d3 Akkhan's Leniency Nerf & Stash Space Clarifications: May 10th

[Stan 5,240]

Akkhan's Leniency was unintentionally nerfed in the official patch notes and we have more clarifications regarding the Patch 2.6.5 Stash space and why we're only getting a single new tab.

Akkhan's Leniency Nerf Just a Typo

Each enemy hit by your Blessed Shield increases damage of your Blessed Shield by a maximum of 35%. This was posted in the official patch notes. Turns out the max value is supposed to be 40%, rather than 35%.

Blizzard (Source)

The Akkhan's Leniency to 35% max was a typo. Our community manager updated the S17 patch notes recently:

Each enemy hit by your Blessed Shield increases damage of your Blessed Shield by 35-40% for 3 seconds.

Signal boosting! I meant to come make a post in here, but I caught this right before lunch and had plans with a friend. 

Thanks for calling it out, by the way. Turns out this was overlooked during our patch note review and I'm glad folks were vocal about it so I could double check and get things corrected. Much appreciated!

Stash Space Clarifications

The goal of Patch 2.6.5 was to deliver more Stash space to all players, but the latest patch notes revealed just one new tab coming in Season 17 due to technical issues that would cause rubberbanding in worst-case scenarios.

Blizzard (Source)

So is the max extra stash tabs now 5 or 9? The newest season blog made me wonder.

After PTR, we continued testing and tweaking and could not meet a satisfactory quality game experience with the initially planned number of additional tabs. As a result, we had to further reduce the amount being added.

We communicated too early before we were fully confident in the proposed change. In many cases, this is often why we're more quiet than proactive about potential future changes; we generally wait until we're past a high percentage of certainty because we don't want to have to backtrack if something happens and we can't deliver. This is a perfect example of that, and we got ahead of ourselves on this one out of our own excitement.

As I'm an eternal optimist and want to make the best of any situation, on the plus side, there were a lot of areas for improvement in regards to our communication pipelines that were highlighted by this situation. We're taking full advantage of those lessons to improve overall, so we can meet in a happy medium where we're communicating clearly, transparently, and confidently.

The thread on the PTR Bug Report forum, where you asked for reports of people having problems, received zero responses.

We have to constantly plan for worse-case scenarios; i.e., even if the average number of stash tabs per person was under the max, we have to assume situations will occur where players may be impacted by being the one person with average in a group of people who are completely maxed out. 

Think of every stash tab as actually (4) times the amount of actors, because every tab we make available to one person can theoretically be available to four. Each item slots can, in a worse-case scenario, be occupied by 2 actors (a ring with a gem or a chest with 3 gems). Each tab has (10) rows, (7) columns, resulting in 70 open slots or potentially 140 additionally loaded actors. With four players in the party, that's 560 additionally loaded actors, per stash tab. 

This is an issue that very quickly becomes really bad exponentially.

The issues occur more obviously in the most extreme cases, and PTR is very limited in participation compared to live. For example, one situation we tested was four players with maximum tabs, every item slot filled, and every gem slot filled. There's a threshold below that where rubberbanding, lag, and (in the cases of consoles) game crashes were occurring.

That's not acceptable quality for us. We don't want players to log in, happen to be grouped with 3 dedicated players with a lot of gear saved up, and have their game suffer for it (or in the case of hardcore, have their character be at higher risk of death). We've pushed the limit as far as we comfortably can without risking that situation.

You claim that the issue is client side in an earlier post.

To clarify - the issue isn't exclusively client side. It's a combination. The issue is exacerbated on console because offline mode means there's a higher reliance on client-side resources.

[pwnz0r 11]

Now i'm confused, are we getting 1 extra tab per season and up to +5 in total, or just +1 tab extra max?

[Stan 5,240]

1 minute ago, pwnz0r said:

Now i'm confused, are we getting 1 extra tab per season and up to +5 in total, or just +1 tab extra max?

I believe It's just one Stash tab rewarded from reaching Conqueror in Season 17.

[pwnz0r 11]

Well, they should rework item management to be more efficient then. I had issues, when D3 was still somewhat popular (actually after every major patch), with screen freezes when opening the stash, items taking minutes to show up. Maybe some major patch is on the way, and that makes the devs worry. Fingers crossed ?

 

p.s. or maybe they are just about to cut on servers, noooo~~~~~~ XD

[Stan 5,240]

59 minutes ago, pwnz0r said:

Well, they should rework item management to be more efficient then. I had issues, when D3 was still somewhat popular (actually after every major patch), with screen freezes when opening the stash, items taking minutes to show up. Maybe some major patch is on the way, and that makes the devs worry. Fingers crossed ?

 

p.s. or maybe they are just about to cut on servers, noooo~~~~~~ XD

I think by now, they have a whole team working on D4 and they won't waste valuable dev resources to overhaul the tech behind D3 Stash tabs. They're going to keep the game fresh with new Seasonal buffs and tuning, but that's about it.

[Guest]

Well, if more stashs crashes the system you can all thank me that I did not buy the Necromancer.

What would have happened if everybody would have bought it and gotten more stashs this way? Meltdown of the game?

 

Seriously, you can't make stuff up like this, it's hilarious.

[pwnz0r 11]

Sincerely, i got the necro right away. Not for the extra tabs, don't really need em in seasons, mules works just fine in HC, and SC you can just salvage all but the best rolled items, so no lack of stash space there. Non seasonal players maybe need extra stash, idk, i just salvage everything after seasonal rollover.

Edited May 11, 2019 by pwnz0r

[Trepide 6]

1 hour ago, Stan said:

I think by now, they have a whole team working on D4 and they won't waste valuable dev resources to overhaul the tech behind D3 Stash tabs. They're going to keep the game fresh with new Seasonal buffs and tuning, but that's about it.

My guess is that their team is working on D3 Immortal 2 on phones. Hey, everybody has a phone! Why will they waste resources on D4 or worse on D3 XD

[pwnz0r 11]

You mean D3 Immoral :P ?

Idk about D4. It's only been 7 years since D3 was released, ha ha ha (5y since RoS). Would they send blizzcon invites to streamers just for a D4 announcement? Must be some demo, but i doubt it's D4.