by Whitney "Neinball" Fairchild - 10 years ago     show comments

A few days ago some forum-goers expressed their dismay over the apparent pointlessness of the Reaper of Souls beta.  They claim the lack of updates and some misguided assumptions about previous betas as the reason for RoS being dead in the water already. CM Nevalistis jumps in to make it clear that the RoS Friends & Family beta is a bit different from any other beta Blizzard has run previously.

F&F betas are nothing new to Blizzard but normally these betas have been very limited in terms of participation and locked down with NDAs to prevent any information from being made public.  The RoS F&F marks the first time that Blizzard has openly invited many members of the community and skipped the NDA requirement. However, the way that Blizzard has handled closed betas for previous games has brought certain expectations that don’t apply to this step of the development process.  During this stage Blizzard rarely compiles full sets of patch notes and will constantly be making tweaks to the game files on a daily basis to try out different features and it’s this lack of comprehensive notations that is causing people to think that there is nothing going on behind the scenes.  This couldn’t be any further from the truth, but things are changing so fast that new features aren’t ready to be implemented yet.  Does this mean we won’t see anything new in the RoS beta?  It’s possible, but I don’t think Blizzard has revealed their entire hand just yet.

The dev team is working on pushing changes out as quickly as they can at this point, but once the number of changes and fixes slows down and the game transitions into the closed beta phase we’ll see traditional patches and balance fixes.  This is also the time we’d see new features, if any, get added in.  There are still a ton of datamined information that hasn’t made it’s way into the game yet like the very mysterious Devil’s Hand feature which no one really knows much about.

From what we know the Devil’s Hand requires hunting down certain relics within the world and bringing them to an NPC somewhere and receiving cards of some type.  Is this a tarot card reading? A daily buff? A replacement for the long abandoned Talisman? Will the Devil’s Hand even be something that’s added in at launch or was it just some experiment that can got canned?  Only time will tell.

You can find Nevalistis’ rather in-depth comments below.

This has been a really interesting Beta test for a lot of reasons.

First, we’ve never done a Beta quite like this before. Normally, our Friends & Family Beta phase goes relatively under the radar, because it’s locked down with an NDA and includes only folks who have been recommended internally for testing. This time, however, we’ve opened up invitations to major community influencers in addition to another 3000 of our most active players. On top of lifting NDA restrictions, we’re aiming to allow the community at large the chance to provide input at an earlier stage than we’ve ever offered before.

The best thing about this level of transparency is that we’re receiving a massive amount of feedback at an incredibly early stage of development. Forums are lit up, videos and livestreams are coming in, and our inbox is bursting with constructive criticism and positive feedback alike. Weekly reports are compiled that go directly to our development team to make sure they’re able to stay on top of community sentiment, concerns, and mechanical feedback while they continue to work. It’s definitely a busy time over here, and we’ve already addressed several legendary item effects, disabled Crushing Blow, and are continuing to making tuning adjustments to skills, difficulty, and monsters as a direct result of player feedback. For a very small glimpse at these changes, you can view some of the hotfixes we’ve implemented here.

However, an unfortunate side effect of inviting a larger audience of players to the Friends and Family stage (a phase which is historically not supported with forums, patch notes, or even routine patches) is that people are making assumptions off of a limited amount of information. For example, items are dropping in droves right now. That’s in part because of intentional over-tuning for testing purposes and in part the result of several bugs, making loot acquisition much more rapid than what players will see when Reaper of Souls ships. A lot of fixes and changes have gone under the radar because, at this point in testing, adjustments happen to the Friends & Family Beta so quickly that compiling and maintaining a patch list for them is not entirely feasible. A tweak that goes in in the morning might be reverted a few hours later. These things happen in multiple iterations and waves and at an extremely fast pace. As the Beta progresses, however, the process slows down a bit and becomes less frantic. For Closed Beta, for example, we’ll be able to provide regularly updated patch notes to keep you all up to date and give you a better idea of how your feedback is affecting development.

There’s only a certain amount of comfort I can lend, and I know showing is generally easier to accept than telling. We’ve been hard at work here, and hopefully (very soon), we’ll be able to share the fruits of our labor – much of which are directly a result of your feedback.