Diablo 2 patch history
Today I had notcing better to do, so I took a look on the Most Bugged Game After Constant Patching in History, namely Diablo 2.
It curently still has ca. 200 bug PLUS the balance-issues (including unusable skills), but let's take a look how professional the game was when released, how much care Blizzard releases its products!
I'll look through all official patch-release datas, and highlight (and comment) all the really scary parts.
Let's start with 1.01 naturaly:
When looking through all the details it is clear the game was not tested by professional testers, but that1s one thing. Here's the scary part:
"Fixed a crash bug that very rarely occurred when a Sorceress cast the Meteor spell. " - this means if you used that skill, you were screwed.
"Sand Leaper corpses no longer prevent players from moving through a tight pass in the Act II desert. " - how the heck could this even happen? Aren't all the same things handled the same way???
"Fixed a bug that prevented some complete Item Sets from having their full bonus. " - sets were weak anyway, but without the set bonus no use at all.
"Removed an unused gossip from Ormus (Act III)." - now this is the strangest thing to hear ever.
"Fixed the following 3 bugs that could occasionally crash the game:
Killing Lord De Seis (Act IV).
A multiplayer party fighting in the Kurast Bazaar (Act III). " - that's Blizzard for you.
1.02:
"Fixed a bug that deleted your single player or open character if you deleted a Realm character with the same name. " - how loosy design is that? not distincting two different but allowed filetype from each other is very careless work.
"Fixed a bug that caused the portal to the Canyon of the Magi to disappear if a player had completed the Arcane Sanctuary quest (by killing the Summoner) but exited the game without taking the portal and establishing the waypoint in the Valley of the Magi. (Act II). " - So this ment you could never ever finish the game if you went through that red portal, but didn't took the waypoint. Huray I think.
1.03
"Fixed a bug that caused Amazons wielding a javelin in the right side inventory box and a shield in the left to do no damage with javelin-throwing skills assigned to the right mouse button. " - plain scary.
"Fixed 3 rare lock-up bugs with Lord De Seis: killing him as any character " - remember the 1.01 note? Sounds like that part of that patch did not work...
"The "Toggle Belt" hotkey is no longer active when the in-game chat overlay is displayed. " - this means if you tried to write 1-4 (eg. in single player mode changing the players setting), you drank a potion. In case of full rejuv potions that's be reeealy expensive.
"Conversion (Paladin) Lowered the formula calculating the chance to convert for extra levels gained in this skill. " - ye. Nerf one of the weakest skill anyway in the game. Typical for Blizzard.
1.04
"Equipping a barbarian with a two-handed sword or with a shield while holding two two-handed swords will no longer cause disconnection from the Realm. " - only this time they got to fix THIS?
"Removed "invisible islands" from the River of Flame, Tal Rasha's Tomb, Spider Forest, and Tower Cellar, preventing Barbarians/Sorceresses from leaping/teleporting onto them. " - sorceresses still can teleport into walls even today though.
"Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented the Golden Bird and Blade of the Old Religion quests from giving their rewards. " - now that's what I call gamebreaking.
"Removed the pesky "thief" ability from Lord De Seis." - woot, Blizzard actually disabled an entire feature from the game, because they realised they were stupid to invent it the first place!
1.04b
they fixed minor technology issues, nothing within the game.
1.05
"Fixed all spell ranges. They were mistakenly reduced in v1.04. " - wtf? "mistakenly"? how can you change tons of values not related to the implemented changes "mistakenly"?
"The Conversion skill no longer causes a monster counting error in the Den of Evil. " - this is pure lol
1.05b
What are these "b" patches? These are "oh we forgot to add these", or "we pretend to be release less patches then we actually do"?
1.06
Not much for this patch as content, but this is rofl:
"Updated Battle.net's Terms of Service agreement. It can now be accessed without having to create a new account. " - so you either wrote it up, or had an unfailable memory, because we don't let you see what you signed policy was at Blizzard???
1.06b
"Fixed a bug that allowed players to crash other players by spamming them. " - ye. Some people are just evil for the sake of evilness. And BVlizzard even today don1t understand why hardcore mode players demand "mutual agreement on PvP" policy...
"Battle.net's Terms of Service agreement updated. Everyone please take note. " - now just tell me why this was not included in plain 1.06? Also, if someone'd use pre-1.06b, the policy will be the pre-1.06b, right?
1.07
This was actually not a patch, but a whol expansion-disc. Just to be clear.
"Decreased the length of time that Converted monsters fight for you. " - let's see what remained from this skill after the constant nerf at 1.13d!
"In expansion games, Whirlwind is now properly modified by weapon speed.
In non-expansion games, Whirlwind remains the same. " - now help me decide: whirwind being adjusted by weapon speed is intended or not??
"Sets and Uniques can no longer be gambled for. " - when was this put back? I got curious.
"Names of pre-existing Rare Items have changed. However, the item properties have not. " - change names of RARE items? They have random names anyway. Who's responsible for this wasting of time?
1.08
"When using two-handed attacks the speed of both weapons are averaged." - this is "whoops, we have that in the game!?" issue. Blizzard is simply careless of their work.
"Thunder Storm now hits a target every time. " - what good did it have then until now??
"Removed several melee modifiers from generating on orbs. " - it still generates awful lot of melee properties...
This whole patch seems to focus on giving more damage to the PLAYERS. Seems Blizzard didn't think through the changes in 1.07...
"Act II hirelings have been improved with additional skills including auras. - now I wonder what this ment to be, as A2 merc already had auras in 1.07. Although they did not have the nightmare variations, what got included in 1.09 only...
1.09
"Changed Telekinesis to only work on scrolls, potions, keys, gold, arrows and bolts. " - this was a gamebreaking issue, but after this change what remaining use it had on that field? (it got entirely removed for today, no wonder there)
"Players can no longer give or take items from a hireling if they are not within range (this fixes a bug where the game would crash if a player gave or removed an item from a hireling when the Hireling was out of range)" - what it means "out of range"? The issue should have never be related to range.
"Duriel now always drops a Town Portal scroll in addition to his regular drop. " - question: why? This also led a bug in 1.13 where Duriel only dropped a bunch of tp-scrolls...
"Added several very low-level magic affixes. " - why? there were already too many lowlevel (= unusable) attributes...
"Using a potion from the belt (either by hotkey or right-clicking) while holding down the shift key will give the potion to the player's hireling if he/she has one. " just imagine the life before this.
"Changed monster stats back to what they were before v1.08. " -another "we are stupid" change
"Rare items will now always spawn with three or more affixes if possible. " - what was the reason previous this?
"The Shae, Po, and Jo runes have been renamed. They are now the Shael, Io, and Jah runes respectively" - so now you could mix "io" and "Lo" runes...
"The Resistance penalty at higher difficulty levels no longer applies to Magic Resistance. " - this sounds so lol
"Crush Beasts no longer give only 1 exp when they are killed. " - monsters in question are the thingies from A5 on the imps ride. They are high-hp monsters, so 1 exp per kill is kinda lame... (would be anyway, but this way even more)
"Swapped properties for Jah and Cham runes in weapons. " - I like these kind of changes - you make your build, then it becomes entirely useless because of the change, despie you're wearing very costy stuff.
"Added rune words for Single Player/Other Multi Player which previously only showed up on Realm games. " - simply before this in single player mode you did not have runewords. Ever. Despite the specific reason of the A5 questreward for example to make the Ancient's Pledge.
"Fixed a bug where Tyrael would sometimes create an inaccessible portal." - Blzzard can not do anything right?
"Fixed a bug where it was possible to repair Throwing Potions. " - that was not a bug. I mean now you still can sell and buy them back fully charged...
"Fixed a bug that caused a rune word item to lose its rune word bonuses when transferred off of the character who created it. " - heh, this could enhance trading I bet.
"Fixed a bug where using the Taunt skill would sometimes cause the game to crash. " - they realised it only now, or they messed up something furing the time passed?
"Fixed bug where Regurgitators would eat Hirelings and destroy them. " - i bet people got finaly totally infuriated when their infinity got eaten...
Noticed how long the patchnotes got after 1.07?
1.09b
Considering there was a c and d from this patch, was this versionrelease really necessary?
1.09c
I don't quote as it'd be too long. Basically this was NOT a patch, but a trojan virus collecting data from north-america's computers for Warcraft 3 developing. Why only there? How they dare? And you could not avoid this if you wanned to play on multiplayer. Hack, this shit might even collect datas today!
1.09d
focusing on the same problem as 1.09c and such... Seems they can't do what they claim to do...
1.10
This was again NOT a patch, but a hugh modification (called "mod"). The game only barely resemles on the original from this point.
"Increased difficulty for high-level players to reduce future exploitation of the game system. " - this translated "you won't be level 99 in your life"
"Reduced the HP of (Act V) Barbarian soldiers in Nightmare and Hell difficulties. " - and thus made the A5 mercenary almost completly useless.
The core of the "patch" is basically adding synergies between skills without testing, and for that buffing monsters without second thought. Nobrainer that it caused problems. Serious problems.
"Added 20 new Rune Words. " - too bad only 2-3 are to access in a reasonable playthrough. All the others require at least 2 hrs, what makes it impossible to use by the average player in a legitim way. Also as they are uber-strong, duping started to get out of hand.
"Introduced a new Ladder System for those who prefer to play free from any characters who may have participated in past item duping or hacking." - thus BLizzard called all nonladder player "dupoer and hacker". How nice.
"Once a player defeats Diablo, all Diablo II Battle.net accounts accessed from that computer may create Hardcore characters. " - muling with hardcore character had to be tedious before this xD
"Removed Age from the Player Profile. " - the must have realised people can say anything on the net...
"Barbarians and Assassins who are dual-wielding potions are no longer prevented from entering a game. " - hope noone did that with lvl 99 chars xD
"A Zod Rune applied to an Ethereal item no longer reduces its durability to 0. " - I bet reason of Zod then actually started to have!
"The 3rd charge of the Assassin's Skill - Blades of Ice, now freezes the target. " - this and many similar cases happend during this "patch". Shame on Blizzard not noticing them before (and released unfixed).
"NPCs no longer accept lower difficulty quest items to complete quests in a higher difficulty. " - lol, players just can not be beaten when it is about effectiveness.
"Only a very few Unique items and new 'uber' items are now over level 85. That is, the best items now drop more often. " - ye. You can have them curently from Nihlatak and Baal: not one but two monsters! (ok, there are some lvl 90 areas, but this is still a ridiculous statement)
1.11
"Added 10 New Runewords. " - actually they added 3. Isn't this make them breaking the contract with their users?
"Skills obtained from Rune Words created while the item is equipped will no longer disconnect you from Battle.net when chosen. " - shall I say anything?
1.11b
Seems the game still has crash-issues...
1.12
Seems Macintosh-compatibility is still not entirely solved after all the patching. Well, after all the years of patching the ca. 200 known bugs and unsolved balance-issues still remains, so be happy that at least you no longer need the ancient scrachy CD to play.
1.13c
Where went the 1.13 and 1.13 b patch? Unsolved mystery.
" a new challenge awaits you" - reused by copy&paste method from the Pandemonium event. This time there is no "new challenge", but you can gather essences to assemble tokens thus have the chance of unlimited respec.
"Fixed an item dupe bug. " - these are my favourites. No telling what they actually do, or whether they actually do anything. The same time we shal mention the appearance of "hybrid runewords", what must be related to some kind of new duping method, and result these kinda items:
1) make a runeword. 2) remove the runes from the item, and make another runeword in the same item. 3) the result is a runeword item what has the abilities of the first runeword (those that don't come streight from the runes), while having the abilities from the second set of runes. Would be cool to know how to make those...
"Fixed an issue where some players could kill other players while in town ("TPPK"). " - there remained plenty of way to tppk, mostly associated the fact that it still not requires mutual agreement on the duel :(
"Increased the drop rate of high runes. " - sounds fine, too bad the chance is still 1 during 100 years of playing.
"Some rare drop items now have an orange color." - signed as the "most defining issue in 1.13 patch" by the players. This tells everything.
Pay attention how little acutal patching happened despite the detailed list the players provided to Blizzard (including the way to fix the problems).
1.13d
As support to Diablo 2 is entirely halted, now you can permanently squelch advertising bots. Too bad they no longer exist.
It curently still has ca. 200 bug PLUS the balance-issues (including unusable skills), but let's take a look how professional the game was when released, how much care Blizzard releases its products!
I'll look through all official patch-release datas, and highlight (and comment) all the really scary parts.
Let's start with 1.01 naturaly:
When looking through all the details it is clear the game was not tested by professional testers, but that1s one thing. Here's the scary part:
"Fixed a crash bug that very rarely occurred when a Sorceress cast the Meteor spell. " - this means if you used that skill, you were screwed.
"Sand Leaper corpses no longer prevent players from moving through a tight pass in the Act II desert. " - how the heck could this even happen? Aren't all the same things handled the same way???
"Fixed a bug that prevented some complete Item Sets from having their full bonus. " - sets were weak anyway, but without the set bonus no use at all.
"Removed an unused gossip from Ormus (Act III)." - now this is the strangest thing to hear ever.
"Fixed the following 3 bugs that could occasionally crash the game:
Killing Lord De Seis (Act IV).
A multiplayer party fighting in the Kurast Bazaar (Act III). " - that's Blizzard for you.
1.02:
"Fixed a bug that deleted your single player or open character if you deleted a Realm character with the same name. " - how loosy design is that? not distincting two different but allowed filetype from each other is very careless work.
"Fixed a bug that caused the portal to the Canyon of the Magi to disappear if a player had completed the Arcane Sanctuary quest (by killing the Summoner) but exited the game without taking the portal and establishing the waypoint in the Valley of the Magi. (Act II). " - So this ment you could never ever finish the game if you went through that red portal, but didn't took the waypoint. Huray I think.
1.03
"Fixed a bug that caused Amazons wielding a javelin in the right side inventory box and a shield in the left to do no damage with javelin-throwing skills assigned to the right mouse button. " - plain scary.
"Fixed 3 rare lock-up bugs with Lord De Seis: killing him as any character " - remember the 1.01 note? Sounds like that part of that patch did not work...
"The "Toggle Belt" hotkey is no longer active when the in-game chat overlay is displayed. " - this means if you tried to write 1-4 (eg. in single player mode changing the players setting), you drank a potion. In case of full rejuv potions that's be reeealy expensive.
"Conversion (Paladin) Lowered the formula calculating the chance to convert for extra levels gained in this skill. " - ye. Nerf one of the weakest skill anyway in the game. Typical for Blizzard.
1.04
"Equipping a barbarian with a two-handed sword or with a shield while holding two two-handed swords will no longer cause disconnection from the Realm. " - only this time they got to fix THIS?
"Removed "invisible islands" from the River of Flame, Tal Rasha's Tomb, Spider Forest, and Tower Cellar, preventing Barbarians/Sorceresses from leaping/teleporting onto them. " - sorceresses still can teleport into walls even today though.
"Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented the Golden Bird and Blade of the Old Religion quests from giving their rewards. " - now that's what I call gamebreaking.
"Removed the pesky "thief" ability from Lord De Seis." - woot, Blizzard actually disabled an entire feature from the game, because they realised they were stupid to invent it the first place!
1.04b
they fixed minor technology issues, nothing within the game.
1.05
"Fixed all spell ranges. They were mistakenly reduced in v1.04. " - wtf? "mistakenly"? how can you change tons of values not related to the implemented changes "mistakenly"?
"The Conversion skill no longer causes a monster counting error in the Den of Evil. " - this is pure lol
1.05b
What are these "b" patches? These are "oh we forgot to add these", or "we pretend to be release less patches then we actually do"?
1.06
Not much for this patch as content, but this is rofl:
"Updated Battle.net's Terms of Service agreement. It can now be accessed without having to create a new account. " - so you either wrote it up, or had an unfailable memory, because we don't let you see what you signed policy was at Blizzard???
1.06b
"Fixed a bug that allowed players to crash other players by spamming them. " - ye. Some people are just evil for the sake of evilness. And BVlizzard even today don1t understand why hardcore mode players demand "mutual agreement on PvP" policy...
"Battle.net's Terms of Service agreement updated. Everyone please take note. " - now just tell me why this was not included in plain 1.06? Also, if someone'd use pre-1.06b, the policy will be the pre-1.06b, right?
1.07
This was actually not a patch, but a whol expansion-disc. Just to be clear.
"Decreased the length of time that Converted monsters fight for you. " - let's see what remained from this skill after the constant nerf at 1.13d!
"In expansion games, Whirlwind is now properly modified by weapon speed.
In non-expansion games, Whirlwind remains the same. " - now help me decide: whirwind being adjusted by weapon speed is intended or not??
"Sets and Uniques can no longer be gambled for. " - when was this put back? I got curious.
"Names of pre-existing Rare Items have changed. However, the item properties have not. " - change names of RARE items? They have random names anyway. Who's responsible for this wasting of time?
1.08
"When using two-handed attacks the speed of both weapons are averaged." - this is "whoops, we have that in the game!?" issue. Blizzard is simply careless of their work.
"Thunder Storm now hits a target every time. " - what good did it have then until now??
"Removed several melee modifiers from generating on orbs. " - it still generates awful lot of melee properties...
This whole patch seems to focus on giving more damage to the PLAYERS. Seems Blizzard didn't think through the changes in 1.07...
"Act II hirelings have been improved with additional skills including auras. - now I wonder what this ment to be, as A2 merc already had auras in 1.07. Although they did not have the nightmare variations, what got included in 1.09 only...
1.09
"Changed Telekinesis to only work on scrolls, potions, keys, gold, arrows and bolts. " - this was a gamebreaking issue, but after this change what remaining use it had on that field? (it got entirely removed for today, no wonder there)
"Players can no longer give or take items from a hireling if they are not within range (this fixes a bug where the game would crash if a player gave or removed an item from a hireling when the Hireling was out of range)" - what it means "out of range"? The issue should have never be related to range.
"Duriel now always drops a Town Portal scroll in addition to his regular drop. " - question: why? This also led a bug in 1.13 where Duriel only dropped a bunch of tp-scrolls...
"Added several very low-level magic affixes. " - why? there were already too many lowlevel (= unusable) attributes...
"Using a potion from the belt (either by hotkey or right-clicking) while holding down the shift key will give the potion to the player's hireling if he/she has one. " just imagine the life before this.
"Changed monster stats back to what they were before v1.08. " -another "we are stupid" change
"Rare items will now always spawn with three or more affixes if possible. " - what was the reason previous this?
"The Shae, Po, and Jo runes have been renamed. They are now the Shael, Io, and Jah runes respectively" - so now you could mix "io" and "Lo" runes...
"The Resistance penalty at higher difficulty levels no longer applies to Magic Resistance. " - this sounds so lol
"Crush Beasts no longer give only 1 exp when they are killed. " - monsters in question are the thingies from A5 on the imps ride. They are high-hp monsters, so 1 exp per kill is kinda lame... (would be anyway, but this way even more)
"Swapped properties for Jah and Cham runes in weapons. " - I like these kind of changes - you make your build, then it becomes entirely useless because of the change, despie you're wearing very costy stuff.
"Added rune words for Single Player/Other Multi Player which previously only showed up on Realm games. " - simply before this in single player mode you did not have runewords. Ever. Despite the specific reason of the A5 questreward for example to make the Ancient's Pledge.
"Fixed a bug where Tyrael would sometimes create an inaccessible portal." - Blzzard can not do anything right?
"Fixed a bug where it was possible to repair Throwing Potions. " - that was not a bug. I mean now you still can sell and buy them back fully charged...
"Fixed a bug that caused a rune word item to lose its rune word bonuses when transferred off of the character who created it. " - heh, this could enhance trading I bet.
"Fixed a bug where using the Taunt skill would sometimes cause the game to crash. " - they realised it only now, or they messed up something furing the time passed?
"Fixed bug where Regurgitators would eat Hirelings and destroy them. " - i bet people got finaly totally infuriated when their infinity got eaten...
Noticed how long the patchnotes got after 1.07?
1.09b
Considering there was a c and d from this patch, was this versionrelease really necessary?
1.09c
I don't quote as it'd be too long. Basically this was NOT a patch, but a trojan virus collecting data from north-america's computers for Warcraft 3 developing. Why only there? How they dare? And you could not avoid this if you wanned to play on multiplayer. Hack, this shit might even collect datas today!
1.09d
focusing on the same problem as 1.09c and such... Seems they can't do what they claim to do...
1.10
This was again NOT a patch, but a hugh modification (called "mod"). The game only barely resemles on the original from this point.
"Increased difficulty for high-level players to reduce future exploitation of the game system. " - this translated "you won't be level 99 in your life"
"Reduced the HP of (Act V) Barbarian soldiers in Nightmare and Hell difficulties. " - and thus made the A5 mercenary almost completly useless.
The core of the "patch" is basically adding synergies between skills without testing, and for that buffing monsters without second thought. Nobrainer that it caused problems. Serious problems.
"Added 20 new Rune Words. " - too bad only 2-3 are to access in a reasonable playthrough. All the others require at least 2 hrs, what makes it impossible to use by the average player in a legitim way. Also as they are uber-strong, duping started to get out of hand.
"Introduced a new Ladder System for those who prefer to play free from any characters who may have participated in past item duping or hacking." - thus BLizzard called all nonladder player "dupoer and hacker". How nice.
"Once a player defeats Diablo, all Diablo II Battle.net accounts accessed from that computer may create Hardcore characters. " - muling with hardcore character had to be tedious before this xD
"Removed Age from the Player Profile. " - the must have realised people can say anything on the net...
"Barbarians and Assassins who are dual-wielding potions are no longer prevented from entering a game. " - hope noone did that with lvl 99 chars xD
"A Zod Rune applied to an Ethereal item no longer reduces its durability to 0. " - I bet reason of Zod then actually started to have!
"The 3rd charge of the Assassin's Skill - Blades of Ice, now freezes the target. " - this and many similar cases happend during this "patch". Shame on Blizzard not noticing them before (and released unfixed).
"NPCs no longer accept lower difficulty quest items to complete quests in a higher difficulty. " - lol, players just can not be beaten when it is about effectiveness.
"Only a very few Unique items and new 'uber' items are now over level 85. That is, the best items now drop more often. " - ye. You can have them curently from Nihlatak and Baal: not one but two monsters! (ok, there are some lvl 90 areas, but this is still a ridiculous statement)
1.11
"Added 10 New Runewords. " - actually they added 3. Isn't this make them breaking the contract with their users?
"Skills obtained from Rune Words created while the item is equipped will no longer disconnect you from Battle.net when chosen. " - shall I say anything?
1.11b
Seems the game still has crash-issues...
1.12
Seems Macintosh-compatibility is still not entirely solved after all the patching. Well, after all the years of patching the ca. 200 known bugs and unsolved balance-issues still remains, so be happy that at least you no longer need the ancient scrachy CD to play.
1.13c
Where went the 1.13 and 1.13 b patch? Unsolved mystery.
" a new challenge awaits you" - reused by copy&paste method from the Pandemonium event. This time there is no "new challenge", but you can gather essences to assemble tokens thus have the chance of unlimited respec.
"Fixed an item dupe bug. " - these are my favourites. No telling what they actually do, or whether they actually do anything. The same time we shal mention the appearance of "hybrid runewords", what must be related to some kind of new duping method, and result these kinda items:
1) make a runeword. 2) remove the runes from the item, and make another runeword in the same item. 3) the result is a runeword item what has the abilities of the first runeword (those that don't come streight from the runes), while having the abilities from the second set of runes. Would be cool to know how to make those...
"Fixed an issue where some players could kill other players while in town ("TPPK"). " - there remained plenty of way to tppk, mostly associated the fact that it still not requires mutual agreement on the duel :(
"Increased the drop rate of high runes. " - sounds fine, too bad the chance is still 1 during 100 years of playing.
"Some rare drop items now have an orange color." - signed as the "most defining issue in 1.13 patch" by the players. This tells everything.
Pay attention how little acutal patching happened despite the detailed list the players provided to Blizzard (including the way to fix the problems).
1.13d
As support to Diablo 2 is entirely halted, now you can permanently squelch advertising bots. Too bad they no longer exist.
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