To shed some light:
Right now PoE is using an Agile method of development versus a spiral method that blizzard uses.
Agile typically means little or no testing and its kicked out the door. More like a shoot and ask questions later.
Spiral is a iterative type of development going through multiple design, implementation and testing phases, the end result is a polished piece of software or in our case "patch", consider the PTR as a form of testing later on in this spiral until patch release.
Spiral is often used with a large amount of resource (big dev teams) and agile works better with fewer, as less documentation is produced, because communication between departments is not required or you don't have larger employee turn over.
Thanks for the insight. Nice info and it's good to see some other people don't see all things as black and white, wrong or right, but instead as 2 sides of a coin that both have advantages/disadvantages.
I understand the points made by kripp and alk but can clearly see that the complexity in D3 does not satiate them and they find comfort in PoE. I see a lot of debate in this yet, only 2 people in this thread have hinted at the question that we should be thinking about and that is: Can't both games co-exist?
^ wise words... I guess the biggest frustration from many old-school Diablo fans is that D1/D2 had such complexity, and D3 got changed into something very very very different. That's understandable.
Nice to see some would be interested in reading what I wrote I'll probably create a thread later today and see how much attention and feedback I get from it. If there's enough interest I might post on the official forums/reddit.
Nice to see some would be interested in reading what I wrote I'll probably create a thread later today and see how much attention and feedback I get from it. If there's enough interest I might post on the official forums/reddit.
Out of curiosity, but do any of the D3 community team drop by here at all? At fansites I've worked at/run (all non-Blizz) the community team would drop by, more so when the game was in active development/early support stages. Going back a while to when the PR guy was the community team the devs dropped by quite often, even got an exclusive once when a dev was a bit too free with answering questions and let something slip.
The "essay of insanity" thread is up, btw. You guys have no idea what you're signing in for (heads-up: it's not your average 20 lines college [meant to say high-school] essay I'm a goddamn lawyer for crying out loud)
Out of curiosity, but do any of the D3 community team drop by here at all? At fansites I've worked at/run (all non-Blizz) the community team would drop by, more so when the game was in active development/early support stages. Going back a while to when the PR guy was the community team the devs dropped by quite often, even got an exclusive once when a dev was a bit too free with answering questions and let something slip.
As far as I know, every now and then they take some time to read our forums looking for interesting feedback to relay to the developers.
I don't think they have member accounts or make posts/exclusive-interviews here, though.
Agile typically means little or no testing and its kicked out the door. More like a shoot and ask questions later.
Spiral is a iterative type of development going through multiple design, implementation and testing phases, the end result is a polished piece of software or in our case "patch", consider the PTR as a form of testing later on in this spiral until patch release.
I understand the points made by kripp and alk but can clearly see that the complexity in D3 does not satiate them and they find comfort in PoE. I see a lot of debate in this yet, only 2 people in this thread have hinted at the question that we should be thinking about and that is: Can't both games co-exist? PoE fills this complexity drive that we crave, which is awesome. Some of us want to just bash stuff when we come home from work and diablo 3 really fits that, these are just 2 reasons to play either game, I however can't speak outside of personal experience.
GGG has alpha servers up with NDA's. It is basically like a short PTR I'm guessing and Blizz's hotfix system seems a lot like GGG's patch system.
100% agree both games can and should exist at the same time. Nothing bothers me more than the Highlander effect. Well, RIP in Peace and all the other gamer/troll lingo comes close
^ wise words... I guess the biggest frustration from many old-school Diablo fans is that D1/D2 had such complexity, and D3 got changed into something very very very different. That's understandable.
Nice to see some would be interested in reading what I wrote I'll probably create a thread later today and see how much attention and feedback I get from it. If there's enough interest I might post on the official forums/reddit.
I think D3 was a result of a new team that thought they could do it better but had very little experience with the genre. They stream lined in the way WoW did for MMO's. They burned the history book and made their own game and it fell flat on its face. It isn't a secret which is why every patch is game changing to some degree. They are learning and fixing. 1.0.8 is the social / mob density patch and will be out in time for the 1 year anniversary of D3's release. If 1.0.8 was the release a year ago do you think opinions would have been different?
I think D3 was a result of a new team that thought they could do it better but had very little experience with the genre. They stream lined in the way WoW did for MMO's. They burned the history book and made their own game and it fell flat on its face.
I honestly honestly don't think they "have very little experience with the genre". I believe it's precisely an insane amount of experience with the genre that made them believe they could come up with gameplay systems that would revolutionize the genre (imho what they thought) and why they weren't afraid of changing the old systems that much.
Some of their core concepts seem to have been borrowed from how some MOBA's work nowadays. And as I've said before, we will only know whether they succeded or not in 10+ years.
If 1.0.8 was the release a year ago do you think opinions would have been different?
Different as in "more positive"? No, I think they wouldn't. I believe a lot of the negative feedback from the community has different reasons.
Some of it is related to how much of the game systems they changed. Potions, stats, item affixes, legendaries, active/passive skills, movement, classes. And then some of it has to do with how they legitimized a gold driven economy (AH) and buying items with real money (RMAH).
As far as I know, every now and then they take some time to read our forums looking for interesting feedback to relay to the developers.
I don't think they have member accounts or make posts/exclusive-interviews here, though.
Ah, ok. The regular posting by devs was back from the time when developers didn't routinely have their own forums so all community interaction was via 3rd party fansites (one of the devs would even do an 'ask me anything' on our forums occasionally, those were the days), these days I find they mainly stick to their own forums and as you say read but don't post on fansites.
I guess the biggest frustration from many old-school Diablo fans is that D1/D2 had such complexity, and D3 got changed into something very very very different. That's understandable.
D1? The game with no skills, predefined max stats, mostly blue items with few BIS choices, lacking special boss powers... had complexity over D3?
Props to D1 for being a cool game, but as many people you have scolded seem to forget, it was radically different from its immediate successor.
GGG has alpha servers up with NDA's. It is basically like a short PTR I'm guessing and Blizz's hotfix system seems a lot like GGG's patch system.
100% agree both games can and should exist at the same time. Nothing bothers me more than the Highlander effect. Well, RIP in Peace and all the other gamer/troll lingo comes close
@point #1
Yes. And if you look through the PoE open beta patch history (it's available on their forums!) you can clearly see that MOST of the contents of MOST patches are bug fixes and tweaks. I do not know the difference between their client-server setup from an architectural standpoint, but they seem to be dealing with a lot of issues via mid-week patches that either never make it live in D3 or are handled by a reboot or server maintenance. To me the two different patching paradigms are really a moot point - both have pros and cons and I'm very content to leave it at that.
@point #2
Fully agreed. I still contend that one of the reasons that people have such fond memories for D2 is simply due to the fact that it had no competition to really make us think about the things that we didn't like about it. If you wanted to play an ARPG in the early 2000s you were playing D2, that's it. Now, I'm not knocking D2 because it really was a great game, all I'm saying is that we weren't so acutely aware of the bad things in the game because there just wasn't that level of competition. When you throw a game like TL2 or PoE into the fray alongside of D3 it begs for compare/contrast discussions and the flaws come to light quickly. It's completely natural, but it's also indicative of the fact that the times have changed and that the 2012 vs 1999 comparisons simply can't be done in a vacuum that ignores the changing landscape.
I think D3 was a result of a new team that thought they could do it better but had very little experience with the genre. They stream lined in the way WoW did for MMO's. They burned the history book and made their own game and it fell flat on its face. It isn't a secret which is why every patch is game changing to some degree. They are learning and fixing. 1.0.8 is the social / mob density patch and will be out in time for the 1 year anniversary of D3's release. If 1.0.8 was the release a year ago do you think opinions would have been different?
I actually take a different perspective on this one. Bear with me here a second...
Initial Inferno design was to cater to the hardcore (the Kripparians, the Kongors, the Athenes, the guys from Method, etc.). This was a major error because those guys just spent a massive amount of time on content, even found a few exploits, and consumed it amazingly fast anyway. Designing content around them, unless it's something like a PoE race, is almost pointless. It will always get consumed way faster than it can be developed. It will always be exploited.
So Blizzard spent what amounted to 4-6 months undoing those things and rebalancing Inferno to something that was more logical and then introducing MP for the leet people. Imagine if they never made that SINGULAR design decision and the game shipped with Inferno balanced as it was in 1.0.5 or 1.0.6. Imagine if every other patch came roughly 6 months faster because of this. We'd have our itemization patch already, along with whatever is next in line.
That one singular decision set the game's development lifecycle back an amazing amount of time. It was such a poor decision. Every other decision has been able to be rectified or tweaked or improved upon pretty easily. The Inferno catastrophe took MONTHS to completely fix and get into a situation that was workable for the duration of the game. If they hadn't gone down the "cater to hardcore players" route this game would be in an amazingly different situation today simply from shifting the timeframe up by several months.
One single decision that has set us back months and months without question. Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but those are the mistakes that we can't afford to have. Monster Density? Eh. It takes maybe 2 months from initial conception to deployment of patch to have a working solution (while they're also working on other things). Fixing Inferno so it's not a playland for Kripparian? Takes triple that time and doesn't really allow room to work on other projects because it requires a series of patches and not one singular patch.
IDK, to me it's the only mistake they've made that has cost them so much time that it truly effected the quality of the game.
My personal feeling is that while the first Inferno nerf was probably needed, the nerf with the introduction on MP less so, I was progressing slowly but surely at that point, and had just kill Azmodan (didn't have time to try and do Act 4) self found when the second nerf hit, and that second nerf kind of hit my will to play for quite a while.
Something I have noticed cropping up is how long it takes something to come out in D3 vs PoE.
To shed some light:
Right now PoE is using an Agile method of development versus a spiral method that blizzard uses.
(Snips for length...)
I'm glad you put the time into putting these points onto the forum. A lot of people do not understand nor take the time to try and understand why the patching process for Blizzard is what it is. I still think they took too long to announce their removal of the PvP system they were working on, but most other changes I understand why we don't see an immediate fix for what people might call "obvious and easy to fix issues".
As for the games coexisting, I'm honestly surprised it's even an issue. A lot of people like to bash one or the other, but the truth is they can easily exist because of different gameplay needs of various gamers. It's an odd mentality that gamers tend to focus on one game and want to forsake all others in order to feel good about choosing that game. I, for one, like many games and prior to my one month hiatus of Diablo clones here I was playing D3, PoE, and Torchlight 2. Each game has a reason to love it, each game has their own frustrations.
What blizzard wants to do is create a game that will appeal to as many people as possible. This means it will NOT appeal to those hardcore gamers who want the hardest content and complexity. It's a point I tried to make a few times in the past, I don't need Diablo 3 to be my hardcore game of choice. It doesn't have to be hard, there are other games out there for that. This is a good thing because it creates a competition space and drives all the ARPG makers to do better.
All this converastion makes me realize I need to put out another podcast... I've been dreadfully behind thanks to family and illness.. *grumble* I'm a horrible content creator.
One single decision that has set us back months and months without question. Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but those are the mistakes that we can't afford to have. Monster Density? Eh. It takes maybe 2 months from initial conception to deployment of patch to have a working solution (while they're also working on other things). Fixing Inferno so it's not a playland for Kripparian? Takes triple that time and doesn't really allow room to work on other projects because it requires a series of patches and not one singular patch.
Clearly Inferno wasn't tuned for the new player at the start I don't agree that it was why the game didn't get fixed immediately though. Tuning monster variables is not time consuming. The hardest part of that tuning was adding enrage timers since the code probably didn't exist. MP1-10 is just messing with that monster database in percentages that should have taken no time to code. Paragon levels just add to stats / max out variables. Easy addition as well. Depending on their map generating code (it probably is terrible based off lack of random maps) the mob density code may have taken a while. All of this is guess work though. Maybe they hardcoded every single monster and use spaghetti code for the IM system.
Clearly Inferno wasn't tuned for the new player at the start I don't agree that it was why the game didn't get fixed immediately though. Tuning monster variables is not time consuming. The hardest part of that tuning was adding enrage timers since the code probably didn't exist. MP1-10 is just messing with that monster database in percentages that should have taken no time to code. Paragon levels just add to stats / max out variables. Easy addition as well. Depending on their map generating code (it probably is terrible based off lack of random maps) the mob density code may have taken a while. All of this is guess work though. Maybe they hardcoded every single monster and use spaghetti code for the IM system.
My point was not that adding Monster Power was a difficult fix. My point was that the collective bevy of changes to Inferno took months of time. There were three (?) patches that directly addressed Inferno difficulty. Think of where the game would be if they did the sensible thing and didn't cater to the eSports crowd and just released Inferno as something we could all play with various degrees of success. Think of the time they wasted un-doing the stupidity that resulted in Inferno being dedicated to the top .0001%.
Like I said, if they hadn't have made that particular mistake we'd be at the patch AFTER itemization by now. That's how much real-world time it took to fix Inferno to something that was playable, yet challenging, for all.
Clearly Inferno wasn't tuned for the new player at the start I don't agree that it was why the game didn't get fixed immediately though. Tuning monster variables is not time consuming. The hardest part of that tuning was adding enrage timers since the code probably didn't exist. MP1-10 is just messing with that monster database in percentages that should have taken no time to code. Paragon levels just add to stats / max out variables. Easy addition as well. Depending on their map generating code (it probably is terrible based off lack of random maps) the mob density code may have taken a while. All of this is guess work though. Maybe they hardcoded every single monster and use spaghetti code for the IM system.
Inferno wasn't tuned for anyone at the start. The biggest blunder of this game was allowing beta testers to only test up to Leoric because they didn't want to give away the Saturday morning cartoon level story line to anyone. So many of the pitfalls of the game could have been recognized had they just allowed beta testing.
As for the rest, I don't know why people speculate about development times for different aspects of the game. I really do feel bad for the real developers who have to put up with all the arm chair developers exactly how long it should have taken for them to deliver certain things.
In this industry you are damned if you do, damned if you don't with how whiny and demanding the player bases are. And God forbid if you were to release it a bug! They'll get crucified for that too.
I can tell you this, I work on highly dynamic websites for a living, which in comparison pale to the complexities of these games. You'd be surprised how many times someone has come to me with what you'd think would be the simplest of requests only to have me tell them that it just isn't that simple. That the initial specs didn't call for me to consider certain things and to input their requests it would require a minor recoding/redesign of the database to create the most seemless way possible for us to code going forward and for the UI/UX portion of the update. So now that simple request that they figured would only take an hour, coupled with all of the other things going on at work is now on a time table of a week or longer for a delivery date.
The development life cycle isn't that easy of a process to work through, and it just irks me to her people speculating on how systems should have been built to incorporate unforeseen twists and turns in how companies plan for their projects to evolve. These people have lives and families too, they can't just code 24/7/365 so we can have unlimited bug free content as out disposal.
The development life cycle isn't that easy of a process to work through, and it just irks me to her people speculating on how systems should have been built to incorporate unforeseen twists and turns in how companies plan for their projects to evolve. These people have lives and families too, they can't just code 24/7/365 so we can have unlimited bug free content as out disposal.
What I love is "just put some more people on the problem!" As if you're hammering nails into a floor.
The development life cycle isn't that easy of a process to work through, and it just irks me to her people speculating on how systems should have been built to incorporate unforeseen twists and turns in how companies plan for their projects to evolve. These people have lives and families too, they can't just code 24/7/365 so we can have unlimited bug free content as out disposal.
What I love is "just put some more people on the problem!" As if you're hammering nails into a floor.
The other logical fallacy that gets used is "you guys have enough money that you should be able to fix it faster"
Guys let's not forget how Inferno itself was quite a big experiment. There was nothing like it in D1/D2, and definitely nothing like it in any ARPG before.
That's probably why they had such difficulty in tuning the drops and enemy power. Monster Power adresses that really wel imo. You can clearly see how people farmed to get to an insane gear-lvl (2k+ hours?) to be able to do MP10 consistently.
And I'm happy average Joes like me can settle around MP 4-7
All this converastion makes me realize I need to put out another podcast... I've been dreadfully behind thanks to family and illness.. *grumble* I'm a horrible content creator.
I can tell you this, I work on highly dynamic websites for a living, which in comparison pale to the complexities of these games. You'd be surprised how many times someone has come to me with what you'd think would be the simplest of requests only to have me tell them that it just isn't that simple. That the initial specs didn't call for me to consider certain things and to input their requests it would require a minor recoding/redesign of the database to create the most seemless way possible for us to code going forward and for the UI/UX portion of the update. So now that simple request that they figured would only take an hour, coupled with all of the other things going on at work is now on a time table of a week or longer for a delivery date.
Hey now you made me feel sorry for saying Blizzard was too slow on their patching process..
Short-ish write up after strenously reading these 18 pages...
Let's start by saying I've played both games. For me personally, PoE is much, much more attractive to the point where reading this thread made me think "how can they even believe this?"
I'll try to touch a few points that seeped through the 18 pages.
It isn't a contest. It's not an e-peen competition. I don't believe I'll "sway" anyone here into disliking D3 and liking PoE. The point is simply to relate my experience with both games and expose (again) the simple fact that most PoE players including myself WANTED to like and play D3. That's what compounds the disapointment. It's missing important game systems. I'll explain below.
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I've never particularly liked Kripparrian and I wouldn't consider him influencing me. I was watching his videos mostly for his knowledge of mechanics. Then he started playing PoE and like many I thought "hmm, that game's graphics look outdated." It seemed interesting but I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it.
Over the course of weeks / months he made videos showing the different "advanced" mechanics of the game, which usually revolve around customization. Whether's it's customizing flasks, supporting primary skills with support gems, modifying equipment.. over time curiosity got me interested.
When it came out for open beta I figured I'd try it out. At this point I had stopped playing D3 for several months.
-----
Why did I stop playing D3 in the first place? Because there's no progression whatsoever (or even the feel of progression). I have a level 60 of all 5 classes.
Everytime I logged on in the months I played (including when they added paragon levels), there was only 1 thing to do: mindlessly grind through act 1-2-3 inferno getting paragon levels.
Everyone knows the odds of finding gear upgrades is/was extremely small. You don't look at whites, you don't look at blues, you don't look at 99% of rares except a select few 63 item types. As for uniques.. they're rarely well rolled and even when they are, they don't enable different builds. It's more of the same.
People have talked about the itemization issues at length so there's no point in saying much more about it.
The only customization in the game is whether I'm going to farm with WW barbarian or monk, or another class. In which case you just go to town and swap skills. No effort needed. Some people argue that you have to re-itemize for different builds which is true, but once again, it's more of the same.
Whenever I play a game, I need to have OBJECTIVES to keep me interested. Objectives range from beating the game, trying different play styles, trying some end-game aspects of the game (ie maps in PoE) etc. A major objective is also to improve as a player.
When I started playing D3, the objective was to beat inferno. Then they nerfed inferno into oblivion and made it easy. They stated the change in philosophy was because Diablo's flavor is "item hunt".
2nd objective was to level every class to 60 to test out their gameplay and the different builds.
Once those 2 goals were achieved, what is left to do in this game?
Some people enjoy just going through the acts and killing stuff. It was mentionned several times here.
That's fine, but it's the basis to every game of this type. You can't really argue that it's a part of game design or a game system included to bring replayability. It's like saying you enjoy killing people in a FPS game. You might enjoy the mechanics in one game over the other but that's part of the engine, not really game design.
In that regards, I don't blame anyone for enjoying the graphics or combat in D3 as opposed to PoE. As mentioned above, I thought PoE looked underwhelming before I played it.
----------
Since I started playing PoE, I've only played on HC knowing that I could die. In fact, since I was completely clueless about the game's mechanics, I somewhat expected it.
I've built 7 characters so far that got between level 50 and 75 and every single playthrough has been entirely different.
Different builds. Different items. Different support gems. I guess the flasks are the same.
It's true that on HC, you tend to focus on HP nodes. And at the moment, ranged characters have an advantage since melee builds take too much damage in close range. The devs are aware of this and are actively seeking to mitigate it.
People have mentioned that you can level a character and be gimped out from not picking "correct" builds. That's all part of the learning process.
My first character sucked compared to my 2nd character. Which was worse than my 3rd. Which was worse than my 4th.
Another myth is that you need an Excel spread sheet to succeed in PoE, which is silly. All you need is common sense. If you build glass cannon in HC, you're going to die. If you don't take any resistances, you'll die. If you face tank Vaal merciless and don't dodge lasers / rocks, you'll die. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or an Excel spreadsheet, it's common sense.
With each character iteration, you learn how to level faster, how to be stronger, how to equip better. That's especially true for 1 week races, which are by far my favorite aspect of PoE so far.
A common perception of races is that you can't compete because of time constraints. It's true to some extent in longer races, but how is that true in shorter ones? If you actually spent time practicing, you would improve. As for longer races, I felt great enjoyment "beating" Nugiyen in the first week race. He's a streamer that plays a ton but to be competitive, you have to take some risks. He died on day 5 of the 1 week race. Meanwhile my slower, cautious build carried me to a ~140ish position (which for me was good since I still felt clueless).
How do you "improve" at D3?
You farm act 3 faster?
--------
I mentioned in the intro that I feel D3 is missing game systems and by that I'm specifically thinking of systems to keep you interested in the game.
Some have suggested that D3 is a good $60 game for what it is (and Kripparrian himself mentioned that several times) and you shouldn't expect content all the time.
There's a difference between getting new content all the time and creating a game with systems that support themselves. I'll try to give a few examples.
Someone mentioned Guild Wars 2. In fact, if you played / followed this game at all, you will notice that a lot of its most ardent followers, people who had been waiting for it for years, have all stopped playing. There's no end game and the devlopment team always said there wouldn't be. The games is beautiful in terms of graphics and gameplay (sounds like D3?) but when you reach max level, the vast majority of the playerbase felt like there was nothing to do.
I loved the game on a technical level. I feel like it's the MMORPG with the best graphics and controls I've ever played (sounds like D3?) but it's missing core game systems to make you play long term.
They believed that the PvP system would keep most people hooked but exactly like D3, it was repetitive as hell. Once you did it for a while, it became more of the same. The objectives which I've been talking about through this whole message was to "win" the weekly PvP map. But then it was reset the week later and you just had to re-do it. It didn't feel like there was a long term objective.
Now let's move on to a totally different game: World of Tanks. Let's ignore the fact that there are pay to win elements since that's irrelevant to both D3 and PoE. People criticize WoT because there's a lot of grinding required to go through the content. People love instant gratification and hate working toward goals nowadays.
I played WoT very no life mode for a good 3 months and had a blast. Yet I didn't get to try out 50% of the content (in this case the 120+ different tanks).
I didn't want to use WoT as a model because a lot of people find that too grindy. My point is simply that they have a game system (unlocking different tanks) making it so it has long term replayability. Adding new tanks, new maps, you can play for years without feeling like it's "more of the same".
Path of Exile has a lot of those game systems, and D3 doesn't (yet). Whether it's the race system, the map system, the talent tree, the itemization / crafting system, you never run out of stuff to do.
People love to talk about Kripparrian's freeze pulse marauder "using 1 skill and never losing health". It's like saying Tennis is a crap sport because Roger Federer won for years, or golf sucks because Tiger Woods won for years. You're taking the most extremely example of end game build and generalizing it to the entire game. Not only does his "1 skill" freeze pulse is linked to FIVE OTHER SUPPORT GEMS, he constantly makes new builds. Some of them aren't as strong. Yet due to the game systems, you can pick any skill in the game and create a build around it. It won't be the most efficient but it's doable. The difference is you can't just go to town, change a few skills and voila, not have to work on it.
When I'm playing PoE, there isn't a moment where I don't look at drops whether they're white, blue, rare or uniques. And orbs, of course. Even after playing for 3 months, there is still a high level of excitement when finding a good orb or a 5 link chest (never got a 6 link yet).
Because there's no AH, the economy hasn't crumbled yet to the point where you bypass 99% of items. With the advent of AH-like websites, this is starting to happen sadly. There's been a few cases where I didn't pick up rares knowing that they would have no value. Regardless, because of the game system of races, there will ALWAYS be a part of the game with a fresh economy.
I'm very much looking forward to the 1 week races in the next seasons, especially when they add in new modifiers. 1 week cutthroat race? Sounds fun. 1 week BLAMT race? Sounds crazy challenging and fun.
Those are all objectives that make PoE sustainable long term. They can add new maps, new map mods, new uniques, new races.. those are all things that WILL make it so a lot of us will still play the game years from now. We will surely take breaks, but the infrastructure is there to make it so it's not always more of the same.
Unless they add SIGNIFICANT systems like these in the D3 expansion (which everyone hopes for, since we all have D3), the game will always be a pale comparison of what it should have been.
PS: PoE with all graphics maxed is much better than I ever imagined from watching screenshots / videos.
PPS: No, PoE isn't perfect. On the other hand, I feel like it has the game systems to keep us hooked for years to come with different playstyles and experiences. D3 remains more of the same "grind grind grind" and that will only last for so long.
PPPS(?): They agree maps drop too infrequently. They'll make it more sustenable in the future but in any case, you would have to be extremely hypocritical to stop playing because of it. I bought 21 maps for a handful of orbs just this week.
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^ wise words... I guess the biggest frustration from many old-school Diablo fans is that D1/D2 had such complexity, and D3 got changed into something very very very different. That's understandable.
Nice to see some would be interested in reading what I wrote I'll probably create a thread later today and see how much attention and feedback I get from it. If there's enough interest I might post on the official forums/reddit.
Out of curiosity, but do any of the D3 community team drop by here at all? At fansites I've worked at/run (all non-Blizz) the community team would drop by, more so when the game was in active development/early support stages. Going back a while to when the PR guy was the community team the devs dropped by quite often, even got an exclusive once when a dev was a bit too free with answering questions and let something slip.
college[meant to say high-school] essay I'm a goddamn lawyer for crying out loud)As far as I know, every now and then they take some time to read our forums looking for interesting feedback to relay to the developers.
I don't think they have member accounts or make posts/exclusive-interviews here, though.
It also highlights some very succesful PoE systems (potions, currency, gear crafting to overcome bad RNG).
GGG has alpha servers up with NDA's. It is basically like a short PTR I'm guessing and Blizz's hotfix system seems a lot like GGG's patch system.
100% agree both games can and should exist at the same time. Nothing bothers me more than the Highlander effect. Well, RIP in Peace and all the other gamer/troll lingo comes close
I think D3 was a result of a new team that thought they could do it better but had very little experience with the genre. They stream lined in the way WoW did for MMO's. They burned the history book and made their own game and it fell flat on its face. It isn't a secret which is why every patch is game changing to some degree. They are learning and fixing. 1.0.8 is the social / mob density patch and will be out in time for the 1 year anniversary of D3's release. If 1.0.8 was the release a year ago do you think opinions would have been different?
Path of Exile - CleavieWonder (Elemental Cleave)
Some of their core concepts seem to have been borrowed from how some MOBA's work nowadays. And as I've said before, we will only know whether they succeded or not in 10+ years.
Different as in "more positive"? No, I think they wouldn't. I believe a lot of the negative feedback from the community has different reasons.
Some of it is related to how much of the game systems they changed. Potions, stats, item affixes, legendaries, active/passive skills, movement, classes. And then some of it has to do with how they legitimized a gold driven economy (AH) and buying items with real money (RMAH).
Ah, ok. The regular posting by devs was back from the time when developers didn't routinely have their own forums so all community interaction was via 3rd party fansites (one of the devs would even do an 'ask me anything' on our forums occasionally, those were the days), these days I find they mainly stick to their own forums and as you say read but don't post on fansites.
/off-topic
D1? The game with no skills, predefined max stats, mostly blue items with few BIS choices, lacking special boss powers... had complexity over D3?
Props to D1 for being a cool game, but as many people you have scolded seem to forget, it was radically different from its immediate successor.
@point #1
Yes. And if you look through the PoE open beta patch history (it's available on their forums!) you can clearly see that MOST of the contents of MOST patches are bug fixes and tweaks. I do not know the difference between their client-server setup from an architectural standpoint, but they seem to be dealing with a lot of issues via mid-week patches that either never make it live in D3 or are handled by a reboot or server maintenance. To me the two different patching paradigms are really a moot point - both have pros and cons and I'm very content to leave it at that.
@point #2
Fully agreed. I still contend that one of the reasons that people have such fond memories for D2 is simply due to the fact that it had no competition to really make us think about the things that we didn't like about it. If you wanted to play an ARPG in the early 2000s you were playing D2, that's it. Now, I'm not knocking D2 because it really was a great game, all I'm saying is that we weren't so acutely aware of the bad things in the game because there just wasn't that level of competition. When you throw a game like TL2 or PoE into the fray alongside of D3 it begs for compare/contrast discussions and the flaws come to light quickly. It's completely natural, but it's also indicative of the fact that the times have changed and that the 2012 vs 1999 comparisons simply can't be done in a vacuum that ignores the changing landscape.
I actually take a different perspective on this one. Bear with me here a second...
Initial Inferno design was to cater to the hardcore (the Kripparians, the Kongors, the Athenes, the guys from Method, etc.). This was a major error because those guys just spent a massive amount of time on content, even found a few exploits, and consumed it amazingly fast anyway. Designing content around them, unless it's something like a PoE race, is almost pointless. It will always get consumed way faster than it can be developed. It will always be exploited.
So Blizzard spent what amounted to 4-6 months undoing those things and rebalancing Inferno to something that was more logical and then introducing MP for the leet people. Imagine if they never made that SINGULAR design decision and the game shipped with Inferno balanced as it was in 1.0.5 or 1.0.6. Imagine if every other patch came roughly 6 months faster because of this. We'd have our itemization patch already, along with whatever is next in line.
That one singular decision set the game's development lifecycle back an amazing amount of time. It was such a poor decision. Every other decision has been able to be rectified or tweaked or improved upon pretty easily. The Inferno catastrophe took MONTHS to completely fix and get into a situation that was workable for the duration of the game. If they hadn't gone down the "cater to hardcore players" route this game would be in an amazingly different situation today simply from shifting the timeframe up by several months.
One single decision that has set us back months and months without question. Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but those are the mistakes that we can't afford to have. Monster Density? Eh. It takes maybe 2 months from initial conception to deployment of patch to have a working solution (while they're also working on other things). Fixing Inferno so it's not a playland for Kripparian? Takes triple that time and doesn't really allow room to work on other projects because it requires a series of patches and not one singular patch.
IDK, to me it's the only mistake they've made that has cost them so much time that it truly effected the quality of the game.
Was it easy, no, was it fun, hell yes!
Sure, and that's what some people don't seem to remember when they talk so fondly of Blizzard North and David Brevik.
I'm glad you put the time into putting these points onto the forum. A lot of people do not understand nor take the time to try and understand why the patching process for Blizzard is what it is. I still think they took too long to announce their removal of the PvP system they were working on, but most other changes I understand why we don't see an immediate fix for what people might call "obvious and easy to fix issues".
As for the games coexisting, I'm honestly surprised it's even an issue. A lot of people like to bash one or the other, but the truth is they can easily exist because of different gameplay needs of various gamers. It's an odd mentality that gamers tend to focus on one game and want to forsake all others in order to feel good about choosing that game. I, for one, like many games and prior to my one month hiatus of Diablo clones here I was playing D3, PoE, and Torchlight 2. Each game has a reason to love it, each game has their own frustrations.
What blizzard wants to do is create a game that will appeal to as many people as possible. This means it will NOT appeal to those hardcore gamers who want the hardest content and complexity. It's a point I tried to make a few times in the past, I don't need Diablo 3 to be my hardcore game of choice. It doesn't have to be hard, there are other games out there for that. This is a good thing because it creates a competition space and drives all the ARPG makers to do better.
All this converastion makes me realize I need to put out another podcast... I've been dreadfully behind thanks to family and illness.. *grumble* I'm a horrible content creator.
I'm glad something good is finally coming out of this thread!
Ha. Bagstone.
Clearly Inferno wasn't tuned for the new player at the start I don't agree that it was why the game didn't get fixed immediately though. Tuning monster variables is not time consuming. The hardest part of that tuning was adding enrage timers since the code probably didn't exist. MP1-10 is just messing with that monster database in percentages that should have taken no time to code. Paragon levels just add to stats / max out variables. Easy addition as well. Depending on their map generating code (it probably is terrible based off lack of random maps) the mob density code may have taken a while. All of this is guess work though. Maybe they hardcoded every single monster and use spaghetti code for the IM system.
Path of Exile - CleavieWonder (Elemental Cleave)
My point was not that adding Monster Power was a difficult fix. My point was that the collective bevy of changes to Inferno took months of time. There were three (?) patches that directly addressed Inferno difficulty. Think of where the game would be if they did the sensible thing and didn't cater to the eSports crowd and just released Inferno as something we could all play with various degrees of success. Think of the time they wasted un-doing the stupidity that resulted in Inferno being dedicated to the top .0001%.
Like I said, if they hadn't have made that particular mistake we'd be at the patch AFTER itemization by now. That's how much real-world time it took to fix Inferno to something that was playable, yet challenging, for all.
Inferno wasn't tuned for anyone at the start. The biggest blunder of this game was allowing beta testers to only test up to Leoric because they didn't want to give away the Saturday morning cartoon level story line to anyone. So many of the pitfalls of the game could have been recognized had they just allowed beta testing.
As for the rest, I don't know why people speculate about development times for different aspects of the game. I really do feel bad for the real developers who have to put up with all the arm chair developers exactly how long it should have taken for them to deliver certain things.
In this industry you are damned if you do, damned if you don't with how whiny and demanding the player bases are. And God forbid if you were to release it a bug! They'll get crucified for that too.
I can tell you this, I work on highly dynamic websites for a living, which in comparison pale to the complexities of these games. You'd be surprised how many times someone has come to me with what you'd think would be the simplest of requests only to have me tell them that it just isn't that simple. That the initial specs didn't call for me to consider certain things and to input their requests it would require a minor recoding/redesign of the database to create the most seemless way possible for us to code going forward and for the UI/UX portion of the update. So now that simple request that they figured would only take an hour, coupled with all of the other things going on at work is now on a time table of a week or longer for a delivery date.
The development life cycle isn't that easy of a process to work through, and it just irks me to her people speculating on how systems should have been built to incorporate unforeseen twists and turns in how companies plan for their projects to evolve. These people have lives and families too, they can't just code 24/7/365 so we can have unlimited bug free content as out disposal.
What I love is "just put some more people on the problem!" As if you're hammering nails into a floor.
The other logical fallacy that gets used is "you guys have enough money that you should be able to fix it faster"
That's probably why they had such difficulty in tuning the drops and enemy power. Monster Power adresses that really wel imo. You can clearly see how people farmed to get to an insane gear-lvl (2k+ hours?) to be able to do MP10 consistently.
And I'm happy average Joes like me can settle around MP 4-7
You're not
+1
Hey now you made me feel sorry for saying Blizzard was too slow on their patching process..
Let's start by saying I've played both games. For me personally, PoE is much, much more attractive to the point where reading this thread made me think "how can they even believe this?"
I'll try to touch a few points that seeped through the 18 pages.
It isn't a contest. It's not an e-peen competition. I don't believe I'll "sway" anyone here into disliking D3 and liking PoE. The point is simply to relate my experience with both games and expose (again) the simple fact that most PoE players including myself WANTED to like and play D3. That's what compounds the disapointment. It's missing important game systems. I'll explain below.
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I've never particularly liked Kripparrian and I wouldn't consider him influencing me. I was watching his videos mostly for his knowledge of mechanics. Then he started playing PoE and like many I thought "hmm, that game's graphics look outdated." It seemed interesting but I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it.
Over the course of weeks / months he made videos showing the different "advanced" mechanics of the game, which usually revolve around customization. Whether's it's customizing flasks, supporting primary skills with support gems, modifying equipment.. over time curiosity got me interested.
When it came out for open beta I figured I'd try it out. At this point I had stopped playing D3 for several months.
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Why did I stop playing D3 in the first place? Because there's no progression whatsoever (or even the feel of progression). I have a level 60 of all 5 classes.
Everytime I logged on in the months I played (including when they added paragon levels), there was only 1 thing to do: mindlessly grind through act 1-2-3 inferno getting paragon levels.
Everyone knows the odds of finding gear upgrades is/was extremely small. You don't look at whites, you don't look at blues, you don't look at 99% of rares except a select few 63 item types. As for uniques.. they're rarely well rolled and even when they are, they don't enable different builds. It's more of the same.
People have talked about the itemization issues at length so there's no point in saying much more about it.
The only customization in the game is whether I'm going to farm with WW barbarian or monk, or another class. In which case you just go to town and swap skills. No effort needed. Some people argue that you have to re-itemize for different builds which is true, but once again, it's more of the same.
Whenever I play a game, I need to have OBJECTIVES to keep me interested. Objectives range from beating the game, trying different play styles, trying some end-game aspects of the game (ie maps in PoE) etc. A major objective is also to improve as a player.
When I started playing D3, the objective was to beat inferno. Then they nerfed inferno into oblivion and made it easy. They stated the change in philosophy was because Diablo's flavor is "item hunt".
2nd objective was to level every class to 60 to test out their gameplay and the different builds.
Once those 2 goals were achieved, what is left to do in this game?
Some people enjoy just going through the acts and killing stuff. It was mentionned several times here.
That's fine, but it's the basis to every game of this type. You can't really argue that it's a part of game design or a game system included to bring replayability. It's like saying you enjoy killing people in a FPS game. You might enjoy the mechanics in one game over the other but that's part of the engine, not really game design.
In that regards, I don't blame anyone for enjoying the graphics or combat in D3 as opposed to PoE. As mentioned above, I thought PoE looked underwhelming before I played it.
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Since I started playing PoE, I've only played on HC knowing that I could die. In fact, since I was completely clueless about the game's mechanics, I somewhat expected it.
I've built 7 characters so far that got between level 50 and 75 and every single playthrough has been entirely different.
Different builds. Different items. Different support gems. I guess the flasks are the same.
It's true that on HC, you tend to focus on HP nodes. And at the moment, ranged characters have an advantage since melee builds take too much damage in close range. The devs are aware of this and are actively seeking to mitigate it.
People have mentioned that you can level a character and be gimped out from not picking "correct" builds. That's all part of the learning process.
My first character sucked compared to my 2nd character. Which was worse than my 3rd. Which was worse than my 4th.
Another myth is that you need an Excel spread sheet to succeed in PoE, which is silly. All you need is common sense. If you build glass cannon in HC, you're going to die. If you don't take any resistances, you'll die. If you face tank Vaal merciless and don't dodge lasers / rocks, you'll die. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or an Excel spreadsheet, it's common sense.
With each character iteration, you learn how to level faster, how to be stronger, how to equip better. That's especially true for 1 week races, which are by far my favorite aspect of PoE so far.
A common perception of races is that you can't compete because of time constraints. It's true to some extent in longer races, but how is that true in shorter ones? If you actually spent time practicing, you would improve. As for longer races, I felt great enjoyment "beating" Nugiyen in the first week race. He's a streamer that plays a ton but to be competitive, you have to take some risks. He died on day 5 of the 1 week race. Meanwhile my slower, cautious build carried me to a ~140ish position (which for me was good since I still felt clueless).
How do you "improve" at D3?
You farm act 3 faster?
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I mentioned in the intro that I feel D3 is missing game systems and by that I'm specifically thinking of systems to keep you interested in the game.
Some have suggested that D3 is a good $60 game for what it is (and Kripparrian himself mentioned that several times) and you shouldn't expect content all the time.
There's a difference between getting new content all the time and creating a game with systems that support themselves. I'll try to give a few examples.
Someone mentioned Guild Wars 2. In fact, if you played / followed this game at all, you will notice that a lot of its most ardent followers, people who had been waiting for it for years, have all stopped playing. There's no end game and the devlopment team always said there wouldn't be. The games is beautiful in terms of graphics and gameplay (sounds like D3?) but when you reach max level, the vast majority of the playerbase felt like there was nothing to do.
I loved the game on a technical level. I feel like it's the MMORPG with the best graphics and controls I've ever played (sounds like D3?) but it's missing core game systems to make you play long term.
They believed that the PvP system would keep most people hooked but exactly like D3, it was repetitive as hell. Once you did it for a while, it became more of the same. The objectives which I've been talking about through this whole message was to "win" the weekly PvP map. But then it was reset the week later and you just had to re-do it. It didn't feel like there was a long term objective.
Now let's move on to a totally different game: World of Tanks. Let's ignore the fact that there are pay to win elements since that's irrelevant to both D3 and PoE. People criticize WoT because there's a lot of grinding required to go through the content. People love instant gratification and hate working toward goals nowadays.
I played WoT very no life mode for a good 3 months and had a blast. Yet I didn't get to try out 50% of the content (in this case the 120+ different tanks).
I didn't want to use WoT as a model because a lot of people find that too grindy. My point is simply that they have a game system (unlocking different tanks) making it so it has long term replayability. Adding new tanks, new maps, you can play for years without feeling like it's "more of the same".
Path of Exile has a lot of those game systems, and D3 doesn't (yet). Whether it's the race system, the map system, the talent tree, the itemization / crafting system, you never run out of stuff to do.
People love to talk about Kripparrian's freeze pulse marauder "using 1 skill and never losing health". It's like saying Tennis is a crap sport because Roger Federer won for years, or golf sucks because Tiger Woods won for years. You're taking the most extremely example of end game build and generalizing it to the entire game. Not only does his "1 skill" freeze pulse is linked to FIVE OTHER SUPPORT GEMS, he constantly makes new builds. Some of them aren't as strong. Yet due to the game systems, you can pick any skill in the game and create a build around it. It won't be the most efficient but it's doable. The difference is you can't just go to town, change a few skills and voila, not have to work on it.
When I'm playing PoE, there isn't a moment where I don't look at drops whether they're white, blue, rare or uniques. And orbs, of course. Even after playing for 3 months, there is still a high level of excitement when finding a good orb or a 5 link chest (never got a 6 link yet).
Because there's no AH, the economy hasn't crumbled yet to the point where you bypass 99% of items. With the advent of AH-like websites, this is starting to happen sadly. There's been a few cases where I didn't pick up rares knowing that they would have no value. Regardless, because of the game system of races, there will ALWAYS be a part of the game with a fresh economy.
I'm very much looking forward to the 1 week races in the next seasons, especially when they add in new modifiers. 1 week cutthroat race? Sounds fun. 1 week BLAMT race? Sounds crazy challenging and fun.
Those are all objectives that make PoE sustainable long term. They can add new maps, new map mods, new uniques, new races.. those are all things that WILL make it so a lot of us will still play the game years from now. We will surely take breaks, but the infrastructure is there to make it so it's not always more of the same.
Unless they add SIGNIFICANT systems like these in the D3 expansion (which everyone hopes for, since we all have D3), the game will always be a pale comparison of what it should have been.
PS: PoE with all graphics maxed is much better than I ever imagined from watching screenshots / videos.
PPS: No, PoE isn't perfect. On the other hand, I feel like it has the game systems to keep us hooked for years to come with different playstyles and experiences. D3 remains more of the same "grind grind grind" and that will only last for so long.
PPPS(?): They agree maps drop too infrequently. They'll make it more sustenable in the future but in any case, you would have to be extremely hypocritical to stop playing because of it. I bought 21 maps for a handful of orbs just this week.