This is probably going to come off very harsh but I just feel the need to rant about Diablo 3. Diablo 3 is a good game but its not managed very well. Some might wonder what I mean by that, well, it is a good game, it plays well but its hampered by severe incompetence by the dev's. This game reminds me of Final Fantasy XI back in 2004-2005, another good game for its time but out of touch dev's prevented the game from ascending to greatness.
I'm going to speculate on a lot here, so take it with a grain of salt.
I believe the reason why the dev's are so out of touch, Wyatt Cheng in particular, is because the dev's don't play the game past Torment I and II. Every nerf and buff to skills has been done under the veneer of "Diversity." The higher a player climbs in torment, the more diversity begins to shrink from both items and skill choices. What I find truly fascinating is the amount of "Double Think" displayed by the dev's when these topics of "diversity" arises. If you only play on Torment I and II, you'll find "diversity" everywhere, if you play on Torment V and VI, you'll find very little "diversity." All of the balance problems from both itemization and skill choices all center around the fact that mob damage and hp scaling is extremely bad in this game.
Why is this?
Well, it is the only difficulty Blizzard knows regarding D3. The more hp and damage mobs have, the more "diversity" shrinks, the current game is all about getting to x or y DPS number and getting x or y toughness number, very little strategy is involved. You can either burn the mobs down before they kill you or you're in the wrong difficulty level. There is no additional effects added to elite affixes that are only present in higher torments. There is nothing different about higher torments other than hyper inflated damage and hp numbers with higher gold/exp/magic find/gold find rewards.
If the dev's consistently played D3 on higher torments, they would quickly realize its the HP and Damage scaling as the only difficulty being at the root of the problems of game balance.
Another major problem with this dev team is they simply don't understand "The middleground." Items are either good or extremely bad and the same could be said about the constant nerfs. I often refer to the scalpel vs sledge hammer analogy, a scalpel is a very precise tool to make small, precise incisions. A hammer is a tool to smash things, what do we see in D3? We see hammers instead of scalpels when it comes to nerfs.
One playstyle on x or y character is absolutely fine in one patch and completely gutted beyond uselessness by the next patch. This has lead many players to hoard items because of the balance musical chair syndrome of blizzard. Players have no idea if their playstyle is going to be viable between each and every patch. What was once salvaged in the past becomes the futures biggest regret in D3.
You might enjoy pew pewing mobs with a lightning build. You might spend 2 months collecting the perfect gear to make your lightning build T6 viable only to have Blizzard come in and say, surprise, this rune is now fire.
You might find an incredibly rare item only to have Blizzard come in and say, surprise, the item is out of line with our development ideas and as a result, the items become instant soul fodder. To add further insult to injury the dev's couldn't come up with an interesting, build changing idea to keep said items relevant and interesting to match their rarity.
I don't have any hope in this dev team, which is a shame because the game they created is a good game, it is just managed horribly. The flaws seem to be so obvious to the players but so oblivious to the dev's. Two years later, we're still having conservations about why 2h weapons need more work. Two years later, we're still right where we started with game balance, only difference is that the goal posts were moved for certain classes. Two years later, we still have critical hit damage and critical hit chance being stacked on every item, even when it was a design goal to move away from this with RoS. Two years later, we still have a game where difficulty is conflated to more damage, more hp, which is even expressed worse in Greater Rifts.
Yeah remember in the 1.0 days when it was either you had a skorns or echoing fury? not fun but it doesn't mean that 2Handers were anywhere near viable. Honestly its pretty sad it took this long to get around to it. And it's sadder that they still haven't really changed the gem problem.
Or the fact that every legendary gem is a fuckin damage boost and nothing particularly fun or interesting to play with. That's my sole problem with this game, it's all about damage and modifier for damage, here's damage there's damage fuck it i'll give you millions of damage... Enough with the damage please give us some god damned build diversity, how about items that change skills and the way they work? So many ideas are being dumped for "do X% more damage" because it's what attracts attention.
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I think you've made a number of valid points, but only from the PoV of someone trying to compete at the very end of D3's difficulty curve which, IMO, somewhat invalidates your conclusion. Hyperbole and accusations of entrenched incompetence and indifference doesn't help, either, but too much time on the BNet forums has made me somewhat used to it.
If you're playing the game at the very highest difficultly, you are ipso facto greatly diminishing your build options. A narrative where 'maximum difficulty' is the only way to play necessarily conflates 'optimal' and 'viable', but the fact is that you're in small minority. I'd argue that not only has Blizzard deliberately avoided putting too much effort into preserving at the top difficulty levels, it's not possible to have a game with lots of build options and a meaningfully tough top-end difficulty (and to anyone who wants 'difficulty' to mean more that just 'higher monster HP and damage'... you're in the wrong genre).
I do agree that switching up the elemental damage on particular runes without some kind of player-side remedy is a dick move. It's definitely good that they're adjusting them, but it sucks that they did that without giving us in-game options for targeted re-rolls of elemental damage affixes (or just did away with element-specific damage and resist affixes altogether... they're just noise). I strongly suspect, though, that Blizzard's intention was for us to either switch to a skill+rune combo with the right element (assuming that's even possible), or farm up a new item set... neither of which are ideal options.
I also absolutely agree that the 2h situation combined with the crit-gem clusterfuck is a total headscratcher, but I'm not going to fling accusations of gibbering incompetence at a team that has got so much else absolutely right.
I think that the lack of redress for rune changes, the long time it took to get the 1h/2h situation sorted, and the bewildering persistence of the crit-gem nonsense are all topics which we (and I hate using this word) deserve direct blue-text communication on, as they do seem very difficult to explain for us on the outside.
My dh likes her 2h wep. You were way to general, i had to read it a few times to understand your point because of the redundency in your insults to the dev team.
I read it, you didn't miss much. Just the usual "everyone at Blizzard is an incompetent idiot, none of them play the game and none of them know anything about game design" whine.
I haven't played D3 for a few weeks now. When I do, i just play for 10 minutes and become quite bored.Having reached paragon 3XX, I frequently ask myself "why I am I still playing ?" and the answer is always "I don't know" so I end up logging out.
There are 2 issues here :
1. Blizzard have tried to make this game last longer and they have done a pretty decent job of it. The problem is in doing so, they have made some aspects of the game too slow, tedious and boring. They could have done a better job but then again, maybe not.
2. Some users of this game just don't know when to stop and will expect the game to satisy them for years and years whereas others of us expect the game to burn out after a few hundred hours. Having played approx 500 hours myself, I feel I have gotten my monies worth ( 70 USD ) so will let the cat rest in peace rather than continue to flog it.
When 2.1 comes along, I may play again but once I get bored, will stop.In terms of enjoyment/cost, D3 is a success. 500+ hours fun for only 70USD. Where I live, 70USD will only get me 7 Rum & Cokes which will only last 3 hours if I drink slowly.
1. Blizzard have tried to make this game last longer and they have done a pretty decent job of it. The problem is in doing so, they have made some aspects of the game too slow, tedious and boring. They could have done a better job but then again, maybe not.
And therein lies the double-edged sword nature of people wanting Blizzard to deliver on "longevity."
There is no way to purposefully and deliberately add "longevity" to the game without simultaneously making the game too tedious and boring for some segment of the playerbase.
The best way to add longevity to a game is simply to make replaying it fun.
What fun does the 500th rift bring?
What fun does the 2500th bounty bring?
What fun does taking a 2nd/3rd/4th/5th character through the gear/difficulty progression bring?
Now those are all rhetorical questions, but you will automatically create "longevity" when you have people POSITIVELY responding to them. For me doing rifts ad infinatum (and, more specifically with Rifts being extended to Greater Rifts) is that after a while it doesn't become THAT much more engaging than doing your 200th Alkaizer run. Sure the scenery and monsters are different, but by focusing on rifts (and leaving the rest of adventure mode, and campaign mode in the dust) eventually people get rather ho-hum about them.
Greater Rifts are cool. But deep down I find myself wondering why Greater Rifts don't simply REPLACE rifts altogether. It's nice to see new features, but re-hashing the same content but with a different ruleset can only keep the game "fresh" for so long. You can only add so many new legendaries and force people to reroll so many times and funnel everyone through the Nephalem Rift portal so many times before it becomes more a chore than something enjoyable.
There exists a degree of "games like this are about the grind" and that's correct. But it's sloppy and lazy to not realize that Greater Rifts are so inherently similar to Rifts that they are just going to lead to burnout faster for the average player. Variety is the spice of life and Greater Rifts, aside from the randomization, completely lack any semblance of variety.
If the developers really care about "longevity" they'd understand that Greater Rifts probably will be great in the short-term but in the long-term they're even less compelling than Rifts because they're like a schizophrenic copy/paste job.
I read it, you didn't miss much. Just the usual "everyone at Blizzard is an incompetent idiot, none of them play the game and none of them know anything about game design" whine.
Why dopeople always have to resort to "whine" statements in the Diablo 3 community. Its like that's all you can say.A PVP thread pops up what do you see? A bunch of monkeys trying to hump the keyboard faster than the other monkeys to say first on the post "stop crying" or "whine, boo hoo, whine". Same as this thread and all others about the Dev team being incompetent. Why don't you stop acting like a monkey and use that brain you were born with to contribute your opinion or facts about the game as the OP posted, instead of just telling people "just the usual whine".
With all due respect, you do have the choice not to read this thread. As this thread istitled "Diablo 3 Rant", you do know what's coming before you click
Why dopeople always have to resort to "whine" statements in the Diablo 3 community. Its like that's all you can say.A PVP thread pops up what do you see? A bunch of monkeys trying to hump the keyboard faster than the other monkeys to say first on the post "stop crying" or "whine, boo hoo, whine". Same as this thread and all others about the Dev team being incompetent. Why don't you stop acting like a monkey and use that brain you were born with to contribute your opinion or facts about the game as the OP posted, instead of just telling people "just the usual whine".
I was going to answer, until I noticed who posted. I have no interest in conversing with scum like you whose self-proclaimed interest in Diablo 3 is to profiteer from violating the TOS.
To the OP; All these paragraphs and not one tip-o-the-hat to the fact that this game is still evolving after 2 1/2 years, currently awaiting a massive overhaul, soon to be released. .....for a non-sub game.
Free improvements are met with cries for more, with the stinging refrain that only pure petulance can provide.
In regard to the statements made about balancing, both items and skills; All this complaining was done as if players should take it personally when a skill rune switches elements. Presented are opinions that an adjustment in this regard betrays all your hard work, as if spittle had been hurled into your mouth by a complete stranger.
You complain about this without noting that it is good they make changes, when they could just as easily leave the game to rot until another xpac is released years from now. To this end, such unforgiving banter seems selfish, ungrateful and spoiled.
I agree with the difficulty scaling, it would be cool if the higher torment levels introduced new challenges instead of just higher hp / dmg on the mobs you're facing.
I also agree with the changes to skills, if you change the elemental type, you're really screwing people who has spent months perfecting a build.
However..there ARE items that changes the way skills work, so i don't get your point there..and there'll be more of them in the next patch.
Two handers are finally in a good place, and they should recieve some credit for actually taking that step instead of hiding under a chair.
Game ran by Devs that a player doesn't like is what I am thinking, if it was ran by fools then it would still be a dead beat game.
Wanna see devs who are REAL fools? - Hammerpoint Interactive.
Never will I complain about a shitty company and devs after dealing with them...talk about not only a scam but incompetent devs who can't fix even a main menu screen.
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I'm going to speculate on a lot here, so take it with a grain of salt.
I believe the reason why the dev's are so out of touch, Wyatt Cheng in particular, is because the dev's don't play the game past Torment I and II. Every nerf and buff to skills has been done under the veneer of "Diversity." The higher a player climbs in torment, the more diversity begins to shrink from both items and skill choices. What I find truly fascinating is the amount of "Double Think" displayed by the dev's when these topics of "diversity" arises. If you only play on Torment I and II, you'll find "diversity" everywhere, if you play on Torment V and VI, you'll find very little "diversity." All of the balance problems from both itemization and skill choices all center around the fact that mob damage and hp scaling is extremely bad in this game.
Why is this?
Well, it is the only difficulty Blizzard knows regarding D3. The more hp and damage mobs have, the more "diversity" shrinks, the current game is all about getting to x or y DPS number and getting x or y toughness number, very little strategy is involved. You can either burn the mobs down before they kill you or you're in the wrong difficulty level. There is no additional effects added to elite affixes that are only present in higher torments. There is nothing different about higher torments other than hyper inflated damage and hp numbers with higher gold/exp/magic find/gold find rewards.
If the dev's consistently played D3 on higher torments, they would quickly realize its the HP and Damage scaling as the only difficulty being at the root of the problems of game balance.
Another major problem with this dev team is they simply don't understand "The middleground." Items are either good or extremely bad and the same could be said about the constant nerfs. I often refer to the scalpel vs sledge hammer analogy, a scalpel is a very precise tool to make small, precise incisions. A hammer is a tool to smash things, what do we see in D3? We see hammers instead of scalpels when it comes to nerfs.
One playstyle on x or y character is absolutely fine in one patch and completely gutted beyond uselessness by the next patch. This has lead many players to hoard items because of the balance musical chair syndrome of blizzard. Players have no idea if their playstyle is going to be viable between each and every patch. What was once salvaged in the past becomes the futures biggest regret in D3.
You might enjoy pew pewing mobs with a lightning build. You might spend 2 months collecting the perfect gear to make your lightning build T6 viable only to have Blizzard come in and say, surprise, this rune is now fire.
You might find an incredibly rare item only to have Blizzard come in and say, surprise, the item is out of line with our development ideas and as a result, the items become instant soul fodder. To add further insult to injury the dev's couldn't come up with an interesting, build changing idea to keep said items relevant and interesting to match their rarity.
I don't have any hope in this dev team, which is a shame because the game they created is a good game, it is just managed horribly. The flaws seem to be so obvious to the players but so oblivious to the dev's. Two years later, we're still having conservations about why 2h weapons need more work. Two years later, we're still right where we started with game balance, only difference is that the goal posts were moved for certain classes. Two years later, we still have critical hit damage and critical hit chance being stacked on every item, even when it was a design goal to move away from this with RoS. Two years later, we still have a game where difficulty is conflated to more damage, more hp, which is even expressed worse in Greater Rifts.
TL:DR: Good game, managed by fools.
I remember when every single one of my chars were running with skorn, what the hell is wrong with you?
Or the fact that every legendary gem is a fuckin damage boost and nothing particularly fun or interesting to play with. That's my sole problem with this game, it's all about damage and modifier for damage, here's damage there's damage fuck it i'll give you millions of damage... Enough with the damage please give us some god damned build diversity, how about items that change skills and the way they work? So many ideas are being dumped for "do X% more damage" because it's what attracts attention.
If you're playing the game at the very highest difficultly, you are ipso facto greatly diminishing your build options. A narrative where 'maximum difficulty' is the only way to play necessarily conflates 'optimal' and 'viable', but the fact is that you're in small minority. I'd argue that not only has Blizzard deliberately avoided putting too much effort into preserving at the top difficulty levels, it's not possible to have a game with lots of build options and a meaningfully tough top-end difficulty (and to anyone who wants 'difficulty' to mean more that just 'higher monster HP and damage'... you're in the wrong genre).
I do agree that switching up the elemental damage on particular runes without some kind of player-side remedy is a dick move. It's definitely good that they're adjusting them, but it sucks that they did that without giving us in-game options for targeted re-rolls of elemental damage affixes (or just did away with element-specific damage and resist affixes altogether... they're just noise). I strongly suspect, though, that Blizzard's intention was for us to either switch to a skill+rune combo with the right element (assuming that's even possible), or farm up a new item set... neither of which are ideal options.
I also absolutely agree that the 2h situation combined with the crit-gem clusterfuck is a total headscratcher, but I'm not going to fling accusations of gibbering incompetence at a team that has got so much else absolutely right.
I think that the lack of redress for rune changes, the long time it took to get the 1h/2h situation sorted, and the bewildering persistence of the crit-gem nonsense are all topics which we (and I hate using this word) deserve direct blue-text communication on, as they do seem very difficult to explain for us on the outside.
There are 2 issues here :
1. Blizzard have tried to make this game last longer and they have done a pretty decent job of it. The problem is in doing so, they have made some aspects of the game too slow, tedious and boring. They could have done a better job but then again, maybe not.
2. Some users of this game just don't know when to stop and will expect the game to satisy them for years and years whereas others of us expect the game to burn out after a few hundred hours. Having played approx 500 hours myself, I feel I have gotten my monies worth ( 70 USD ) so will let the cat rest in peace rather than continue to flog it.
When 2.1 comes along, I may play again but once I get bored, will stop.In terms of enjoyment/cost, D3 is a success. 500+ hours fun for only 70USD. Where I live, 70USD will only get me 7 Rum & Cokes which will only last 3 hours if I drink slowly.
There is no way to purposefully and deliberately add "longevity" to the game without simultaneously making the game too tedious and boring for some segment of the playerbase.
The best way to add longevity to a game is simply to make replaying it fun.
What fun does the 500th rift bring?
What fun does the 2500th bounty bring?
What fun does taking a 2nd/3rd/4th/5th character through the gear/difficulty progression bring?
Now those are all rhetorical questions, but you will automatically create "longevity" when you have people POSITIVELY responding to them. For me doing rifts ad infinatum (and, more specifically with Rifts being extended to Greater Rifts) is that after a while it doesn't become THAT much more engaging than doing your 200th Alkaizer run. Sure the scenery and monsters are different, but by focusing on rifts (and leaving the rest of adventure mode, and campaign mode in the dust) eventually people get rather ho-hum about them.
Greater Rifts are cool. But deep down I find myself wondering why Greater Rifts don't simply REPLACE rifts altogether. It's nice to see new features, but re-hashing the same content but with a different ruleset can only keep the game "fresh" for so long. You can only add so many new legendaries and force people to reroll so many times and funnel everyone through the Nephalem Rift portal so many times before it becomes more a chore than something enjoyable.
There exists a degree of "games like this are about the grind" and that's correct. But it's sloppy and lazy to not realize that Greater Rifts are so inherently similar to Rifts that they are just going to lead to burnout faster for the average player. Variety is the spice of life and Greater Rifts, aside from the randomization, completely lack any semblance of variety.
If the developers really care about "longevity" they'd understand that Greater Rifts probably will be great in the short-term but in the long-term they're even less compelling than Rifts because they're like a schizophrenic copy/paste job.
Free improvements are met with cries for more, with the stinging refrain that only pure petulance can provide.
In regard to the statements made about balancing, both items and skills; All this complaining was done as if players should take it personally when a skill rune switches elements. Presented are opinions that an adjustment in this regard betrays all your hard work, as if spittle had been hurled into your mouth by a complete stranger.
You complain about this without noting that it is good they make changes, when they could just as easily leave the game to rot until another xpac is released years from now. To this end, such unforgiving banter seems selfish, ungrateful and spoiled.
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I also agree with the changes to skills, if you change the elemental type, you're really screwing people who has spent months perfecting a build.
However..there ARE items that changes the way skills work, so i don't get your point there..and there'll be more of them in the next patch.
Two handers are finally in a good place, and they should recieve some credit for actually taking that step instead of hiding under a chair.
Wanna see devs who are REAL fools? - Hammerpoint Interactive.
Never will I complain about a shitty company and devs after dealing with them...talk about not only a scam but incompetent devs who can't fix even a main menu screen.