PTR 2.4.1 Server Slam This Weekend
by JR Cook - 8 years ago show comments
The Diablo team needs your help! As many of you know and potentially have seen first-hand, gameplay in Diablo III is often at its worst in high Greater Rifts when monsters are sticking around for a long time and a party of four players is stacking tons of damage. All of the calculations that the game has to make between damage-over-time effects, area damage procs, Shield Pylon reflected damage, and a myriad of other skills and effects can sometimes bring the server to a grinding halt. Well, Patch 2.4.1 seeks to address many of those issues, but the developers won’t know if the changes they’ve engineered have hit the mark without your testing on the PTR. Keep reading for what exactly is being asked of us:
The Patch 2.4.1 PTR is now live, and while this is a smaller content patch, we’ve included additional changes designed to improve server and gameplay performance.
Our engineers have been hard at work continuing to monitor gameplay in calculation heavy environments and narrowing down potential solutions for smoother gameplay. We’re asking our PTR participants to join us each night from March 11 to 13 from 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. PT to help us stress test these optimizations.
What We’re Looking For
So what do you need to do if you want to participate? We’re looking for focus on playing in the following environments:
- High tier Greater Rifts, especially in four-person groups
- Use builds you are most comfortable with – anything from your normal “farming” level to pushing your limits
- Heavy use of Area Damage
- Use of items or powers that you may have previously avoided due to notable impact to gameplay performance, such as the Gem of Efficacious Toxin or Pain Enhancer
A Few Important Notes:
- If you find that a particular skill, item, or combination of skills and items is causing issues with performance, please let us know with as much detail as possible in the associated Focused Feedback thread
So, if you have time this weekend between 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Pacific (and don’t forget about Daylight Savings Time on Sunday), then you should assemble your crew and see if you can break things. It might just save a life in Season Six!
