The core-fans felt shunned, "Why is this not like Diablo 2" they often said.
because it's diablo 3
All I got in return was canned corporate jargon. This console bullshit did it for me. Not that I'm opposed to a console version. I'm opposed to the timing. The fact that they had the nerve to do that in the midst of their PC failure. The fact that they are obviously being forced by higher-ups to withhold real change, if it even comes at all, until well after the console so as not to interfere with console sales.
console team isn't the same team as pc team is it? I don't actually know this.
Unlike some dickheads, I won't be sticking around here to poke at people whom do, for some reason, stick with this game.
If you people can't see this, you're blinded by some intangible hope
thats kind of dickheady, or at least passive aggressive dickheady.
/signed Another One Bites The Dust......AKA ruksak
The skill system of D2 isn't more balanced or provide more variety than D3's. It's the fact that D2 is just easier than D3. Mp10 D3 is a lot more difficult than Players 8 D2. Being more difficult, it pigeon holes people into the most efficient builds. People still run a variety of builds in D3 but they aren't viable on high mp because of the difficulty. It's an illusion of skill balance variety due to difficulty.
FYI I played Diablo 2 since 1.07 and still do to this day. Just so we know where we stand. From some of your points it seems to me that you didn't play Diablo 2 online AT ALL
Yeah except 1.07 is already Diablo 2 classic + LOD + 6 patches. You just don't know how crappy it was prior to that (like, let's say, in 1.04 where there was this wonderful bow bug that took months to get fixed).
Diablo 2 had THE best economy system of any online game - a Barter based system with values only serving as basic guidelines. Prices of any item are well known (if you spend any time trading) in High Runes/ Ists/ SoJs, but you can still get good deals either way (buy low, sell high, just like D3 flipping) but it actually involves human contact and isn't just Open AH -> enter stats -> Click Buyout.
Yeah, except most of that stuff was duped. But hey who cares.
Also, the big problem with bartering is that it forces you to spend hours in trade channels instead of - you know - actually playing the game.
This is a good thing however as it lead to D2 economy obviously being far better and more stable than D3 one, even with the game being 13 years older.
The main reason D2 had a more stable economy was the ladder. End of story. D3 doesn't have a ladder (which is both good and bad, though I'm happy I don't have to go through the pain of leveling every 6 months). Since no items are taken out of the system, yeah it is slightly less stable. Hopefully, BOA-ing items with the mystic will correct that.
Also you could just magic find and play in any part of Hell and nearly guaranteed get stuff to sell every now and then.
And what would I get? That's right, uniques that for most part are not worth a damn. Like woohoo, I get my 1256th steelclash, my 785th maul and the 95th WWS. Woohoo. Oh wait, those aren't worth a damn.
There's a reason why 100% of rich D3 players are either Flippers or Dual Visa wielders. (This was all before d2jsp took over and D2 had an actual economy in-game - I can see how someone wouldn't like d2jsp, though it has its merits)
Yeah, an no one never ever bought stuff online in D2? Like ever? But of course, all those enigmas were 100% legit and not store-bought at all. /sarcasm
Diablo 3 skills are unbalanced. Every class has 1-2 viable builds and everything else is used than less than 1% of the population.
And it was the same thing in D2. Most pallies ran hammerdins, most sorcs ran with FO/FB (with an occasional lighning) and so on.
Maybe the game had slightly more diversity, but you wanna know why? Because it was undertuned as heck. If you got some half decent (duped) gear, the chance of getting killed was closed to zero. Like, if Inferno had only MP0 (at its current level), you would have a bajillion of builds as well. Luckily, you have 11 sub-levels.
Diablo 2 had THE best economy system of any online game - a Barter based system with values only serving as basic guidelines. Prices of any item are well known (if you spend any time trading) in High Runes/ Ists/ SoJs, but you can still get good deals either way (buy low, sell high, just like D3 flipping) but it actually involves human contact and isn't just Open AH -> enter stats -> Click Buyout.
Yeah, except most of that stuff was duped. But hey who cares.
Also, the big problem with bartering is that it forces you to spend hours in trade channels instead of - you know - actually playing the game.
What's even worse is that in 1.10 the net effect of duping over the previous three-ish years was so severe that they added in Uber Diablo to siphon SoJs out of the online game.
Chalk one up for a "better economy" I guess. Gotta love the "objectivity" huh?
Yeah, wasn't Witcher 2 almost perfect? Nobody complained about that game having dumbed down systems and a lot more focus on its action-side than its RPG-side, JUST LIKE what most people did with D3? Want me to point you to the hundreds of threads on their official forums?
Nevermind. You're probably just trolling. D2 economy being better and "more stable"? D2 allowing having gear flexibility? Paragon 100 to get something that sells for more than 2 mil? Trolling everyone by disagreeing just for the sake of it?
I'm not gonna waste any more of my time with it. Should've realized that earlier. I'd advise others to do the same.
I don't usually waste my time. But let's take the bait this time.
It has an actual economy.
Please tell me what do you think of a 280 Dex 85 Vit Mempo. Can you tell how much that's worth? Can you quantify its value based on supply/demand? Can you buy it using an actual currency that works like one? Let's try it with other gear pieces. How about an Inna's Vast Expanse with 160 Vit and 65 All Res? Is it better than a 50 Vit 80 All res one? Does it change from one region to the other (US, EU)?
Enlighten me with your infinite knowledge of Diablo 2 about how that game's economy was better than D3's. Even better, explain in how that game even had an economy (and please leave the idiots who lost actual money being scammed and buying duped gear from third-party websites out of the explanation).
It has a better respec system.
You're not stuck with that INT you chose because you thought your Wiz/Sorceress, being an intel based class, would use her intelligence to be a viable end-game character. You're not stuck with that STR for your Barb which can probably only kill stuff on Hell through Berskerk. You wanna make your class use the stat that makes sense with its lore, and use it to increase its offensive power? Too bad.
Do you even know what I'm talking about? Or did you only play D2 up to Normal Act IV, and is jumping on the fan bandwagon? The rose-tinted-glass symptom usually indicates that.
In D3, you can change gear pieces around and rebalance the power of your character. Too squishy? Get more EHP pieces. Taking too long to kill? Change that +AllRes +Vit ring into a Trifecta one. Dying to Reflect Damage and from standing in Plague? Get more sustain. I'm deeply sorry if I prefer a system that actually requires you to use your intelligence instead of 50 hours of grinding the same shit for levels/stat-pointsbecause the game design surrounding stats is crap.
It has a better skill system.
Almost every skill in Diablo 3 is more interesting looking and more fun to use than the majority of D2 active skills.
Maybe please tell me how managing Paladin auras made the gameplay so much more fun in D2? Or how Leap(Attack) could actually be used for something. Or how much fun was it to farm with a Hammerdin pressing the exact same BUTTON (singular, not plural) for hours. Oh wait, nevermind, you had to press 3 buttons - 1 for potion spam, 1 for Enigma's Teleport and 1 for Hammer. Such tactical decisions.
You sir, are everything that's wrong with "old school nostalgic" gamers. Stuck in the same mindset forever. Incapable of accepting any change. Can't even simply deal with a different opinion than yours. Can't handle the fact that someone is enjoying a game, and you aren't.
But hey, keep... that... up... In 30 years you're gonna be blabbering about how your grandsons' music is shit, how "there weren't so many problems back then", how that new Virtual Reality is crap and videogames of 2005 were better than it, how their hobbies are less fun than playing paper-and-pen RPGs, and how their new brain-implanted cellphones are a dumb novelty. I'm sure everyone will love that attitude.
FYI I played Diablo 2 since 1.07 and still do to this day. Just so we know where we stand. From some of your points it seems to me that you didn't play Diablo 2 online AT ALL. Let's start;
Economy
- Diablo 2 had THE best economy system of any online game - a Barter based system with values only serving as basic guidelines. Prices of any item are well known (if you spend any time trading) in High Runes/ Ists/ SoJs, but you can still get good deals either way (buy low, sell high, just like D3 flipping) but it actually involves human contact and isn't just Open AH -> enter stats -> Click Buyout. You can't "buy stuff with the currency" like gold, luckily. This is a good thing however as it lead to D2 economy obviously being far better and more stable than D3 one, even with the game being 13 years older. Also you could just magic find and play in any part of Hell and nearly guaranteed get stuff to sell every now and then. Unlike D3 where you can sell roughly 1 out of 100 legendaries, so unless you are a plvl 100 char who doesnt feel like wasting his time playing on lvl 100, you most likely won't ever sell anything worth more than 2 mil. There's a reason why 100% of rich D3 players are either Flippers or Dual Visa wielders. (This was all before d2jsp took over and D2 had an actual economy in-game - I can see how someone wouldn't like d2jsp, though it has its merits)
Respec system
- Let's get the obvious right out of the way: D2 has a respec system (again obvious you haven't played it in a long time/ ever). That said, stat points actually mattering and being a choice is a bad thing? Having fucking FIXED stats for every class and every class being an EXACT CLONE with 0 customization is a good thing? And then I have "rose-tinted glasses"...
You say "Too squishy? Get more EHP pieces. Taking too long to kill? Change that +AllRes +Vit ring into a Trifecta one. Dying to Reflect Damage and from standing in Plague? Get more sustain." THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH D2 CHARACTER STATS!!! Too squishy? Invest in Vit OR Dex (block chance). Taking too long to kill? Invest in further skill points. Get more sustain? D2 also had LL, on many more items and more readily available than it having to be a mandatory roll on weapons only.
Skill system:
"Almost every skill in Diablo 3 is more interesting looking and more fun to use than the majority of D2 active skills.
Maybe please tell me how managing Paladin auras made the gameplay so much more fun in D2? Or how Leap(Attack) could actually be used for something. Or how much fun was it to farm with a Hammerdin pressing the exact same BUTTON (singular, not plural) for hours. Oh wait, nevermind, you had to press 3 buttons - 1 for potion spam, 1 for Enigma's Teleport and 1 for Hammer. Such tactical decisions."
Diablo 3 skills are unbalanced. Every class has 1-2 viable builds and everything else is used than less than 1% of the population. So all those "beautiful skills" are as good as non-existant, if they are shitty and just there to look flashy. Diablo 2 had at least 3 builds per class, not including the builds made possible by 1.10+ items, WITH VARIATION. Different stats, different skills, different distribution of either... chars weren't just clones of eachother, with the only difference being whether they Dual Wield Visas or not.
Paladin aura system was far far more fun, interesting and impactful than Monk spamming the same Mantra over and over. You'd use Fanaticism most of the time. Meet a Lightning Enchanted/ Elemental Monster? Turn on Salvation. Low on HP/ Mana after a fight? Turn on redemption. Turn on Holy Freeze momentarily to freeze the enemies before diving in to destroy them. Turn on Conviction when you encounter a monster immune to your damage type(s). Choice. Variation. Also you failed at Hammerdin if you had to potion spam. It's enough to turn on Redemption every few packs for a couple of seconds and you're instantly full.
"But hey, keep... that... up... In 30 years you're gonna be blabbering about how your grandsons' music is shit, how "there weren't so many problems back then", how that new Virtual Reality is crap and videogames of 2005 were better than it, how their hobbies are less fun than playing paper-and-pen RPGs, and how their new brain-implanted cellphones are a dumb novelty. I'm sure everyone will love that attitude."
--> If I have good arguments, I will always speak out yes. I don't see how someone can like all the dumbed down aspects of Diablo 3, and not only TOLERATE, but LOVE them. I stand by what I said earlier, people like you are what's brought the gaming industry to where it is today. Making more and more dumbed down games costing more and more, charging parts of the game as DLC from Day 0, releasing unfinished alpha state products cause they know most people will buy it and be happy with it anyway (think Dragon Age II or Diablo 3 - tho I'm sure you think DA2 is better than DA:O too)... every greedy move, every huge fail is met with <3 <3 <3 and some people being delighted by it, so when the companies notice it works (hey, why not get the money for crap games when we can, why would we waste time and resources to actually develop good games) the gaming industry as a whole suffers. Just look at what Call of Duty turned into. 14 sequels, all exactly the same. And still counting. But hey at least they aren't 10 times worse than the previous game in the series, like Diablo 3
LOL oh i love it... you are my forum hero. Don't expect zero to respond to this though dude.
Anyway to respond to the OP i like both D2 and D3... D3 isnt as good but it has its own pros that i find fun.
Im good with its systems i just want to feel slightly more rewarded for my gameplay in D3. Hopefully we will get that in RoS.
Were we even playing the same Diablo 2? Because I certainly don't remember it the way you do.
Leveling in Diablo 2 was SUPER EXCITING as well, you know, Trist runs > Tomb runs > Rush to Hell > Leech Baal bot runs to 99 (Cow runs before Baal-runs was a thing). Unless you botted yourself, which pretty much everyone wanting to hit 99 did anyway. That's some awesome gameplay right there, for sure.
ummm what? Yea leveling really wasn't all that exciting. Yay lets sit in 29807458390 chaos and baal runs to level and have all the bots pickit the good items so we get nothing! Super duper fun times!
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It's true that 1.07 was quite a few patches + LoD. The difference is LoD was ALREADY OUT a year and a half after D2 release. Back when Blizzard was a way smaller company with much more limited resources and personnel.
D2 was much simpler to develop. Game development costs increased exponentially in the last years. The "guest monsters" in A5 alone must have saved a lot of costs on sprites. Also, the RMAH somewhat restraints the possibility of doing whatever ones likes, as there is money behind.
Errr... everyone because dupes totally messed up with the economy. You found a Windforce? Gratz, except that those bots are selling them by dozens! Heck, D2 economy was referred by some people as "jokeonomy". Not too hard to figure out why.
Also about sitting in channel. 1) it was fun as you spoke to someone all the time, bartered, talked via /f m (I still can't believe this is not in Diablo 3) 2) you could always offer a good deal and trade instantly if you cba "wasting time looking for a good deal". When I wanted my first Tal Armor in any ladder, I'd MF for a couple days, find a few Arach's/ Shakos/ Occys/ runes and stuff and offer more than the worth of Tal armor, I'd get it instantly, then I'd continue MFing and getting better and better stuff...
Listening to you, it's like uniques rained all over the place. Well, they didn't. I played for 4 years (even made it to the hardcore ladder and stuff) and I can literally count the number Occys/Arachs/Shakos on the fingers of one hand. Highest rune I saw was an Ist.
I won't even mention the fact that chatting in /f m while playing was plain dangerous for me.
you know, constant upgrades, constant buying and selling. Just the opposite of Diablo 3 where you buy good stuff for a couple of million that you pick from the ground (as you rarely get anything sellable) and then you can't get anymore upgrades unless you buy gold.
I don't buy gold, yet I'm progressing quite fine. Sure, I won't be farming MP10 with my gear, but I'm doing MP7 and I'm pretty happy with that. It's just that - again - D2 was tuned much lower. Why? Because it is a single player game, basically. Which is supposed to be playable offline, with no trade. So of course, once you get access to some decent gear, you just mow stuff down. In 1.09 and before, it went all they way up to solo-8.
Ladder. Yes, good point. Ladder is a big part of what makes D2 so long lasting. Though I'm happy we don't have it in D3 due to the extremely boring lvling process I already mentioned in one of my previous posts (and I note no one disagreed on that :P).
How is D2 leveling different from D3 one? They're both boring after a couple of times. Actually, D2 was worse because if you got your main skills at lvl 24 or 30, you had to resort on boring and painful leveling. Same deal if you're a no-energy class (which for HC, was all classes). If anything, D3 leveling is more fun (with the exception of closed areas for final bosses - which IS a gigantic pain in the booty, I'll agree).
I know respec was released with 1.11. Still, I think it wasnt a neccessary addition to Diablo 2. Its system actually stimulated making alts
"Making alts" makes a huge time sink, which runs contrary to today's gamer's profile. Today's average gamer won't do that, he will rather leave and play another game whose editor is not as clueless.
Necro - Summoner. Bone Spear. Bone Spirit. Poison. All about equally played.
How can you list Bone Spear and Bone Spirit separately, as the synergize each other in 1.10.
Necro is either Summon or Bone. Some motivated guys run poison nova but not much.
Elemental was crap in 1.09, and half of the tree is still useless in 1.10. WW/WB are cool, that's for sure. But hey, I thought the class had 3 trees?
If anything, patch 1.10 gutted the build diversity much more than D3. Which is expected - builds requiring 60 or 80 points into a skill + synergies can only be extreme. But somehow, people did not complain about it. Also, again, you can have diverse builds in Diablo 3. Especially on very low MPs, because that's how complicated D2 was once you got some gear. So sure, you can have just about any skill and it will work. It's just that the higher the obstacle is, the less builds remain. And in D2, once the patch 1.10 buffed the mobs and synergies were introduced, the build diversity plummeted dramatically as well.
And a lot of crap legendaries and sets. Let's take the bows: who used anything else than WF or Burrito? Maybe some WWS here and there too. Everything else (especially low levels)? Utter garbage.
Same thing for e.g. crossbows. Oh yeah, and it totally makes sense that you use a lvl 42 xbow at level 90+. And yeah, instead of CC/Crit dmg/AS, we had +X to all skills and resists. Big difference.
ummm what? Yea leveling really wasn't all that exciting. Yay lets sit in 29807458390 chaos and baal runs to level and have all the bots pickit the good items so we get nothing! Super duper fun times!
Not to mention the generally inept ALL CAPS players, TPPK hacks, non-shared loot and all the wonders of pubbie games.
While I cannot agree with the statement that you found something useful almost every run, I have to say that you did find items and runes at a reasonable pace.
Right, I think that's the point the guy you quoted was making. Loot was reasonably paced but to say you found a "sellable" item "very nearly every run" coming from a guy who claims to be OBJECTIVE is laughably ignorant. It's so obviously incorrect that it probably is the most-incorrect statement I've ever read on these forums.
If someone is of the opinion that they got a great item "very nearly every run" in D2 then it's no wonder they're disappointed with D3 and it's *absolutely* a case of rose-tinted glasses (that phrase that the people who mis-remember the past so loathe).
I think it's safe to assume that whoever did not enjoy the PC version for reasons like "online only", "AH > self found", "farm gold to buy items", etc... would totally enjoy the console version.
I'm not going to bash the OP just because he decided to create a thread about him quitting D3 because it is probably annoying for him, but i really think that it's a suicide mission to create such a thread because the rage / hate is eminent
I personally played D2 for ~10 years on and off (like 2 months a year or so). and i am aware of all the issues that were brought up by others before me in this thread and i do agree with most of what "Grafikm_fr" said. As to D3, well i spent more than 800 hours on the PC version already. I also spent real money on both D2 and D3 throughout the years. I just don't delve into endless raging arguements about which game is better. It is obvious that D3 is technically a better game. It is argueable that D2 was a better game at it's time even though, just like others noted, it was a horrid mess in certain aspects at it's release and got constantly patched untill it was a bit more playable...
To each his own i guess. But i'd say go play the console version. It's awesome.
Also learn to read. I didn't write A GREAT ITEM every run but A SELLABLE ITEM every run. Sellable item includes 4-socket flail. 3 socket Breast Plate. Heck, WHITE monarch. During ladder nearly everything that drops is sellable. Small charms of many kinds, Grand charms of many kind, gems... But yeah, you're so smart. Just wait till someone answers me with a valid point, then quote it as your own
The point being that it's horribly inaccurate to say you got something "sellable" every run. While it's possible, that would require the most extreme luck ever and certainly wasn't the average experience. Even the biggest haters in the community know just how inaccurate that statement is. So keep slamming away at it. Keep trying to prove that you, the guy who started in 1.0.7, know everything about D2, even though you don't.
It's really ironic that the guy who started playing in LoD is lecturing other people who played from the very start about what was good, bad, and indifferent about D2. How many people have to point out just how inaccurate your statements are?
You're completely exaggerating about drop rates. You're completely wrong about equal efficiencies across classes. You're completely wrong about the "spec variety" you claim existed. The majority of your points are just factually-incorrect.
And you have the audacity to claim that you're "objective." If you didn't play vanilla D2 then you can't really be objective in this discussion because you simply don't have the knowledge to do so.
That really depends on playstyle, playtime and patch. 4 years might not be much if you played it very casually and mostly just did stuff like group baals. I spent most of my time in D2 MF'ing or doing runs like chaos and baal on my own.
Clarification: I did almost no Baal group runs, it was either solo Baal runs or 3SU/Pit runs.
I might have been lucky when I played D2 or I just played a lot, possibly both. But from my experience, good loot felt a bit more tangible in D2 than it is in D3 right now on the Pc. But with the console release and the tendencies Loot 2.0 seem to take, we might see this change as well.
First, yes Loot 2.0 will probably fix some of it.
Second, the reason loot felt more tangible is because it was regularly siphoned off the economy every ladder reset (and because of deaths in the case of HC). THAT made loot more valuable indeed. The totally crappy rune drop rate prolly helped too.
I'm still not sure whether it's reasonable to compare D3 to vanilla D2.
Not only you can do that, but you can compare it with any vanilla Blizzard game. Which was OK at best, and it took an expansion and a lot of patches to get a great game. See WoW, Warcraft 3, SC1.
I know that a game in this genre takes quite a while to fully balance and tweak to the customers liking, especially when you try to reach such a broad audience. Yet I feel that they left some of the valuable experience they gained behind.
Because the valuable experience was obtained with a totally different audience. D2 was first and foremost a single-player game (and tuned as such) with no mandatory online access and targeted towards more hardcore players that would not mind rerolling each time they screwed up stat or skill attribution. Except that gamers changed a lot, they are now more casual and less likely to spend months or even years on a single game. And most of them certainly wouldn't tolerate constant rerolling, bartering in channels with scammers and generally not very bright people, and other things that were OK in 2001 but aren't in 2012.
Plus, please don't forget that games like D3 are a dying breed to begin with. Many younger players simply don't get the goal of an ARPG like D3 (or Torchlight, or POE, for that matter). The whole concept of "kill mobs, get gear, kill more mobs" is getting strangely alien in the modern VG world.
Let's for instance take the current gem system. While most likely noone socketed an El rune unless it was part of a rune word, there were quite a few reasonable socketing additions for runes on their own that tweaked the gem system; D3 just employed a system of 4 gems with very little variation to their effects and quite some of those limited options being fairly useless.
If you ask me, both systems had flaws. In D2, in effect, only diamonds and topazes were used. In D3, it is just about stacking your primary damage stats. If anything, gems should have more varied effects, and their combination should produce an effect greater than the sum (either through socket-bonuses like WoW) or some other more intricate system.
Regarding runes, it is slightly another story. Early in D3 beta, they planned on dropping skill runes rather than gaining them when leveling. But the system was pulled off the market, I guess because they feared that it would make the corresponding items either too valuable or vendor trash depending on the tuning of the drop rate. Not to mention the storage space issue. But again, I agree that rune effects (I'm not talking runewords here, just single runes) were very interesting, and that's something gems should be doing in D3.
What does it even matter how it was in vanilla? The game has been out for 14 years. I don't see what "how it was in vanilla" has to do with anything, when they had LoD 1.10 already out before they started working on Diablo 3. So WHY would they mess up this bad? Why not keep what was good, throw out what was bad and make the Perfect game?
But that's precisely what they did. Only, they don't have the same definition of good and bad. To you, constant alt rerolling is a good thing, but to a casual players it's an absolute pain in the booty, especially if you mess up with your skills/stats. To you, bartering in trade channels is an awsum experience, to a lot of new players it's a huge mess, especially after something like WoW (or any other MMO with an AH for that matter). And so on, so forth. Essentially, what remains is the item division (unique/leg - set - yellow etc...), some of the stats and the general concept - smash monsters to get gear to smash monsters. Which, by the way, is a dying concept in the modern video games.
Why build it from the ground up with a team of people who've obviously never played ARPG's before?
Because the team from BNorth left when they wanted to turn D3 into an MMO, which would cause problems with segment cannibalization because of WoW. Failing to reach an agreement, they left.
It would of course be best if they just improved on Diablo 2 with new items, polishing its systems and getting rid of redundant ones while adding their own... But no.
NO, NO, NO. Diablo 2 system wouldn't hold water with modern gamers. Constant rerolling, being punished for a misplaced point (before anyone brings up D2 respec again - it was done in 1.11 and NOT by the original dev team, which left prior to that), cryptic transmutes with the cube, horrendous leveling if your character acquired its main skills at level 24+ - all of that wouldn't fly with today's typical casual gamer. So, you couldn't just "polish" systems, you had to scrap them and start anew. Which they did - maybe not in the best way, but it is still more adapted to the modern audiences than the original.
So yeah they deleted my big post that I answered to you Grafikm. Also got an Infraction. Gotta love the community here, as soon as you don't agree with the mods/ the majority, it's time to bring up the admin tools. Anyway cba rewriting it, and it'd probably get deleted again.
Yes, I saw the post. I don't remember all the points you raised, but I'll answer just one about the usefullness of items. What you seem to miss is the ability to disjoin the effects of the ladder with the actual usefulness of the items. Because of the short duration of the ladder, the items were - by definition - much more valuable. Finding a shako alone was cool because you wouldn't find a bunch early on and by itself, it was valuable. But with D3 SC, since there is no way to pull items out of the economy, you end up with the current situation. And yes, it is a problem. But ladder isn't a solution, because it would bring more problems.
Consider D3 early on. Decent weapons (I don't mean good, I mean blues with decent DPS) were going for quite a bit - I remember paying 1 or 2 mil for my DH's crossbow and I was like "woohoo, imba DPS inc". But several months later, with no way of pulling items out and with MF being independent of MP (after it was introduced), we got what we got.
Plus, the AH bugs didn't help. But hey, we got the same bugs in Marvel Heroes and it's run by a former D2 boss, so apparently no one is shielded
Even if they make self-found viable, people in general will always want to MinMax and will still buy upgrades whenever they can, so they don't have to wait for the item they want to drop.
And? I've typed this what seems like a hundred times... WHO CARES?
Blizzard is never going to stamp out the min/max people. They have a completely different take on the game than self-found players. That doesn't mean that a guy like Jaetch is somehow less of a player, less of an asset to the community, or playing the game incorrectly.
Trying to socially engineer the game so that the only way to play the game is killing monsters is absurd. And it's an unrealistic goal that doesn't help the game at all. Self-found players seem to love to complain that their playstyle is alienated, but they seem to have no issues alienating other playstyles so that their playstyle is feasible.
I play self-found. I have for over half a year now. I don't give a fuck if little Johnny steals his mother's credit card and buys gear on the RMAH. That doesn't effect my enjoyment of D3. What does effect my enjoyment is my PERSONAL ability to find items. If they fix that then I could give a rat's ass what other people are doing because it has NO BEARING on what I'm doing in the game.
The idea of self-found is that the "economy" doesn't matter to you - you are self-sufficient. So I don't get why people who claim to want to play self-found are so worried about what other people are buying on the AH. This whole "even if I can find good gear, if others can buy it on the AH then my existence is ruined" is so fucking emo it's not funny.
Did you care in D2 when people were trading massive amounts of duped items? Did it bother you that some guy had a duped Enigma? Why? I know I didn't care because I was busy playing the game for myself with my friends. How come that doesn't apply now?
That's all good and well, but the point is sitting in Trade chat wasn't MANDATORY in Diablo 2. You could just play self-found and steadily progress. You could also trade very quickly by offering too much and making a game called O Mara N Shako and MFing in it. In Diablo 3 you can argue that the AH isn't mandatory either, but you won't ever be able to play the higher MP's unless EXTREMELY lucky.
Of course you won't be, as high MP inferno is way more difficult than hell in D2. So yeah, in D2 you could play self-found (which I did in HC) and progress. Same thing you can do in MP0/MP1 in D3. And D3 devs realized that perfectly, which is why they created a fourth difficulty level to begin with.
Constant alt rerolling also wasn't a requirement at all. But it was something to do. You gear one char fully, get it to your desired lvl, play some PvP.. at some point if you get bored, you can make another char, but you don't HAVE to. Experiment with builds/ combinations etc. In D3 you WON'T EVER need/want more than 1 of each class at lvl 60.
You answered the question in your following paragraph in part. The other part is: D3 is a B2P game. Hence there is no financial need (except the RMAH which is marginal from that PoV) to give players something to do all the way during game's life. You level a toon once, you can respec it as you wish, you can leave it for months, then come back and it will still be able to play (see "No ladder"). In this way, D3 resembles, for instance, GW2 (plus the gear treadmill mandatory for RPG). When there is no sub, you're not pressured into making people play all the time. Playing sometimes is enough.
Yeah I agee with everything. But I'm afraid there aren't any viable solutions outside of making Ladder/ SelfFound.
I've been thinking about that for quite a bit now. Ladder is certainly a solution but it brings more problems than it solves in the current game environment. Self-found option is certainly possible but I doubt it will be widespread, so it is a nice at best.
What I think, however, is that the game needs for a way to siphon out items without making people reroll toons all the time. There are several ways to do that, such as (these are all hypotheses of course):
- When playing above Monster Power X, the items lose Y% of their max stats every time you die, up to Z% of the original stat. This way, eventually, your equipment will gradually lose power. It will still be good enough to play (if Z=75, for instance), but you may want to replace it at some point. Also, it won't affect new players having trouble powering up their toon for higher MPs. In compensation, maybe MF% in higher MPs should be increased.
- A more extreme way would be for the item to break after you die several times (in other words, reduce item's max durability).
- Alternatively, you could restore the said durability with a scroll/item obtained using salvaged legendary ingredients (brimstone or w/e), but only obtained from legendaries of comparable power (e.g. same ilvl). This would siphon legendaries out of the system as well.
These are only several hypotheses which need to be checked and tested, of course. But I'm afraid that in a game with RMAH, getting items out by whatever means (including turning a ladder toon into a non-ladder) carries serious risks. I don't even know how people who spent thousans of dollars on their toons will react at ROS release.
Kind of the same with what Ghostcrawler always brings up as an issue for WoW - if one spec is 3% better than the other, a huge majority of people will go that spec.
Indeed, but the problem isn't D3, it's the humans
And frankly, I don't think deliberately undertuning the game like D2 was (esp. prior to 1.10) is the solution to that.
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console team isn't the same team as pc team is it? I don't actually know this.
thats kind of dickheady, or at least passive aggressive dickheady.
so long
I also re-installed two days ago, but still!
Yeah, except most of that stuff was duped. But hey who cares.
Also, the big problem with bartering is that it forces you to spend hours in trade channels instead of - you know - actually playing the game.
The main reason D2 had a more stable economy was the ladder. End of story. D3 doesn't have a ladder (which is both good and bad, though I'm happy I don't have to go through the pain of leveling every 6 months). Since no items are taken out of the system, yeah it is slightly less stable. Hopefully, BOA-ing items with the mystic will correct that.
And what would I get? That's right, uniques that for most part are not worth a damn. Like woohoo, I get my 1256th steelclash, my 785th maul and the 95th WWS. Woohoo. Oh wait, those aren't worth a damn.
Yeah, an no one never ever bought stuff online in D2? Like ever? But of course, all those enigmas were 100% legit and not store-bought at all. /sarcasm
Yeah, and it only took patch 1.11 to add it. Whoop-dee-doo. Check the calendar and look when it was released.
And it was the same thing in D2. Most pallies ran hammerdins, most sorcs ran with FO/FB (with an occasional lighning) and so on.
Maybe the game had slightly more diversity, but you wanna know why? Because it was undertuned as heck. If you got some half decent (duped) gear, the chance of getting killed was closed to zero. Like, if Inferno had only MP0 (at its current level), you would have a bajillion of builds as well. Luckily, you have 11 sub-levels.
What's even worse is that in 1.10 the net effect of duping over the previous three-ish years was so severe that they added in Uber Diablo to siphon SoJs out of the online game.
Chalk one up for a "better economy" I guess. Gotta love the "objectivity" huh?
Nevermind. You're probably just trolling. D2 economy being better and "more stable"? D2 allowing having gear flexibility? Paragon 100 to get something that sells for more than 2 mil? Trolling everyone by disagreeing just for the sake of it?
I'm not gonna waste any more of my time with it. Should've realized that earlier. I'd advise others to do the same.
LOL oh i love it... you are my forum hero. Don't expect zero to respond to this though dude.
Anyway to respond to the OP i like both D2 and D3... D3 isnt as good but it has its own pros that i find fun.
Im good with its systems i just want to feel slightly more rewarded for my gameplay in D3. Hopefully we will get that in RoS.
Anyway laterz OP.
ummm what? Yea leveling really wasn't all that exciting. Yay lets sit in 29807458390 chaos and baal runs to level and have all the bots pickit the good items so we get nothing! Super duper fun times!
If you want to arrange it
This world you can change it
If we could somehow make this
Christmas thing last
By helping a neighbor
Or even a stranger
And to know who needs help
You need only just ask
Right, because Tristram for D2 ubers wasn't recycled.
Errr... everyone because dupes totally messed up with the economy. You found a Windforce? Gratz, except that those bots are selling them by dozens! Heck, D2 economy was referred by some people as "jokeonomy". Not too hard to figure out why.
Sure, and when I buy stuff IRL, I don't care if it was stolen? Is it supposed to be funny?
Listening to you, it's like uniques rained all over the place. Well, they didn't. I played for 4 years (even made it to the hardcore ladder and stuff) and I can literally count the number Occys/Arachs/Shakos on the fingers of one hand. Highest rune I saw was an Ist.
I won't even mention the fact that chatting in /f m while playing was plain dangerous for me.
I don't buy gold, yet I'm progressing quite fine. Sure, I won't be farming MP10 with my gear, but I'm doing MP7 and I'm pretty happy with that. It's just that - again - D2 was tuned much lower. Why? Because it is a single player game, basically. Which is supposed to be playable offline, with no trade. So of course, once you get access to some decent gear, you just mow stuff down. In 1.09 and before, it went all they way up to solo-8.
How is D2 leveling different from D3 one? They're both boring after a couple of times. Actually, D2 was worse because if you got your main skills at lvl 24 or 30, you had to resort on boring and painful leveling. Same deal if you're a no-energy class (which for HC, was all classes). If anything, D3 leveling is more fun (with the exception of closed areas for final bosses - which IS a gigantic pain in the booty, I'll agree).
Hmmm, why didn't I get those tons of stuff, I wonder?
"Making alts" makes a huge time sink, which runs contrary to today's gamer's profile. Today's average gamer won't do that, he will rather leave and play another game whose editor is not as clueless.
Holy fire is 1.09, it was all but eliminated in 1.10. Zealot was marginal, especially in HC.
PS got the axe in 1.10, shadow as well. The HUGE majority of assassins in 1.10 ran either DS/LS or a hybrid with Dragon Talon.
The huge majority ran the cookie-cutter Lightning or the Burrito Cannon with MS.
How can you list Bone Spear and Bone Spirit separately, as the synergize each other in 1.10.
Necro is either Summon or Bone. Some motivated guys run poison nova but not much.
Elemental was crap in 1.09, and half of the tree is still useless in 1.10. WW/WB are cool, that's for sure. But hey, I thought the class had 3 trees?
If anything, patch 1.10 gutted the build diversity much more than D3. Which is expected - builds requiring 60 or 80 points into a skill + synergies can only be extreme. But somehow, people did not complain about it. Also, again, you can have diverse builds in Diablo 3. Especially on very low MPs, because that's how complicated D2 was once you got some gear. So sure, you can have just about any skill and it will work. It's just that the higher the obstacle is, the less builds remain. And in D2, once the patch 1.10 buffed the mobs and synergies were introduced, the build diversity plummeted dramatically as well.
And a lot of crap legendaries and sets. Let's take the bows: who used anything else than WF or Burrito? Maybe some WWS here and there too. Everything else (especially low levels)? Utter garbage.
Same thing for e.g. crossbows. Oh yeah, and it totally makes sense that you use a lvl 42 xbow at level 90+. And yeah, instead of CC/Crit dmg/AS, we had +X to all skills and resists. Big difference.
Not to mention the generally inept ALL CAPS players, TPPK hacks, non-shared loot and all the wonders of pubbie games.
Right, I think that's the point the guy you quoted was making. Loot was reasonably paced but to say you found a "sellable" item "very nearly every run" coming from a guy who claims to be OBJECTIVE is laughably ignorant. It's so obviously incorrect that it probably is the most-incorrect statement I've ever read on these forums.
If someone is of the opinion that they got a great item "very nearly every run" in D2 then it's no wonder they're disappointed with D3 and it's *absolutely* a case of rose-tinted glasses (that phrase that the people who mis-remember the past so loathe).
I'm not going to bash the OP just because he decided to create a thread about him quitting D3 because it is probably annoying for him, but i really think that it's a suicide mission to create such a thread because the rage / hate is eminent
I personally played D2 for ~10 years on and off (like 2 months a year or so). and i am aware of all the issues that were brought up by others before me in this thread and i do agree with most of what "Grafikm_fr" said. As to D3, well i spent more than 800 hours on the PC version already. I also spent real money on both D2 and D3 throughout the years. I just don't delve into endless raging arguements about which game is better. It is obvious that D3 is technically a better game. It is argueable that D2 was a better game at it's time even though, just like others noted, it was a horrid mess in certain aspects at it's release and got constantly patched untill it was a bit more playable...
To each his own i guess. But i'd say go play the console version. It's awesome.
The point being that it's horribly inaccurate to say you got something "sellable" every run. While it's possible, that would require the most extreme luck ever and certainly wasn't the average experience. Even the biggest haters in the community know just how inaccurate that statement is. So keep slamming away at it. Keep trying to prove that you, the guy who started in 1.0.7, know everything about D2, even though you don't.
It's really ironic that the guy who started playing in LoD is lecturing other people who played from the very start about what was good, bad, and indifferent about D2. How many people have to point out just how inaccurate your statements are?
You're completely exaggerating about drop rates. You're completely wrong about equal efficiencies across classes. You're completely wrong about the "spec variety" you claim existed. The majority of your points are just factually-incorrect.
And you have the audacity to claim that you're "objective." If you didn't play vanilla D2 then you can't really be objective in this discussion because you simply don't have the knowledge to do so.
First, yes Loot 2.0 will probably fix some of it.
Second, the reason loot felt more tangible is because it was regularly siphoned off the economy every ladder reset (and because of deaths in the case of HC). THAT made loot more valuable indeed. The totally crappy rune drop rate prolly helped too.
Because the valuable experience was obtained with a totally different audience. D2 was first and foremost a single-player game (and tuned as such) with no mandatory online access and targeted towards more hardcore players that would not mind rerolling each time they screwed up stat or skill attribution. Except that gamers changed a lot, they are now more casual and less likely to spend months or even years on a single game. And most of them certainly wouldn't tolerate constant rerolling, bartering in channels with scammers and generally not very bright people, and other things that were OK in 2001 but aren't in 2012.
Plus, please don't forget that games like D3 are a dying breed to begin with. Many younger players simply don't get the goal of an ARPG like D3 (or Torchlight, or POE, for that matter). The whole concept of "kill mobs, get gear, kill more mobs" is getting strangely alien in the modern VG world.
If you ask me, both systems had flaws. In D2, in effect, only diamonds and topazes were used. In D3, it is just about stacking your primary damage stats. If anything, gems should have more varied effects, and their combination should produce an effect greater than the sum (either through socket-bonuses like WoW) or some other more intricate system.
Regarding runes, it is slightly another story. Early in D3 beta, they planned on dropping skill runes rather than gaining them when leveling. But the system was pulled off the market, I guess because they feared that it would make the corresponding items either too valuable or vendor trash depending on the tuning of the drop rate. Not to mention the storage space issue. But again, I agree that rune effects (I'm not talking runewords here, just single runes) were very interesting, and that's something gems should be doing in D3.
Because the team from BNorth left when they wanted to turn D3 into an MMO, which would cause problems with segment cannibalization because of WoW. Failing to reach an agreement, they left.
NO, NO, NO. Diablo 2 system wouldn't hold water with modern gamers. Constant rerolling, being punished for a misplaced point (before anyone brings up D2 respec again - it was done in 1.11 and NOT by the original dev team, which left prior to that), cryptic transmutes with the cube, horrendous leveling if your character acquired its main skills at level 24+ - all of that wouldn't fly with today's typical casual gamer. So, you couldn't just "polish" systems, you had to scrap them and start anew. Which they did - maybe not in the best way, but it is still more adapted to the modern audiences than the original.
Yes, I saw the post. I don't remember all the points you raised, but I'll answer just one about the usefullness of items. What you seem to miss is the ability to disjoin the effects of the ladder with the actual usefulness of the items. Because of the short duration of the ladder, the items were - by definition - much more valuable. Finding a shako alone was cool because you wouldn't find a bunch early on and by itself, it was valuable. But with D3 SC, since there is no way to pull items out of the economy, you end up with the current situation. And yes, it is a problem. But ladder isn't a solution, because it would bring more problems.
Consider D3 early on. Decent weapons (I don't mean good, I mean blues with decent DPS) were going for quite a bit - I remember paying 1 or 2 mil for my DH's crossbow and I was like "woohoo, imba DPS inc". But several months later, with no way of pulling items out and with MF being independent of MP (after it was introduced), we got what we got.
Plus, the AH bugs didn't help. But hey, we got the same bugs in Marvel Heroes and it's run by a former D2 boss, so apparently no one is shielded
And? I've typed this what seems like a hundred times... WHO CARES?
Blizzard is never going to stamp out the min/max people. They have a completely different take on the game than self-found players. That doesn't mean that a guy like Jaetch is somehow less of a player, less of an asset to the community, or playing the game incorrectly.
Trying to socially engineer the game so that the only way to play the game is killing monsters is absurd. And it's an unrealistic goal that doesn't help the game at all. Self-found players seem to love to complain that their playstyle is alienated, but they seem to have no issues alienating other playstyles so that their playstyle is feasible.
I play self-found. I have for over half a year now. I don't give a fuck if little Johnny steals his mother's credit card and buys gear on the RMAH. That doesn't effect my enjoyment of D3. What does effect my enjoyment is my PERSONAL ability to find items. If they fix that then I could give a rat's ass what other people are doing because it has NO BEARING on what I'm doing in the game.
The idea of self-found is that the "economy" doesn't matter to you - you are self-sufficient. So I don't get why people who claim to want to play self-found are so worried about what other people are buying on the AH. This whole "even if I can find good gear, if others can buy it on the AH then my existence is ruined" is so fucking emo it's not funny.
Did you care in D2 when people were trading massive amounts of duped items? Did it bother you that some guy had a duped Enigma? Why? I know I didn't care because I was busy playing the game for myself with my friends. How come that doesn't apply now?
You answered the question in your following paragraph in part. The other part is: D3 is a B2P game. Hence there is no financial need (except the RMAH which is marginal from that PoV) to give players something to do all the way during game's life. You level a toon once, you can respec it as you wish, you can leave it for months, then come back and it will still be able to play (see "No ladder"). In this way, D3 resembles, for instance, GW2 (plus the gear treadmill mandatory for RPG). When there is no sub, you're not pressured into making people play all the time. Playing sometimes is enough.
What I think, however, is that the game needs for a way to siphon out items without making people reroll toons all the time. There are several ways to do that, such as (these are all hypotheses of course):
- When playing above Monster Power X, the items lose Y% of their max stats every time you die, up to Z% of the original stat. This way, eventually, your equipment will gradually lose power. It will still be good enough to play (if Z=75, for instance), but you may want to replace it at some point. Also, it won't affect new players having trouble powering up their toon for higher MPs. In compensation, maybe MF% in higher MPs should be increased.
- A more extreme way would be for the item to break after you die several times (in other words, reduce item's max durability).
- Alternatively, you could restore the said durability with a scroll/item obtained using salvaged legendary ingredients (brimstone or w/e), but only obtained from legendaries of comparable power (e.g. same ilvl). This would siphon legendaries out of the system as well.
These are only several hypotheses which need to be checked and tested, of course. But I'm afraid that in a game with RMAH, getting items out by whatever means (including turning a ladder toon into a non-ladder) carries serious risks. I don't even know how people who spent thousans of dollars on their toons will react at ROS release.
Indeed, but the problem isn't D3, it's the humans
And frankly, I don't think deliberately undertuning the game like D2 was (esp. prior to 1.10) is the solution to that.