Certain bounty events being temporarily disabled

Greetings, nephalem! 

One of our ongoing goals for Diablo III (and Seasons in particular) is to promote diversity in play styles and encourage a variety of experience whenever possible. In line with this goal, and as a direct result of your feedback from Season 1, we’re in the process of implementing a series of hotfixes that will temporarily disable the following events as eligible bounties:

This change will apply to both Seasonal and non-Seasonal games. Additionally, please note that these hotfixes will only remove the above events from the active bounty pool, not the game itself. The events can still spawn in-game and will provide rewards as normal. 

We don’t have an ETA at this time for when these events will be re-added to the bounty pool, but are working to have them available for Season 2. 

Looking Forward:

In Season 1, many players were able to quickly level their heroes and earn a coveted rank on the “Race to the Top” leaderboard exclusively by running the bounties in question. While we won’t be removing any Conquest credit or ranking from players who chose to use this particular technique, we will be making changes to these bounties for future Seasons. The desire here is to help promote an environment where the most efficient way to play is also the most varied (and ideally the most fun too). With this, one of our goals for Seasonal Conquests is to encourage players to try out different tactics and explore different play styles, so we will be evaluating all Season 1 Conquests with that goal in mind and making changes for Season 2 as needed. 

Once again, thank you for your feedback. We’ll continue to grow and improve Diablo III with your support, so please keep posting! In the meantime, we wish you glory and good fortune in Season 1, and good luck to those still racing for a spot on our current Conquest leaderboards. 

See you in Sanctuary!

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While I think it is great they are hotfixing these particular bounty events, it still boggles my mind that they even made it into seasonal play to begin with.  These fast leveling techniques were already well known since March.  Furthermore, why they weren’t designed properly in the first place seems to be par for the course with these folks.  This is a key reason why I didn’t even bother with providing any feedback for the 2.1 PTR on the forums (why I self-banned myself as well) and I’m pretty sure there was feedback being posted by others to get these sort of bounties addressed before 2.1 went live.

All events should require actual combat engagement; not afk’ing or being dead while waiting for some timer to run out.  Matriarch’s Bones for example should require you to kill the main ghost spawns before you can even activate the altar.  One of the 2.0.x patches, their bandaid fix was to spawn in an elite pack near the altar (it’s a lazy fix).  The Miser’s Will was partially addressed in this same manner when they spawned in an elite pack.  Why not change the actual mechanic?  If you pick the wrong chest, more stuff spawns; the requirement should be that you must then kill all those spawns before you can even open the other chests.

My point is that this is probably what they are going to do in order to make them available again in Season 2.  My point is rhetorical; why didn’t they design it properly to begin with?  It’s symptomatic of the D3 team which is why there was stuff like chest runs and running certain quests over and over in the campaign; all nerfed into the ground.  It’s why they have to keep changing the “rules” of the game under the guise of game play diversity.  Fail design team is fail.  Those same group of designers have been making the same mistakes through the entire development process of Diablo III. Someone else made a really great remark; the compensation to incompetence ratio at Blizzard is incredible.  It’s why many of us (who are normally positive), have become cynical when it comes to this franchise and call out the D3 design team on their BS when it comes to their “design philosophies”.

This is the exact reason why I highlighted the flaws in the trial rift system as well as Greater Rifts.  I afk to fail the trial so that I can start off low, and then repeat the same afking to only take down the GRG with less than 4 minutes so that I can progress to the next tier.  It’s initially about getting all the gems as well as loot.  But it’s very stupid that one can even do this in the first place.  It’s about how this D3 team, keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over.  It’s NOT a quality assurance testing thing either.  This is how these systems were DESIGNED and intended to work.  Furthermore, Blizzard  in general, does not place a high premium/value on actual QA testing (most of those folks are hourly workers and are likely tasked with finding more generic issues in their game testing).  Their most “valuable” QA testing comes from statistics/info gathered from actual live server game play by the player base.

Furthermore (as I’ve opined before), the majority of the leaderboards are meaningless.  This “coveted” Race to the Top rank is one of the worst because it’s not being broken out into co-op versus solo (solo will normally be much slower); co-op play amounts to mutual power leveling due to how multiplayer  bonuses scale.  More importantly though, the real meat of the game starts at level 70 in Reaper of Souls (level 60 for those who did not upgrade to the expansion) since most all lower level items do not scale well.  And that is why many want to rush to get past levels 1-69.

And this is where the designers/devs are full of it.  They keep in the need to level in seasons, BUT completely remove the “fresh start” aspect of the game by fully enabling adventure mode, master, and torment difficulties from the get go so long as those had already been unlocked on a non-seasonal character.  It’s a half-assed fresh start.  But half-assed defines the PC D3 design team which is why the game has so many flawed systems which are half-assed bandaid fixed.

Again, for most players, the level 1-69 process is no different than having to play through the complete campaign again in order to unlock adventure mode.  However, to meet the fresh start aspect, the requirements that exist should apply to Seasons, or you might as well just let all players start off at level 70 as well (so long as they are already met that requirement with a non-seasonal character).  The game’s base design is linear (on rails); leveling in Diablo III is more about being a general time sink leading up to max level which is where the best items in the game will be.  It is nothing like how leveling was in it’s predecessors.  ARPG’s like this should never be about this level of linear progression (again, World of Warcraft influence).  It wasn’t in older hack and slash games like Wizardry or Ultima, it wasn’t like this in D1 or D2, it isn’t like this in Path of Exile and Torchlight.  And that is one of the games primary flaws where it is mostly about the characters gear, not about actual character building and progression outside of those items.

Vanilla D3 naturally lacks adventure mode (much of the game is balanced around that mode); that is why I refer to it as the Reaper of Souls Starter Edition.  Seasons does not exist there and the only leaderboard available is the one related to total achievement points.  Furthermore, since max level is 70, skills and items are now balanced around that.  To put it even more simply, the majority of these bandaid fixes tend to have a detrimental effect on the base vanilla game (compared to vanilla patch 1.0.8, vanilla 2.1 is lacking).

And once again, rather than actually addressing the underlying deficiencies which tends to cause all these sort of unintended ways of playing the game, they perform even more bandaid fixes on the game.  And yes, I do know that fixing those underlying problems is pretty much not going to happen because I’ve already touched on that before; it would amount to being a completely new design and therefore, amounting to being Diablo IV.  But here’s the kicker.  This team has proven they would not be able to properly design a D4.  It’s going to sound good on paper, but the execution and implementation will end up being lacking.  This is primarily why I mentioned several months ago why PC D3 is going to be it for me (before, I was willing to see it through to the 2nd expansion – now though, that is looking less likely).  

Myself, I did start a seasonal character since I wanted to go through the motions and at least collect the transmog and banner unlocks; I solo leveled using a combination of bounties and rifts.  At lower levels, I only did certain bounty objectives (usually cursed chest/shrine events).  Once I got enough rift keys, I leveled using rifts.  The only times I completed all bounty objectives was in Act IV if I got two chest/shrine events; the Cursed Dais and the Cursed Chapel).  And because I didn’t care about efficiency (since I’m not playing for the leaderboards), I had the difficulty usually set to Master (once I could finally make a flawless square ruby, I then switched to Torment I).

It was not the fastest going (16 hours to hit level 70) playing this way.  And once I hit level 70, I used the shards I had to replace most of the level 61/66 rares I had in slots that didn’t have a level 60+ legendary equipped.  I still don’t have all level 70 items in each slot but am sticking to playing on Torment I.  This is the reason I played on higher difficulty settings while at a lower character level; I conditioned myself for the slog of being way too undergeared while having to deal with 95% of all elite affixes spamming out electrified and thunderstorm.

D3 developer design logic consists of “if ranged class, unavoidable damage like thunderstorm has a .95 proc rate chance” as a means of creating a challenge.  Thus my game play is instinctively second nature where it consists of constantly teleporting around courtesy of the Illusionist proc while I drop hydra; it makes what would normally be frustrating game play (due to this unavoidable spam) with crap gear tolerable until I can get better items.

I already noticed my RNG is not going to be much different compared to how it was on live even though they boosted the legendary rate for caches (though it really requires doing higher Torment since T6 is a guaranteed act specific legendary – and even with that guaranteed, still no RoRG doing T6 on my non-seasonal wizard).  It’s no different than the countless Whimsyshire runs I did without finding a Spectrum or Hamburger (for the transmog), not getting that one last event for the Wheel of Misfortune achievement, not seeing the cow rift, and zero goblin portals (none during PTR and none on live).  At least in my game play, I consider this content non-existent.

As far as the remainder of my seasonal play, I’m just going to do enough bounties to get enough rift keystones so that I can get enough trial keys so that I can initially get all the gems, and then find that sweet spot range of tiers to use that level up those gems.  I have zero intention though of getting involved in the masochistic game play of pushing to do one rift tier higher than my gear is capable of just so that I can get that 100% guaranteed gem upgrade, just so that I can continue pushing into the next Greater Rift tier.  I’m already disgusted with this funneling of everything into rift play at the expense of the rest of the game world outside of bounty and rifts when it comes to rewards angle.

I did fortunately get a trial rift key on my first level 70 T1 rift run and as mentioned before, am playing Greater Rifts in the way that it was NOT intended to be played; purposely failing the trial so that I can rift through tiers 1-15ish (whatever tier represents around Torment I difficulty), get all my legendary gems PLUS more importantly, better items.  I already got what I wanted out of season 1 (the transmog + Feat of Strength banner unlocks) but may try to get the other seasons only achievements.