D3 Dev's Lessons Learned - How Relevant to PoE?

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Journey from Diablo 3 Vanilla to Reaper of Souls and the Ultimate Evil Edition (for consoles)

Josh isn't the only responsible for the changes - the entire D3 team (and even other teams) were equally important
Contrary to popular belief, they do have Deadlines ("expected dates" for releases) - supposed to launch in November 2013 - they went to Mike Morhaime and asked for more time to "get it right"
Team came together to define the 3 fundamental pillars of any Diablo game:
(1) Focus on the Fantasy - playing epic, bigger than life heroes, fighting the forces of Hell, with the promise of Epic Loot.
(2) Endgame for Everyone - no matter how many hours you play, there's something for you to do and get > this is where Adventure mode came from.
(3) Make online matter with the Cooperative and Social experience

Huge expectation - 10 years of work, with people from Blizzard North
Extreme hype for the game, even internally
Events everywhere to celebrate the release
Huge sales - the team predicted 6.66 million units sold in the first year, they got it in the first couple days
Server meltdown at launch really hurt the game
Reaper of Souls had a near flawless launch
Launch was the lowest point of the game for the developers - letting the playerbase down.
Other reasons for people being upset ("road to Hell is paved with good intentions") - the team was passionate but made some mistakes
(1) Original Launch Philosophy - stuck with D2's structure and mentality
Long item reward tail aspirations (based on 10 years of D2) .... resulted in very stingy drops!
Players like it difficult? No, they like efficiency!
Rarity vs Power correlation was unclear
(2) Misunderstood Player Psychology
Why we Play - Fantasy vs Efficiency
Where we Play - Shop, not Play
How we Play - Flip Farming
(3) Wrong Kind of Beta Test
Too Short
No End Game testing
More of a Demo than a Beta
The console "translation" (not port) was a pivotal point at finding out potentially good changes for D3V/RoS.
Auction House - was a grand experiment, with good intentions to make safe trading a reality.

Biggest Lessons learned from D3:
Making games is a hard endeavour!
The importance of Pillars - when things are ugly, know and rely on your "pillars"
Know your Fears - game designers make assumptions (and bad decisions sometimes) based on their fears >> "this is not Diablo" ... "afraid of being too generous" (in item drops)
Randomness is not necessarily Replayability - devs want people to come back, and randomness can push them away
Remember the Fantasy
The Teams define the Game's Success - during D3V launch, it felt like a funeral due to player feedback; and he thinks they turned that around

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Shagsbeard wrote:

"With help from Blizzard North".

Nonsense. Blizzard North quit working on D3 because the company wanted a business model, not a game. What we have today is NOTHING like the D3 that was being made by Blizzard North. And "Ten years of development" includes about 4 where they built a game and had to scrap it because the team walked out rather than bow to the demands of the company.

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ShimmyShimmy wrote:

For a group of people who hate diablo 3 so much you sure do bring it up a LOT in the path of exile forums or is that how it goes???