Chapter Review – Diablo III

Blizzard’s Blunder

The fourth chapter of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels overlooks the development of Diablo III by Blizzard Entertainment. Upon its release, it faced a little bit of backlash over not being fun to play, as we will learn from the chapter. On May 15, 2012, Blizzard released Diablo III to the world, and hundreds of thousands of people eagerly awaited getting to play. As they attempted to load into the game, however, they were faced with an issue. The servers, all of the servers, were stuck and unable to work, and would provide an error message. This error, numbered Error 37, quickly became a meme around the internet, being wide-spread across the platform in an effort to alleviate their anger. In Blizzard headquarters, they were trying to handle the issues of their servers overloading with the large burst of players trying to enter. These errors mainly occurred due to their want to keep it fully online as a game in order to limit the piracy of the game to maximize profits, which leads to their servers being too small to handle the capacity. It took 2 full days of 24/7 work to try to decipher the errors fully and fix the game, allowing it to come fully online. Errors would still occur, but far less than before and on a smaller scale. This allowed people to finally play the game, but unfortunately, led to a new, deeper issue within the game. Many players came to found that as they played the game, they would encounter the marketplace. This marketplace was where people could sell their items for real world currency, and some of these item were extremely difficult to come by, and helped players progress through the extremely difficult endgame content. This pay-to-win content was extremely controversial and lead to lots of anger coming out towards the Blizzard Entertainment company.

Redemption

Blizzard knew they needed to find a way to calm everyone’s anger and fix the problems they made. They told everyone they had a long-term goal on how to make the game more enjoyable in the end-game content and balance, but it still faced a lot of heat. They knew their only chance of redeeming the game in the public eye was when their usual expansion coming out soon. As they usually have a release of an expansion once the game has been out for a little while, it was their next and only chance to fix the problems before people left the game, and instead of a normal expansion, they would need to have a transformative redesign over the top. Along with the expansion to the game, they would need to completely change how the Auction House worked, especially since many just saw it as a cash-grab for Blizzard. Many people’s wishes came true even, as in March 2014 the Auction House was taken offline. With the release of their expansion, Reaper of Souls, the game was redeemed after 2 years.

My Thoughts and Conclusion

When Diablo III originally released, the main problem people had with the game were the errors in the servers overloading and the auction house being a cash grab for the company. The game being solely online was a byproduct of them wanting it to be unpiratable for profit reasons as well, which lead to their server errors. While its understandable for a corporation to want to make money from their products, the lack of proper planning for the number of people playing on their servers caused a majority of their problems on that side. With proper planning, and understanding that many players will be dissatisfied if the endgame content is only achievable with money or a great deal of time being put into the game. The change of mechanics within a game franchise is difficult, but it has worked in some games in the past. Any changes need to be taken very slowly and carefully and given feedback from your audience or else you will lose them over time to the changes. In-game purchases can work for certain games where its used for cosmetics and other optional content, but market systems typically should rely on in-game currency.