Diablo 3's team deathmatch cancelled

The long-awaited PVP content, specifically the team deathmatch mode, has now been scrapped. Jay Wilson broke the news to their fans over at Diablo 3's official blog. Not all is lost, the ability to duel players is still a go though, which is in the 1.0.7 patch planned for release sometime this month.

Certainly, we've gotten a lot of benefits from the development of Team Deathmatch, especially in the areas of controls and combat model tuning, but at this point we don't believe it's the experience we feel it needs to be in order to ship, so we will be shelving it for now and exploring other options.

This is quite a disappointment since it's been nearly 8 months since the game went live and I'm sure a couple of players was sticking around, planning, patiently waiting for PVP to go live. But not all is lost. dueling will come with the 1.0.7 patch that's schedule sometime this month. It won't be what we expected even before the game was released, but at least we finally get to beat players up with gears found/bought after playing the game for thousands of hours.

With the current state of Diablo 3, it makes sense to why they are having such a hard time making PVP work. Balancing alone is mostly what's keeping most developers busy. It's hard to manage a system that randomly generates stats for weapons.

For us it comes to a few issues, one of which is depth.  Simply fighting each other with no other objectives or choices to make gets old relatively quickly.  We've brought a lot of people in to try out Team Deathmatch and, while some found it entertaining, most of our testers didn't feel like it was something they'd want to do beyond a few hours.

They are now working on a replacement. Don't hold your breathe though, I have a feeling this "replacement" won't see the light of day anytime soon, or even when the game turns 1 year old on May.

Curious on how it looks? Check out the video below.

[Source: Diablo 3 Blog]