Wheres your problem? Don't trade if you don't want to. The items wouldn't become worse just because of being tradeable.
Making items non-tradeable when upgraded will help keep the economy fresh. As it is right now its pretty hard to find anything worth selling.
That is not the point. The game a multiplayer game, you suppose to interact with others. Making item untradable remove 1/2 of it. The other half is coop, which they removed long time ago. So, they finally created a single player DRM product.
Thanks for your post, seems like you put a lot of thought into that. However, you still overlooked a few things:
1) Diablo 3 is not a subscription-based game. You cannot expect weekly updates. The reason why PoE gets weekly updates are because it's in beta, there's no money involved, and they don't have a million players that just play and leave for good if a patch in one week breaks the game.
I just had a feeling someone was going to take that sentense out of context. I never stated that Diablo 3 was a sub based game, I mearly stated that that sub based games are affected even greater by it. And yes, we can expect and we should very well expect weekly updates if they are relevant, like bug fixes and completed features. This is a problem that companies have done well to confused the playerbase about, and thats how frequent content updates can be.
Just because something doesnt have a monthly monetary fee, doesnt mean its value is any less; and if anything most monthly fees dont reward players with better value for their game, its very much an up and down curve depending on what part of a very long development cycle the company is at. This is why having frequent updates makes that monthly value reasonable.
The other problem is that companies dont feel required to further update a game if they are not recieving a possible profit from it, ala monthly fees, dlc, in game transactions, etc. This still doesnt devalue the need for frequent updates, it just means that companies have refused to support their game honorably after the initial release. How many companies shovel out a bad or unfinished game and then just quietly disapear, usually with a "we cannot afford to further develop the game" ? A metric ton. How many games can honestly say they are "complete" at release? Almost none of them. There are also games, like Diablo 3, that have stated that they will continue to develop the game for the years to come. So there is no clause that says "We do not have to be professional about our game support, you are not giving us money" . And yet they are recieving continued monetary support, just like a free to play game though via the RMAH.
Also, PoE hasnt been in beta for months and it has a ton of players. Also, LoL has a much higher player base than Diablo 3, and it has an almost annoyingly frequent amount of updates. The amount of games that actually do frequently update their game is not some small number, and not one thats religated to only niche genre or money.
2) Upon reading your post it becomes pretty obvious that you have no idea how difficult programming is. There is no such thing as "easy change" for anything in a game. If you change one line of code, such as the proc rate of a wizard's spell, all of the sudden their might be some phase beast champion affix that will 1-shot players in rare occasions. Don't believe that? Ask people who played WoW vanilla, they can tell you...
Thats a rather funny and ironic statement to make, considering you saying that shows that you do not have an idea in how programming works, or that your "expertise" in the field is fed solely from what game developers have told you in PR talks and what "a friend of a friend" have said. I in fact know very well how programming "works" . I do not claim to be the be all and end all of all things software, but I very well know the very basic rule that every computer science student or enthusiest learns when they start on the path for software development; you're code is only as good as you make it to be.
Just because blizzard made a lot of mistakes, and a lot of companies, in their coding process, who the hire, how they treat their workers, etc. does not mean that the "physics" of coding is some sort of unrulely dragon that you cannot fathom to saddle, that only god himself has the knowhow to write beautiful code. Changing 1 line of code does not break another line of code, unless you improperly wrote all the code. Giving a sword +5 to str accidently does not create 100 black dragons to spawn in a noob friendly zone, unless something went horribly horribly wrong in designing the game. Now, you can argue things like: causing memory leaks, runtime errors, eronious movement / controls , etc. , those are valid issues that come up with improper code and/or bad design. Having your armor turn blue when you pick up a rock does not qualify as "just how it works when you code".
Bad programmers make bad code, bad teachers make bad programmers, and bad bosses make bad workers. Code, only does what you tell it to do.
3) Since everything you change can affect anything else in the game, you need to do QA testing before you release it. For most of us it's not necessary because we don't care about the problems, but there are some players who really rely on QA testing. For example: hardcore players - if the phase beast in aforementioned example 1-shots a HC character, hundreds of hours of work and careful gearing go to waste, just because someone skipped QA. Or people who are top-geared and have characters worth the equivalent of thousands of dollars - regardless if they found the items, got the money via AH flipping, or credit card: it's just not right to make all their equipment worthless because you didn't want to test stat changes and its effects on the AH. Or casual players who are so annoyed of a new bug after a patch that they quit - forever.
Again, propper coding negates the need for heavy Q & A . Do we live in a world where everyone writes beautiful code? A lot of people do, but if someone who doesnt messes something up, of course things will break. Do I think having a testing phase is important? I sure do. I never stated it wasnt important, I only stated that that Blizzard's Q&A is laughable, and they still release errors that have been pointed out to them for weeks, and break things in the game that have no relation at all to what they were working on. Again, this is not something that "just happens" as a result from programming, its a result from poor workmanship. Q&A, as well as frequency of errors, can be improved by doing the job correctly the first time around, or at the very least focused more heavily on doing a propper job.
Im sure there are employees at blizzard that do their best, and some that dont realize that they are making mistakes or making unnessisary bloat to their game. Its still the job of blizzard and the employees to put forth an effort to correct and improve the quality of work, as well as comprehend preventative skills to keep things like this from becoming a hinderance.
Last but not least, this sentence here struck me: "This is like companies that delay releases of games because they keep working on new features to the game every week, which ends up with a game that has no focus and a lot of mediocre "inspiring" content, and dead wallets with pushy publishers." You can't possibly talking about Blizzard here. Blizzard is the one and only video game developer in the world that can tell their publishers to postpone a release as long as they want (happened for every game), reset a development (SC2, D3) or cancel a game (SC: Ghost, WC: Adventures, D3: MMORPG).
I don't believe you understand the statement you quoted, or the context of where you quoted it from. Blizzard "postponing a release as long as they want" , ' reset a development" and "cancel a game" are exaclty the issues I was talking about. Blizzard postpones releases of things "to create the best quality content" sure, but thats not even half of the real reason.
They postpone because they cant get a grip on what it is they are trying to create, they try too many different iterations of the same thing, the coding / development becomes a much bigger job than the workers can accomplish in the given time, someone changes thier focus part of the way through because of a sudden development, etc. etc. Preaching quality is a very admirable thing, but blizzard has been far from "quality" work for years now.
They have also admited several times (as shields against people getting angry about features not being released) , that they spend a lot of time reworking the same thing over and over, even to the detriment of the feature itself. They also spend a great deal of time trying to create features that either dont pan out as well as they had hoped (or us hoped) for , or dont even make it to finish. These are design resources that countless companies waste and get lost "in the heat of" when developing games, especially before a release of one. These are not examples of "making the game better" , they are examples of "going overboard in design" and creating development bloat.
Is it great and good for companies to want to experiment? Sure is. But you dont sacrafice the overarching progress of the game "to feel something out." . Too many companies, with kickstarter for example, create these huge stretch goals to "improve the game with better funding" , and bottom out shortly after wtih all that extra funding. They dont know how to properly manage their resources, and know when to "stop" or "let it go" , if even temporarly until a better time to work on it.
Titan is a great example at blizzard tryin to create something without a propper focus and desgin, and wasting a lot of manhours and resources (leaving the rest of their franchises with less manpower) , only to scrap it and start over with a smaller team. Does this happen? Yea, it happens, and its unfortunate. But blizzard has done this too frequently (ghost, diablo 3, content updates for wow, etc.) , that its no longer a "Hey, cut them a break, stuff happens." and its entirely "Hey, get your development teams and higher ups heads out of the sand."
They've shown full well that their last several years, and their comitments of "getting better" , have fallen flat. They need to actually change up and create a new system for development, or they will continue to waste time, effort, money; and delay, reset, and cancel games/content for the forseeable future.
Its a choice, not a condition, to stay the course when you are doing poorly at something.
Changing 1 line of code does not break another line of code, unless you improperly wrote all the code.
This is just not how coding works. In a fully-fledged game like Diablo 3 that has millions of lines of code, unforeseen things just happen. You talk about programming as if there were two kinds of programmers: those who make mistakes, and those who make no mistakes. This is just wrong. Bug-free software is a myth.
If you believe otherwise, read up a bit, for example follow some of the links and arguments in this StackOverflow discussion, familiarize with the history of TeX (which was believed to be bug-free since 1982, but Donald Knuth is still sending out checks to people - a friend of mine got his just a couple of years ago), or just spend some time around real programmers. No programmer will ever say he has never made a programming mistake (and if you know someone who says that he's either lying or not really a programmer).
They postpone because they cant get a grip on what it is they are trying to create, they try too many different iterations of the same thing, the coding / development becomes a much bigger job than the workers can accomplish in the given time, someone changes thier focus part of the way through because of a sudden development, etc.
They have also admited several times (as shields against people getting angry about features not being released) , that they spend a lot of time reworking the same thing over and over, even to the detriment of the feature itself. They also spend a great deal of time trying to create features that either dont pan out as well as they had hoped (or us hoped) for , or dont even make it to finish. These are design resources that countless companies waste and get lost "in the heat of" when developing games, especially before a release of one. These are not examples of "making the game better" , they are examples of "going overboard in design" and creating development bloat.
Is it great and good for companies to want to experiment? Sure is. But you dont sacrafice the overarching progress of the game "to feel something out." . Too many companies, with kickstarter for example, create these huge stretch goals to "improve the game with better funding" , and bottom out shortly after wtih all that extra funding. They dont know how to properly manage their resources, and know when to "stop" or "let it go" , if even temporarly until a better time to work on it.
Titan is a great example at blizzard tryin to create something without a propper focus and desgin, and wasting a lot of manhours and resources (leaving the rest of their franchises with less manpower) , only to scrap it and start over with a smaller team.
Okay, this is my last comment to what you said here - initially didn't want to respond but there are just some things that cannot be left uncommented. It's fairly obvious that we disagree in how software development works, and I'm not gonna say that what you said is wrong (though I believe it is) - I just want to clarify some things for other readers.
1) You cannot compare some small Kickstarter project with a Blizzard game. Period.
2) You have no idea about the Titan development (if you had, you wouldn't be bitching about Blizzard so much). Please refrain from making statements like "blizzard tryin to create something without a propper focus and desgin, and wasting a lot of manhours and resources".
3) "Iterating too often" is almost impossible. In fact, everything you say about Blizzard's style of game development is what distinguishes them from all the other companies that create software with mediocre quality. If you think that Blizzard's software is bad in terms of quality, then please move along and keep thinking that way, but in the world of software engineers and game developers you won't find many people to agree with you.
"The 2 billion gold Auction House cap might get raised, but it's a fairly complex thing to do technically"
this is the last thing we need at this point...
also, itemization not untill next year just made me decide to just walk away from the game till then. not worth it since that patch on the horizon was the only thing keeping me interested enough to keep logging in.
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That is not the point. The game a multiplayer game, you suppose to interact with others. Making item untradable remove 1/2 of it. The other half is coop, which they removed long time ago. So, they finally created a single player DRM product.
I just had a feeling someone was going to take that sentense out of context. I never stated that Diablo 3 was a sub based game, I mearly stated that that sub based games are affected even greater by it. And yes, we can expect and we should very well expect weekly updates if they are relevant, like bug fixes and completed features. This is a problem that companies have done well to confused the playerbase about, and thats how frequent content updates can be.
Just because something doesnt have a monthly monetary fee, doesnt mean its value is any less; and if anything most monthly fees dont reward players with better value for their game, its very much an up and down curve depending on what part of a very long development cycle the company is at. This is why having frequent updates makes that monthly value reasonable.
The other problem is that companies dont feel required to further update a game if they are not recieving a possible profit from it, ala monthly fees, dlc, in game transactions, etc. This still doesnt devalue the need for frequent updates, it just means that companies have refused to support their game honorably after the initial release. How many companies shovel out a bad or unfinished game and then just quietly disapear, usually with a "we cannot afford to further develop the game" ? A metric ton. How many games can honestly say they are "complete" at release? Almost none of them. There are also games, like Diablo 3, that have stated that they will continue to develop the game for the years to come. So there is no clause that says "We do not have to be professional about our game support, you are not giving us money" . And yet they are recieving continued monetary support, just like a free to play game though via the RMAH.
Also, PoE hasnt been in beta for months and it has a ton of players. Also, LoL has a much higher player base than Diablo 3, and it has an almost annoyingly frequent amount of updates. The amount of games that actually do frequently update their game is not some small number, and not one thats religated to only niche genre or money.
Thats a rather funny and ironic statement to make, considering you saying that shows that you do not have an idea in how programming works, or that your "expertise" in the field is fed solely from what game developers have told you in PR talks and what "a friend of a friend" have said. I in fact know very well how programming "works" . I do not claim to be the be all and end all of all things software, but I very well know the very basic rule that every computer science student or enthusiest learns when they start on the path for software development; you're code is only as good as you make it to be.
Just because blizzard made a lot of mistakes, and a lot of companies, in their coding process, who the hire, how they treat their workers, etc. does not mean that the "physics" of coding is some sort of unrulely dragon that you cannot fathom to saddle, that only god himself has the knowhow to write beautiful code. Changing 1 line of code does not break another line of code, unless you improperly wrote all the code. Giving a sword +5 to str accidently does not create 100 black dragons to spawn in a noob friendly zone, unless something went horribly horribly wrong in designing the game. Now, you can argue things like: causing memory leaks, runtime errors, eronious movement / controls , etc. , those are valid issues that come up with improper code and/or bad design. Having your armor turn blue when you pick up a rock does not qualify as "just how it works when you code".
Bad programmers make bad code, bad teachers make bad programmers, and bad bosses make bad workers. Code, only does what you tell it to do.
Again, propper coding negates the need for heavy Q & A . Do we live in a world where everyone writes beautiful code? A lot of people do, but if someone who doesnt messes something up, of course things will break. Do I think having a testing phase is important? I sure do. I never stated it wasnt important, I only stated that that Blizzard's Q&A is laughable, and they still release errors that have been pointed out to them for weeks, and break things in the game that have no relation at all to what they were working on. Again, this is not something that "just happens" as a result from programming, its a result from poor workmanship. Q&A, as well as frequency of errors, can be improved by doing the job correctly the first time around, or at the very least focused more heavily on doing a propper job.
Im sure there are employees at blizzard that do their best, and some that dont realize that they are making mistakes or making unnessisary bloat to their game. Its still the job of blizzard and the employees to put forth an effort to correct and improve the quality of work, as well as comprehend preventative skills to keep things like this from becoming a hinderance.
I don't believe you understand the statement you quoted, or the context of where you quoted it from. Blizzard "postponing a release as long as they want" , ' reset a development" and "cancel a game" are exaclty the issues I was talking about. Blizzard postpones releases of things "to create the best quality content" sure, but thats not even half of the real reason.
They postpone because they cant get a grip on what it is they are trying to create, they try too many different iterations of the same thing, the coding / development becomes a much bigger job than the workers can accomplish in the given time, someone changes thier focus part of the way through because of a sudden development, etc. etc. Preaching quality is a very admirable thing, but blizzard has been far from "quality" work for years now.
They have also admited several times (as shields against people getting angry about features not being released) , that they spend a lot of time reworking the same thing over and over, even to the detriment of the feature itself. They also spend a great deal of time trying to create features that either dont pan out as well as they had hoped (or us hoped) for , or dont even make it to finish. These are design resources that countless companies waste and get lost "in the heat of" when developing games, especially before a release of one. These are not examples of "making the game better" , they are examples of "going overboard in design" and creating development bloat.
Is it great and good for companies to want to experiment? Sure is. But you dont sacrafice the overarching progress of the game "to feel something out." . Too many companies, with kickstarter for example, create these huge stretch goals to "improve the game with better funding" , and bottom out shortly after wtih all that extra funding. They dont know how to properly manage their resources, and know when to "stop" or "let it go" , if even temporarly until a better time to work on it.
Titan is a great example at blizzard tryin to create something without a propper focus and desgin, and wasting a lot of manhours and resources (leaving the rest of their franchises with less manpower) , only to scrap it and start over with a smaller team. Does this happen? Yea, it happens, and its unfortunate. But blizzard has done this too frequently (ghost, diablo 3, content updates for wow, etc.) , that its no longer a "Hey, cut them a break, stuff happens." and its entirely "Hey, get your development teams and higher ups heads out of the sand."
They've shown full well that their last several years, and their comitments of "getting better" , have fallen flat. They need to actually change up and create a new system for development, or they will continue to waste time, effort, money; and delay, reset, and cancel games/content for the forseeable future.
Its a choice, not a condition, to stay the course when you are doing poorly at something.
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ModeratorThis is just not how coding works. In a fully-fledged game like Diablo 3 that has millions of lines of code, unforeseen things just happen. You talk about programming as if there were two kinds of programmers: those who make mistakes, and those who make no mistakes. This is just wrong. Bug-free software is a myth.
If you believe otherwise, read up a bit, for example follow some of the links and arguments in this StackOverflow discussion, familiarize with the history of TeX (which was believed to be bug-free since 1982, but Donald Knuth is still sending out checks to people - a friend of mine got his just a couple of years ago), or just spend some time around real programmers. No programmer will ever say he has never made a programming mistake (and if you know someone who says that he's either lying or not really a programmer).
Okay, this is my last comment to what you said here - initially didn't want to respond but there are just some things that cannot be left uncommented. It's fairly obvious that we disagree in how software development works, and I'm not gonna say that what you said is wrong (though I believe it is) - I just want to clarify some things for other readers.
1) You cannot compare some small Kickstarter project with a Blizzard game. Period.
2) You have no idea about the Titan development (if you had, you wouldn't be bitching about Blizzard so much). Please refrain from making statements like "blizzard tryin to create something without a propper focus and desgin, and wasting a lot of manhours and resources".
3) "Iterating too often" is almost impossible. In fact, everything you say about Blizzard's style of game development is what distinguishes them from all the other companies that create software with mediocre quality. If you think that Blizzard's software is bad in terms of quality, then please move along and keep thinking that way, but in the world of software engineers and game developers you won't find many people to agree with you.
this is the last thing we need at this point...
also, itemization not untill next year just made me decide to just walk away from the game till then. not worth it since that patch on the horizon was the only thing keeping me interested enough to keep logging in.