I think a strong indicator that D2's itemization was better was the fact that people didn't throw a god damn fit about how bad it sucked.
We could argue in frantic circles all day about the technicals, the why's and if's and but's ........people loved D2 itemization and the only complaints I ever heard about them was that there were too few BiS selections of Uniques/RW's.
As already mentioned, the game was easy and it had no AH economy. These are much bigger factors than item lovers will give credit for.
With ROS infinite paragon system does that mean a ladder system is coming?
I don't know what the OP had in mind, but the whole point of "resetting" the ladder was because levels were not, in fact, infinite. The only new thing infinite levels brings to the table is a "ladder" without resets, which also makes segregation and exclusive items nonsensical, so a different experience from what we saw in D2.
Thanks to the character DB API, someone will put such a leaderboard site together to rank the highest paragon levels, regardless of Blizzard support.
So who actually played LoD when it first came out? They'd likely remember that while, yes, expansion vs non was segregated, you could easily CONVERT your existing toons to expansion. it wasn't till 1.10 ladders that people got this restart nonsense in their head.
If level cap requires purchase though, I'm wondering how the game difficulty is supposed to scale now. Is inferno lvl 70 for everyone? how does mlvl scale between normal a nightmare depending on if you have an act 5 to go to? Will the public game lists be segregated if nothing else? Does the game host determine how mlvl scales? Frankly I'm having a hard time seeing how things won't be segregated unless the 70 cap is free in the patch for all, but that still leaves the scaling problem based on act 5 being present or not.
If any company ever came up with a way to prevent modification of save-files, they wouldn't be wasting all that cash on online servers in the first place. Hell at that point they ought to be able to stop piracy too, which would make all those server farms expensive and redundant. Because companies exist in the real world though, they pay the big bucks to host servers to do these things, because they know that anything on a local computer is hackable.
As long as Jay was in charge, D3 had no intention on being "e-sport." Yes, given prefab gear would be much more balanced then allowing people to bring their own, but then it would just further accentuate which the good classes and builds are. If barb is OP then there would only be barbs, not badly equipped barbs vs. moderately equipped wizards on the lower end of the matchmaking. Gear disparity has the potential to mask the serious class balance issues that would inevitably emerge, so there's big appeal for the team to try and use that fog to cloud class/skill balance issues they outright said they didn't want to address.
Would a balanced TDM be cool? Yeah probably. But so far the Diablo team has said over and over that after they saw the problems with WoW, that they just don't want to commit to serious PvP balancing ever. Unless there's a massive reversal in philosophy with the expansion, any PvP mode is probably going to introduce significant random and/or PvE elements in a more indirect competition to sidestep all the imbalances with player combat.
Wanting to please the majority of your playerbase doesn't have to be just about $$$. Maybe you want people to enjoy themselves for the 20-40 hours they do throw at your title, have some good memories and stories about it. I find it kind of strange attitude actually that one should exclusively design for the minority of your hardcore fans.
Diablo 1/2 had stories and world-class cinematics that were irrelevant past the first 25 hours. D2's nightmare/hell modes had a grand total of 2 months testing before initial release, and it's no coincidence that the skill tree ends pretty close to where the normal content does. This is not an MMO where they stagger actual content to make distant goals, instead they just let grinders grind away on old content, which isn't how you draw the biggest audience to your long-term. Emphasis on the short-term is not something new with D3, and the pace of hardcore-oriented changes we have been getting has been much greater than D2 ever received outside of their expansion.
It is clear that the devs still try to dodge the ladder at the moment because it would basically make the established, now one year old economy completely obsolete.
Blizzard's always said they were opposed to a straight up ladder because unlike PoE, they want to cater to more than the few hundred top players (since they actually have a million some). Some kind of item reset sure, but purely for the sake of a relative handful of spots would, in their minds, be pointless.
So I take it some of you guys upset about lack of options have never played a Blizzard game before.
Anyway, in this specific case, he's right. The majority of players enjoyment is destroyed to more or less of a degree by the AH in Jay's own words. Asking people to self-select into a special restricted mode is not the answer; this is not a niche minority that wants a niche challenge mode (hardcore). Fun with finding item upgrades is core to Diablo, something every player should experience without having to make such a drastic decision on their own.
However they handle it, it will still be very weird for console owners to get a huge patch that completely changes loot right after they start playing instead of having it from the start.
I think this is just people being unreasonably optimistic.
75% of the population is bored after nearly a year of grinding two weeks' worth of content... what a surprise. Clearly never happened with the earlier Diablo games.
There's a reason the series has never gotten MMO level support.
Sony is planning to launch a cloud-based streaming service through Gaikai, a company acquired by Sony in July 2012. The service will emulate and render previous generations of PlayStation games, streaming them to the PS4 and, likely, the Vita, over the internet.[67][68]
a cloud-based streaming service
streaming
There's no emulator that could ever handle running incomplete roms in a reliable way. What get streamed to you is a video feed from their *remote* severs doing the emulation. Expect most of the input lag suckitude that plagued OnLive.
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As already mentioned, the game was easy and it had no AH economy. These are much bigger factors than item lovers will give credit for.
I don't know what the OP had in mind, but the whole point of "resetting" the ladder was because levels were not, in fact, infinite. The only new thing infinite levels brings to the table is a "ladder" without resets, which also makes segregation and exclusive items nonsensical, so a different experience from what we saw in D2.
Thanks to the character DB API, someone will put such a leaderboard site together to rank the highest paragon levels, regardless of Blizzard support.
If level cap requires purchase though, I'm wondering how the game difficulty is supposed to scale now. Is inferno lvl 70 for everyone? how does mlvl scale between normal a nightmare depending on if you have an act 5 to go to? Will the public game lists be segregated if nothing else? Does the game host determine how mlvl scales? Frankly I'm having a hard time seeing how things won't be segregated unless the 70 cap is free in the patch for all, but that still leaves the scaling problem based on act 5 being present or not.
WoW goes underdark?
Also presuming this is Malthiel.
Yes.
As long as Jay was in charge, D3 had no intention on being "e-sport." Yes, given prefab gear would be much more balanced then allowing people to bring their own, but then it would just further accentuate which the good classes and builds are. If barb is OP then there would only be barbs, not badly equipped barbs vs. moderately equipped wizards on the lower end of the matchmaking. Gear disparity has the potential to mask the serious class balance issues that would inevitably emerge, so there's big appeal for the team to try and use that fog to cloud class/skill balance issues they outright said they didn't want to address.
Would a balanced TDM be cool? Yeah probably. But so far the Diablo team has said over and over that after they saw the problems with WoW, that they just don't want to commit to serious PvP balancing ever. Unless there's a massive reversal in philosophy with the expansion, any PvP mode is probably going to introduce significant random and/or PvE elements in a more indirect competition to sidestep all the imbalances with player combat.
Diablo 1/2 had stories and world-class cinematics that were irrelevant past the first 25 hours. D2's nightmare/hell modes had a grand total of 2 months testing before initial release, and it's no coincidence that the skill tree ends pretty close to where the normal content does. This is not an MMO where they stagger actual content to make distant goals, instead they just let grinders grind away on old content, which isn't how you draw the biggest audience to your long-term. Emphasis on the short-term is not something new with D3, and the pace of hardcore-oriented changes we have been getting has been much greater than D2 ever received outside of their expansion.
Blizzard's always said they were opposed to a straight up ladder because unlike PoE, they want to cater to more than the few hundred top players (since they actually have a million some). Some kind of item reset sure, but purely for the sake of a relative handful of spots would, in their minds, be pointless.
So how much are they willing to pay for these?
Anyway, in this specific case, he's right. The majority of players enjoyment is destroyed to more or less of a degree by the AH in Jay's own words. Asking people to self-select into a special restricted mode is not the answer; this is not a niche minority that wants a niche challenge mode (hardcore). Fun with finding item upgrades is core to Diablo, something every player should experience without having to make such a drastic decision on their own.
I think this is just people being unreasonably optimistic.
There's a reason the series has never gotten MMO level support.
There's no emulator that could ever handle running incomplete roms in a reliable way. What get streamed to you is a video feed from their *remote* severs doing the emulation. Expect most of the input lag suckitude that plagued OnLive.