Diablo 4 devs just had a community chat were they expressed how “sorry” they were about a recent patch introducing a bunch of nerfs just before Season 1; they acknowledged how they made a mistake, had made the game less fun, vowed to make changes, etc. Do you think the devs truly believe that their patch was a bad call in terms of game design, or are they moreso just trying to temper outrage at the expense of what they really wanted to do? And so, how sincerely should fans take their apology?

I’m sure that they had plenty of good reasons for the overall changes in the patch. I think that the D4 team leadership misjudged the audience reception to the patch, which is why they apologized for the way it was delivered. It is unfortunate, but game devs are fallibly human too and we do make mistakes from time to time.

It is likely to me that they justified making these changes for the long term health of the game and to bring things back to expected values in accordance with future content releases - there’s a plan in place that those of us on the outside are not privy to for not just Season 1, but also Season 2 and beyond. Season 1 has already launched, Season 2 is likely undergoing its final touches before being locked down, and Season 3 is likely already in production as we speak. They know where they want the game to go, so it is likely they want to bring power levels in line now before things spiral out of control later on. This doesn’t mean that they gave enough thought about how well the changes would be received, only that there is likely a reasonable basis for their decisions.

As for how sincerely fans should take their apology, I would say it doesn’t really matter. Fans should not look at this as anything more than a consumer relationship - they get a product whose value they can determine for themselves. If they continue to get sufficient value from the product for the time and effort they put into it, then they’ll continue to engage with it. If the value proposition goes negative, they’ll drop it. This is how things should be. I think that getting too emotionally invested in the drama around the metagame is unhealthy. I think that fans should play the game if they like it and put it down if they don’t. Getting too much into whether one should accept an apology from the dev team is too much emotional investment in my opinion.

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