If you were one of the 6.5 million purchasers that made Diablo III the fastest-selling PC game of all time last week, you should know that Blizzard now admits the game you were playing was broken in some significant ways. I don't just mean broken in ways that prevent you from playing the game (though the company is still fixing many server and programming issues that continue to cause connection problems), but broken in ways that made certain character skills unintentionally powerful.

Blizzard has now posted a list of hotfixes that were applied to the game yesterday, and aside from a few obvious usability bugs, all of them significantly scale back the power of certain key class abilities. Basically, if you were using any of these abilities before the patch, you were unintentionally taking advantage of skills that made the game much easier than Blizzard apparently intended.

Take the Monk class's Boon of Protection rune, which let a player's party absorb a good deal of damage for ten seconds. Community Manager Bashiok admits on the forums that this ability "was approximately ten times over its budget on the benefits it provided" and has now been "nerfed to the point of obsolescence until we can implement a new rune in its place in a future patch.

"We don't intend to take these quick and drastic measures often, but considering the severity of the issue, we felt it important to correct it swiftly," he continued.

Players on the forums have been quick to complain that the newly downgraded abilities will make it practically impossible to beat the game on the highest difficulties, where the enemies are downright ferocious. I can't comment on the substance of those complaints, as I'm still slowly working my way through Normal difficulty and finding it almost insultingly easy for my Demon Hunter.

Gamers deserve better than this

What I can say, however, is that the dedicated players who have already used these abilities to fight through to the game's highest difficulty levels deserve better than being told, in essence, "you were playing an incorrect and incomplete version of the game." Such players now have to look back at their in-game achievements with some suspicion, wondering whether their performance would stand up if they were playing the newly rebalanced, "corrected" version of the game that went live yesterday.

Post-release patching is nothing new, of course, especially in the PC space. Diablo II, for instance, was still being rebalanced through patches as recently as March of 2010, nearly ten years after its initial release. I also understand that any game with as many moving parts as Diablo III is probably going to have a few outstanding issues on release, and that being able to correct these issues with a hotfix is better than just letting them ruin the game forever.

But the ubiquity of the post-release patch has led too many developers to be pretty lax about prerelease balancing, secure in the knowledge that they'll be able to fix any problems that pop up at a later date. For a prime example of this viewpoint, check out Bashiok's response to forum-goer complaints that classes with ranged attacks are significantly more powerful than the Monk and Barbarian, which are forced to fight up close:

"In general class balance is an ongoing investigation, and by no means do we believe the game is now perfect, but we're also seeing evidence that supports (with a few nerfs to wizard and demon hunter) the monk and barbarian are not as bad off as they seem," he writes. "Our intent is to get classes a bit more aligned, verify no new issues crop up from these hotfixes, and then considering all the factors we'll look at content," he writes in later post. "It's not a preferred method of operating, I'd say, but just because the game is so new we don't think quick decisions on overall balance is the right approach when the metagame is still shifting.

"The game is young, there were some skills that threw things out of whack, and we expect the landscape to settle out a bit more evenly," he continues in yet another post.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure why it should take an "ongoing investigation" to help perfect a game that still needs to "settle out a bit more evenly" weeks after it has been released.

Bashiok cites a shifting "metagame" in what is still a "new" release, implying that real-world conditions and play style are messing with what seemed like a carefully balanced experience in testing. That argument works all right for competitive games, where the community can often uncover previously unknown strategies and combos that even diligent testers might have missed (see this demonstration of how powerful the now-banned Akuma was in competitive Super Street Fighter II Turbo, for example). But it seems to me that the issues that broke the initial Diablo III experience would have been present and apparent in the version Blizzard presumably tested for balance issues well before its oft-delayed release.

The only thing that has changed since that prerelease testing is that Blizzard has belatedly realized it made some significant mistakes in balancing Diablo III's character classes and abilities. As the "ongoing investigation" into these balancing issues continues into the future, players can rest assured knowing the game they're now playing is far from perfect and still subject to significant, regular tweaks. Maybe they'll finally get it right in ten years or so...