. They flopped the PvPness test in terms of direct conflict but PoE is a masterclass in passive competitiveness.

And that works for PoE because even at ten acts it remains a terribly linear game. Great for races. Almost as if...designed for it.

But DIV is very much not linear. You can do any of the non endgame acts as you see fit. Or not at all, for quite a long time. So a hardcore race to 100 is almost inherently a novelty, which is why the ludicrously novel prize is so fitting. Your username on a statue only Blizzard employees will see regularly and almost certainly give zero fucks about. Lol.

And as I said, of the million plus people ready to play the game, maaaaybe a few thousand gave a shit about any of this or indeed any sort of "race" approach to what is obviously a very big world.

And yknow what? If I am wrong and the whole thing turns out to be Anthem or Wolcen or whatever, I will be sad but Jesus everloving Christ it won't hurt me personally. It's just another game in a year fuckoff full of them.

Hell chances are I won't be playing DIV on release since I have finally gone back to Elden Ring and see absolutely no end in sight with that one. So pleaae don't try to position me as some sort of DIV shill just because I pointed out that as usual Exiles seem more eager to make more of DIV's foibles than most of its intended players. There is bugger all about it in the news churn and as I said a few middling threads on the diablo subs and nada on larger gaming subs beyond that godawful stupid tweet. THAT was untenably bad...but it got people's attention.

No...the thing most DIV waiting room occupants are worried about is the hilariously aggressive eleventh hour marketing push. The whole thing can look a lot like a pump and dump but otoh hilariously aggressive marketing has been a Blizzard thing since Mr T and Captain Kirk told us all which race and class they'd be in WoW. Not exactly a pump and dump there.

And not to end on a whataboutism but yknow it's not as if GGG haven't misread the room in the past regarding streamers, racing and early access. Seems a wee bit hypocritical to give them a pass on that but try to make some sort of sad little war on a game you probably won't even play.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Dude/woman/wouldprefernottosay, I have been playing Diablo since the shareware demo. Played the d2 closed beta. And D2 until eh about 2001 I guess when I moved onto more engaging things. They did have ladders and competitive aspects but absolutely no one I knew bothered with them that much. They came after the heyday of the game -- unsurprising, given it's a form of life-extender for stale, played-out material.

I kinda agree... diablo was never a competitive game. Like poe, the "competition" outside a microscophic number of people boils down to a kinda dumb dick measuring contest. D2 "race" to 100 was a joke, they didnt even made token efforts to disgise how the whole list was populated by bots and thus, i never encountered anyone who took it seriously. D3 was hardly better, they tried to implement a bit more seriously, but idiotics decisions(like not weighting mobs per challenge they pose or seeding the maps) also made the whole thing a joke and the "rank" was less a badge of honor and more akin to presence on poe ninja

The "competition" on poe largely boils down to dick measuring, how rich you are next to the average dude. Whats the number next to your forum name. Stuff that have exactly zero importance. Games with rank systems at least being high or low is relevant for the sake of matchmaking, poe how rich or how slow you play earns zich penalties or disadvantages


All THAT said...

Yeah, blizzard made a(nother) dumb move. The prize is not "irrelevant", even if its a statue that nobody will look, its still a nice homage: statues of important people are hardly noticed by the average dude as well, its still significant, even so

And even if the prize was really meager, it still is an event they are pushing considerable to people to see, that puts it on a different level from D2/3 ladders where people who didnt had the game likely werent even aware existed. If you put foward something, its just obvious to make it at least decent, or its gonna hurt your image. The whole thing is moronic for blizzard in particular because they have massive history with pro-level competition, so amateur moves like that are even more eye-rolling than if it came from an indie dev

And well... game being linear or not dont change the fact people with some experience will have an unfair headstart, wich is exactly the sort of thing ANY competition that can be called halfway decent will do anything it takes to avoid. People starting on uneven conditions is one surefire way to turn the whole thing into a meaningless affair, and again, blizzard really was supposed to know better

Granted, maybe the average joe dont give a shit, but then... that would raise the question of why even bother, woudnt it?

I do not plan on playing d4 anytime soon but this just feels a little bit of a last minute promo. The ones that want to and could compete in this are the diehards that would have already gotten the early access. I would be more upset about the build creators and such getting early access and spoiling the natural process of learning the game with build guides and such before release.

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feike wrote:

statues of important people are hardly noticed by the average dude as well, its still significant, even so

This is not that, not even remotely. The delusions of grandeur are strong here.

I mean this statue (if there even ends up being one), will be on private property at the HQ. A few employees will see it. Wow. Such significance.

Anyways Charan basically covered everything that needed to be covered in a couple of his posts. I did touch on a few similar points within a thread over in GD. I don't have much else to add other than to express how unfathomably small the number of players this impacts on scale.

We are probably looking at a number in the multi-millions launch week, and upwards of 5 or 6 million by the end of June. Even if there were 1500 - 2000 serious hardcore racers, that would represent a number in the thousandths of 1%. For the other 99.9997 folks this is laughably insignificant.

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Granted, maybe the average joe dont give a shit, but then... that would raise the question of why even bother, wouldn't it?

I honestly believe this was a reaction to the announcement there wouldn't be a ladder ready at launch. Which again, almost no one cares about. I believe they came up with this to placate the loudest voices in the creator space, but still they have issues. If I was Blizz I would cancel the whole thing and never think twice about it. These vocal few are totally out of touch imo.

By contrast there was no controversy when the Royal competitions could be abused with the ultra-wide screens.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

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feike wrote:

statues of important people are hardly noticed by the average dude as well, its still significant, even so

This is not that, not even remotely. The delusions of grandeur are strong here.

I mean this statue (if there even ends up being one), will be on private property at the HQ. A few employees will see it. Wow. Such significance.

Anyways Charan basically covered everything that needed to be covered in a couple of his posts. I did touch on a few similar points within a thread over in GD. I don't have much else to add other than to express how unfathomably small the number of players this impacts on scale.

We are probably looking at a number in the multi-millions launch week, and upwards of 5 or 6 million by the end of June. Even if there were 1500 - 2000 serious hardcore racers, that would represent a number in the thousandths of 1%. For the other 99.9997 folks this is laughably insignificant.

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Granted, maybe the average joe dont give a shit, but then... that would raise the question of why even bother, wouldn't it?

I honestly believe this was a reaction to the announcement there wouldn't be a ladder ready at launch. Which again, almost no one cares about. I believe they came up with this to placate the loudest voices in the creator space, but still they have issues. If I was Blizz I would cancel the whole thing and never think twice about it. These vocal few are totally out of touch imo.

Yet I'm sure if GGG allowed beta testers to compete in events you'd be saying completely different things...