The actual D2 players:
The gamers from that era are no longer 18 or 19 years old, we're more like late 20s even 30s - we know how the world works, we've lived with absolute rubbish games back in the day and we appreciate the up and downsides of D3. We also know that Blizzard generally still provides the best quality and content when compared to any other game developer out there.
I think to this layer of gamers the game is ok. It's not brilliant yet, but it's definitely not something to cry about every day before sleep. 40-50 bucks is not something to cry about either, hell - beer for one night could cost way more than that. D3 is a potentially fantastic platform, give it some time and it will possibly develop into superb game, just like D2 did with LOD release - because lets face it original D2 was pretty damn boring.
The i played D2 gamers:
Yep they are early 20s or even below that, yet somehow despite the simplest calculus they played D2 for many years, even the original... These guys want INSTANT GRATIFICATION. They want to whine and cry and demand things - because lets face it - the modern society rewards whining and crying and demanding - that's the only thing they know and that's the only thing they will ever do.
They are the one and only mistake Blizzard ever made - listening to QQQQqqqQQQqqqQQqqqQQQ. Back in the day Blizzard never did bother with as much 'community management' or even really reading forums. They just released content and it was a simple decision - play it if you like, if you don't - there are many other games to choose from.
Today, because of all these QQs Blizzard actually made a step forward towards community and started working with the community (unlike any other game developer out there), and the only result of them trying to 'satisfy' the 'instant gratification generation' is the incessantly increasing amount of QQ. Because now...the QQers feel empowered! Blizzard did react to them a few times and that was their biggest mistake.
Hence there will always be 2 sides to this argument, and this argument is not based on the game itself, it is rather based on the perception of the world in general and the gap between generations. There will never be any agreement about it or any solution. If 'instant gratification' is not achieved = it's shit. End of story. Screw waiting, screw everything. I paid 40 bucks i want it NOW. While the rest of us are thinking 'wdf have we done to our younger generation? Should've sent them out to work at the age of 16 like we did instead'
This is the biggest self-gratification post I've ever seen. You generalize people by age groups, which proves you don't have the tiniest of an idea of 'how the world works' because if you would then you would know age is not a factor in personality, nor is it in maturity. If you want to make yourself feel better because you're older and therefore 'a superior gamer' than go right ahead, but don't expect people to buy that load of shit you're trying to peddle.
I can't believe somebody out of High School could even come up with such a theory, haven't you learned you're not a unique snowflake anymore?
Regardless, given communication or not from the devs you will always have the people who complain and those who do not... and before forums there were STILL people who complained and those who did not - because that is how we operate as a fucking consumer. So it has absolutely nothing to do with 'instant gratification' nor does it have to do with the dev's communicating with us, because none of it will shape our opinions more than the game itself already is, and will always.
The game design is flawed. The devs made some real obvious errors, and are not fixing them. The fixes they are making don't really fix the core problem of the loot. (oter than the legendary fix, but still needs work. 80% of legs are garbage).
The two biggest issues are the itemization and the skill system. Itemization can be fixed with a patch... all they have to do is either get creative or look to other games like D2, TL2 or PoE for ideas on how to add complexity. Skill systems on the other hand is going to require either an expansion or a very.. very large patch to fix, simply because it requires an entire new addition to the system. While the game design is flawed, I think they are at the very least extremely aware of the itemization issues.
Ego's out of the way, I think Jay and his team are working very hard to work out the itemization issue. I have my personal suspicions that the reason patch 1.1 was delayed by *so* long wasn't only because of PVP. They know that patch 1.1 is either going to make or break the interest of a lot of people who've had wavering faiths about the future of D3, so they have to make it come out with the bang. No matter how popular PVP is, it's not the 'bang' they need to spark renewing interest in the game... and they KNOW. They know because we know. So with that being said I'm looking forward to seeing if my suspicion is right about 1.1.
THAT BEING SAID THOUGH, it's going to be interesting to see how they do it... since the skill system directly connects to itemization and affixes in general.
Thanks for your support again, guys. I actually added the public games one yesterday because that feature means the most to me. Of course it'd be nice to have more social chat features... but I think a big part of Diablo 2's success was named games, 8 player max, and dueling. That way, the game becomes a hangout. You're always meeting people and that keeps you coming back. Who knows if they actually planned that or not, but back then, no one was complaining about Battle.net the way that we are now.
Putting aside itemization (or w/e other) issues with Diablo 3 that may exist, if your only public interaction is auto-matching quest runs, that puts a lot of pressure on the game itself to be endlessly entertaining, rather than people creating their own entertainment. It also seems to lead to "zero talk" runs. Games like Super Mario, Half-Life, or even mobile games like Tiny Wings, are games that you go nuts on for a while, and then stop. However, games like Diablo 2, Counter Strike, and Warcraft 3 keep you coming back because of the community (in the latter 2 cases, custom maps did it for me!).
The auction house has also had profound effects. I think it's very cool having one, but man, the one time (in D3) I had to do a real trade with someone made me realize how much I miss that interaction.
My conclusion is that all of these slick technologies and efficiencies have made the game so streamlined that it hampered the community/social aspect, and so the game didn't build as much culture around it, in the same way older Blizz games (including WoW) did. But these are just my opinions... maybe I'm becoming a cynical grumpy 24 year old lol.
I completely agree - community is what holds games together. I remember back to the days of Socom and the amount of community there was on that game. There were no forums, and not much for chatrooms.. and the gameplay was your average run of the mill counter strike gameplay but the fact that you and your friends could play together constantly finding new lobbies, and your clans could make clan lobbies so you could all hang out while you enjoy the game you bought.. it made it so much more appealing to want to come and play for years. Diablo 3 needs a community, and the practically solo experience they have running right now isn't working. The chatrooms are nice but the way Diablo 2, and Warcraft 3 had it set up allowed for a presence of population that really made you feel like you were part of a larger place. From the lobby chat rooms that had 50 different characters staring you in the face, random stupid chats and of course the public named games, where you saw hundreds of people enjoying the game you bought, all in different parts of the game.
That is really what makes the world feel alive. Sure the auction house takes away from the very personal trading and bartering (which I feel is a very strong part of Diablo) but if we had public games a lot of high end traders would be making FT games because they wouldn't lose the ridiculous cut that the auction house takes.
I really hope your screenshots spoke to them, because I know that even the starcraft community has been complaining about the overall dead feeling of their lobby since 2010, and here we are doing the same thing with no change. Even if they don't take it part for part here's hoping they'll at least consider it.
Your show brought up a lot of good points, but I truly think it was a mistake to avoid comparing Diablo 2 to Diablo 3. When players look at the Diablo franchise they have expectations built around already established game mechanics, and when Diablo 3 came out they decided to go in a completely different direction when it came to itemization. It would be akin to buying a PC and getting a mac instead.
Itemization is the lifeblood of any ARPG and Blizzards choice to reinvent the wheel was probably their biggest blunder. Simply put, itemization is the foundation of how the game will play out. It dictates every variable a character is able to change, and change promotes choice. Looking at the base itemization comparisons between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 any person with half a brain can see that there is a seriously large difference in the amount of affixes and variables available to the player. These problems were created largely by two major changes to the way that Diablo 3 interacts with the player.
Weapon DPS and Skill Damage and Defenses
Weapon DPS and Skill Damage: The correlation between the two has been devastating the item pool of Diablo 3 since the beginning. Diablo 3 focuses heavily on a simple formula that even a child could understand: Skill Damage = weapon damage + class stat + IAS + Average Damage + Critical Chance + Critical Damage. Any way you look at it all you have to do is stack these affixes and your damage will go up, and not only will YOUR damage go up but EVERYBODY'S damage will go up because Diablo is a game about using skills, and because every character uses skills... every character will follow that formula.
Diablo 2 on the other hand had a handful of affixes that were completely essential to one build and completely essential to another. Take druid for example: an elementalist had little use for crushing blow, but was utterly essential for a Lycan. At the same time Lycans REQUIRED lifesteal and IAS, but what was the point of it for elementalists. in contrast FCR and +fire skill damage was seen as one of the most desirable stats for a elements druids, but not a Lycan. Just a SINGLE class could find use in almost every single affix there was, but it completely depended on the build. The only affix that followed the Diablo 3 philosophy of 'one size fits all' is the +skill affix.
Defenses: Hit recovery, DR%, AR, and resistances. These are what made up the majority of how a character chose to stay alive in Diablo 2. If you couldn't hit a monster you upped your AR. If you were getting hit and died because you couldn't cast a spell, or were getting recovery locked, you found gear to up your hit recovery. If you bumped into Diablo with 40 fire resistance on hell chances were you'd be dead in seconds, so you looked around for pieces that would increase your resistance to that... and last but not least was DR%, which was the end all be all of defenses. It was the stat you saw on a piece of gear and KNEW it was good.. but at the same time it wasn't oversaturated in gear.
Diablo 3 decided to do away with the chance to miss. It got rid of any kind of hit recovery and let your character be a beast tank who could take hits but keep on the move. They consolidated resistances and DR% by trivializing elemental damage with the introduction to +all resist on EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF GEAR. There is no more CHOICE left - only +all resist.
I'm not trying to be a downer here, but ultimately the changes seen in Diablo 3 have consoladated and simplified the game so much that there literally aren't affixes that they can introduce that would make a substantial change to the game unless they changed the way the character interacts with its environment and skills... and I just don't see that happening. I haven't lost completely faith in Diablo 3 but I just don't see Blizzard calling their failure and re-reinventing the wheel to allow for such a change.
I haven't come back. I quit after about a month and occasionally check for game changes but all in all it just doesn't feel like Diablo. A lot of people say "you don't remember Diablo 2 like it actually was" but Ive put more hours into D2 in the past couple months than in D3 and I can tell you that it is still a much more satisfying game to play right now. Once they fix the boring loot issue, bring in some real challenge instead of just ramping the numbers per difficulty, and add some sort of ladder to remove this beta-worthy clusterfuck of changes reflected back into the game - then.. and only then, will I come back. Until then though, there is plenty to do, and plenty of work for Jay's team.
/sarcasm
It seems like a ton of people wish D3 was a D2 clone, because "it was better".
This brings me to a couple of comments...
-I remember Arctic gear dropping from hell Baal, and 99% of rares in the game being junk..
-I remember having to carry around a tome of tps and id scrolls(or talk to cain) to identify these crappy items just to find out that they are only valuable as ground decorations or gold... which had only 2 purposes in the game...(repairs and resurrecting mercs)
-I remember the only story for D2 (other than the cut-scenes), occurred if you manually listened to each npc, during which you could do NOTHING.
-I remember only a handful of viable end-game builds
-I remember having to farm for HR's which were rare as !@#% just to trade for gear that made your cookie-cutter build efficient.
-I remember much less dynamic combat.
-etc..
How can people say that this game sucks in comparison?
-Because Arctic gear was good for something. It had something that most gear pieces of that level didn't have, so if you happened to want to use it to an easy legit play through, it was available to you. Sure what the boss dropped was junk for you, but it wasn't always junk to everybody else.
-So now you don't have to carry around tomes of tp/id but in a regular run in Diablo 3 you most likely aresalvaging or selling over 100 pieces of loot just to keep up with repairs and make a tiny bit of side gold, which in this current economy is completely useless seeing as the most you'll come out with is 60-100K. What's different here?
-This is personal preference, but I enjoyed the story of Diablo 2 a lot more. Sure it was less convenient to listen, but at least it wasn't chocked full of predictable cliche's which makes the convenience of D3's story telling a lot less impressive.
-You remember wrong. The pally alone had Hammerdin, Auradin, FoHer, Smiter, Zealer, and charger, all playing much different then the rest. The amount of viable builds a paladin could go alone not to mention the less-viable but still workable builds almost surpasses the TOTAL amount of viable (very unique) builds that Diablo 3 players have options to. (And I'm not talking about changing Arcane Orb for Blizzard and calling it a new spec either).
I'll take time on this one since I really want to remind players how much variety D2 really had. I've already listed off the major Pally builds.. so.
so by my count you've got over 29 different builds that play completely different from each other and that's just from memory... Now I don't know how big your 'handfuls' are but I'm fairly sure there are only about a 'handful' (9 at best) viable builds in D3.
-Atleast the high runes were there and not there in mass. Apart from duping, if you got something as rare as jah, or bur, or god forbid you even got a ZOD or a Vex you felt GOOD. you KNEW you just struck gold but at the same time it could only net you 2 maybe 3 top tier items that didn't use those runes as runewords. You didn't find a 1900 DPS 2 hander just to sell it for 200 million gold just to look at the pretty numbers.
- Combat may have been less dynamic but the focus of Diablo 2 was on how you built your characters and what they could do. In Diablo 3 all you have is the dynamic combat and it stops there. The items are boring and generic ( Main stat, vit, resist all, IAS, CRIT, crit dmg on EVERY SINGLE ITEM YOU COULD GET IT ON), and the character development stops at the skill system.
To put it into perspective, lets look at shields. In Diablo 3, if you're going to use a shield it's going to be stormshield.. and that's about it - if you're using much else it's pretty subpar and there are thousands of shields similar to compare. In Diablo 2, Stormshield was a staple piece of gear for those in melee, the DR it provided was unparallelled with any other shield, but apart from its small bonuses and fast block rates that's all it was good for. Depending on your spec, you didn't always WANT Stormshield. You wanted HoZ, Spirit runeword, or lidless eye, exile, a specific rare shield or a few others.
To someone who is a veteran to the ARPG genre you could introduce them to Diablo 3 and I can confidently say that in less than 100 hours you could fully understand the scope of the game. you could understand what affixes you want on every character you play, you could understand the play style of every single build in the game and what items you want. Put that same player in Diablo 2 and I can guarantee that in the same 100 hours they could maybe learn 2 builds and what items to get on those builds to optimize them. I can almost guarantee that most players who play Diablo 3 or browse the forums couldn't even name me one D2 build gearset in completion without looking it up.
1
This is the biggest self-gratification post I've ever seen. You generalize people by age groups, which proves you don't have the tiniest of an idea of 'how the world works' because if you would then you would know age is not a factor in personality, nor is it in maturity. If you want to make yourself feel better because you're older and therefore 'a superior gamer' than go right ahead, but don't expect people to buy that load of shit you're trying to peddle.
I can't believe somebody out of High School could even come up with such a theory, haven't you learned you're not a unique snowflake anymore?
Regardless, given communication or not from the devs you will always have the people who complain and those who do not... and before forums there were STILL people who complained and those who did not - because that is how we operate as a fucking consumer. So it has absolutely nothing to do with 'instant gratification' nor does it have to do with the dev's communicating with us, because none of it will shape our opinions more than the game itself already is, and will always.
1
The two biggest issues are the itemization and the skill system. Itemization can be fixed with a patch... all they have to do is either get creative or look to other games like D2, TL2 or PoE for ideas on how to add complexity. Skill systems on the other hand is going to require either an expansion or a very.. very large patch to fix, simply because it requires an entire new addition to the system. While the game design is flawed, I think they are at the very least extremely aware of the itemization issues.
Ego's out of the way, I think Jay and his team are working very hard to work out the itemization issue. I have my personal suspicions that the reason patch 1.1 was delayed by *so* long wasn't only because of PVP. They know that patch 1.1 is either going to make or break the interest of a lot of people who've had wavering faiths about the future of D3, so they have to make it come out with the bang. No matter how popular PVP is, it's not the 'bang' they need to spark renewing interest in the game... and they KNOW. They know because we know. So with that being said I'm looking forward to seeing if my suspicion is right about 1.1.
THAT BEING SAID THOUGH, it's going to be interesting to see how they do it... since the skill system directly connects to itemization and affixes in general.
1
I completely agree - community is what holds games together. I remember back to the days of Socom and the amount of community there was on that game. There were no forums, and not much for chatrooms.. and the gameplay was your average run of the mill counter strike gameplay but the fact that you and your friends could play together constantly finding new lobbies, and your clans could make clan lobbies so you could all hang out while you enjoy the game you bought.. it made it so much more appealing to want to come and play for years. Diablo 3 needs a community, and the practically solo experience they have running right now isn't working. The chatrooms are nice but the way Diablo 2, and Warcraft 3 had it set up allowed for a presence of population that really made you feel like you were part of a larger place. From the lobby chat rooms that had 50 different characters staring you in the face, random stupid chats and of course the public named games, where you saw hundreds of people enjoying the game you bought, all in different parts of the game.
That is really what makes the world feel alive. Sure the auction house takes away from the very personal trading and bartering (which I feel is a very strong part of Diablo) but if we had public games a lot of high end traders would be making FT games because they wouldn't lose the ridiculous cut that the auction house takes.
I really hope your screenshots spoke to them, because I know that even the starcraft community has been complaining about the overall dead feeling of their lobby since 2010, and here we are doing the same thing with no change. Even if they don't take it part for part here's hoping they'll at least consider it.
1
1
Itemization is the lifeblood of any ARPG and Blizzards choice to reinvent the wheel was probably their biggest blunder. Simply put, itemization is the foundation of how the game will play out. It dictates every variable a character is able to change, and change promotes choice. Looking at the base itemization comparisons between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 any person with half a brain can see that there is a seriously large difference in the amount of affixes and variables available to the player. These problems were created largely by two major changes to the way that Diablo 3 interacts with the player.
Weapon DPS and Skill Damage and Defenses
Weapon DPS and Skill Damage: The correlation between the two has been devastating the item pool of Diablo 3 since the beginning. Diablo 3 focuses heavily on a simple formula that even a child could understand: Skill Damage = weapon damage + class stat + IAS + Average Damage + Critical Chance + Critical Damage. Any way you look at it all you have to do is stack these affixes and your damage will go up, and not only will YOUR damage go up but EVERYBODY'S damage will go up because Diablo is a game about using skills, and because every character uses skills... every character will follow that formula.
Diablo 2 on the other hand had a handful of affixes that were completely essential to one build and completely essential to another. Take druid for example: an elementalist had little use for crushing blow, but was utterly essential for a Lycan. At the same time Lycans REQUIRED lifesteal and IAS, but what was the point of it for elementalists. in contrast FCR and +fire skill damage was seen as one of the most desirable stats for a elements druids, but not a Lycan. Just a SINGLE class could find use in almost every single affix there was, but it completely depended on the build. The only affix that followed the Diablo 3 philosophy of 'one size fits all' is the +skill affix.
Defenses: Hit recovery, DR%, AR, and resistances. These are what made up the majority of how a character chose to stay alive in Diablo 2. If you couldn't hit a monster you upped your AR. If you were getting hit and died because you couldn't cast a spell, or were getting recovery locked, you found gear to up your hit recovery. If you bumped into Diablo with 40 fire resistance on hell chances were you'd be dead in seconds, so you looked around for pieces that would increase your resistance to that... and last but not least was DR%, which was the end all be all of defenses. It was the stat you saw on a piece of gear and KNEW it was good.. but at the same time it wasn't oversaturated in gear.
Diablo 3 decided to do away with the chance to miss. It got rid of any kind of hit recovery and let your character be a beast tank who could take hits but keep on the move. They consolidated resistances and DR% by trivializing elemental damage with the introduction to +all resist on EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF GEAR. There is no more CHOICE left - only +all resist.
I'm not trying to be a downer here, but ultimately the changes seen in Diablo 3 have consoladated and simplified the game so much that there literally aren't affixes that they can introduce that would make a substantial change to the game unless they changed the way the character interacts with its environment and skills... and I just don't see that happening. I haven't lost completely faith in Diablo 3 but I just don't see Blizzard calling their failure and re-reinventing the wheel to allow for such a change.
1
2
-Because Arctic gear was good for something. It had something that most gear pieces of that level didn't have, so if you happened to want to use it to an easy legit play through, it was available to you. Sure what the boss dropped was junk for you, but it wasn't always junk to everybody else.
-So now you don't have to carry around tomes of tp/id but in a regular run in Diablo 3 you most likely aresalvaging or selling over 100 pieces of loot just to keep up with repairs and make a tiny bit of side gold, which in this current economy is completely useless seeing as the most you'll come out with is 60-100K. What's different here?
-This is personal preference, but I enjoyed the story of Diablo 2 a lot more. Sure it was less convenient to listen, but at least it wasn't chocked full of predictable cliche's which makes the convenience of D3's story telling a lot less impressive.
-You remember wrong. The pally alone had Hammerdin, Auradin, FoHer, Smiter, Zealer, and charger, all playing much different then the rest. The amount of viable builds a paladin could go alone not to mention the less-viable but still workable builds almost surpasses the TOTAL amount of viable (very unique) builds that Diablo 3 players have options to. (And I'm not talking about changing Arcane Orb for Blizzard and calling it a new spec either).
I'll take time on this one since I really want to remind players how much variety D2 really had. I've already listed off the major Pally builds.. so.
Sorc: Blizzard Sorc, Meteorb Sorc, Chain Lightning Sorc, Fireorb sorc, Enchantress.
Druid: Wind druid, Arma druid, rabies werewolf, fireclaw werebear, fury werewolf.
Assassin: Monks, Kicksins, WWsins, Trappers
Barb: Bard, Thrower, WW, Frenzy, conc, zerkers.
Zons: Bowazons, Javazons, Jabazons
so by my count you've got over 29 different builds that play completely different from each other and that's just from memory... Now I don't know how big your 'handfuls' are but I'm fairly sure there are only about a 'handful' (9 at best) viable builds in D3.
-Atleast the high runes were there and not there in mass. Apart from duping, if you got something as rare as jah, or bur, or god forbid you even got a ZOD or a Vex you felt GOOD. you KNEW you just struck gold but at the same time it could only net you 2 maybe 3 top tier items that didn't use those runes as runewords. You didn't find a 1900 DPS 2 hander just to sell it for 200 million gold just to look at the pretty numbers.
- Combat may have been less dynamic but the focus of Diablo 2 was on how you built your characters and what they could do. In Diablo 3 all you have is the dynamic combat and it stops there. The items are boring and generic ( Main stat, vit, resist all, IAS, CRIT, crit dmg on EVERY SINGLE ITEM YOU COULD GET IT ON), and the character development stops at the skill system.
To put it into perspective, lets look at shields. In Diablo 3, if you're going to use a shield it's going to be stormshield.. and that's about it - if you're using much else it's pretty subpar and there are thousands of shields similar to compare. In Diablo 2, Stormshield was a staple piece of gear for those in melee, the DR it provided was unparallelled with any other shield, but apart from its small bonuses and fast block rates that's all it was good for. Depending on your spec, you didn't always WANT Stormshield. You wanted HoZ, Spirit runeword, or lidless eye, exile, a specific rare shield or a few others.
To someone who is a veteran to the ARPG genre you could introduce them to Diablo 3 and I can confidently say that in less than 100 hours you could fully understand the scope of the game. you could understand what affixes you want on every character you play, you could understand the play style of every single build in the game and what items you want. Put that same player in Diablo 2 and I can guarantee that in the same 100 hours they could maybe learn 2 builds and what items to get on those builds to optimize them. I can almost guarantee that most players who play Diablo 3 or browse the forums couldn't even name me one D2 build gearset in completion without looking it up.
That is what makes Diablo 2.. SO much better.