I write from the perspective of someone who abandoned battlenet. A most unsatisfying experience. So bad I don't know where to begin....
I'll limit myself to one topic here: trading.
The online system is too open to exploits and dupes.
For trading to be fair you must eradicate dupes.
Given the advances in computing power in the last ten years it should be possible to establish the uniqueness of an item. As a seasoned app systems designer and ER modeller I can see many ways of doing this. Whether it would affect game play and cause server stress I cannot say.
Preventing dupes in the first place is the number one priority for implementing a trading system that is fair at its foundations. No trading mechanism can compensate for dodgy gear.
Secondly, a fool proof means of swapping gear is required. Very easy to do, from my background at least.
Limit trades to swaps/bartering. Many to many, one to many, or one to one item. Seller posts item(s) for trade. This request stays live while the user is logged on. Connection drop or whatever = cancelled sale. At posting time the seller can enter a minimal description of what is sought. Keep it simple and short. Seller does not enter text to describe item(s) being sold. Let battlenet work that out.
Option to be notified in game that someone is wanting to buy. TP to town and enter the trade window. See the offer of the purchaser. Accept or decline. Both parties can see a full icon view of the item.
At this offer stage both sets of items are locked in escrow on battlenet. There can be no dodgy substitution.
If trade accepted by seller: battlenet does the swap. Confirms swap and flags trade as complete in the battlenet trade DB. If problems, backout trade when the user is next logged in, for example. An escrow system is very simple to do.
With these two enhancements: No dupes and guaranteed integrity of the swap then I'll return to battlenet.
At home we run multiple copies of D2. We dupe at home, I'll admit. If I had my time all over again I'd not support that. Duping should also be impossible for home TCP/IP users.
(My IT background says "unique keys" but generating this rapidly across all servers and saving and maintaining these centrally I can't say if it is feasible. Locally no problem as our CD key can seed the keys, etc although a security concern if using our CD key online?)
A third suggestion: When I trade I want to see rare items which are genuinely rare. Let's have some limits and make this gear uber good. Again you'll need a central DB of issued gear, with a guaranteed unique ID. Possible?
A fourth suggestion: Items only. No health/mana/full rejuves (it seems they must be cnsumed at pickup time in D3 - good) and no gold in bartering. Common stuff like that just creates a currency.
I want to HnS and immerse myself in the storyline and quests. Making gold rarer would minimise the possibility of players doing lucrative gold runs as gold hordes with gold as a currency will skew trading.
A fifth suggestion: The old and dodgy "droping an item" trading system. Just make it impossible. If a player wants to trade they MUST use the barter system. In game (in town) or out of game. Trades can be private if you like (i.e. not open to other barterers). If a player drops gear then it stays there until an NPC steals it, as happens now in D2.
This gets back to unique IDs for gear. A monster drops gear specifically for a player then it stays assigned to that player until such time as it is traded fairly.
If I drop gear in game then it can just stay invisible to other players.
Yes, that means I have to mule the gear myself but with the bag system developments I have seen, extra mule characters won't be necessary.
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To Blizzard: I love what I have seen of D3 so far. Bring it on when you're good and ready. We'll be buying three copies.
- Lucion
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Member for 17 years
Last active Fri, Nov, 4 2016 05:10:28
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Aug 12, 2008Lucion posted a message on Diablo MMO Hinted?I think D3 should do nicely for the storyline - there's not much more scope for extending it except to mislead us that the big D has been defeated only to come back yet again. That gets stale.Posted in: News
Anything more? Why not. WIII wasn't the end of that franchise. Perhaps WoD. Rather than prejudge (like the colour campaigners) I'll sit back and see what happens if indeed they go down this path. Intuition says it would suck but, hey, this is Blizzard and they have an excellent track record at getting things right. Let's not forget that!
A D movie would be nice too. Hopefully not rated for kiddie viewing. I want to see the blood spraying out of arteries and I want to see an assassin in her bikini in the Frigid Highlands having a wardrobe malfunction. -
Aug 1, 2008Lucion posted a message on Diablo 3 Multiplayer To Be EncouragedI played single player at first due to a lame internet connection.Posted in: News
I was always frustrated by certain uniques or bosses or quests with the character I was playing - I wished I had a partner to help me out at certain times.
And the sets. I never seemed to get a full set. I wished I could swap online. And research at Planet Diablo told me that there was a hell of a lot of cool gear out there - if only I could find it.
Eventually I went online.
A bunch of tossers.
Everybody has amazing gear. Everybody just flies through a map - like they know exactly where to go already. Hassles not being able to do quests. Dick brains who always grab the cool loot and disappear rather than share. No-one wants to explore together. Indulgent players who pretend to be experts at everything and flame if I do, in their opinion, the wrong curse or spell or if I have the wrong mercenary - like I have to adhere to a formula. And suddenly I was getting killed a lot. And gutless heroes who disappear when we faced Mephisto or Diablo. And basically everyone was totally up themselves with how uber expert they were.
No thanks.
I won't go into personal details but I now have a very active setup at home. Totally LAN based. Nothing fancy. No high end computers. Our 1000T ethernet or 802.11n wireless easily copes. We NEVER get any lag problems.
Sure, there is a delay of about a second sometimes if entering a waypoint and rarely in battle. But we don't play in a lame arse way that a second of precious time is the difference between life or death.
A far bigger problem is getting frozen or stunned from stacked hits and not being able to escape a horde / do anything at all. That's where we come undone. Never from LAN lag.
The new battlenet had better be very good for us to change our ways. -
Jul 29, 2008Lucion posted a message on Diablo 3 Boss Damage StatesWe got ourselves a potentially "postal" problem here with D3 becoming a gore fest.Posted in: News
Limbs flying with severed arteries spraying blood wildly will not happen I would think.
In my country, we have draconian censorship for computer games that goes way beyond that for porn due to an anomaly in our outdated pre-computer era laws. Same in some other countries.
But I do want nice effects when a monster dies and a blood splat will be great. I just hope that there is the ability to hack the game to turn it "on" as it will ship in Australia disabled if it is too nice.
Falling armour or a bloodless limb dropping off the undead - skels don't have blood - would be good (but not great).
A real clincher is a total transformation from a behemoth into a hundred zombies for example or a bloated boss exploding and covering our heroes in slimey poison.
Whatever. Just get it past the censors! -
Jul 27, 2008Lucion posted a message on Official Diablo 3 Website Media UpdateDidn't take long for the idiots to come on and complain about the D3 (concept) art not being "real" or gothic enough.Posted in: News
Boring. Heard enough already.
We've one to two years to enjoy and celebrate D3 being built. Let's just do that huh? -
Jul 24, 2008Lucion posted a message on Diablo III Gameplay Video Q&A part 2 - July 22A strong argument for the static above ground areas is storyline continuity. So long as the bump in richly drawn landscapes and buildings makes it worthwhile I think I'm for it.Posted in: News
To support my opinion, the randomisation of the Rogue Encampment annoys me. If it was interesting, like Kurast then I'd support our home bases being static too. Kurast works for me. Add in some more environmental effects and Kurast like bases would rock in D3.
I'm keen for less important areas like dungeons to be random.
I do hope it will be worthwhile venturing into these dungeons though. ATM I only go forth if I feel the need for levelling up or some more gratuitous h&s. The chest drops are usually pretty ordinary for the non-quest dungeons in D2.
Quote from "Mr.Yoshida" »Please everyone, try to read the the entire post before jumping to conclusions.
*Out door areas will be mostly static, does not mean the whole world will be static and everything in it.
*There was no class specific armor in D2... everyone could wear any type of armor, it just looked different on the characters. It was noted previously by Bashiok that there would still be class specific weapons and such.
1) No one said the whole world would be static. Please read the posts LOL.
2) Wrong. Please read my previous post, just above yours LOL. Barb helms anyone. What were those pelts for? And the shrunken heads - who was supposed to use them? Um, paly shields were for, well, palies? Some of this stuff could be equipped on other classes but you'd be mostly hard up for gear to do so.
3) Class specific weapons announced by Bashiok. Yep, you're right on the money, keep up the good work. -
Jul 24, 2008Lucion posted a message on Diablo III Gameplay Video Q&A part 2 - July 22What concerns me is the radical changes mooted:Posted in: News
1) Venturing above ground will be very static but a richly painted canvas nevertheless. We will not get random areas like the Black Marsh or Cold Plains.
The randomness of the maps in D2 aids replayability. I take the point that quality graphics has won out over random tiles with the same edges in order to allow seamless joining. I am ambivalent here. Bring on the richly drawn maps. But how soon will these same maps begin to be repetitive when replaying?
2) Non-class specific armour. Some modifiers will be more useful for some classes (perhaps e.g. "+10 to mana") and some armour just won't make sense for some classes. So that hasn't changed. But this means we now won't get the Barb helms and the necro shrunken heads and the druid pelts.
Can anyone suggest why this has happened? What is the good of this?
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I want to see heads getting ripped off and my character's arm getting ripped off and me having to limp back to town for repair to one leg and with a gaping hole in my abdomen. With a trail of blood in my wake too and some monster following behind, licking up my entrails....
Glad to hear that the disappearing path the barb had to leap/tele over was just an example of what is possible. Giving everyone teleport would suck. -
Jul 17, 2008Lucion posted a message on Diablo 3 Not An MMOWith two zoomancers with easily 30 revives between them and assorted other minions, a Baal run is an absolute mess even before we start spamming bone spirit and bone wall and bone prison.Posted in: News
Let's keep the awesome effects promised in D3 and be happy with small parties where we can enjoy the SFX and cool PvM interactions.
This is one area that Blizzard hasn't changed in D3 and I'm happy. God I hope we don't get another petition about this too!
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My party games are about 2 or 3 people only. All good buddies / family and yet after all these years we still argue incessantly over gold and item drops, especially full rejuves. Imagine parties of 10 or 20 playing D2 or D3 - we'd spend more time arguing over sharing the green set pieces and so on than actually playing the game.
D2 never was an MMO, thankfully. D3 never will be. Amen. -
Jul 16, 2007Lucion posted a message on Biggest Diablo 3 Information Yet!Days to go until Blizzcon. Not all, but some will be revealed!Posted in: News
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Kenzai is right: Blizzard had a hard enough job balancing (um... nerfed sorceresses anyone? rebuffed necros anyone?) D2 and D3 will probably up the ante with the complexity of the algorithms that I'd opt for a simpler respec system.
Plus, and I agree with Blizzard here, the player must be penalised for respeccing. Free attribute / skill point swaps would see us heading back to town every time we get to a quest monster. Then the interminal arguments on battlenet when trying to put a party together. And PvP would die in the ass as you wouldn't know what you were up against.
But yeah, I'd crap myself laughing at the glass cannon builds some of us would come up with.
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The ability to have our old D2 save folder characters recognised in-game would be cool. Perhaps a roster of heroes, like a remembrance shrine in the town square of tristram. Click on it and we'll see a list of character names, cLvl, honorific ("Slayer" etc), and the key achievement. "Champion Sarmdin, L70, guardian of Lut Gholein". In other words that character reached Act 2 in Hell. Nothing more need be said.
No to import of gear. Otherwise a sea of duped items in D3.
But an algorithm to bestow, for one time only, a nice head start for a new character would be good. If the highest level character had completed normal then +1 attribute point. If nightmare completed then +1 again. Hell +1 again.
A small bonus is better than nothing and doesn't unbalance the game. And the bonus is so small that we wouldn't be bothered importing hacked files with a character that had defeated hell if all we had ever done was almost complete normal.
Another idea is for our fallen hero (it is 20 years after D2 so our hero is probably dead by now from too many fights...) to have bequeathed a special item which we obtain the first time we visit an NPC. The NPC goes and unwraps the parcel, with appropriate dialogue etc. Actually what happens is we get a random item drop.
I would like to see some recognition of our old D2 characters but recognise that unbalancing and hacked items would be a problem.
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Anything more? Why not. WIII wasn't the end of that franchise. Perhaps WoD. Rather than prejudge (like the colour campaigners) I'll sit back and see what happens if indeed they go down this path. Intuition says it would suck but, hey, this is Blizzard and they have an excellent track record at getting things right. Let's not forget that!
A D movie would be nice too. Hopefully not rated for kiddie viewing. I want to see the blood spraying out of arteries and I want to see an assassin in her bikini in the Frigid Highlands having a wardrobe malfunction.
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I don't think Diablo is all about having detail of the economy of our Act base. Tax would skew this. ATM in D2 we accept the superficiality of the local providers of equipment and such. I don't want home base distractions.
But an interesting thought anyway Teofill
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Publishers try to balance things out but when Act V is built upon wave after wave of tough monsters as a lead up to Baal then there's nothing much Blizzard can do, short of removing all the rewards. The rewards should be good for a Baal run because it is a tougher run than other areas.
If people get bored with Baal runs then that's their problem.
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Monster shrines rule in MP but not so good if a noob in SP. Once a little more experienced then these MF/experience opportunities were impossible to pass up. How about some REALLY tough ones being randomly spawned. But don't make them SHRINES again. Perhaps a doorway like opening a prison cell, releasing a trap door, genie bottles which get rubbed to activate and so on.
I forget the name of the item, its gold titled / unique and a ring which gave certain DRUID skills. My non-druids love to wear it - heck for the life of me I've drawn a blank on its name but I use it all the time - today in fact! More items like this please. But this ring requires level 76. Something for the mere mortals in normal. I DON'T mean "5% chance to cast level 1 frost nova when struck". That's garbage. Something unique and really worthwhile.
The sound Charsi makes when at work. When I first played D2 I thought "wow!".
Geglash is a favourite. I have listened to every one of his drunken ramblings and loved them all. I wish I could have rolled him in a lane way and looted his corpse though... Some sort of special elixir as a reward?
Sorry, I'm watching the Olympics and its late night here - the NPC who writes in the air - I love the art and especially the sound FX.
Raiding the camps in the Cold Plains is what I always imagined a monster "camp" should be like.
Defeating the three ancients in MP is always exciting if we're doing it legit and not having an uber hero / uber gear to help us out. We always debate who to attack first and talk about "what if"s and such. And we always get annoyed if one of us dies and then we accuse each other of not helping out and such. This battle is admittedly tightly controlled in an arena. Just three good monsters, the heros and no TPs for health/mana/mercenaries. But I want to see more situations like this but as "challenges" / side quests. I want to really have to think about these battles. Perhaps I have to equip a very certain type of gear and have a specific type of hireling. And then the choice of spells and the order of battle will be like solving a puzzle. No need to pound the keyboard with lightning combinations and super sharp reflexes. Guile will win the day. If I want to mash buttons to win I'll do a regular quest :D.
Andy and level four of the Catacombs can be a problem in SP for a hero who has rushed and has a weak build or is just plain inexperienced. But the strategy of clearing out the two rooms, opening the door and waiting for the monsters there to walk out into your attack, then carefully clearing left and right without going too far in and THEN getting Andy is a strategy we have all had to learn with weak heroes. And when Andy just won't die we can run around the pond/bog in the middle room while we hastily buy time for mana refresh or just to think or whatever.
My point is that strategy could overcome a problem here and I liked it. This contrasts with Duriel where the arena is very cramped and you basically have to pound your keyboard. I hope we still have both types of battle but more subtle ways to victory would be good too. I want to see the same contrast in quest / Act boss battles in D3.
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Hell no. "nobody ever listens" because we just can't wait!
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He argued in a very reasonable way, without ridiculing the colour trolls. Shows that Blizzard do listen and the confidence of his reply shows that a lot of thought has gone into the colour "direction" of D3.
Vote of confidence in Blizzard from me.
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Poison is underpowered and too slow in my opinion but it is fun so I'd have one necro focusing on poison nova with maxed synergies as well as a golem and maxed synergies as points permit. That has all skills points used up well into nightmare.
Another could focus on bone spirit as well as bone spear maxed as much as possible with all synergies also maxed. Also a golem and synergies as points permit. Bone spear is useful when you line yourself up side on to a row of monsters as the spear goes through each monster!
The other should aim for revives of about ten with synergies maxed out. This necessarily means the possibility of lots of skeletons too and this should be maxed as points permit.
Avoid hirelings who do cold damage and go for an Act V barb and in normal use an Act 2 guard until you get to Act 5.
That's what we do although we always mix it up and the builds never follow this "set" course because we like to do our own things and experiment. But necros are lots of fun. Fragile, but fun!
If you're wondering. In a party of necros we only ever have one necro going toe to toe with Baal - dishing out bone spirit like crazy and quaffing full rejuves. The others hang around and handle his nasty summoned thingies and drop full rejuves / super mana / super health etc for the necro who is up close and personal with Baal. The others have the luxury of being able to stand back and safely open their inventories.
One more very important thing: curses. A matter of personal preference. Only one of you needs to do this. Don't pump too many points in here. Also, one of my builds has an iron golem and fire golem maxed. Not a good thing. So what if they die - just use a bit of mana for another. They are only good as tanks. That build was a mistake but, oh well, lots of fun.
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About time we laid down our swords and headed to Atma's tavern for a cool drink and had a constructive look at D3.
Let's not all be sore losers.
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Give it a rest colour troll. Go peddle your colour crap somewhere else and leave the fans alone. Your post was totally off topic. Get it.
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Exactly. Can hardly wait for the colour trolls (we all know who they are :D) to depart for moribund sites supporting D1 so that real fans can get on with having fun. Oh yeah, on the way out take your knickers with you, trolls. They're terribly soiled and stinking up the place.
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I started a similar thread http://www.diablofans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13406 which got bizarrely merged with another thread but both got overtaken by colour trolls.
I am surprised a mod here would even bother to start the same thread again. Just another excuse to allow the trolls to vent.
The good thing is that the debate has descended into really pathetic blobby colouring efforts using MS Paint from Windows 3.1. So folks at Blizzard will be even more inclined to laugh at the lamers.
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D2 was a massive hit so the hype is perfectly justified. It's the "king" of it's genre.
Blizzard will make sure that the game remains hyped and in fact that the hype intensifies as we approach the shipping date.
Precious little has been released so far.
No real data on gear.
No real data on types of loot.
No real data on the Horadric cube (if any...)
No real data on the storyline.
The mystery of Leah.
Other NPCs?
The number of Acts?
Plus a never ending trickle of screen caps / wallpapers.
Perhaps a beta lottery. Perhaps competitions for a fan to name a monster. Fan art competitions.
Blizzard can just keep that promotion juggernaut rolling until it's good and ready to ship.
Don't worry.
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(As the colour controversy dies down the real fans will stay and the goths / trolls will drop out of here. We'll be able to get back to discussing builds / stats / gear. Like it always was!)