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Diablo III players have been anxiously awaiting the launch of the game’s PvP feature since the game’s release in May. Unfortunately, fans will have to wait a while longer. After some PvP testing, Blizzard has determined that their initial foray into Diablo III PvP was just not the quality experience that they had hoped for and has since scrapped the initial version.

In a new update post, Game Director Jay Wilson discussed what comes next for PvP development in Diablo III to address character balance, quality and the new dueling feature. In short, Dueling is coming with patch 1.0.7 next year, Team Deathmatch is going back into a new development from scratch phase, and the possibility of adding PvE rewards for defeating players in PvP.

It’s unfortunate that Diablo III wasn’t able to match its predecessor at launch in PvP. For those of you that never played Diablo II, you could have up to 8 players in a game room at a time and you could make custom named rooms for players to join such as PvP Kill, Act 1 PvP, and when killed players would drop gold they were carrying, all features not available with Diablo III. While the balance in Diablo II was questionable (I had a barbarian that had so much absorb and leech that he could only be damaged 10% by lightning and also absorbed so much fire and ice that it would heal him at one point) it was simplistic and fun. Not everything needs to be competitive scene eSports style PvP and require rewards. Sometimes just giving your players the simple tools to have a little fun is enough as Diablo II proved by maintaining a strong and dedicated playerbase with a healthy PvP community for many years. If you have that in place you can then expand at a safe pace and build on from there.

In any case, at the very least we should finally see the first bit of PvP with the dueling feature arrive whenever the 1.0.7 update is ready for deployment. Just don’t expect that other stuff anytime soon.

Source: Diablo III PvP Update