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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.

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.

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.

I played single player at first due to a lame internet connection.

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.

We got ourselves a potentially "postal" problem here with D3 becoming a gore fest.

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!

Didn't take long for the idiots to come on and complain about the D3 (concept) art not being "real" or gothic enough.

Boring. Heard enough already.

We've one to two years to enjoy and celebrate D3 being built. Let's just do that huh?

A 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.

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.

What concerns me is the radical changes mooted:

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.

With 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.

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.

Days to go until Blizzcon. Not all, but some will be revealed!