At long last, running 8 months behind schedule, a mere 16x longer than estimated, the 1.13 Patch hits the PTR and what it tests better than anything is player patience.

Forums are billowing with outrage over the lack of new content. This is what we've waited for? This is what we get for all the thoughtful, well-researched, well-written patch suggestions that Blizzard asked of us? This is what you killed the ladder economy for? This is what you skipped a reset for? This is what you taunted us, month after month, with "soon" for? Copy/pasted patch notes add insult to injury.

It appears, however, that they did have good reason to postpone the ladder reset. Patch notes claim and reports confirm that they have indeed..

- Fixed an item dupe epidemic bug.

For players, the best news out of this patch is that an old dupe method that had been causing a lot of realm instability and lag has been removed. A reset would have been meaningless with duping run amok. Of course, by launching this change on the Player Test Realm, they've given dupers a cue to ramp up production and build stock before the patch goes live on the standard realms. So, if the realms have been especially unstable since the PTR launched, you know why.

Probably the most troubling news, that Blizzard hasn't let on, is that they've known about this dupe method for a very long time, and they let it go unchecked. They haven't wiped any accounts or deleted any items or banned any IPs. Why patch it now? Was the dupe fix originally part of the patch or did it only get incorporated recently? We may never know, but it is the only meaningful change in the patch so perhaps fixing the dupe method was its primary purpose.

On the other hand, the method has seen an exponential growth in use over the past year, which may have finally helped tip the scale from acceptable to not. I speculate that when the patch was first discussed 8 months ago, someone who held the dupe got spooked and decided to sell it around in a last minute effort to squeeze a few more dollars out of it, not expecting the buyers to have more than 2 weeks with it. Whoops!

Duping isn't the only thing that's been on the rise over the last 8 months though. It's almost like once Blizzard got started on this patch they forgot about everything else. It's been over 9 months since anyone has been banned for game spam and I can't remember the last time they really laid the smackdown on people using 3rd party tools/hacks/bots either.

People have proposed CAPTCHA and other methods of foiling bots but Blizzard already has a powerful tool it's not using. Warden is active but it might as well not be as it doesn't start testing a character until it's been in a game for 45 seconds. If you can finish your run or spam in under 45 seconds, you're home free. Drop this delay to a few seconds to make farmbot runs impossible; require a correct response to Warden before a player can speak to mute spambots.



Another thing I don't get is this increased stash nonsense. Above and beyond an increased stash, by far, the most requested 1.13 feature was bug fixes. New content is great, but you've got no business going there when you haven't fixed stuff like TPPK. How about you get the game we've got working, then think about expanding? A stash increase would have been the icing on the cake--if you had a cake. Right now you've got something like a shitty meatloaf. Don't put icing on a shitty meatloaf.

Now, about this increased drop rate for high runes... Let me put this in to perspective. I recently spoke with someone who'd previously been involved in a mass botting operation. This is a direct quote: "I did a year of Pindlebotting and got 2 Zods from 150 bots over millions of runs." So, guess what? You still won't be finding any Zod runes. I'm not going to get too far into itemization here. Suffice it to say that when duping and botting are endemic to your game, you need to design with that in mind--especially when you aren't doing anything much to combat them. Does it matter if the drop rate for Zod went from 1 in 10m to 1 in 1m if you can buy them anywhere for $0.25?



What Blizzard has produced looks like not more than a week's worth of work. I'm holding out hope though--hope that not everything is being tested on the test realm. I'm hoping that things that shouldn't need testing, like new items, will greet us when the patch goes live on the standard realms.

I'd like to know at what point Blizzard knew that the patch was going to take 8 months to complete. It is hard to imagine with what they've delivered so far, that this patch was ever more than 1 week from completion. Did it take them 7.5 months to get started? Did they devote 1 day a month to it? I don't believe that it ever touched internal QA given the quick player discovery of a big, and obvious problem with skill respecs--the largest feature of the patch.

Players are feeling especially burnt because they reasonably assumed, when Blizzard asked for patch wishes, that new features would be in addition to the long-outstanding, well-documented, highly demanded, severely detrimental bugs that they've known or should have known about for years.





"One problem we're running in to with some reports at the moment though is that people are using slang terms for issues because they've been around for so long. We still need detailed steps on how to reproduce all bugs, especially long standing issues." -- Bashiok

Are you for real? You're really having a hard time understanding people because they're using Diablo 2 slang? D2 is still your game, right? Last time I checked, it was still $40 retail for a set of Classic + Lord of Destruction. Now, I've owned my copy for 9 years.. I feel like I've gotten my money's worth. I just feel sorry for the guy who bought the game yesterday and paid new game price for something that is essentially unsupported. Look, you could hire 1 guy for 5 hours a week to keep up with everything that's going on in Diablo 2. It wouldn't be that hard. Or, you could just read your own forums once in a while. Notice that 99% of the bugs that people are bringing up aren't new bugs that exist only on the PTR? They've all been posted, in detail, in plain English, on the Bnet forums before.

Just as I was about to post this blog entry, I read this:

"To give you a small hint, nothing is going to happen or be decided until after the new year." -- Bashiok

I really don't get how you can announce to dupers that you've fixed their method, knowing full well how many problems it creates with the servers, and then just let it keep running on and on. Wouldn't a better strategy have been to simply patch the dupe outright without warning, and then take your sweet time running the rest of the changes on the PTR? I do appreciate you giving me enough notice to make plans for the holidays though. When you launched the PTR I canceled everything, thinking the patch would be launched earlier, as a Christmas present.

and this:

"I also want to impress upon everyone that 1.13 isn't and never has been intended as a final patch for Diablo II. I realize with the long delays in getting it to PTR, and longer stretches of time inbetween patches that it seems like it's necessary that 1.13 encompass everything because, well, there's just no guarantee that anything will come after. Or in a timely fashion. But, there is a solid long term plan of action for future support of Diablo II. There's obviously plenty of room for skepticism, and I can't blame anyone for that. But even with that skepticism I hope that we can get the message across that we have no intention of stopping here." -- Bashiok

Damn right there'll be skepticism. It sounds like you've basically set what's known as a 'soft cap' on patching. If it took you 8 months (and counting) to get out a patch representing 1 week's worth of work, can we really believe that there will be any meaningful patches in the future? Perhaps in another 2 years we'll get another patch representing 3 weeks worth of real coding. Oh, but by then Diablo 3 will be out so why even bother? I'd really like to hear what this long term plan is for Diablo 2.







Let me pose a question to the community:

Since it appears that the 12m WoW subscribers are barely keeping the company afloat, how much would you be willing to donate to Blizzard toward a Diablo maintenance fund? Call it the No More Excuses Fund. Let's say we could get 20,000 people to each donate $5/yr. That'd be $100k/yr--enough to hire a decent programmer who could work on Diablo 2 full-time; who could read the forums and understand the slang; who could do a week's worth of work in less than 8 months; who wouldn't have to stop patching a dupe method to work on warcraft sound effects. Count me in for $100.

