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Bluepost Roundup

by - 9 years ago

Activity in the Diablo 3 world ramped up this week with some forum posts and the sudden release of the patch 2.2.0 PTR. Blizzard covered various hot topics like the delay of the new Ruins of Sescheron zone, Act 1 bounty farming, a new file system being implemented, and micro transactions being implemented in other regions.

 

Earlier this week Blizzard released a preview blog for patch 2.2.0 that contained a peek at what’s to come with it’s release. What surprised a lot of people was the absence of the new zone that was showed at Blizzcon, Ruins of Sescheron. Blizzard has clarified it’s absence by saying that it will not be making the cut for the next patch. But fear not, it’s merely delayed and will make it into the game in the near future.

 The Ruins of Sescheron will indeed be coming to Adventure Mode in a later patch, as I mentioned in the comments for our First Look: Patch 2.2.0 post. We’re continuing to flesh out the environments we showed at BlizzCon for the area, and we can’t wait to dig deeper into the “twisted nature” vibe the dev team mentioned.

On a related note, did you know there’s a term for “fear of objects with irregular patterns of holes?” (Trigger warning for trypophobics!) The Rat King abides!

While we’re on the subject, is there anything in particular that you guys are looking forward to about Sescheron? Is it the new environments, new enemies, or the chance to learn more about a location we only got a glimpse of in Diablo II?

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There are a lot of players including myself, that dread farming Act 1 bounties for a Ring of Royal Grandeur. Blizzard is aware that this is causing the bounties to feel like a chore instead of something that you want to do. On top of pigeon holing players into focusing on the bounty rewards for just Act 1. They have plans to fix this in the future and have given a few examples of how they may approach this issue. Whether or not this makes it into the patch 2.2.0 PTR remains to be seen.

That’s a fair point.

Wyatt mentioned in our Tavern Talk livestream that playing Adventure Mode is fun when you’re just beginning, but that players can get burnt out quickly if they spend all of their time just trying to farm the Ring of Royal Grandeur.

With that said, we’re currently considering ways we could alleviate the focus on just doing Bounties in one act over and over again. To get the conversation rolling, here are a few of the ways we could achieve this:

  • We could allow Ring of Royal Grandeur to drop from Horadric Caches in any act
  • We could move it to the global drop table, allowing it to drop almost anywhere in the game
  • We could allow it to drop when you do one of the two bonus acts of the day (those which currently give bonus Blood Shards)

These are only three ideas, of course, so you can imagine there are lots of ways we could go about achieving our goal of encouraging more diversity when doing Bounties. With that said, how would you change Adventure Mode to incentivize doing a variety of Bounties across all five acts of the game?

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There has been a bit of an uproar recently because of a set of datamined strings that suggested micro transactions making their way into Diablo 3. But Nevalistis came to the forums to clarify that these will not be implemented into the EU or Americas regions and have no plans as of now to do so. I actually wouldn’t have a problem with some of these micro transactions because I would love some extra stash space and character slots.

Development for patch 2.2.0 has been underway for some time and we’ll be launching the PTR shortly. We’ve got great quality of life changes and new content coming in our next patch, and we’ll have even more details to share in the near future.

In the meantime, some new features may start to show up in data mined information for patch 2.2.0 that will not apply to all regions. Specifically, the following features will not apply to the Americas:

  • A new currency called “Platinum”
  • Timed experience boosts
  • New cosmetic items including wings, non-combat pets, and character portraits
  • References to stash space and character slot expansions
  • A new UI interface that references the above information

While the above features will not apply to this region, players will still benefit from some of the quality of life perks tied to these additions, such as a streamlined UI for selecting cosmetic benefits like pets and Collector’s Edition wings.

We recognize that many players have expressed an interest in microtransactions being added to Diablo III. While we may explore this model in some regions, we have no immediate plans to implement such purchases or the aforementioned features anytime soon for the Americas region.

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Last but not least if you were wondering about the benefits of switching Diablo to the CASC file system, Blizzard gave some information on that with a post on the forums.

In our preview blog for the patch 2.2.0 PTR, we mentioned some of the benefits of switching Diablo III over to the CASC file system. For those of you who geek out about file systems as much as you do about games, here are a few others:

    • It allows the game client to finds assets more quickly due to its non-redundant file structure, improving real-world game performance

 

    • It means patches no longer require double the installation size on-disk when patching (one of the drawbacks of the old file system)

 

  • It lets us easily integrate new technologies for patching as we develop them

While I don’t have a specific list of the kinds of data that can be “hot patched,” the main takeaway should be that adopting this file system will ideally lead to a better, more seamless experience – both when the game client is being patched and while you play the game. It can also give us the opportunity to implement some changes more quickly than in the past.

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