DiabloFans

Quote from Irrational

The reason everyone played Diablo [...]

It's great that you know EVERYONE'S motivation for playing the game.

Well, I guess we just disagree here. Take Torchlight for example to see why mods, cheats, character editors, and savegames - all available in both TL 1 and TL 2 - are not simply "good stuff" (there is a good side to them, but also a bad thing about them).

Let's look at the problem of D3 and the people complaining about it. Besides our two frustrated non-AH players (make and indimix), all the D3 hate posts or more civilized constructive criticism I've heard comes from players who have played for many hundreds of hours, explored almost every aspect of the game (including the AH and its economy, which is the subject of this thread/discussion). It seems to be consensus that D3 is an okay-ish game for casual gamers, capturing in the beginning, but lacking long-term motivation and proper endgame.

Now what about TL? Most reviews I've read, all people I've talked to who played it, and also to some extent my personal experience was that in the beginning the game is extremely fun and offers a lot of rewards. But upgrading gear is never an endless process, otherwise you would be at some million DPS at some point; so there needs to be a limit. Once you're getting closer to that limit, upgrades are harder to find, and just like in D3 you might end up playing a couple of hundreds of hours without finding anything that is a huge upgrade and gives you that awesome feeling of "yeah, I definitely improved my character a lot with this item". This was similar, if not the same in D2 offline play. And it was the reason why said character editors have 50m+ downloads: at some point you don't wait for the endgame, you take the shortcut and cheat. What does that mean? It's fun for a while, blasting through everything, but it soon becomes pointless, because you realize there are no (legal) upgrades. Even finding the BiS items won't mean anything to you, because you already have them, thanks to your character editor. Diablo is mainly about loot, and if you use cheats, savegames, char editors, you take away the core essence of the game.

Quote from m4st0d0n

Quote from Zero(pS)

In D2, duping and character editors were abundant. Sometimes I understand what Jay Wilson meant about fighting people's memories. Try playing D2 again, no help from anything, and let me know how many hours it takes to get the runes for an Enigma (I'm pretty sure it's somewhere around 1k). That's how you supposedly "stay away from the economy". People remember D2 differently because it was a much easier game, and because they could have anything with dupes.

And I think that Jay Wilson, and whole Blizzard as a matter of fact, is in grave mistake if they think they know in full detail how people played Diablo 2, because they don't know a bit about people playing offline or a pirated version. That is the pitfall of data-driven game development. Data simply did not exist for the majority of players, as they were not playing connected to battle.net. Diablo 2 was played worldwide, it was played on lan, and it was played on unofficial bnets. All those Diablo 2 players simply did not exist for Blizzard, and that's okay, because they never payed for the game. But Blizzard failed to realize that all those people will want to play Diablo 3 too, and their experience of Diablo 2 differs greatly from those played on legit bnet.

TL;DR: When you, or Jay Wilson, or anyone at Blizzard say you're fighting people's memories you are actually trying to force your reality on other people's very different realities.

Your post would be correct, if you were talking about a company like EA that doesn't care about people.

When Jay Wilson talked about "memories of people", this does not translate to "look at D2 ladder data". They actually go out and do user interviews, studies, talk to people. The Blizzard job site has a lot of HCI positions with these requirements every now and then. Also, if you actually read the interview Zero was talking about, it has nothing to do with game data but it's just stuff you realize if you interview gamers or at least listen to their forum posts. So please don't assume D3 was developed around the D2 ladder mode; if this was the case, D3 would be a competitive esports game. The exact opposite is the case.

And I can just +1 Zero's comment: there may have been a lot of dupes in ladder mode, but the stuff I saw on bigger LAN parties and in forums online was way beyond any dupes. Mods, cheats, character editors, savegames - stuff that makes dupes look like a joke. If you talk about online players enforce their reality on someone else, please don't do the same. I played both by the way, but never used trading. The main reason I switched to online play (and ladder) was because of the low level runewords. In 12 years of D2 I never found a real high rune, btw. So much for the people complaining about really good items/good rolls in D3 are too rare...

What's all that nitpicking and "is this even possible" about. Jealous much?

It took Alkaizer 2 weeks to get to 100 first, and now there's someone who has done that 5 times in about 20 weeks.

Most of us won't do this, I'm not even close of getting my first char to 100. But could people please stop accusing someone of illegal activity without having the slightest proof about it? And no, just looking at his character data will not yield a valid proof. Heck, if someone plays extremely effectively it will look exactly the same as if he's a bot, and therefore the stats will be exactly the same, too.

Congratulations for having an insane amount of tenacity and pulling this off.