Diablo IV dev team states it will not release a patch like 1.1 “ever again”

Just days after the game's most recent patch was released, the Diablo IV team responded to fan feedback and vowed never to release another patch with such drastic changes again.

The details:

• In a new "Campfire Chat," core members of the game's development team say they "acknowledge everyone's feedback" on the 1.1 patches, and that it was done to prevent players from "blasting through the content," but it also made gameplay less fun for the rest of the playerbase. "We want to acknowledge everyone's feedback regarding reducing player power," said Adam Fletcher, the game’s community manager. "We know it is bad. We know it is not fun... We also want to talk about what we were trying to achieve specifically with this patch and with the changes that players ended up seeing. And then, separately, we do want to also talk about how we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again."
• Fans were outraged when the patch notes for the game were released last week, with numerous nerfs "ruining" builds for all five playable classes, including game-wide damage, stats, and XP reductions. Some critics took to the game's subreddit, while others went to Metacritic and review-bombed the game, lowering its user score on PC to just 2.2.
• To address fan concerns, the team plans to release patch 1.1.1 within the next few weeks, which will buff Barbarians and Sorcerers, increase elixir stack size to 99, and reduce respec costs by 40%, as well as a hotfix that will increase mob density in Nightmare Dungeons. The developers also announced that patch notes will now be released ahead of time to allow the team to listen to fan feedback and tweak certain changes to strike a balance between fixes and keeping the game fun.

More Activision Blizzard news:

• Overwatch 2 will be released on Steam in August, marking the first time that a Blizzard game has been released on PC outside of Battle.net since 1996. It also confirmed that more titles from its catalog will be released in the future.
• Activision Blizzard has laid off approximately 50 employees from its esports division, leaving fans to wonder what will become of its competitive Overwatch and Call of Duty leagues in the future. Before the layoffs, the company was working on new tools to run tournaments, and it has been suggested that esports will be handled by an external contractor in the future.