they're just making sure that whatever gets released is both finished and balanced, and not in beta status
Wow...seriously?
Were you awake/alive/conscious when D3 was launched?
They didn't realize 10 million people would buy their game. Who would've? Most people said it'll sell like 2mil. I guess Blizz predicted 5 at most.
Pleas tell me you guys are joking.......
How is this a joke. I honestly believe them when they say they were unprepared for the numbers. And its not just the fact that 10 million people bought the game (it was actually around 7 at launch i believe), it was that many people hitting the server system with everything at the same time. Ask the people who got into games on launch and it wasn't that unstable (at least for me it wasn't outside of the occasional crash or kick).
How many games let alone publishers support games this far after launch (outside of MMO markets), and of those how many support the games to the degree diablo has received.
If we look at where we are from where we were there has been a lot of progress made and we also need to think about how much of what we want is being delegated to the xpac instead of a patch. Intact isn't the only major thing in the pipe PvP at this point (whenever that decides to come out)?
How is it not a joke? Look do you believe Blizzard in general when they talk about World of Warcraft and the shit they spew? We are lucky that Diablo has not reached that tipping point and that undocumented changes get no attention from blues. Let me give you a few examples. Find me the patch notes and the blue post that talks about the nerf to grimoire of sacrifice for warlocks in their newest patch, it no longer gives chaos bolt % damage like many other skills; however, it was changed to give chaos bolt a dot that you can clip for a dps loss. We found out about it not from official sources but rather through non Blizzard people/ptr/in the live game. If you can find me where a blue tells you about that spell than I must apologize for this example.
Do you honestly believe that only a small % of players have over 50k gold on their account? I have 139k on my account. you can make gold in wow so fucking easy and that is one of the reasons why they put in the black market auction house to try and take some gold out of the economy.
I don't believe them for 1 minute when they spew that kind of crap about being unprepared for these numbers this is Diablo 3 we're talking about the most anticipate game of the year because of the epicness of Diablo 2. I bet you also believe that they spent 10 years developing Diablo 3 don't you? Well you're wrong they didn't start until atleast 2006/7 because they announced their project at Blizzcon in 2008 or 9, I forget witch Blizzcon it was announced at.
no they did not spend 10 years making that game. But quite frankly undocumented changes are going to slip past.
Also how may undocumented changes get by right now in D3, they just patched to 1.06, and we got 4 lines of notes cause nothing of consequence got changed (except a fun -15% health bug) and 2 hotfix lines. WoW is an MMO and again lets not enter that here as MMOs by defanition are an insane cluster of messed up and convoluted systems because of 10 years of accumulated code. Go take any 10 year old system thats been played with to the level of WoW and try and read the code. Trust me I am sure its messed up and full of crap that shouldnt be there anymore. This happens in simple systems let alone game systems which are freaking huge.
And on topic of do i believe blizzard. At what. The numbers they say. Well yes, they are liable as that is shareholder information being issued. does WoW have 10million+ subs right not, yup, at least till the next shareholders meeting. That stuff is important because they CAN NOT lie about that info without being horribly libel. Do I believe they were unprepared... well lets look at the numbers.
4.7 million players in first 24 hours. 24 hours. It was just about 6.7 million by week one but most of the login issues we corrected by the addition of more auth servers for battle.net. Before that no game even came close. Infact if you look at top ten games sold in first 24 hours they are all cross platform except D3 and halo franchies (go Halo?) . The closes selling PC game was.... duh duh duh... Cata....an MMO set at 3.3 million... .
6.7--> 3.3. Double.... freaking double on a NON-MMO. I can imagine the net admins shitting a brick (well probably puking in a corner) when they saw how fast their servers were getting swamped and crashing. LEts just assume that it was 4.7-3.3, well the 3.3 didn't matter to blizzard. they already had that infrastructure inplace to handle the load (and on high pop realms, well QUES!!!) for a non MMO to even come close was more then likely unexpected so fast. and thats the rub with the launch, it was so fast. Will they make a mistake like that again, probably not, but it was one no company had yet to have to deal with until D3.
And frankly lets look at most MMO launches and cringe... Star Wars, AoC, Linage, hell WoW was a nightmare for 1 month, we got maybe 2 days then 1-2 weeks of problems connecting sometime.
On the gold comment, again.. WoW (a game without enough gold syncs), which is another topic entirely.
I am ont a blind supported of blizzard. I think there are things that should and will change. But I will not claim the sky is falling or exaggerate the state of the game out of passion one way or the other. D3 is far from the best game right now, but frankly its a very good one. Weather or not its as a good as D2 is subjective as people prefer some systems over others which is inherent to a player-base this big.
One thing they should get in gear on is PvP so we can either truly condemn it or praise it.
You missed the point of my response and to not quote x5 something yes I understand that their liable with their shareholders and they only have to tell their shareholders the truth. When it comes down to us, the players, undocumented changes go though and it is pointless to list every single change that happened in a patch; however, something as important as grimoire of sacrifice nerf is patch note worthy. The gold cap in WoW the reason why they don't increase that upon server transfer is not because a small % of the players don't have 50k. There is another reason Why they're not doing that, most likely to combat china farmers from moving their product from account to account. That is a big reason why I don't believe every word Blizzard says.
Lets get off the topic of wow, because this is the Diablo forums.
Lets here everyone's opinion on why the mystic npc was not included in the release of the game.
You missed the point of my response and to not quote x5 something yes I understand that their liable with their shareholders and they only have to tell their shareholders the truth. When it comes down to us, the players, undocumented changes go though and it is pointless to list every single change that happened in a patch; however, something as important as grimoire of sacrifice nerf is patch note worthy. The gold cap in WoW the reason why they don't increase that upon server transfer is not because a small % of the players don't have 50k. There is another reason Why they're not doing that, most likely to combat china farmers from moving their product from account to account. That is a big reason why I don't believe every word Blizzard says.
Lets get off the topic of wow, because this is the Diablo forums.
Lets here everyone's opinion on why the mystic npc was not included in the release of the game.
I dunno. They should have, and I wish I could socket all my pieces with different stats like d2 (4 gems is not enough IMO). My guess about the mystic is that there was either an issue technically that was very borked (that they found out too late to fix before launch), or was too close to the gems we already use.
Lets here everyone's opinion on why the mystic npc was not included in the release of the game.
She was mainly an enchanter and let's face it. Everyone would always and only enchant CC, CH, IAS and sockets. It's just a gold sink that adds no metagame. I'm not saying the Blacksmith currently offers something (as Blizz have admitted and are looking into) but I'm sure you can remember how heavy the crafting metagame was before the Legendary revamp. It was all about crafting.
And the Jewelcrafter does his job flawlessly - he creates gems. Currently they're pretty stable.
This is all my opinion of course. If there was something official on this we'd already know it.
She did originally also made scrolls, which got removed. She added charms, which sadly also got removed (here's hoping for the expansion). And finally she made potions (meh?) and "spell runes", which got scraped and reworked into skill runes.
So she just kinda got useless really. Hopefully they invent something more interesting for her later on in the game's life. She already has spots for her in the different cities.
I think it's safe to say that a primary stat would also be on the list of enchants, but she could have added special affix's instead of those 4. chance on hit to cast poison nova, chance on hit to summon a guardian, those types of enchants would be great along with the optional crit, crit damage, ias, socket and primary stat.
I don't think she got useless, I think she is going to be a feature for the xpack when they bring in charms and jewels, i just wish they add sapphires, diamonds and skulls and make them useful because the current gems suck dick. I'm a barbarian derp I use str gems in my gear and a crit damage gem in my weapon. With the paragon leveling system (band aid system) its pointless to use an amethyst gem in you're helm unless you're level 100, the emerald in the helm is pointless because of the gold find cap, the topaz in the helm is pointless because of the magic find cap and not to mention pointless to use in weapons, the ruby is pointless to use in the weapon also. Did I miss any?
I think it's safe to say that a primary stat would also be on the list of enchants, but she could have added special affix's instead of those 4. chance on hit to cast poison nova, chance on hit to summon a guardian, those types of enchants would be great along with the optional crit, crit damage, ias, socket and primary stat.
I don't think she got useless, I think she is going to be a feature for the xpack when they bring in charms and jewels, i just wish they add sapphires, diamonds and skulls and make them useful because the current gems suck dick. I'm a barbarian derp I use str gems in my gear and a crit damage gem in my weapon. With the paragon leveling system (band aid system) its pointless to use an amethyst gem in you're helm unless you're level 100, the emerald in the helm is pointless because of the gold find cap, the topaz in the helm is pointless because of the magic find cap and not to mention pointless to use in weapons, the ruby is pointless to use in the weapon also. Did I miss any?
On your first point - it's not that she wouldn't have had "fun" affixes, it's that no one would sadly pick them, because of the being "efficient" philosophy that's been going on in gaming the last few years. You can't just have fun - you have to be at the top. But I do agree that some of the things might've been very fun, like the ones you mentioned. If it's any consolidation - all of the affixes she was able to enchant got thrown into the current poll of possible affixes on rares and legendaries right now (bar the unique ones for legendaries I suppose). So there weren't that many fun ones in the plans to begin with. Hopefully that changes in time.
Me - I'd sure like to see "Cannot be frozen", but then the Frozen affix would be a waste on Elite mobs.
And on your second point - of course. I'm sure the vast, vast majority of the player base would like more customization, be it cosmetic or effective. I think though, that we'd first need a bigger variety of important affixes added in that would be used as such on gems.
If you read the first few lines at the beginning of this post you'll hopefully see, the way I do, that "efficiency" is just getting in the way of fun. And that's in almost any game. Currently we have CC, CH, IAS, AR and sockets as "mandatory" affixes. That's not bad design (imo), but it's super hard to balance. Adding more good affixes would really destroy the somewhat good balance we have right now when you include them to the aforementioned ones and the scales would need to be re-balanced again. I'm sure we'll see some good ones being added in the future but before that ideas need to be thrown around between designers and then testing needs to commence on them. Otherwise people would then just say "Damn it, now I have to look for a weapon that has ALL of these - CH, IAS, Socket and the new X, Y and Z affixes." All in the name of efficiency.
But then with efficiency come bigger drop rates because of faster farming... and it's just a long, long topic. So I'll leave it here for now and see what other people pick off my post.
With regards to this image the problems are not simply itemization. its more to do with the way itemization interacts with, skills and attributes. So just working on items (more different affixes) will not be sufficient, the weapon dps dependence and primary stat dependence are what causes many of the issues with itemization. So realistically for the problems with items to be solved it would require an admission from the design team that some of the key decisions they have made are flawed that being the complete gear and weapon dps dependence.
Second, the problem with efficiency currently is that it is one dimensional. The only way to make a class more efficient is to increase its dps and damage output over time which centralises and thus hinders build diversity.
Efficiency is one dimensional because the only problem which players have to solve is how to minimise run time with as much dps as possible. for example as i stated earlier there is no damage type problem to be solved, the kind of damage you are dealing makes no difference. thus rather than having people who specialise in dealing fire damage and ice damage or physical damage or a combination thereof. players simply seek to maximise damage in general.
When there is a damage type problem to be solved(as there was in D2 because of immunities) people specialise in one type of damage or another and gain a certain kind of efficiency or proficiency and then are rewarded by being more or less successful depending on what kind of monster they are fighting. In D3 the kind of specialisation is identical no matter what class you are playing everyone specialises towards maximising damage output. This is a strong reason for the lack of build diversity.
what i want to know is: WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF HAVING WEAPONS AND SKILLS THAT DO DIFFERENT KINDS OF DAMAGE WHEN IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO THE GAME-PLAY!!??
seriously i dont get it, maybe it made the game easier to tune, but so far as i am concerned the decision sucks, and its has not helped make the game more fun in any clear way.
I think the above post highlights that some and maybe even allot of the problems with itemization are the result of systematic changes which have been made between D2 and D3. Thus allot of the dissatisfaction with items can be attributed to those changes and not items specifically.
Thus the three most fundamental changes i would like to see from D3
1.Make damage type have efficacy.(this esp)
2. diversify drop rates and types across areas. (eg. make so certain items only drop in certain acts/certain monsters)
3. Reduce the the dependence on gear, primary stat, and weapon dps.
Ah, but, you see, what you fail to mention (or understand) is that, with limited number of affixes on gear, if you have more useful affixes that those that can appear on gear, you can't get ALL the good ones in one item, so you'll have to make choices.
No, what my thought process was that +1X might still have slightly higher value than +1Y, so CH for example might always be the SLIGHTLY better stat for classes, but everyone would just say "just go with CH, it has the best value". That's what's difficult to balance. The other choice would've been to have all mentioned stats on items, which of course would be ridiculous.
And on the launch part, it wasn't a cop out. An ARPG is not the most popular genre of games, even if it's Diablo. Not to mention it's single platform. Did I like the problems at launch? Of course not. Could they have been foreseen and fixed beforehand? Of course. Did Blizzard want to insure themselves by overstocking hardware? I guess not. It wasn't fun for anyone, player and developer alike.
Beyond that, about the "quality of the finished product". Beta was super small and like everyone I think this was a big mistake. The end result was many bugs that couldn't have been foreseen or have been, but without a proper time window to be fixed. Enter iterative development.
Or do you mean it feature wise? I don't have a particular comment for that. I played all classes to 60, geared up 2 of them, finished Inferno on one, and the first few patches started at about that point. For some players this could've been too much time. Me personally - I was fine.
Oh and the RMAH part? I honestly can't say I care. People that use it mostly like it. The people that don't mostly hate it. Was the game going to be better without it? Would 3rd party trading be super relevant? I dunno.
1. Jay Wilson decided "okay, let's announce that there will be a PvP blog post soon". What does that mean? Firstly, he seems to be interested in PvP as well, otherwise he wouldn't tweet about it. Secondly, he decides to throw pieces of information out there; like "hey, we're still alive". Anyone ever played an EA game? It feels like they don't exist. They're some monkeys in a submerged submarine, randomly putting in some lines of code, and once a year they surface to release another crappy game. Information? Patches? Upgrades? Nice games with improvements? They never heard of that. Thirdly, have you ever thought that Jay Wilson put this tweet out to create some pressure on the PvP development and design team? He announced an update, and a week later had to say it got postponed because it's not done yet. He didn't say "hey, I'll implement PvP tomorrow" followed by "damn, I didn't get it done because I was lazy" - the TEAM told him to tweet that it got postponed. Don't bitch about Jay Wison - bitch about the team which is slacking off! Besides, I don't think they're lazy at all, they're just making sure that whatever gets released is both finished and balanced, and not in beta status.
Hey bro I know about everything you're talking about, but ignorance/lazy think of people (including my trolling on Jay's resign - that some people didn't understand that was a troll comment) is to point fingers to who's on focus (Jay), it's not something that only happens with D3, every place is like that. Look at WOW, everyone says pvp sucks etc, and blames Greg Street, but guess who is in charge of pvp team? Tom Chilton.
Example: If your football team sucks, you're gonna blame the coach right? No one cares why your team is losing but why they aren't winning. But hey, the administrators of your team is not paying the football players, and the coach is always on focus giving press conference to it's fans, so you blame it.
What I'm trying to say is, people blame who is in focus, incorrectly, I can see that, but that how things works, and I'm going to say this again: I appreciate overneathe info about who is in charge of in diablo 3 development to try to mitigate this type of situation.
2. This must be a joke. In D2 everyone was like "uniques are useless, you can do funny stuff with them, but in the end a nice rare is always better". Then they buffed uniques and in particular created some awesome runewords, and everyone goes "rares are useless, everyone just wants Enigma, Hoto, ...". D3 gets released, rares are superb, legendaries and sets kinda useless... everyone complains again. Legendaries and sets gets buffed, everyone runs around in brown and green items (except for some slots like gloves but people don't seem to stick to the truth when complaining) and now everyone's complaining that rares are useless.
About aspect of the drop, everything falls on the shoulder of itemization, everything is so undimensional and tied to the primary stats that makes 1 affix to make a rare thrash. I don't want easy farm, I want a piece of gear make me think if it's worth change my build instead of just min max my stats (the case of D3). Just see the image, it's not that difficult to understand.
Now everyone prays for a legendary to drop because it have 50% or more of it's affixes acurrate and less chance to be garbage, Sagathiest explains this well. Also point a fact in other to solve it is not complain.
What's next? Let me guess. Actually, you could bet a fortune on what's happening next: Blizzard revives crafting by introducing level 63 rares for crafting and maybe even buffs some of the stats. Market gets flooded with rares. Everyone complains again about BiS legendaries being useless.
First: Blizzard said that crafting is supposed to help people to get that piece of gear that you don't have and help progression through acts and levels (nightmare/hell/inferno). Thing is, we have GAH an RMAH that sells pretty decent items with pathetic gold cost for that purpose (progression through acts and levels), so it's a fail design and EVERYONE knows that. Do you think nothing have to be done? it's ok to just leave this way? it's an issue and this Topic is about discussion about the format of the game, if you just put random thoughts of "people complain again" does not help.
And about the low droprate. Some of you played 1000+ hours. Anyone ever played Torchlight? If you play Torchlight for that much time, you have seen every single f***ing BiS item a 100 times. The amount of good drops is so overwhelming that it's just boring. When a 62 mace drops, I bet that everyone, including a p100 1000h+ player, gets at least a bit excited. This feeling is something that you cannot possibly get after playing Torchlight (or in fact, many other games) for that long.
Damnit... 1000 hours of fun and people still complain, I don't get it. Seriously.
It doesn't matter how many hours we spent on the game. Aren't this a "diablofans" forum? We want to HELP this game to get better and better, some just like to troll everytime and says everything sucks.
She was mainly an enchanter and let's face it. Everyone would always and only enchant CC, CH, IAS and sockets. It's just a gold sink that adds no metagame.
Is that what you really think? what about jewelcraft? EVERYONE just socket your primary stats or vit if you wish more hp. it's a gold sink that adds no metagame too. See the flaw? why itemization is bad? at least an enchanter would add a flavor to that rare you droped that the only thing that missed on it was a IAS, and you could make it "perfect".
She did originally also made scrolls, which got removed. She added charms, which sadly also got removed (here's hoping for the expansion). And finally she made potions (meh?) and "spell runes", which got scraped and reworked into skill runes.
So she just kinda got useless really. Hopefully they invent something more interesting for her later on in the game's life. She already has spots for her in the different cities.
At least, overneathe, is something that you wish to farm, even if it was potion that increases MF/GF, etc, is an incentive to farm faster, more efficient, I don't know.
First: Blizzard said that crafting is supposed to help people to get that piece of gear that you don't have and help progression through acts and levels (nightmare/hell/inferno). Thing is, we have GAH an RMAH that sells pretty decent items with pathetic gold cost for that purpose (progression through acts and levels), so it's a fail design and EVERYONE knows that. Do you think nothing have to be done? it's ok to just leave this way? it's an issue and this Topic is about discussion about the format of the game, if you just put random thoughts of "people complain again" does not help.
I want things to change. Things shouldn't be left the way they are. No question about it :-)
It doesn't matter how many hours we spent on the game. Aren't this a "diablofans" forum? We want to HELP this game to get better and better, some just like to troll everytime and says everything sucks.
Couldn't agree more. However, this is a fan forum, not the official forums. Devs don't read here. And bitching about some people, creating conspiracy theories (other thread), and complaining about the way things are right now, especially without saying what could be changed to make things better, are not helping anyone. This is what I'm annoyed with. If people need stress relief, go kill some monsters ;-)
Otherwise, I'm in total agreement to most of your statements.
no they did not spend 10 years making that game. But quite frankly undocumented changes are going to slip past.
Also how may undocumented changes get by right now in D3, they just patched to 1.06, and we got 4 lines of notes cause nothing of consequence got changed (except a fun -15% health bug) and 2 hotfix lines. WoW is an MMO and again lets not enter that here as MMOs by defanition are an insane cluster of messed up and convoluted systems because of 10 years of accumulated code. Go take any 10 year old system thats been played with to the level of WoW and try and read the code. Trust me I am sure its messed up and full of crap that shouldnt be there anymore. This happens in simple systems let alone game systems which are freaking huge.
And on topic of do i believe blizzard. At what. The numbers they say. Well yes, they are liable as that is shareholder information being issued. does WoW have 10million+ subs right not, yup, at least till the next shareholders meeting. That stuff is important because they CAN NOT lie about that info without being horribly libel. Do I believe they were unprepared... well lets look at the numbers.
4.7 million players in first 24 hours. 24 hours. It was just about 6.7 million by week one but most of the login issues we corrected by the addition of more auth servers for battle.net. Before that no game even came close. Infact if you look at top ten games sold in first 24 hours they are all cross platform except D3 and halo franchies (go Halo?) . The closes selling PC game was.... duh duh duh... Cata....an MMO set at 3.3 million... .
6.7--> 3.3. Double.... freaking double on a NON-MMO. I can imagine the net admins shitting a brick (well probably puking in a corner) when they saw how fast their servers were getting swamped and crashing. LEts just assume that it was 4.7-3.3, well the 3.3 didn't matter to blizzard. they already had that infrastructure inplace to handle the load (and on high pop realms, well QUES!!!) for a non MMO to even come close was more then likely unexpected so fast. and thats the rub with the launch, it was so fast. Will they make a mistake like that again, probably not, but it was one no company had yet to have to deal with until D3.
And frankly lets look at most MMO launches and cringe... Star Wars, AoC, Linage, hell WoW was a nightmare for 1 month, we got maybe 2 days then 1-2 weeks of problems connecting sometime.
On the gold comment, again.. WoW (a game without enough gold syncs), which is another topic entirely.
I am ont a blind supported of blizzard. I think there are things that should and will change. But I will not claim the sky is falling or exaggerate the state of the game out of passion one way or the other. D3 is far from the best game right now, but frankly its a very good one. Weather or not its as a good as D2 is subjective as people prefer some systems over others which is inherent to a player-base this big.
One thing they should get in gear on is PvP so we can either truly condemn it or praise it.
Lets get off the topic of wow, because this is the Diablo forums.
Lets here everyone's opinion on why the mystic npc was not included in the release of the game.
I dunno. They should have, and I wish I could socket all my pieces with different stats like d2 (4 gems is not enough IMO). My guess about the mystic is that there was either an issue technically that was very borked (that they found out too late to fix before launch), or was too close to the gems we already use.
I expect the mystic to come back in the xpac.
She was mainly an enchanter and let's face it. Everyone would always and only enchant CC, CH, IAS and sockets. It's just a gold sink that adds no metagame. I'm not saying the Blacksmith currently offers something (as Blizz have admitted and are looking into) but I'm sure you can remember how heavy the crafting metagame was before the Legendary revamp. It was all about crafting.
And the Jewelcrafter does his job flawlessly - he creates gems. Currently they're pretty stable.
This is all my opinion of course. If there was something official on this we'd already know it.
She did originally also made scrolls, which got removed. She added charms, which sadly also got removed (here's hoping for the expansion). And finally she made potions (meh?) and "spell runes", which got scraped and reworked into skill runes.
So she just kinda got useless really. Hopefully they invent something more interesting for her later on in the game's life. She already has spots for her in the different cities.
Ha. Bagstone.
I don't think she got useless, I think she is going to be a feature for the xpack when they bring in charms and jewels, i just wish they add sapphires, diamonds and skulls and make them useful because the current gems suck dick. I'm a barbarian derp I use str gems in my gear and a crit damage gem in my weapon. With the paragon leveling system (band aid system) its pointless to use an amethyst gem in you're helm unless you're level 100, the emerald in the helm is pointless because of the gold find cap, the topaz in the helm is pointless because of the magic find cap and not to mention pointless to use in weapons, the ruby is pointless to use in the weapon also. Did I miss any?
On your first point - it's not that she wouldn't have had "fun" affixes, it's that no one would sadly pick them, because of the being "efficient" philosophy that's been going on in gaming the last few years. You can't just have fun - you have to be at the top. But I do agree that some of the things might've been very fun, like the ones you mentioned. If it's any consolidation - all of the affixes she was able to enchant got thrown into the current poll of possible affixes on rares and legendaries right now (bar the unique ones for legendaries I suppose). So there weren't that many fun ones in the plans to begin with. Hopefully that changes in time.
Me - I'd sure like to see "Cannot be frozen", but then the Frozen affix would be a waste on Elite mobs.
And on your second point - of course. I'm sure the vast, vast majority of the player base would like more customization, be it cosmetic or effective. I think though, that we'd first need a bigger variety of important affixes added in that would be used as such on gems.
If you read the first few lines at the beginning of this post you'll hopefully see, the way I do, that "efficiency" is just getting in the way of fun. And that's in almost any game. Currently we have CC, CH, IAS, AR and sockets as "mandatory" affixes. That's not bad design (imo), but it's super hard to balance. Adding more good affixes would really destroy the somewhat good balance we have right now when you include them to the aforementioned ones and the scales would need to be re-balanced again. I'm sure we'll see some good ones being added in the future but before that ideas need to be thrown around between designers and then testing needs to commence on them. Otherwise people would then just say "Damn it, now I have to look for a weapon that has ALL of these - CH, IAS, Socket and the new X, Y and Z affixes." All in the name of efficiency.
But then with efficiency come bigger drop rates because of faster farming... and it's just a long, long topic. So I'll leave it here for now and see what other people pick off my post.
Ha. Bagstone.
With regards to this image the problems are not simply itemization. its more to do with the way itemization interacts with, skills and attributes. So just working on items (more different affixes) will not be sufficient, the weapon dps dependence and primary stat dependence are what causes many of the issues with itemization. So realistically for the problems with items to be solved it would require an admission from the design team that some of the key decisions they have made are flawed that being the complete gear and weapon dps dependence.
Second, the problem with efficiency currently is that it is one dimensional. The only way to make a class more efficient is to increase its dps and damage output over time which centralises and thus hinders build diversity.
Efficiency is one dimensional because the only problem which players have to solve is how to minimise run time with as much dps as possible. for example as i stated earlier there is no damage type problem to be solved, the kind of damage you are dealing makes no difference. thus rather than having people who specialise in dealing fire damage and ice damage or physical damage or a combination thereof. players simply seek to maximise damage in general.
When there is a damage type problem to be solved(as there was in D2 because of immunities) people specialise in one type of damage or another and gain a certain kind of efficiency or proficiency and then are rewarded by being more or less successful depending on what kind of monster they are fighting. In D3 the kind of specialisation is identical no matter what class you are playing everyone specialises towards maximising damage output. This is a strong reason for the lack of build diversity.
what i want to know is: WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF HAVING WEAPONS AND SKILLS THAT DO DIFFERENT KINDS OF DAMAGE WHEN IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO THE GAME-PLAY!!??
seriously i dont get it, maybe it made the game easier to tune, but so far as i am concerned the decision sucks, and its has not helped make the game more fun in any clear way.
Thus the three most fundamental changes i would like to see from D3
1.Make damage type have efficacy.(this esp)
2. diversify drop rates and types across areas. (eg. make so certain items only drop in certain acts/certain monsters)
3. Reduce the the dependence on gear, primary stat, and weapon dps.
No, what my thought process was that +1X might still have slightly higher value than +1Y, so CH for example might always be the SLIGHTLY better stat for classes, but everyone would just say "just go with CH, it has the best value". That's what's difficult to balance. The other choice would've been to have all mentioned stats on items, which of course would be ridiculous.
And on the launch part, it wasn't a cop out. An ARPG is not the most popular genre of games, even if it's Diablo. Not to mention it's single platform. Did I like the problems at launch? Of course not. Could they have been foreseen and fixed beforehand? Of course. Did Blizzard want to insure themselves by overstocking hardware? I guess not. It wasn't fun for anyone, player and developer alike.
Beyond that, about the "quality of the finished product". Beta was super small and like everyone I think this was a big mistake. The end result was many bugs that couldn't have been foreseen or have been, but without a proper time window to be fixed. Enter iterative development.
Or do you mean it feature wise? I don't have a particular comment for that. I played all classes to 60, geared up 2 of them, finished Inferno on one, and the first few patches started at about that point. For some players this could've been too much time. Me personally - I was fine.
Oh and the RMAH part? I honestly can't say I care. People that use it mostly like it. The people that don't mostly hate it. Was the game going to be better without it? Would 3rd party trading be super relevant? I dunno.
Ha. Bagstone.
Hey bro I know about everything you're talking about, but ignorance/lazy think of people (including my trolling on Jay's resign - that some people didn't understand that was a troll comment) is to point fingers to who's on focus (Jay), it's not something that only happens with D3, every place is like that. Look at WOW, everyone says pvp sucks etc, and blames Greg Street, but guess who is in charge of pvp team? Tom Chilton.
Example: If your football team sucks, you're gonna blame the coach right? No one cares why your team is losing but why they aren't winning. But hey, the administrators of your team is not paying the football players, and the coach is always on focus giving press conference to it's fans, so you blame it.
What I'm trying to say is, people blame who is in focus, incorrectly, I can see that, but that how things works, and I'm going to say this again: I appreciate overneathe info about who is in charge of in diablo 3 development to try to mitigate this type of situation.
About aspect of the drop, everything falls on the shoulder of itemization, everything is so undimensional and tied to the primary stats that makes 1 affix to make a rare thrash. I don't want easy farm, I want a piece of gear make me think if it's worth change my build instead of just min max my stats (the case of D3). Just see the image, it's not that difficult to understand.
Now everyone prays for a legendary to drop because it have 50% or more of it's affixes acurrate and less chance to be garbage, Sagathiest explains this well. Also point a fact in other to solve it is not complain.
First: Blizzard said that crafting is supposed to help people to get that piece of gear that you don't have and help progression through acts and levels (nightmare/hell/inferno). Thing is, we have GAH an RMAH that sells pretty decent items with pathetic gold cost for that purpose (progression through acts and levels), so it's a fail design and EVERYONE knows that. Do you think nothing have to be done? it's ok to just leave this way? it's an issue and this Topic is about discussion about the format of the game, if you just put random thoughts of "people complain again" does not help.
It doesn't matter how many hours we spent on the game. Aren't this a "diablofans" forum? We want to HELP this game to get better and better, some just like to troll everytime and says everything sucks.
Is that what you really think? what about jewelcraft? EVERYONE just socket your primary stats or vit if you wish more hp. it's a gold sink that adds no metagame too. See the flaw? why itemization is bad? at least an enchanter would add a flavor to that rare you droped that the only thing that missed on it was a IAS, and you could make it "perfect".
explained above what stable is.
At least, overneathe, is something that you wish to farm, even if it was potion that increases MF/GF, etc, is an incentive to farm faster, more efficient, I don't know.
I want things to change. Things shouldn't be left the way they are. No question about it :-)
Couldn't agree more. However, this is a fan forum, not the official forums. Devs don't read here. And bitching about some people, creating conspiracy theories (other thread), and complaining about the way things are right now, especially without saying what could be changed to make things better, are not helping anyone. This is what I'm annoyed with. If people need stress relief, go kill some monsters ;-)
Otherwise, I'm in total agreement to most of your statements.