Hrmm...let's look at the obvious here blizzard. What you have on your hands is by far the worst ladder season ever, only one that can compete is the previous ladder.
What makes these 2 the worst ladders ever? Well quite simply 2 things.
The first of which is hacks. Mainly the obvious portion of hacks are all the bots. Spam bots are just annoying, and mf/exp bots remove any incentive to play. If you do bot, you can run your bot 23 hours a day, and for the hour you feel like playing you maybe just do a few duels, pk attempts(on bots, go figure), or trades. Realistically why would you shut your mf bot off just to manually mf? Its more fun to just play solitaire and watch the bot run in a window. I'll admit it, I botted before, so I'm speaking from experience here. The only thing lamer then botting is playing a game where you can't ever get anything you need because 3/4 of the players bot and whatever you have to offer is garbage to them. Prior to botting I'd get excited if a Pul rune dropped. Post botting I set my bot to not even pick anything up lower then an Ist rune. Even if you don't bot, every time you get a sweet deal in a trade, chances are it came from someone who just popped on to check his bot and wanted to clear up some space. You have two choices, bot and be part of a flooded economy, or don't bot and be part of a flooded economy, but either way those who do bot screw the game up for everyone.
Also jumbled into the hacks category is all the lame pvp hacks people use. Auto aim isn't even the bad one. A skilled player has the upper hand over an auto aimer, so let the noobs auto aim away, but can you please get rid of that annoying speed hack people use. Seeing a max ias/fcr/fhr guided arrow bow sorc in every duel game for the last month I played was a contributing factor to not wanting to play anymore. They aren't annoying because they are hard to kill or anythings, its just people blatantly rubbing impossible builds in your face just because they can. There's no way to max your fcr and ias on a bowsorc, anyone who knows the game at all could tell you this.
Now that my rant on hacks is over, on to the second factor that made the last two ladder seasons the worst ever...respecs. Respecs obviously dovetail with the bot problem, and its not too complicated to see how.
Let's say you want an auradin. Prior to respecs you had to have your gear in advance, plan your character in advance, and level in a certain manner. Regardless of the pros and cons of having to do this, the fact is you had to do it manually. You couldn't ever just get to level 70 and say sweet, now I can bot my auradin up to 95+. However, with the respecs, you can do just that. All you have to do is level a hammerdin to level 70, turn on the bot, and 2 weeks later you have a level 95, which can then be respecced into an auradin. Suddenly seeing a level 95 auradin didn't go from "wow thats a sweet character, thats not something I see often" to "wow wonder what bot that guys uses."
Even without botting as a factor, respecs still give me every reason in the world to play the top pvm class for each character. Gone are the days of leveling up a hammerdin, a smite/foh hybrid, a pure smiter, and an auardin all for various purposes. Now I level 4 hammers and respec 3 of them. This makes the game much easier and much more bland, as I'm sure everyone figured this out.
Now my other gripe with respecs. Was it possible to mess up a character before by misclicking and wasting a few stat points or a wrong skill? Yup. Was it more then likely at some point you'd have to remake characters because you got annis/torches/better gear and wanted to maximize stats? Yup. Was it possible you'd just make a weak character or think of an idea on how to improve your current build and want a tweak? Yup. So, here you have 3 scenarios that encourage making a fresh alt and playing the game more. However, respecs remove them. Why on earth would I remake my level 80 I want to tweak when its gonna take me maybe 6-8 hours worth of playtime to get back to level 80 when I could respec in 60 seconds?
Respecs are baby sitting a little chubby kid and giving him a cookie whenever he asks if the developer is the babysitter, and the player is the little chubby kid. Little chubby kid says COOKIE, and you give him one, and he eats it and leaves you alone for 5 minutes, all is well in the world. He comes back after that 5 minutes and says COOKIE, so you give him another, and all is well in the world for another 5 minutes. Instant gratification is a great thing!
However, after 2 hours of this the little chubby kid pukes all over himself and all over you and makes a horrible disgusting stinky mess. This is exactly the effect respecs had on D2, only instead of a horrible disgusting stinky mess your left with a dead player base. Before when you spent a month planning a character, leveling, deciding to try something different, deleting, remaking, releveling, and you finally hit that point where you said AHA! That's what I want! You felt like you did something cool. Its like you ate box of cookies, over the course of a month. Respecs just force feeds you that box of cookies all at once.
Now, time for the old "If you don't like it don't use it" argument. That's all well and dandy, but it still kills the game. I can't level a noob in a group anymore because everyone else is respeccing. Its not like the good old prior to respec days when you could meet up with a few new people in norm tristram and run with them all the way to hell. Its just like saying if you don't want to pick up dog poop, don't own a dog, then letting your dog crap in my yard.
If not, then yes, the D2 play style that you enjoy will probably be gone.
Woohoo someone understands! D2 was an awesome game that has a lot of huge differences in comparison to a lot of other online rpg type games, so why mainstream D3 with the same lame systems of binding gear and a trash currency with no use other then sinks and hording, when D2 did just fine with "currencies" basically being small crafting items you could store a lot of.(runes/gems)
To suggest that D2's success relies on not having any BoE items seems like a weak connection to me. I'd put my money on the itemization and random element to items, and in the case of PvP'ers, the basically unrestricted PvP play it offered. Trading items for items, given the structure of D2, was probably a helpful part of that, but not the driving factor of D2's success.
And of course, that doesn't include whoever disliked the game and stopped playing. Perhaps equally many did it because they could not grasp the trading system?
Trading items for items is going to be crippled with binding gear and a currency rather then barter based economy. This is why I gripe about those systems, its one of the D2 staples that sets it aside from the masses, why jack it up and mainstream it so its just another WoW clone economy?
As far as the unrestricted pvp play, I'd agree with ya, that's another huge attraction to D2, and I'd hate to see D3 be neutered down to mutual only arena based pvp garbage, but hey, that's a whole different topic:P
As far as those that quit the game because they couldn't grasp trading...so what? RPG's should require some learning and thinking to get good at. I've ripped myself off trading plenty of times while learning the game. I've also ripped myself off plenty of times just to get something fast, which was another great thing about the way it worked. You could make wealth in the game just by trading for an item, then turn around and trading it again. I could play for an hour and gain more wealth then I'd have made mf'ing for an hour. Why dumb a game down to the point it has minimal learning curve just to appease people who can't be bothered to take a little time to learn the economy? Especially when its easy as making a few in game friends and double checking with them before making a trade...
BOE does one thing: create a sink for the best items. To take D2 as an example. Enigma, BOTD, CoH, etc, are items that no one in their right mind would sell to a merchant because these are the best items. These continue to build up and will never disappear from the economy. In D3 there are sinks for all other items in the form of salvaging, but the best items are worth more as items than as salvage materials, so they need a different sink. BOE is the simple solution.
How does binding cause an item to disappear from the economy? Last I checked if an item wasn't destroyed permanently its still in the economy. Sure, I can't trade my bound item, but I still have one so why would I trade anyone else for theirs? If there is only BoE items will still build up regardless.
As far as salvaging gear goes, this system was already in place in D2. Let's say you made a runeword that consists of 2 HR's and a base item worth another HR. Whatever random mod rolls on it rolls low. You might use it for a while simply because its still an uber runeword, but 2 weeks later you roll a higher one. You then trade(salvage) your lower roll obviously for less then the value of the original ingredients to create it. Meanwhile some poor player, or someone looking to just test a build out, is totally thrilled that they got something that is still awesome for fairly cheap. This was actually a pretty amazing system for casual players in D2. If you knew what things were worth it allowed you to gear up a pretty sweet character with actually very little grind time, but hey, what do I know, this couldn't possible have been attractive to anyone vs just grinding the same npc ai over and over.
Also why are you comparing the economy of a game with cars. That just does not work.
Wait a minute...so what your saying is if I apply a concept being used in game to a real life economic issue to show how lame it is, its a poor example and doesn't work...BUT
Look guys, Blizzard hired people that actually studied economics to aid them. And those 4 years you spend learning basic economy is nothing compared to what those people know.
It for some reason works the other way around?
Is this team of economic experts going to require that your UBER 1337 SWORD require a constant supply of materials(spare parts) to keep it in working order, and you have to give it a lube job every 3 months or 3000 miles? Also your going to pay property taxes on it gas it up, or recharge it every night if you go electric. Make sure you get the sport car model and not the minivan model so you can impress the ladies. Oh depending what state you play from, you might have to carry insurance as well. If you have kids that wanna take the UBER 1337 out for a night, you'll just have to go get some extras, since its bound and you can't just toss them the keys:(
So yeah anyways, if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm just not impressed that blizzard highered so called economic experts to try to design some cool fancy game economy, and binding gear is their so called improvement over D2?
***hint from your friendly forum troll*** botting did far more to screw up the D2 economy then lack of binding items.
So it is impossible to get block chance, and vita, and run walk and kill people without teleporting around...cause you know teleport magically gives you block chance now? Or does it magically give you life? Or maybe it magically makes run walk nonexistant? Maybe you need to learn how to build a barb?
Its impossible to make a BvA with no enigma. A BvA teleports. You can make good barbs with no enigma, but you are not making a BvA.
20 points which you will dump into...what? Nothing? You keep your level 1 ww and ill keep my smite damage/speed kicks and let's see who wins.
Considering a wwsin is one of those builds that if you leveled to 99, no matter how you built it, you'd end up thinking dam, I wish I had more skill points...its not hard at all to make good use out of those 20 points.
However with that being said...its obvious, one more build you don't understand, and one more build you underestimate.
Oh yes I am sure it is designed and coded to make sure that wolves take hits before you do. Of course it is, much like the golem is designed and coded the same exact way unless you don't namelock when you attack a necro. No way is that a glitch. Im so foolish to think that!
Agreed! Don't forget mercs are also coded this way. Also, don't forget there are ways to move minions...
Haha...you really think your foh/smiter is gonna kill a top tier assassin? Your foh will do no damage, and your smite...forget it. You won't get to pull 1 smite out without getting smashed with mb and traps and dying kid.
Yes, I'd expect to win this one 100% of the time if they're a pure trapper and relying on traps to kill me. I'd just sorb them. They can't sorb my melee, simple as that.
Imagine that, you have charge/smite to fall back on when your not a pure foh'er with a faceted scepter that does awful melee damage and has no ias, when could you possible ever use some silly little feature like that to your advantage.
Bring the best zon on east and ill smash it with no dr on the worst caster on east with just enigma.
lolz, if you even got on my screen you wouldn't be there long enough to do anything with 0 fcr/0 fhr.
My naked druid with just enigma alone will 10-0 any zon you got buddy.
This is about the time, everyone who hasnt already, realizes your trolling.
Judging by how you are talking about kickers and your foh/smite builds and how you think zons rule...maybe you are just not good?
*VladDracul anytime you wish to prove me wrong. I have no characters but a barbarian that needs to be leveled to wear gear and a druid with just enigma but that is plenty enough to prove my point that my barb will smash whatever you got with no enigma and my druid will smash whatever you got with just enigma.
Lol mighty brave of ya to keep challenging me when I already said in this thread I haven't bothered this ladder...too many people hacking in duels:P
Who knows though, maybe if I have some time this weekend I'll start from total scratch and pwn your enigma only druid with a zon, and pwn your no tele barb with whatever I feel like using:P Its kinda stupid to start now seeing as to how its probably gonna reset soon, but I'm feeling kinda tempted just to let you realize your clueless:P What realm are you on btw...
Zons are pretty good even with other classes teleing. A lot of zons wear nigma and just don't tele because their fcr framerates suck, and they run so damn fast and can dodge while running, there isnt much reason for them too. I've never had a problem dueling with various zon builds, seen plenty of good zons, and seen plenty of downright nasty fc zons, I guess I just disagree they aren't useful, but I would love to see fc patched.
Barbs, they'd leap even more. Tele is the main way for BvC or BvA to catch anyone. If you can't catch them your gonna play more defensively until they screw up and make a bad tele. Now you can make a bvb, bva, or bvc, they all are viable, and all have their strong points and weaknesses. Get rid of engima and bva and bvc are no longer possible, seems to me like its adding variety to the class.
Pallies, most of them charge more then tele anyhow. Pally builds wouldn't change much with or without enigma.
Necroes, Hey good point, bone prison would be a little more useful without enigma! Oh wait, the entire summon tree would suck balls without enigma. Seems like nigma makes more then it breaks here too.
Assassin, With or without enigma, people are going to opt for wwsin over kicker. Its like making a conc barb over a wwbarb. Its a niche build people make for various reasons, its just not very useful.
Druids, Fire druids suck for more reasons then people having enigma. Good lucking using armageddon as an offensive spell when it trails behind you. They just arent popular becuase they don't do much damage, have timered spells, are hard to aim, and still are outdamaged and slower then fire sorcs. If anything lack of enigma would hurt fire druids, and windy's because you couldnt stack your minions with tele. I'll admit though, lack of enigma would be nice for SS, probably the only builds in the game it'd pwn for.
Sorcs, They'd be getting an obvious boost in the sense of being the only ones left with tele, but guess what, other people tele'ing doesn't ruin sorcs...sorb does.
How exactly are you going to stop people from running? If you can't catch a tele'er with your tele'er, your not going to catch a runner with your runner. If I know I'm gonna flee to town when I get low, I'm just gonna hug the edge of town all the time. Pussies are gonna be pussies with or without tele.
Fix desynch, get rid of the lame ias/fcr/fhr hack, ban autoaims aggressively, and maybe lowering max res/sorb so ele builds arent so damn easy to totallynegate would do a hell of a lot more for the dueling environment then removing enigma.
One other change I'd love to see in dueling is for rejuvs to be unusable while hostile. This would end so much crying in duel games and make pk'ing pub games a lot more challenging:)
i already said that making the game easier was a dumb move. i agree, if they're going change the difficulty, make it harder, not easier.
I don't get it. Let's remove immunities, but not make the game easier...hrmm...
what i meant was: you can't say that every class has its strengths and the sorc's strength is MFing, because when blizz made the class, they weren't thinking "yeah, this one is gonna be best at MF". no, they wanted to make a class that could finish the game (N,NM and H) solo. just like every other class. and playing hell solo with a sorc is frustrating because of full immunes, you end up skipping lots of sections, or spend an hour clearing a dungeon. so i'd just like them to make monsters who are highly resistant to elements, instead of 100% immune. is that too much to ask?
It isn't about class, its about the build. I already told you how you could beat the game solo with a sorc. It's doable, and its not that hard. Try a cl/orb hybrid, and static the bosses. Between 2 elements, static, teleport and a merc, your pretty much set to do all the pvm you want.
Theres reasons for going single element, and reasons for going multi. Its quite foolish to go single element and then complain about your weakness, when the obvious solution to sidestep that weakness is to go multi element.
Its like this for every class. Look at paladins. There's pure smiters, pure foh'ers, and all kinds of smite/foh hybrids. How is this any different then pure light sorcs, pure ice sorcs, and ice/light hybrids? The foh/smite hybrid isn't going to be as good at smiting as a pure smiter, or as good at foh as a pure foh'er, but they make up for it in versatility, sorcs are the same concept.
Oh, so if you disagree with people on a discussion board, you can get negative rep? Isn't the point of discussion boards for people to bounce ideas off each other?
It seems to me, that far too often around here people with negative rep are those who disagree with some of the mods. If reputation was given for coming up with new or well thought out and explained ideas it might mean little more than making it a popularity contest.
Let's face it, get rid of all the people with bad rep on here, and it wouldn't be a discussion forum, it would be a fanboy conformity forum.
I was glad they didn't increase stashes after all, that would have made bm'ing everyone in duels even easier then it already is.
Kinda neat to see hydras and werebears get a boost, maybe there'll be some people trying new builds with them in pvp games now. It would have been really nice though to see sorb get toned, its lame now when you can bm someone and heal off their attacks.
Slightly more common hr's and dupe patch might be cool, depending how effective their dupe patch is.
Nerfed hammers and light sorcs...big deal. There is plenty of other builds that completely crush pvm. Pvm is easy, with the exception of these two nerfs it just got even easier this patch. Sure I hate pvm'ing with my fire sorc, but I love to pvp with it, its all a trade off, not every character is equal at everything. Soon as they announced the hydra change, I knew it was a pvp change, gl for anyone trying to solo hell with a hydra sorc:)
Would have been better overall imo if they just focused more on cracking down on illegal third party programs. Somehow they decided to ban people running 2+ legit copies of the game from one ip, but they still let the guy using 19 different mods go untouched. Seems a little backwards if you ask me.
Other thing seriously lacking is new gear. Would have been great to see some of the slightly underpowered builds get a boost from some new runewords designed for them, like fire druids or ma sins.
Otherwise though, I doubt I'll bother with it. Not worth the time just to play the same old game, thats gonna be ruined by the same old hacks, just becuase I might see a hydra sorc or werebear in a duel.
Ughh, I disagree, seperate them. Like you mentioned D2 still hits 60k people a day. Even if thats all the traffic D3 attracts, and they're seperated evenly into PK and NOPK, that leaves 30k people each. Considering you can only have what, 4-8 players in a game, I'm not sure if anytings been finalized, whether you have a 30k player base or 60k is pretty much the same. Its not like your talking about splitting up a game with 40 players on it.
Why seperate them you ask. Everyones just going to make an mf farmer for gear running, and and PK'er for jumping randoms. Good look ever getting an MF farmer agreeing to fight you when they know your obviously a geared/specced out PK'er.
If you want to put it in D2 terms are you going to agree to hostility when your on your 500mf meteorb sorc when you know the sorc that just hostiled you probably has twice your damage/res/health/mana?
I can completely understand some people just don't want to PK. However, for those that do, if you want to do it, you should be forced to live with the risk/fun factor of it at all times. Otherwise its going to amount to pub games full of standard mf characters that will never agree to PK'ing.
I don't even think they should be able to trade with eachother. I'm just going with the assumption drops will be better in more populated games, like they were in D2. If this is the case, why should I be able to completely safely farm with my 500mf sorc in pub games with 0 risk of getting PK'd, when I'm farming gear for PK characters? Considering at some point I'd enjoy going in and stomping some pub mf runs, I think its only fair other people have the chance to do it back to me.
As far as the achievements go, more features are generally better then less, but I just can't find myself caring about worthless features being passed off as rewards. Getting a comment for having a cool generic title is far less cool then just getting a comment for coming up with a cool character name. Ears...yeah sure they're cool, its fun to see piles of them on the ground, but I'd never waste time clicking to pick one up, or inventory space on them. Achievements that amount to just a little icon on some score screen somewhere...as respectfully as I can put it, these "rewards" are all useless.
If these characters must be mixxed, why not actually make pvp "rewards" worth it without disrupting the balance of power at all between a pvp and non-pvp fight. Something reasonable would be give all PVP characters +25% more drops. If your willing to expose yourself at all times to PK'ers, and are good enough to fight them off, then it is far worth your time to go pvp. If your just learning the game or just hate pvp, well then you just get a little less reward, because you have less risk.
As far as griefing in D2 goes, it really wasn't that bad. There were obviously some hacks and glitches people used to grief people, and the game would be better without them. I don't think anyone would be sad to see tppk hacks eliminated, other then the cheaters that use them.
Corpse camping as previously mentioned. You can be super slick and outmaneuver the camper, have a friend chase him off or kill him, save/exit and rejoin if you want to take the guy out that bad, or just save/exit and go to a different game if you think the guys a jerk and you don't want to play with him.
If you consider someone taking your gold griefing...is it really that bad? Its pretty worthless anyhow. You need 50k for a merc on occasion, and some repair money here and there, and all the rest pretty much just gets tossed away gambling. So you die, drop 200k, someone grabs it...big deal. You join some random baal/chaos game, fill up your inventory once, that takes about 30 seconds, sell it, and you made all your money back.
A lot of other forms of griefing could just be worked out by design. Obviously pots are gone so you don't have to deal with people juvving. Hopefully the res/absorb system sees some improvements so you don't always get those guys that run to stash, then come back with enough sorb on to get healed off a direct 50k meteor hit.
Sixen made a great point how you will always have griefers no matter what the game design is. That thing that confuses me though, is without counting hacks/glitches, I don't ever consider myself to have been griefed in D2. Since nobody has any way to track what game I'm in unless I add them as a friend or tell them, and I have the option to squelch whoever I want at any time, theres really nothing you can do to grief anyone. Sure you might be able to sorb my sorc, juv in a duel, camp my corpse, take my gold, but its all legal within the legit limits of the game, its all things I can do right back to you, and its all things that are totally irrelevant as soon as I save/exit and join a different game with different people. I just don't see any legit way to grief someone hard enough to actually screw them in D2.
In the context of Diablo 2, the only thing I liked about ladder was a fresh restart, in which everyone started off on equal footing and trading was plentiful in the first few months of each reset. Duels and PK'ing was also at its prime during this period, as if you managed to put together a good character quickly you could join games feeling like a god for a while.
The whole ranking by experience system was never important to me be. Obviously, bots kinda killed any fun factor for legit people. You waste a day getting your first character to 80, then wake up the next day and see some bots already run up to 93. The other reason I never really cared for it is simply becuase I never planned to go to 99. Pretty much every character could be "completed" by 95 for 1/100th of the time investment.
The achievement factor for me, has always been in joining a pub baal/chaos run and being strong enough to slaughter everyone, or joining a duel game with a friend and owning the game 2v6, or even a 4v4 with another organized team. I would rather enjoy the satisfaction that my game knowledge, trading abilities, time spent farming/leveling/tweaking builds, and skill at the game allows me to killed the toughest things in the realms, other players. Being part of a game where the ground is littered in ears, but not any of mine, is much more enjoyable then seeing my name on a list, that the only reason I'm there is because I've invested enough time.
What it boils down to for me is, so what if you get a special icon for killing baal 1000x or saving up some amount of gold, any of this grind type stuff to me, just indicates that your willing to put your time in, not that you are actually good at the game. Even as far as pvp tracking, D2 is pretty much build A pwns build B, build B pwns build C, build C pwns build A in 1v1 duels with skilled, well geared players. This would obviously just be heavily taken advantage of, making pretty much every elemental based build worthless for duel ranking.
Achievement is running a fast string of runs and having people ask you for advice after they've seen what you can do. Achievement is pwning someone elses baal run for a good laugh. Achievement is knowing I litter the ground with 30 ears for every 1 of mine I drop. Achievement is finding other players I have a good to playing with, or against. Achievement is enjoying a game where I can be the nicest guy around, or the biggest jerk around, whichever I feel like being that day. Achievement is not my name on a list.
Binding is a gear sink because it takes items off the market.
Unbinding a item might be one of those B.Net 2.0 priced services.
You take it off the market but you don't do anything to alter demand. Once I have my 1337 axe, I'm gonna bind it to my autostatted respeccable barb and never need another one. So if you happen to find 2 and want to trade one, guess what, its not gonna be nearly as tradable as an end game axe on D2.
When you die, you lose exp, its removed from your character, you have to replace it. That is a sink, it creates a near constant demand for exp.
When you die you lose gold, or you have to spend gold to repair items and buy potions and other random things, or you can gamble it away those are gold sinks. Gold is removed from the game, and at some point you will have to acquire more.
Now can you see the difference between a concept that can create more demand, and one that creates annoyances and discourages trading? Imagine how much it'd suck if when you bought a car, you couldnt ever trade it in or sell it and put that money towards a different car. Thats the restriction this bind on equip bullshit is going to place on the economy.
If you want an equipment sink, something has to actually remove equipment from play, and create more demand for it. Ladder resets did this well, unfortunately botters and dupers really cut down on the amount of time afterwards the economy felt fresh. Ways to actually have gear destroyed could also do this, such as a rare chance for things to break at random when you die, but that would be too unfair to morons I suppose.
As far as unbinding being a paid service, most awful thing I've ever heard. If I wanted to go play a pay per advantage game I'd go play one of the hundreds of free ones out there I don't have to pay 50 bucks to start on. Why would you even want bound items if you think this is a good idea, your just asking blizzard to take your money.
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What makes these 2 the worst ladders ever? Well quite simply 2 things.
The first of which is hacks. Mainly the obvious portion of hacks are all the bots. Spam bots are just annoying, and mf/exp bots remove any incentive to play. If you do bot, you can run your bot 23 hours a day, and for the hour you feel like playing you maybe just do a few duels, pk attempts(on bots, go figure), or trades. Realistically why would you shut your mf bot off just to manually mf? Its more fun to just play solitaire and watch the bot run in a window. I'll admit it, I botted before, so I'm speaking from experience here. The only thing lamer then botting is playing a game where you can't ever get anything you need because 3/4 of the players bot and whatever you have to offer is garbage to them. Prior to botting I'd get excited if a Pul rune dropped. Post botting I set my bot to not even pick anything up lower then an Ist rune. Even if you don't bot, every time you get a sweet deal in a trade, chances are it came from someone who just popped on to check his bot and wanted to clear up some space. You have two choices, bot and be part of a flooded economy, or don't bot and be part of a flooded economy, but either way those who do bot screw the game up for everyone.
Also jumbled into the hacks category is all the lame pvp hacks people use. Auto aim isn't even the bad one. A skilled player has the upper hand over an auto aimer, so let the noobs auto aim away, but can you please get rid of that annoying speed hack people use. Seeing a max ias/fcr/fhr guided arrow bow sorc in every duel game for the last month I played was a contributing factor to not wanting to play anymore. They aren't annoying because they are hard to kill or anythings, its just people blatantly rubbing impossible builds in your face just because they can. There's no way to max your fcr and ias on a bowsorc, anyone who knows the game at all could tell you this.
Now that my rant on hacks is over, on to the second factor that made the last two ladder seasons the worst ever...respecs. Respecs obviously dovetail with the bot problem, and its not too complicated to see how.
Let's say you want an auradin. Prior to respecs you had to have your gear in advance, plan your character in advance, and level in a certain manner. Regardless of the pros and cons of having to do this, the fact is you had to do it manually. You couldn't ever just get to level 70 and say sweet, now I can bot my auradin up to 95+. However, with the respecs, you can do just that. All you have to do is level a hammerdin to level 70, turn on the bot, and 2 weeks later you have a level 95, which can then be respecced into an auradin. Suddenly seeing a level 95 auradin didn't go from "wow thats a sweet character, thats not something I see often" to "wow wonder what bot that guys uses."
Even without botting as a factor, respecs still give me every reason in the world to play the top pvm class for each character. Gone are the days of leveling up a hammerdin, a smite/foh hybrid, a pure smiter, and an auardin all for various purposes. Now I level 4 hammers and respec 3 of them. This makes the game much easier and much more bland, as I'm sure everyone figured this out.
Now my other gripe with respecs. Was it possible to mess up a character before by misclicking and wasting a few stat points or a wrong skill? Yup. Was it more then likely at some point you'd have to remake characters because you got annis/torches/better gear and wanted to maximize stats? Yup. Was it possible you'd just make a weak character or think of an idea on how to improve your current build and want a tweak? Yup. So, here you have 3 scenarios that encourage making a fresh alt and playing the game more. However, respecs remove them. Why on earth would I remake my level 80 I want to tweak when its gonna take me maybe 6-8 hours worth of playtime to get back to level 80 when I could respec in 60 seconds?
Respecs are baby sitting a little chubby kid and giving him a cookie whenever he asks if the developer is the babysitter, and the player is the little chubby kid. Little chubby kid says COOKIE, and you give him one, and he eats it and leaves you alone for 5 minutes, all is well in the world. He comes back after that 5 minutes and says COOKIE, so you give him another, and all is well in the world for another 5 minutes. Instant gratification is a great thing!
However, after 2 hours of this the little chubby kid pukes all over himself and all over you and makes a horrible disgusting stinky mess. This is exactly the effect respecs had on D2, only instead of a horrible disgusting stinky mess your left with a dead player base. Before when you spent a month planning a character, leveling, deciding to try something different, deleting, remaking, releveling, and you finally hit that point where you said AHA! That's what I want! You felt like you did something cool. Its like you ate box of cookies, over the course of a month. Respecs just force feeds you that box of cookies all at once.
Now, time for the old "If you don't like it don't use it" argument. That's all well and dandy, but it still kills the game. I can't level a noob in a group anymore because everyone else is respeccing. Its not like the good old prior to respec days when you could meet up with a few new people in norm tristram and run with them all the way to hell. Its just like saying if you don't want to pick up dog poop, don't own a dog, then letting your dog crap in my yard.
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Woohoo someone understands! D2 was an awesome game that has a lot of huge differences in comparison to a lot of other online rpg type games, so why mainstream D3 with the same lame systems of binding gear and a trash currency with no use other then sinks and hording, when D2 did just fine with "currencies" basically being small crafting items you could store a lot of.(runes/gems)
Trading items for items is going to be crippled with binding gear and a currency rather then barter based economy. This is why I gripe about those systems, its one of the D2 staples that sets it aside from the masses, why jack it up and mainstream it so its just another WoW clone economy?
As far as the unrestricted pvp play, I'd agree with ya, that's another huge attraction to D2, and I'd hate to see D3 be neutered down to mutual only arena based pvp garbage, but hey, that's a whole different topic:P
As far as those that quit the game because they couldn't grasp trading...so what? RPG's should require some learning and thinking to get good at. I've ripped myself off trading plenty of times while learning the game. I've also ripped myself off plenty of times just to get something fast, which was another great thing about the way it worked. You could make wealth in the game just by trading for an item, then turn around and trading it again. I could play for an hour and gain more wealth then I'd have made mf'ing for an hour. Why dumb a game down to the point it has minimal learning curve just to appease people who can't be bothered to take a little time to learn the economy? Especially when its easy as making a few in game friends and double checking with them before making a trade...
How does binding cause an item to disappear from the economy? Last I checked if an item wasn't destroyed permanently its still in the economy. Sure, I can't trade my bound item, but I still have one so why would I trade anyone else for theirs? If there is only BoE items will still build up regardless.
As far as salvaging gear goes, this system was already in place in D2. Let's say you made a runeword that consists of 2 HR's and a base item worth another HR. Whatever random mod rolls on it rolls low. You might use it for a while simply because its still an uber runeword, but 2 weeks later you roll a higher one. You then trade(salvage) your lower roll obviously for less then the value of the original ingredients to create it. Meanwhile some poor player, or someone looking to just test a build out, is totally thrilled that they got something that is still awesome for fairly cheap. This was actually a pretty amazing system for casual players in D2. If you knew what things were worth it allowed you to gear up a pretty sweet character with actually very little grind time, but hey, what do I know, this couldn't possible have been attractive to anyone vs just grinding the same npc ai over and over.
Wait a minute...so what your saying is if I apply a concept being used in game to a real life economic issue to show how lame it is, its a poor example and doesn't work...BUT
It for some reason works the other way around?
Is this team of economic experts going to require that your UBER 1337 SWORD require a constant supply of materials(spare parts) to keep it in working order, and you have to give it a lube job every 3 months or 3000 miles? Also your going to pay property taxes on it gas it up, or recharge it every night if you go electric. Make sure you get the sport car model and not the minivan model so you can impress the ladies. Oh depending what state you play from, you might have to carry insurance as well. If you have kids that wanna take the UBER 1337 out for a night, you'll just have to go get some extras, since its bound and you can't just toss them the keys:(
So yeah anyways, if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm just not impressed that blizzard highered so called economic experts to try to design some cool fancy game economy, and binding gear is their so called improvement over D2?
***hint from your friendly forum troll*** botting did far more to screw up the D2 economy then lack of binding items.
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Its impossible to make a BvA with no enigma. A BvA teleports. You can make good barbs with no enigma, but you are not making a BvA.
Considering a wwsin is one of those builds that if you leveled to 99, no matter how you built it, you'd end up thinking dam, I wish I had more skill points...its not hard at all to make good use out of those 20 points.
However with that being said...its obvious, one more build you don't understand, and one more build you underestimate.
Agreed! Don't forget mercs are also coded this way. Also, don't forget there are ways to move minions...
Yes, I'd expect to win this one 100% of the time if they're a pure trapper and relying on traps to kill me. I'd just sorb them. They can't sorb my melee, simple as that.
Imagine that, you have charge/smite to fall back on when your not a pure foh'er with a faceted scepter that does awful melee damage and has no ias, when could you possible ever use some silly little feature like that to your advantage.
lolz, if you even got on my screen you wouldn't be there long enough to do anything with 0 fcr/0 fhr.
This is about the time, everyone who hasnt already, realizes your trolling.
Lol mighty brave of ya to keep challenging me when I already said in this thread I haven't bothered this ladder...too many people hacking in duels:P
Who knows though, maybe if I have some time this weekend I'll start from total scratch and pwn your enigma only druid with a zon, and pwn your no tele barb with whatever I feel like using:P Its kinda stupid to start now seeing as to how its probably gonna reset soon, but I'm feeling kinda tempted just to let you realize your clueless:P What realm are you on btw...
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Barbs, they'd leap even more. Tele is the main way for BvC or BvA to catch anyone. If you can't catch them your gonna play more defensively until they screw up and make a bad tele. Now you can make a bvb, bva, or bvc, they all are viable, and all have their strong points and weaknesses. Get rid of engima and bva and bvc are no longer possible, seems to me like its adding variety to the class.
Pallies, most of them charge more then tele anyhow. Pally builds wouldn't change much with or without enigma.
Necroes, Hey good point, bone prison would be a little more useful without enigma! Oh wait, the entire summon tree would suck balls without enigma. Seems like nigma makes more then it breaks here too.
Assassin, With or without enigma, people are going to opt for wwsin over kicker. Its like making a conc barb over a wwbarb. Its a niche build people make for various reasons, its just not very useful.
Druids, Fire druids suck for more reasons then people having enigma. Good lucking using armageddon as an offensive spell when it trails behind you. They just arent popular becuase they don't do much damage, have timered spells, are hard to aim, and still are outdamaged and slower then fire sorcs. If anything lack of enigma would hurt fire druids, and windy's because you couldnt stack your minions with tele. I'll admit though, lack of enigma would be nice for SS, probably the only builds in the game it'd pwn for.
Sorcs, They'd be getting an obvious boost in the sense of being the only ones left with tele, but guess what, other people tele'ing doesn't ruin sorcs...sorb does.
How exactly are you going to stop people from running? If you can't catch a tele'er with your tele'er, your not going to catch a runner with your runner. If I know I'm gonna flee to town when I get low, I'm just gonna hug the edge of town all the time. Pussies are gonna be pussies with or without tele.
Fix desynch, get rid of the lame ias/fcr/fhr hack, ban autoaims aggressively, and maybe lowering max res/sorb so ele builds arent so damn easy to totallynegate would do a hell of a lot more for the dueling environment then removing enigma.
One other change I'd love to see in dueling is for rejuvs to be unusable while hostile. This would end so much crying in duel games and make pk'ing pub games a lot more challenging:)
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I don't get it. Let's remove immunities, but not make the game easier...hrmm...
It isn't about class, its about the build. I already told you how you could beat the game solo with a sorc. It's doable, and its not that hard. Try a cl/orb hybrid, and static the bosses. Between 2 elements, static, teleport and a merc, your pretty much set to do all the pvm you want.
Theres reasons for going single element, and reasons for going multi. Its quite foolish to go single element and then complain about your weakness, when the obvious solution to sidestep that weakness is to go multi element.
Its like this for every class. Look at paladins. There's pure smiters, pure foh'ers, and all kinds of smite/foh hybrids. How is this any different then pure light sorcs, pure ice sorcs, and ice/light hybrids? The foh/smite hybrid isn't going to be as good at smiting as a pure smiter, or as good at foh as a pure foh'er, but they make up for it in versatility, sorcs are the same concept.
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It seems to me, that far too often around here people with negative rep are those who disagree with some of the mods. If reputation was given for coming up with new or well thought out and explained ideas it might mean little more than making it a popularity contest.
Let's face it, get rid of all the people with bad rep on here, and it wouldn't be a discussion forum, it would be a fanboy conformity forum.
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Kinda neat to see hydras and werebears get a boost, maybe there'll be some people trying new builds with them in pvp games now. It would have been really nice though to see sorb get toned, its lame now when you can bm someone and heal off their attacks.
Slightly more common hr's and dupe patch might be cool, depending how effective their dupe patch is.
Nerfed hammers and light sorcs...big deal. There is plenty of other builds that completely crush pvm. Pvm is easy, with the exception of these two nerfs it just got even easier this patch. Sure I hate pvm'ing with my fire sorc, but I love to pvp with it, its all a trade off, not every character is equal at everything. Soon as they announced the hydra change, I knew it was a pvp change, gl for anyone trying to solo hell with a hydra sorc:)
Would have been better overall imo if they just focused more on cracking down on illegal third party programs. Somehow they decided to ban people running 2+ legit copies of the game from one ip, but they still let the guy using 19 different mods go untouched. Seems a little backwards if you ask me.
Other thing seriously lacking is new gear. Would have been great to see some of the slightly underpowered builds get a boost from some new runewords designed for them, like fire druids or ma sins.
Otherwise though, I doubt I'll bother with it. Not worth the time just to play the same old game, thats gonna be ruined by the same old hacks, just becuase I might see a hydra sorc or werebear in a duel.
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Why seperate them you ask. Everyones just going to make an mf farmer for gear running, and and PK'er for jumping randoms. Good look ever getting an MF farmer agreeing to fight you when they know your obviously a geared/specced out PK'er.
If you want to put it in D2 terms are you going to agree to hostility when your on your 500mf meteorb sorc when you know the sorc that just hostiled you probably has twice your damage/res/health/mana?
I can completely understand some people just don't want to PK. However, for those that do, if you want to do it, you should be forced to live with the risk/fun factor of it at all times. Otherwise its going to amount to pub games full of standard mf characters that will never agree to PK'ing.
I don't even think they should be able to trade with eachother. I'm just going with the assumption drops will be better in more populated games, like they were in D2. If this is the case, why should I be able to completely safely farm with my 500mf sorc in pub games with 0 risk of getting PK'd, when I'm farming gear for PK characters? Considering at some point I'd enjoy going in and stomping some pub mf runs, I think its only fair other people have the chance to do it back to me.
As far as the achievements go, more features are generally better then less, but I just can't find myself caring about worthless features being passed off as rewards. Getting a comment for having a cool generic title is far less cool then just getting a comment for coming up with a cool character name. Ears...yeah sure they're cool, its fun to see piles of them on the ground, but I'd never waste time clicking to pick one up, or inventory space on them. Achievements that amount to just a little icon on some score screen somewhere...as respectfully as I can put it, these "rewards" are all useless.
If these characters must be mixxed, why not actually make pvp "rewards" worth it without disrupting the balance of power at all between a pvp and non-pvp fight. Something reasonable would be give all PVP characters +25% more drops. If your willing to expose yourself at all times to PK'ers, and are good enough to fight them off, then it is far worth your time to go pvp. If your just learning the game or just hate pvp, well then you just get a little less reward, because you have less risk.
As far as griefing in D2 goes, it really wasn't that bad. There were obviously some hacks and glitches people used to grief people, and the game would be better without them. I don't think anyone would be sad to see tppk hacks eliminated, other then the cheaters that use them.
Corpse camping as previously mentioned. You can be super slick and outmaneuver the camper, have a friend chase him off or kill him, save/exit and rejoin if you want to take the guy out that bad, or just save/exit and go to a different game if you think the guys a jerk and you don't want to play with him.
If you consider someone taking your gold griefing...is it really that bad? Its pretty worthless anyhow. You need 50k for a merc on occasion, and some repair money here and there, and all the rest pretty much just gets tossed away gambling. So you die, drop 200k, someone grabs it...big deal. You join some random baal/chaos game, fill up your inventory once, that takes about 30 seconds, sell it, and you made all your money back.
A lot of other forms of griefing could just be worked out by design. Obviously pots are gone so you don't have to deal with people juvving. Hopefully the res/absorb system sees some improvements so you don't always get those guys that run to stash, then come back with enough sorb on to get healed off a direct 50k meteor hit.
Sixen made a great point how you will always have griefers no matter what the game design is. That thing that confuses me though, is without counting hacks/glitches, I don't ever consider myself to have been griefed in D2. Since nobody has any way to track what game I'm in unless I add them as a friend or tell them, and I have the option to squelch whoever I want at any time, theres really nothing you can do to grief anyone. Sure you might be able to sorb my sorc, juv in a duel, camp my corpse, take my gold, but its all legal within the legit limits of the game, its all things I can do right back to you, and its all things that are totally irrelevant as soon as I save/exit and join a different game with different people. I just don't see any legit way to grief someone hard enough to actually screw them in D2.
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The whole ranking by experience system was never important to me be. Obviously, bots kinda killed any fun factor for legit people. You waste a day getting your first character to 80, then wake up the next day and see some bots already run up to 93. The other reason I never really cared for it is simply becuase I never planned to go to 99. Pretty much every character could be "completed" by 95 for 1/100th of the time investment.
The achievement factor for me, has always been in joining a pub baal/chaos run and being strong enough to slaughter everyone, or joining a duel game with a friend and owning the game 2v6, or even a 4v4 with another organized team. I would rather enjoy the satisfaction that my game knowledge, trading abilities, time spent farming/leveling/tweaking builds, and skill at the game allows me to killed the toughest things in the realms, other players. Being part of a game where the ground is littered in ears, but not any of mine, is much more enjoyable then seeing my name on a list, that the only reason I'm there is because I've invested enough time.
What it boils down to for me is, so what if you get a special icon for killing baal 1000x or saving up some amount of gold, any of this grind type stuff to me, just indicates that your willing to put your time in, not that you are actually good at the game. Even as far as pvp tracking, D2 is pretty much build A pwns build B, build B pwns build C, build C pwns build A in 1v1 duels with skilled, well geared players. This would obviously just be heavily taken advantage of, making pretty much every elemental based build worthless for duel ranking.
Achievement is running a fast string of runs and having people ask you for advice after they've seen what you can do. Achievement is pwning someone elses baal run for a good laugh. Achievement is knowing I litter the ground with 30 ears for every 1 of mine I drop. Achievement is finding other players I have a good to playing with, or against. Achievement is enjoying a game where I can be the nicest guy around, or the biggest jerk around, whichever I feel like being that day. Achievement is not my name on a list.
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You take it off the market but you don't do anything to alter demand. Once I have my 1337 axe, I'm gonna bind it to my autostatted respeccable barb and never need another one. So if you happen to find 2 and want to trade one, guess what, its not gonna be nearly as tradable as an end game axe on D2.
When you die, you lose exp, its removed from your character, you have to replace it. That is a sink, it creates a near constant demand for exp.
When you die you lose gold, or you have to spend gold to repair items and buy potions and other random things, or you can gamble it away those are gold sinks. Gold is removed from the game, and at some point you will have to acquire more.
Now can you see the difference between a concept that can create more demand, and one that creates annoyances and discourages trading? Imagine how much it'd suck if when you bought a car, you couldnt ever trade it in or sell it and put that money towards a different car. Thats the restriction this bind on equip bullshit is going to place on the economy.
If you want an equipment sink, something has to actually remove equipment from play, and create more demand for it. Ladder resets did this well, unfortunately botters and dupers really cut down on the amount of time afterwards the economy felt fresh. Ways to actually have gear destroyed could also do this, such as a rare chance for things to break at random when you die, but that would be too unfair to morons I suppose.
As far as unbinding being a paid service, most awful thing I've ever heard. If I wanted to go play a pay per advantage game I'd go play one of the hundreds of free ones out there I don't have to pay 50 bucks to start on. Why would you even want bound items if you think this is a good idea, your just asking blizzard to take your money.