Diablo 4 Q&A's Questions Are Fake; Blizzard Pisses Off Fans Again
A recent Q&A session with the developers of Diablo 4 was supposed to answer the fans' most burning questions. Instead, the community began asking questions about whether the entire video was a fake.
The official launch of Diablo 4 is almost a week away (earlier, on June 2, the game will be available to users who preordered the game). Blizzard devs, in the persons of deputy director Joseph Piepiora and art director John Mueller, decided to answer fan questions in a classic Q&A session at the very end of the campaign to advertise the game. The video, published on the Future Games Show channel, was intended to dispel all doubts of inquisitive players.
Bad luck (well, at least for Blizzard) was that it came out that most of the questions that appeared in the video, did not come from the fans at all.
Read out questions
The scandal with the "fake" questions came to the attention of Quin69, who, while streaming his reaction to the Q&A, began to wonder about their rather suspicious content; some of them didn't sound like something a player would write before the release - some comments looked like back patting praises.
The streamer decided to check who the comments mentioned in the video came from. It turned out that a significant part of the "authors" of the questions either do not exist or are somehow connected to the developers.
Fragment of the broadcast were published on YouTube:
As an example, let's take a question "published" by a fake user
"Thanks a lot for putting couch co-op into the game!
I imagine this must have made the development process much more difficult, why was it so important to add this option to Diablo 4?"
After the masquerade was revealed, a wave of criticism rained down on Blizzard, this time from real users leaving real comments:
"The game's marketing team made me hate the game even before I played it," wrote YouTube user HoneyBagder.
"Cardboard questions for cardboard developers from a cardboard fake of something that used to be Blizzard," concludes user Darryls Channel (Y2K Ready).
"You can see it's a fake Q&A when there are no pay-to-win questions," points out Mezz Ops.
Blizzard has so far not addressed the allegations of question-fixing, but it goes without saying that here no amount of positive PR will help here. The question of why the developers decided to shoot themselves in the foot just before the actual launch remains unanswered.
