[2019] We need a “housecleaning” update to address long-standing issues with each of D2’s DLCs

Hey all,

Thanks for the continued feedback on QOL requests from previous seasons and expansions. It helps us to prioritize what players want most, and gives teams an idea of what to schedule for future patches/hotfixes.

To give some context on why QOL is sometimes delayed or not acted upon, I want to call out the Mercury Sparrow bullet in particular. This was something that players were asking about many, many moons ago. It's something that the team actually tried to implement, but it ended up causing some bugs that would crash the game, or impact various activities on Mercury. This jammed up our development timeline, as we essentially lost resources that could have been allocated to testing other content that was being cooked up.

Ultimately, it was decided that the Mercury Sparrow QOL request needed to be reverted and looked at again in the future, as we didn't have enough time to hammer away at the issues brought on by the change. To put another way, each QOL request has a trade off. Do we go back and add sparrows to mercury, or do we spend the same amount of test time on things like the Dreaming City curse cycle? What if a simple QOL request ends up bringing deep rooted bugs that require more time to hammer out? Keep working on that, or hit other items that are easier to implement?

Another example that we worked on during Season of the Drifter - do we add bad luck protection to sleeper nodes, or do we focus on bad luck protection for Raids and Wayfarer objectives first? We'd been getting a lot of feedback on RNG requirements for Seal acquisition, so we needed to figure out which objectives would make players happiest, knowing that we couldn't hit all of them in one fell swoop. Sometimes we have to make these calls knowing that we won't have time to address the items we couldn't hit, so we have to prioritize what to tackle ASAP based not only on community feedback, but our release timelines and people we have available to work on the content.

All that said, we're going to continue collecting feedback from threads like this to ensure community priority is understood. Hope this gave a bit of insight as to how we approach these feedback items!

Cheers!

This.

Prioritize the emblem, or prioritize the Rocket Launcher? We have eyes on the other weapons as well. A bit more tricky as the backend setup is different than a nightfall drop.