Blizzard on PvP and Clvl by Difficulty
Posted 24 April 2012 by FluxThe long-standing rule of thumb estimate of character level progression by difficulty level has been 30/50/60. That’s what Blizzard said in the past, but it was just an estimate and a rough design goal. What are players actually experiencing in play testing? Kaivax shared his own experience in a short post today.
The oft-stated design theory of 
Inferno is that players will need to linger in Hell for a while to build up the high quality gear necessary to survive the end game. Replaying Hell isn’t meant for D2-style level grinding, but many of us figured we’d finish Hell at level 58 or something, then gain some levels while item hunting. Apparently not, at least not on our early, non-twinked, non-rushed chars.
Another blue commented on PvP, which we’ve been told will not be enabled upon launch, but will be added in at some later date. Most everyone who played the Arena demo at the last two Blizzcons loved it and can’t see any reason the devs don’t enable something much like the 2011 deathmatch demo, in the full game upon launch. As Blizzard hasn’t given any official explanation for the delay beyond a generic “more polishing,” there are two main fan theories:
1) Blizzard saw how much fans loved playing the Arena, realized the potential of the system, and they now want to launch it in a more balanced and polished form that they’ll gradually transition to an E-Sport.
2) Blizzard doesn’t think D3′s PvP is noob-friendly or accessible enough and wants to put in more “gold star just for trying” WoW-style achievements.
Neither theory gets any support from Zarhym’s nonspecific comments today, which could have been presented 6, 12, or 18 months ago without a single word being changed.
That said, we want to develop PvP as an engaging and rewarding system. What we don’t want to do is take a traditional eSports approach to PvP, where balance will become so important to a competitive ranking system that solo and cooperative gameplay feel a bit neutered as a result.
We want your characters to feel totally imba. Then we want you to enter some Arenas, send the scorched remains of other players’ corpses flying, and let the satisfaction wash over you — until your opponents take similar care of your hero, that is. 
F-I-R-S-T
Okay, now that is secure, I want to get an issue I have had across. Why are you pushing PvP so hard, Flux. Yes, you played PvP at Blizzcon 2011, and yes, you loved it, there is absolutely nothing wrong there. What I took some issue to, though, are some of your answers which were of type. “If you had played it, you would have cared that PvP isn’t included in the game.” These were relativly common from you back during that poll on PvP when large percentage of visotors said they didn’t care for PvP. I have to say that I do not necessarily condone these types of comments from you, and that I find them somewhat condescending. I am generally uninterested in PvP. Yes, I am sure it will be fun, and I may play it, once a week or month, to get my “PvP fix”, however I really and truly not interested in PvP in Diablo 3.
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against inclusion of PvP in the game, and I certainly support different preferences in end-game, so if someone, anyone, wants to spend most of their game time PvP-ing, more power to them. I, however, in several years of playing D2 (yes, I know, not as long as some of the veterans on this site that were playing since 2000, which is something I plan on rectifying with D3), only ever played two matches, and never had, and still don’t have any interest in doing it.
Don’t take this comment the wrong way, this isn’t a personal attack against you, or anything like that. I respect you and the work you put into this site for us readers, and this is certainly my favorite Diablo site, and the only one I visit on daily basis. However, I just wanted to get to your attention that there are readers of your site who are simply aren’t interested in PvP, and that the comments of the type which assume like of knowledge in your readership, as somewhat irritating.
Lastly, I would like to say that I am not native english speaker, so I apoligise beforehand for any mistakes in this post.
You know on FARK.com, there is a word filter for “first post,” shifting it to “boobies” and moving the entire post forward in time so it is no longer the first post.
Maybe we should have something like that here?
Here’s the tin-foil-hat angle – they don’t want PVP to offer a PVP that kick’s WoW’s ass. Not like that would be hard.
One of many things gimped about the fundamental design to avoid direct cannibalization of the WoW sub base.
That’s too much tinfoil for me. Cannibalization was addressed with the WoW annual pass, and it would be counterproductive to sabotage an up-and-coming game to protect the customer base of a game that’s entered its decline phase.
From a business viewpoint, Having the 3m players who were probably switching to GW2 anyways buy D3 and its expansions and participate in the RM market is probably a better long-term business strategy. At least until Titan comes out.
ya that esport theory is just wishful thinking i think sadly ; (
Everyone knows Blizzard employees are worse than the average player in their games.
If you were a porn movie actor / actress….****ing would be the last thing on your wishlist come Monday morning.
Same here man. It’s a job, it gets tedious and boring.
I work as a software dev. The majority of our clients have a third (at best) of working knowledge of their businesses than we do. We are a service provider ffs and we have to teach them how to run their business.
It’s common, it’s retarded…but that’s how it is out in the real world.
Level 55 for the end of Nightmare? That’s a little higher than I expected. I wonder how the difficulty changed during the last months and how player progression through the different difficulties was affected, if at all.
Keep in mind that Kaivax is probably terrible at the game. I recall when they said their QA team had trouble beating (and thus effectively testing) normal-difficulty raids in WoW, which are pretty easy. So I expect that most of them aren’t that good at the games they play.
That’s the best game decision I have heard in a long time. Being a huge fan of PvP in D2 (I still don’t know what PvE is, PvM FTW), I was afraid Blizz would try to emulate WoW PVP balance system completely destroying D3PVP. I have always believed that PvP should truly be imbalanced. Something should always be better than something else. Some builds are just not viable in PVP. Some match ups are impossible to win… That’s what you bring your buddies in for, or switch characters in attempt to re-balance the match up. Item gear will always matter. (helps create a reason to continue to find gear in inferno). I could go on and on. Yes, i’m 24 years old and just got that giddy feeling in my stomach that D3 PVP may resemble D2 PVP rather than WoW.
I agree with that concept, but it just begs the question… what are they waiting for? If they really are not concerned about balance or esport prep, and they’ve had a working arena system in-game for at least 2 years?
Ok, time for a real post rather than just a rambling. I believe Blizzard would be waiting to polish over certain aspects of PVP. For example, (never played blizzcon demo), they are working on finishing move animations and death animations?
Maybe they decided to add new arena’s, formats and possibly game play? I would tend to think in a MW aspect where Blizzard has put way more emphasis on the single player / coop campaign mode rather than work on the multi player pvp function. Remember this is a game developer who has delay after delay, so a completely different game function might take more time to develop (i hate this reason).
Would it be possible that Blizzard is working on in game “balance” features. I’m not saying things need to be e-sport balance, which i don’t believe they should (see last post), but for example, in D2, mass resistances and exploits completely ruined some dueling match ups which were annoying to deal with (hence calling friends or another character).
Maybe they were thinking of locking skills in place and could not change during arena? Or maybe change after each round.
Just brain storming here.
Perhaps they don’t want just arena in on release? Wishful thinking, but it would be nice if the reason for delay was because they wanted the release of PvP come with multiple modes; instead of tuning the whole thing around arena and wedging CTF, hold the point, etc. in at a later time.
With PvP available as it was, critics would include it as part of their review and overall score, and that might be worse than not having PvP at all for the initial reviews…
The name of the money game is high metacritic scores.
I believe they’ve glimpsed greatness as you’ve, and are working something amazing out. Not a D3 port of WoW Arena, but something tailored for a Diablo game. Hopefully something that involves randomized maps and objectives.
They want to be sure it’s great on consoles? It’s not so obvious that PvP is fine on gamepad right now. Maybe they want to check more arena design, rewards, test gameplay on angry birds players to be absolutely sure what they are about to ship and etc. Skills UI has changed quite lately, so big decision are still made on the fly simultaneously with console port.
PvE
Player vs Environment
exploding barrels, buildings that are on fire, and now falling chandeliers and walls (still wish they caused damage)
So… your saying that if barb vs wiz or DH as an example isnt a good match-up, i should just switch characters? I don’t plan on making anything more than a barb, I honestly was praying to god that arena would be balanced and competitive so I wouldn’t have to make other characters just so i dont get ****d in pvp. bringing friends is a joke, because my friends are competitive people and if im using underpowered characters they won’t like me being on their team, and ill feel like im holding them back. Also the item statement is horribly wrong, if my class is imbalanced I wont bother getting pvp gear, and as a result I won’t be grinding to find items for pvp. This idea of it not being balanced and competitive is honestly an extremely large reason I might not play pvp, and not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. I always wondered why they couldn’t just have seperate pvp and pve spell balance etc because that seems to be the only reason people don’t want pvp to be a e-sport, because it would ruin pve.
Skills in PvP use different data tables than the PvE ones. They are balanced independently.
Source? It’s great but I’ve never heard this.
Dunno when it was said or who by but I remember a blue saying that they had a separate table for PvP.
I know that but from what it sounds it doesn’t seem like they care about it being balanced enough so that I could play against my friend and we wouldn’t need to worry about how bad my character is against theirs. Idn I care that they are forcing me to make another character based entirely on the fact that pvp isn’t balanced. Which I won’t do.
PvM is PvE for hipsters.
it is pretty odd that they aren’t releasing what they had ready at blizzcon. Surely it was good enough. I doubt PVPers would mind much if things changed in PVP after release. Just so long as they got to pvp in the first place.
I’m not a pvper, tho I am definitely intrigued by the arena style that was in the last blizzcon. I’ll definitely give it a shot whenever it comes out.
Well here is a thought. Perhaps they’ve been so busy on the main game, important things like match making were put to the side. And since they obviously got word from up high to release the damn game, they just said ok, we’ll do pvp later.
Imagine how angry PvP fans will be if when the finally release PvP, it is hardly different from the last few Blizzcon models. IMO they should have just released what they had.
They should include both an arena deathmatch type pvp i.e what they’ve shown but I’d love it if they focused upon a PVE + PVP mode. Where you were battling against another team in trying to kill a certain demon. They’ve built some of the lore in the magic wars. It would allow you to force some PVE builds (what the game is built for) but then also introduces some PVP element based on teamwork and skill. It would be much easier to balance than pure player versus player and the rewards make more sense as you are still killing demons and getting loot.
If said demon was beating on each team as they fought their triangle of death, then I for one would watch arena battles. Not sure this will be implemented. Truly nor sure.
Chances are they’re working on a matchmaking system that doesn’t make the game feel like crap when playing PvP.
One of the reasons it was fun at blizzcon was because it was in a sandbox, premade characters with premade gear.
Taking it out of that sandbox, and you don’t want to end up with things like uber geared group v. under geared group. That’s just a pointless matchup. But balancing the matchmaking to properly take that type of thing into account (as well as potentially history / skill) is something that is fairly challenging.
But people are arguing why not just include the sandbox version initially.
I don’t want to see Blizzard make a sandbox. From initial concept, a year later, they’d be wondering “does it have to be sand? What if it were, say, monkeys?”.
Well I’m not arguing that, though I think the sandbox style should be their long term project, for esports. Of course they can’t balance the full game with all the char/skill/equipment permutations. But it seems like they could pick like 3 builds of each class with preset gear and let players choose from those and go in team PvP matches. I’ve been told that WoW PvP is handled that way in tournaments.
These were my thoughts exactly. Blizzard has made some great innovations with matchmaking since WC3 and I think expectations are high for a balanced, competitive, fun PvP environment. The Blizzcon version, while functional, was done with pre-made, pre-balanced characters. They’ve had enough bugs with getting people into a game on the right quest for PvE, I can only imagine that PvP matchmaking is proving difficult to finish at Blizzard-level quality as well.
I wonder what his build was? I picture my build stomping through nightmare.