If you want extremely high replay value join us and make a hardcore character.
Diablo 3 is not the first game to not wipe all your hard work away every 3 months
I can see people's viewpoints of not wiping characters (or at least sending them in to "normal non-ladder world" but the part i hate is how carebear the video game world has become. If you look back 10 years in the EQ days, everything at that point was hardcore. You died, you had to run back, naked, to get your items....and you lost experience; experience that wasn't easy to come by either. And as sadistic and hardcore as that was, people played it and loved it because they didn't know any better. You tried introducing a game like that people would be up in arms and say the game simply just sucks.
I know there is hardcore in D3, but it's just not the same. I'm also willing to bet that in at least one point in D3's lifetime there will be some carebear type changes to hardcore because people think its too extreme.
If you want extremely high replay value join us and make a hardcore character.
Diablo 3 is not the first game to not wipe all your hard work away every 3 months
I can see people's viewpoints of not wiping characters (or at least sending them in to "normal non-ladder world" but the part i hate is how carebear the video game world has become. If you look back 10 years in the EQ days, everything at that point was hardcore. You died, you had to run back, naked, to get your items....and you lost experience; experience that wasn't easy to come by either. And as sadistic and hardcore as that was, people played it and loved it because they didn't know any better. You tried introducing a game like that people would be up in arms and say the game simply just sucks.
I know there is hardcore in D3, but it's just not the same. I'm also willing to bet that in at least one point in D3's lifetime there will be some carebear type changes to hardcore because people think its too extreme.
If you want extremely high replay value join us and make a hardcore character.
Diablo 3 is not the first game to not wipe all your hard work away every 3 months
I can see people's viewpoints of not wiping characters (or at least sending them in to "normal non-ladder world" but the part i hate is how carebear the video game world has become. If you look back 10 years in the EQ days, everything at that point was hardcore. You died, you had to run back, naked, to get your items....and you lost experience; experience that wasn't easy to come by either. And as sadistic and hardcore as that was, people played it and loved it because they didn't know any better. You tried introducing a game like that people would be up in arms and say the game simply just sucks.
I know there is hardcore in D3, but it's just not the same. I'm also willing to bet that in at least one point in D3's lifetime there will be some carebear type changes to hardcore because people think its too extreme.
Still waiting for a real successor to EverQuest (1)
The only game that ever got hardcore right and the best MMO of all time IMHO. I guess because we had a rad community of players and were just happy to be there & play with each other. Stuff like "Trolling" didnt exist yet.....ah the good old days =P
I can see people's viewpoints of not wiping characters (or at least sending them in to "normal non-ladder world" but the part i hate is how carebear the video game world has become. If you look back 10 years in the EQ days, everything at that point was hardcore. You died, you had to run back, naked, to get your items....and you lost experience; experience that wasn't easy to come by either. And as sadistic and hardcore as that was, people played it and loved it because they didn't know any better. You tried introducing a game like that people would be up in arms and say the game simply just sucks.
I know there is hardcore in D3, but it's just not the same. I'm also willing to bet that in at least one point in D3's lifetime there will be some carebear type changes to hardcore because people think its too extreme.
I think you're lamenting a certain kind of gameplay. But be careful, because this is dangerously close to taking the Elitist viewpoint. And if you want really hardcore old school, let's also go back to Ultima Online. Same XP loss, but in UO, people could loot all your equipment before you got back to it, which also let to groups waiting outside safezones and ganking you before you took 2 steps forward then looting your corpse.
Bottomline it was not fun. The only people who found it fun were the bullies. You call it carebear changes, I call it cutting out the really unfun aspects of gameplay. However, that's very subjective. Eg. I lament about how leveling in WoW from 1-60 used to mean something, it was an achievement of perseverance and took a normal person 1-2 months. Now it can be done in 1 week.
If you want extremely high replay value join us and make a hardcore character.
Diablo 3 is not the first game to not wipe all your hard work away every 3 months
I can see people's viewpoints of not wiping characters (or at least sending them in to "normal non-ladder world" but the part i hate is how carebear the video game world has become. If you look back 10 years in the EQ days, everything at that point was hardcore. You died, you had to run back, naked, to get your items....and you lost experience; experience that wasn't easy to come by either. And as sadistic and hardcore as that was, people played it and loved it because they didn't know any better. You tried introducing a game like that people would be up in arms and say the game simply just sucks.
I know there is hardcore in D3, but it's just not the same. I'm also willing to bet that in at least one point in D3's lifetime there will be some carebear type changes to hardcore because people think its too extreme.
EQ is quite an extreme example though, it was too unforgiving.
I thought it was good that dying had consequences, dying resulted in 1-1.5 hours set back in XP, wiping in a raid resulted sometimes in hours of corpse recovery, sure it was hardcore but it was a bit too hardcore
Games have indeed become too user friendly, but that is why there is a choice to play the game more hardcore, which is making a hardcore character, at the moment we don't even know how hard Inferno really is, and it will take a lot of time getting the perfect item rolls, Diablo 3 will give a lot of game time for the game cost.
Games have become more and more mainstream, and this is the price, but like i said earlier, there is always the option of hardcore if people want more replay value and more of a challenge.
I can see people's viewpoints of not wiping characters (or at least sending them in to "normal non-ladder world" but the part i hate is how carebear the video game world has become. If you look back 10 years in the EQ days, everything at that point was hardcore. You died, you had to run back, naked, to get your items....and you lost experience; experience that wasn't easy to come by either. And as sadistic and hardcore as that was, people played it and loved it because they didn't know any better. You tried introducing a game like that people would be up in arms and say the game simply just sucks.
I know there is hardcore in D3, but it's just not the same. I'm also willing to bet that in at least one point in D3's lifetime there will be some carebear type changes to hardcore because people think its too extreme.
I think you're lamenting a certain kind of gameplay. But be careful, because this is dangerously close to taking the Elitist viewpoint. And if you want really hardcore old school, let's also go back to Ultima Online. Same XP loss, but in UO, people could loot all your equipment before you got back to it, which also let to groups waiting outside safezones and ganking you before you took 2 steps forward then looting your corpse.
Bottomline it was not fun. The only people who found it fun were the bullies. You call it carebear changes, I call it cutting out the really unfun aspects of gameplay. However, that's very subjective. Eg. I lament about how leveling in WoW from 1-60 used to mean something, it was an achievement of perseverance and took a normal person 1-2 months. Now it can be done in 1 week.
There is a happy-medium between hardcore & carebear.
Its totally possible to make a game where the top tier items are only obtainable by people with a lot of skill & time while having fun content for people who are happy to just mash buttons.
Games these days cater to much to the happy side of happy-medium and changes like letting everyone get gear with enough time and zero skill in WoW(valor points/raid finder) killed the whole achievement of getting the gear in the first place.
I enjoy the feeling of seeing someone with an item and going "omg thats so rad its a shame I could never get it but damn, congrats!" . I think some of the younger generation these days feel that if one person has it then they have a right to it irreguardless of effort. Just because a quest for a awesome item exists that takes 200 hours & 25 people to complete doesnt mean you *have* to do it if you get what i mean...
Oh no not this garbage "It was better in my time" again : /
EQ is quite an extreme example though, it was too unforgiving.
I thought it was good that dying had consequences, dying resulted in 1-1.5 hours set back in XP, wiping in a raid resulted sometimes in hours of corpse recovery, sure it was hardcore but it was a bit too hardcore
EQ certainly didn't created progamers, on the other hand it created very frustrated and angry people. Punitive is just a cheap tactic to make something difficult.
You can make something difficult without making it punitive thats called good design.
Oh no not this garbage "It was better in my time" again : /
EQ is quite an extreme example though, it was too unforgiving.
I thought it was good that dying had consequences, dying resulted in 1-1.5 hours set back in XP, wiping in a raid resulted sometimes in hours of corpse recovery, sure it was hardcore but it was a bit too hardcore
EQ certainly didn't created progamers, on the other hand it created very frustrated and angry people. Punitive is just a cheap tactic to make something difficult.
You can make something difficult without making it punitive thats called good design.
Its easy to dismiss being set back by an hour and half as silly and pointless but it creates one thing...
Fear of Death
Which creates an immersive world that you respect & take a long, carefull time to explore.
Your decisions suddenly mean something and you cant just mash keys, release spirit and run back in 5mins.
Its easy to dismiss being set back by an hour and half as silly and pointless but it creates one thing...
Fear of Death
Which creates an immersive world that you respect & take a long, carefull time to explore.
Your decisions suddenly mean something and you cant just mash keys, release spirit and run back in 5mins.
so you like feeling fear and experiencing stress while playing games? go play a horror game or one of those games that have been made to deliberately frustrate players [I heard that'I want to be that guy' is that sort]
Its easy to dismiss being set back by an hour and half as silly and pointless but it creates one thing...
Fear of Death
Which creates an immersive world that you respect & take a long, carefull time to explore.
Your decisions suddenly mean something and you cant just mash keys, release spirit and run back in 5mins.
And then nearly 6 months down the road, patches are applied that reverse this decision. The EQ days are long gone because when EQ was at its peak, it was the only game in town. The public has spoken and like it or not, the vast majority of gamers don't like barriers to entry.
Its the same argument can be made for Hardcore in Diablo 3. There are gamers who absolutely LOVE hardcore (HC). They relish achieving level 60 and making a mistake a its all gone. But for every dedicated HC player, there are 50 more who are just fine with SoftCore (SC) mode.
But back to your OP, I don't see a need for Ladder resets, or even to think about them until we see how the Diablo 3 economy plays out in Inferno. As I said before, Duping was the problem in D2. It is why everytime you read a build in D2 they would list specific gear needed for those builds (eg. Windforce or Harlequin Crest). In a randomized game like Diablo 2 or 3, there should be no way of guaranteeing such drops.
If someone is crazy enough to want to buy those items on the RMAH, more power to him. I wish I could drop $1000 a month into Blizz-bucks and start buying up gear. But there's not even a lobby where people congregate to show off stuff. The only time you'll see other player's equipment is if you join in a game with them. Ah that point, who cares. Even if he is a crappy player, those uber items should up his character to at least an average player.
Its easy to dismiss being set back by an hour and half as silly and pointless but it creates one thing...
Fear of Death
Which creates an immersive world that you respect & take a long, carefull time to explore.
Your decisions suddenly mean something and you cant just mash keys, release spirit and run back in 5mins.
so you like feeling fear and experiencing stress while playing games? go play a horror game or one of those games that have been made to deliberately frustrate players [I heard that'I want to be that guy' is that sort]
Fear does not equal frustration, like I said it creates immersion, respect for the world & players who have been able to explore it.
There is a happy-medium between softcore & hardcore. Having a happy medium means the final 5% of content is only avaliable to the top 20% of players.
Why tell me to go play a single player horror game when I just explained how much I love MMO's and the competition amongst other players?
The problem must be that a large portion of people think they deserve the best gear irreguardless of skill & time which is the category i believe you belong in.
I guess I dont really mind your type, your going to be the ones buying out all my gear on the RMAH because you want to be the best without working for it
The problem must be that a large portion of people think they deserve the best gear irreguardless of skill & time which is the category i believe you belong in.
Wtf, I thought you people were supposed to be stuck on SW:TOR forums.
Seriously, take your elitist attitude somewhere else. Nobody cares how much time you have (skill is not a factor) or what you think anyone deserves. That is purely on the dev decision, and smart devs make that gear irrelevant.
See, I'm one of those people that did not play Diablo 2 for years and years. Diablo 2, at it's prime, probably kept me entertained for a good year at most, if that. When LoD came out, I definitely played it again for several months afterwards.
However, it's not a game I can just play over and over and over again. When I beat Hell difficulty, I'm done and I put the game away. What I end up doing is play the game for about a month, uninstall it, then a year later I'll reinstall it and play it again for a couple weeks with friends, uninstall etc. In that sense, D2 has good replay value, but I also do the same for lots of old games. Hell, just the other day I played Rygar again on an NES emulator all the way through, but I wouldn't say Rygar has good replay value.
Late last year (probably Oct. or so) a friend of mine, who is also waiting for D3 now, said he never played the other Diablo games. I convinced him to buy D2, convinced my brother to reinstall it and we played 3 player all the way through Nightmare difficulty over a few weeks. It was an absolute blast! I had more fun playing D2, which is a good 10+ year old game than I usually do playing something like Left 4 Dead. It was awesome! However, once we beat Nightmare, we were pretty much done with it. I don't think any of us has played it again since.
D3 I think will actually have more replay value for a gamer like myself than D2 did. When I read how people claim they have played D2 every day for the last 10 years, I first think to myself that they're full of it. Then I think, if they are in fact telling the truth, how the hell were they not completely bored out of their mind after that first year? Hell, even that first couple of months? The ladder resets alone I don't think makes much difference. It just resets the playing field and eliminates any hacked/duped gear, but ultimately it's the same game.
When it came to D2, I can play it for a few weeks but then I need to step away from the game and give myself breathing room and play something fresh. After a while, I can go back to D2 and really enjoy it again for a couple of weeks. However, I don't agree that D2 had all that much replayability and disagree with people that think D3 will have even less.
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Oh pitiful shadow lost in the darkness,
Bringing torment and pain to others.
Your damned soul wallowing in your sin.
Perhaps... it is time to die.
There will be ladder resets! But, it won't come in the form that we are used to. The ladder resets will happen when a new expansion pack is released. Every xpac will bring a level cap increase, making old gear not as desirable as xpac gear.
It won't be a hard reset like we are used to - we will not have to roll new characters in order to participate in the new ladder, but all the existing characters will need new gear that will come with every level cap increase. The result of this will be a continual decrease in demand for items that aren't at the level cap, but a poignant increase for items that are at the cap, because there will be more chars demanding better items then d2 ever had. This will keep the economy in check. Items naturally decay in value, the stimulant is the infusion of new items - ladder resets create new demand by creating scarcity, the exact same thing will happen when the level cap increases.
The system in d2 was far from perfect, it was an evolution of an economic system which had no base to begin with. When the only option to stabilize an economy is by destroying it and starting fresh that should set alarm bells going off. It sucks to admit, but the system was so broke before that it is hard to imagine one where a free market can actually take place.
(this is assuming that xpacs bring an increase in the level cap, which I'm pretty sure will be the case)
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I can see people's viewpoints of not wiping characters (or at least sending them in to "normal non-ladder world" but the part i hate is how carebear the video game world has become. If you look back 10 years in the EQ days, everything at that point was hardcore. You died, you had to run back, naked, to get your items....and you lost experience; experience that wasn't easy to come by either. And as sadistic and hardcore as that was, people played it and loved it because they didn't know any better. You tried introducing a game like that people would be up in arms and say the game simply just sucks.
I know there is hardcore in D3, but it's just not the same. I'm also willing to bet that in at least one point in D3's lifetime there will be some carebear type changes to hardcore because people think its too extreme.
Yeah, Demon Soul's didn't sell well at all...
Still waiting for a real successor to EverQuest (1)
The only game that ever got hardcore right and the best MMO of all time IMHO. I guess because we had a rad community of players and were just happy to be there & play with each other. Stuff like "Trolling" didnt exist yet.....ah the good old days =P
I think you're lamenting a certain kind of gameplay. But be careful, because this is dangerously close to taking the Elitist viewpoint. And if you want really hardcore old school, let's also go back to Ultima Online. Same XP loss, but in UO, people could loot all your equipment before you got back to it, which also let to groups waiting outside safezones and ganking you before you took 2 steps forward then looting your corpse.
Bottomline it was not fun. The only people who found it fun were the bullies. You call it carebear changes, I call it cutting out the really unfun aspects of gameplay. However, that's very subjective. Eg. I lament about how leveling in WoW from 1-60 used to mean something, it was an achievement of perseverance and took a normal person 1-2 months. Now it can be done in 1 week.
I thought it was good that dying had consequences, dying resulted in 1-1.5 hours set back in XP, wiping in a raid resulted sometimes in hours of corpse recovery, sure it was hardcore but it was a bit too hardcore
Games have indeed become too user friendly, but that is why there is a choice to play the game more hardcore, which is making a hardcore character, at the moment we don't even know how hard Inferno really is, and it will take a lot of time getting the perfect item rolls, Diablo 3 will give a lot of game time for the game cost.
Games have become more and more mainstream, and this is the price, but like i said earlier, there is always the option of hardcore if people want more replay value and more of a challenge.
There is a happy-medium between hardcore & carebear.
Its totally possible to make a game where the top tier items are only obtainable by people with a lot of skill & time while having fun content for people who are happy to just mash buttons.
Games these days cater to much to the happy side of happy-medium and changes like letting everyone get gear with enough time and zero skill in WoW(valor points/raid finder) killed the whole achievement of getting the gear in the first place.
I enjoy the feeling of seeing someone with an item and going "omg thats so rad its a shame I could never get it but damn, congrats!" . I think some of the younger generation these days feel that if one person has it then they have a right to it irreguardless of effort. Just because a quest for a awesome item exists that takes 200 hours & 25 people to complete doesnt mean you *have* to do it if you get what i mean...
EQ certainly didn't created progamers, on the other hand it created very frustrated and angry people. Punitive is just a cheap tactic to make something difficult.
You can make something difficult without making it punitive thats called good design.
Its easy to dismiss being set back by an hour and half as silly and pointless but it creates one thing...
Fear of Death
Which creates an immersive world that you respect & take a long, carefull time to explore.
Your decisions suddenly mean something and you cant just mash keys, release spirit and run back in 5mins.
so you like feeling fear and experiencing stress while playing games? go play a horror game or one of those games that have been made to deliberately frustrate players [I heard that'I want to be that guy' is that sort]
Its the same argument can be made for Hardcore in Diablo 3. There are gamers who absolutely LOVE hardcore (HC). They relish achieving level 60 and making a mistake a its all gone. But for every dedicated HC player, there are 50 more who are just fine with SoftCore (SC) mode.
But back to your OP, I don't see a need for Ladder resets, or even to think about them until we see how the Diablo 3 economy plays out in Inferno. As I said before, Duping was the problem in D2. It is why everytime you read a build in D2 they would list specific gear needed for those builds (eg. Windforce or Harlequin Crest). In a randomized game like Diablo 2 or 3, there should be no way of guaranteeing such drops.
If someone is crazy enough to want to buy those items on the RMAH, more power to him. I wish I could drop $1000 a month into Blizz-bucks and start buying up gear. But there's not even a lobby where people congregate to show off stuff. The only time you'll see other player's equipment is if you join in a game with them. Ah that point, who cares. Even if he is a crappy player, those uber items should up his character to at least an average player.
Fear does not equal frustration, like I said it creates immersion, respect for the world & players who have been able to explore it.
There is a happy-medium between softcore & hardcore. Having a happy medium means the final 5% of content is only avaliable to the top 20% of players.
Why tell me to go play a single player horror game when I just explained how much I love MMO's and the competition amongst other players?
The problem must be that a large portion of people think they deserve the best gear irreguardless of skill & time which is the category i believe you belong in.
I guess I dont really mind your type, your going to be the ones buying out all my gear on the RMAH because you want to be the best without working for it
Seriously, take your elitist attitude somewhere else. Nobody cares how much time you have (skill is not a factor) or what you think anyone deserves. That is purely on the dev decision, and smart devs make that gear irrelevant.
Good thing DIII won't have this problem...
However, it's not a game I can just play over and over and over again. When I beat Hell difficulty, I'm done and I put the game away. What I end up doing is play the game for about a month, uninstall it, then a year later I'll reinstall it and play it again for a couple weeks with friends, uninstall etc. In that sense, D2 has good replay value, but I also do the same for lots of old games. Hell, just the other day I played Rygar again on an NES emulator all the way through, but I wouldn't say Rygar has good replay value.
Late last year (probably Oct. or so) a friend of mine, who is also waiting for D3 now, said he never played the other Diablo games. I convinced him to buy D2, convinced my brother to reinstall it and we played 3 player all the way through Nightmare difficulty over a few weeks. It was an absolute blast! I had more fun playing D2, which is a good 10+ year old game than I usually do playing something like Left 4 Dead. It was awesome! However, once we beat Nightmare, we were pretty much done with it. I don't think any of us has played it again since.
D3 I think will actually have more replay value for a gamer like myself than D2 did. When I read how people claim they have played D2 every day for the last 10 years, I first think to myself that they're full of it. Then I think, if they are in fact telling the truth, how the hell were they not completely bored out of their mind after that first year? Hell, even that first couple of months? The ladder resets alone I don't think makes much difference. It just resets the playing field and eliminates any hacked/duped gear, but ultimately it's the same game.
When it came to D2, I can play it for a few weeks but then I need to step away from the game and give myself breathing room and play something fresh. After a while, I can go back to D2 and really enjoy it again for a couple of weeks. However, I don't agree that D2 had all that much replayability and disagree with people that think D3 will have even less.
Bringing torment and pain to others.
Your damned soul wallowing in your sin.
Perhaps...
it is time to die.
It won't be a hard reset like we are used to - we will not have to roll new characters in order to participate in the new ladder, but all the existing characters will need new gear that will come with every level cap increase. The result of this will be a continual decrease in demand for items that aren't at the level cap, but a poignant increase for items that are at the cap, because there will be more chars demanding better items then d2 ever had. This will keep the economy in check. Items naturally decay in value, the stimulant is the infusion of new items - ladder resets create new demand by creating scarcity, the exact same thing will happen when the level cap increases.
The system in d2 was far from perfect, it was an evolution of an economic system which had no base to begin with. When the only option to stabilize an economy is by destroying it and starting fresh that should set alarm bells going off. It sucks to admit, but the system was so broke before that it is hard to imagine one where a free market can actually take place.
(this is assuming that xpacs bring an increase in the level cap, which I'm pretty sure will be the case)