I'm asking this legitimately because I keep trying to find a reason to come back.
I can currently clear inferno on my severely "undergeared" char because the gear on this game is so strong, and inferno has been so nerfed.
This would be okay if there were good pvp + ladder + a thriving economy + character building and skill trees/stat points, but none of that really exists.
Since I can farm mp0-1 inferno with like, 1mil in gear, I don't really understand where my incentive is.
What do you guys do in diablo 3 to make it fun? Are there any hardcore players? Is it better than softcore?
I was originally really looking forward to playing hardcore with some level of difficulty and risk when the game was released, but now it feels so easy and unchallenging for no real purpose. Currently my only two incentive I suppose are trying to max paragon level and power up my character for higher MP's, but in the auction house I see 50 pages of every legendary not selling, so I don't really understand the purpose of being that efficient.
Well i impressed by the patch in way, that they still working on the game. I mean, right now it feels like subscription based mmo, since in about every patch blizz add some content. I wonder how long will this going.
You must not play too many games with real-money store/commodity sales. Their are plenty of games that continue to provide content when they include some form of real-money transactions. Even PS3/Xbox games get steady content updates with map packs, cosmetic items, etc.
I'm not sure why people are acting like D3 should recieve no changes when we are steadily giving them money through the RMAH. It is very, very common in todays industry to continually improve games, and provide content.....many times even without a commodity store. But when a game includes any sort of real-money investment, even when it is only cosmetic, I think it is expected to get steady patches and content.
Especially when the intitial product fell so short of gamers expectations.
I strongly agree with you here. The standard for most games is to recieve continual improvement and patching/light content changes, even for games with NO commodity store and NO long term playability.
D3 is a game with heavy Real money trasaction, costs as much as 3 top quality steam games, and every content patch benefits their wallets. It's also a huge title with popularity behind it. Zero patching/content would be a bad idea for developers' money flow, as well as very cheap on their parts considering the amount of money this game has raked in from launch to now. (how many millions of copies sold multiplied by $60, and 7 months of raw RMAH transactions).
Please understand this is not some selfless improvement the company is doing on a waning game; they want you to buy RMAH items and that means upgrading things like gems and gear. Even if it weren't, it's simply standard in this day even for cheap games and non subscription games to receive some quality treatment from the devs after launch. They want you to stay around and buy an expansion and ultimately buy more RMAH items.
Obviously the company is a business, and they want to make money, but please don't treat them like a charity company who grinds away their free time thanklessly to improve the game for the users.
Why did the discussion lead to weather Diablo 3 is a MMO or not? I think the OP takes up alot of valid points about the state of games being created for no more than friday nights entertainment and thrown into the bin the day after.
I don´t think the game was designed to be thrown in the bin really, but considering the countless years of development, they really landed a shitty product. Shallow, short, tirelessly repetitive (without being nowhere near any fun). The biggest upside I can give Diablo 3 is that I find it extremely beautiful and visually appealing.
Since your post touched on the main point of my post, I'l address you. I feel it's actually a step further than games just being a night's entertainment to be thrown away. I feel that games are purposefully designed for people who don't look for any depth in games andare carless with their money.
It's like gaming companies are moving towards impulse buyers. I believe they are basically "scamming" players into buying poorly made games where very little effort was put into them.
Even simplistic games such as Pokemon took advantage of aspects like elemental damage being a large part of the game. Were the diablo 3 developers really that bad at creating a meaningful, depth-filled game? No, there's no way. They must have intentionally aimed at creating a shallow game, and I should have caught on to this from the annual pass. Why exactly was this annual pass deal created? The developers wanted players to purchase diablo, play it for a month, buy a few items on the RMAH, get bored, and then ultimately go back to WoW.
Cha-Ching! they make money because you're now playing both of their games, where if Diablo had a great amount of replayability and depth then some users might give WoW up, for a f2p game. That's not good for their wallets.
As for the rest of you, you really need to rethink your concept of an MMORPG.
" 1. MMORPG 837 up, 194 down
An acronym for "Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game". Players play the video game competing against and cooperating with other players connected to an online network. Most require players to purchase the software and pay a subscription fee to participate. "
Diablo 3 fits every single one of these descriptions, and 837 people agree that this description is the accurate definition of an MMORPG. Therefore, Diablo 3 is in fact an MMORPG the same way Diablo 2 was. If you can argue this with verifiable facts, you can stay in the discussion.
The term has been around since the 1990's, for most any game where you sink large amounts of time interconnected in a 'persistent' world (Read: A static world you can log in and log out of). I've been playing games since the early 80's, so I think I know the difference,
If you define a persistent world only as a game where you're always logged in to the same server, then I guess raiding on WoW is not an MMORPG either, because an instanced server === creating a game on diablo.
I understand why some would consider D3 an MMO(rpg), and I respect their view on this.
But as far as I'm concerned, D3 isn't one. The world can hardly be called persistent. Only 4 people can interact at once (and through very limited interactions, no jumping, no dancing, no dueling, mostly moving around together).
Aat most it can be considered a hybrid (with the AH as you pointed out and public games) but leaning heavily towards the single-player story-driven experience, with the possibility of coop.
As such, I don't really think your original argument is correct.
As I agree with you that it can be considered a hybrid, I don't believe whatsoever that it isn't an MMO considering that it came down from 8 players in diablo 2 with full stat allocation and skill trees, and in regards to a persistent world, it's hardly different from logging into a raid instance that resets. With that said the classification isn't relevant, and the game isn't changing to meet our needs based solely on how we classify it. but, the ultimate review of the game is whether it has improved or not from diablo 2. What matters is that what was expected, and what was told to us throughout development (I could cite far too many things), and what was delivered were very different things.
I do believe the game, from a business perspective, was designed not to be as fun as it could have been. Quite frankly, any game where the DPS of a character ranges from 10-20k to 200-400k in the same difficulty is very badly designed.
On the same note, the core designs of the game are very, very flawed. It would need a full makeover inside to out in order to be anything decent. I feel most negative reviews are actually very easygoing when they give it a 4-5/10. I would rate it in the area of a 2/10 to 3/10 at best.
(colloquial) A massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
Action role-playing games (abbreviated action RPG, action/RPG, or ARPG) form a loosely defined sub-genre of role-playing video games that incorporate elements of action or action-adventure games, emphasizing real-time action where the player has direct control over characters, instead of turn-based or menu-based combat. These games often use combat systems similar to hack and slash or shooter games.[1]
Zero(pS) pretty much explained it right.
So you're basically saying that any game that isn't turn based from the 1990's is an ARPG? Think again. If I made a checklist of what you've just posted, almost every game in recent memory would be an ARPG.
An MMO is simply any game where many players are interconnected in a (mostly) persistent world, and usually revolving around the creation of a character. Diablo has always fit into this category. This is in comparison to single players games/co-op games, or RTS style games, or simulation games, or FPS games.
Back in the day, when I first started playing MMO-style gaming, I always envisioned they would be wildly successful amongst gaming companies as more and more companies (I am using this broadly, to encompass all games from massively played ARPGS like the diablo series, to full on MMO games like World of Warcraft or Everquest.)
To me, small subscription fees were incredibly cheap even to very low income people and in turn you got limitless freedom to play MMO games with huge amounts of depth. An entire year of gaming, plus the base cost of the game, might only rack up something like $150.
What you got from this subscription fee were regular updates and content management, protection from outside forces such as bots and hacks, timely bug and exploit control and TIMELY patches. The game was treated more like something you'd invest time into with the promise that in-game economies were handled delicately, or random stat affixes wouldn't suddenly be changed.
I was quite sure that the horizon would have competitive, in-depth MMO games that would make World of Warcraft look bad. As time went on, however, I began to see an odd change in the gaming industry: Trends of companies whipping out very short-term games with f2p models but zero replayability and content, and very poor design. Trends of things like the RMAH, or cosmetic pay items.
Don't get me wrong, I loved many legendary games which weren't MMO games or ARPGS and lacked replayability, such as Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasies. but, I have to say: I saw atleast some level of subscription based, deeper games with overarching stories that took on more commitment.
It seems the model for the gaming industry, to me, is that they simply want to whip out as many ****ty games as possible, with garbage stories and no depth, and when they've ran their course, the companies simply move on to the next ****ty game with the same promises of amazing gameplay and features that either never come into play or are nothing that they're chalked up to be. I firmly believe Diablo 3 is one of these ****ty games. I also believe the game was basically designed to get boring relatively fast intentionally except to the extreme fans (of which I used classify myself) who would hang around. I don't think blizzard wanted the game to overshadow WoW or the future Titan, because it becomes great, they need to keep a level of commitment to mentoring the game that wouldn't be profitable if it took sales away from other games. If blizzard can dupe players into buying a ****ty diablo 3, maybe spending some money on the RMAH, and then ultimately quitting for promises of better games like Mists of Pandaria or Titan, they've succeeded in selling you two products instead of one. Maybe I'm wrong.
I only played for the first month or so, and I made a good amount off the RMAH, so I have nothing to complain over.. but looking at the evidence:
-Annual Pass system at launch appeared to be an omen of bad faith from blizzard, ensuring players wouldn't stick around for 'too long' on diablo 3.
-A number of incredibly cheap band-aid fixes such as when they simply implemented 'rolling blackouts' on the AH because of too much traffic, making the game feel like some kind of a garbage freeware program
-Blatant lies to the more simple minded communitarians: When discussing stat and skill trees, blizzard frequently uses VERY flawed, and very poor arguments, sometimes that don't even make sense. What exactly is 'artificial complexity' ? An entire video game IS artificial complexity. Does blizzard seek to woo High-Schoolers with big words that chalk up to nothing?
When discussing stat/skill trees, blizzard hands out samples packets of fallacies to it's userbase, stating things like "they just don't work" or "one mistake and your character is wasted" or the absolute worst "everyone just ends up using cookie builds anyway". Does blizzard really want to attempt to disprove Linear Algebra? because that's all a stat point system is. I could write an entire essay on why this system has worked for MANY games, and does so without ever alienating a casual playerbase, and most importantly, how it creates an evolutionary metagame by adding a static and unchanging portion "stats and skills" of your customizable character, to a fast paced and frequently changing portion that you swap out all the time "gear". I could argue how many games have never had a single 'cookie cutter' build through their lifetime, much like MOBA games never have a cookie cutter build on heroes.. because, yes, MOBA games have stat systems too and they're wildly successful. I don't think I need to write it out, however.
-Blizzard threw in the garbage huge, promised portions of the game after spending years 'iterating' (the word they love to use) on their game, even when most of the game was complete in 2008 and it mysteriously took another 4 years to be released without explanation.
-Blizzard introduced very, very depthless and very boring classes into d3 that really don't belong except to simpletons that are fresh from WoW, and even copied many world of warcraft skills and names.
-Blizzard had a master skeleton of a game from diablo 2, A game which could have evolved into a transition between an MMO and an ARPG without losing the Diablo feel, and ultimately they settled for extremely dimensionless mechanics such as 'Armor reducing all types of damage', 'stats like All Resist', and ridiculously watered down mechanics such as 'Dodge allowing spells to miss'. This "roll all stats into one big SURVIVABILITY stat" mindset, in conjunction with poorly thought out systems such as weapon damage effecting all spells, makes for a game with absolutely no depth whatsoever.
When I look at this game, and it's irritating 'FILLER SPELL' idea where you spam a 1-mana cost skill over and over after mana dumping, I've got to say that it feels like it has a very large and specific target audience: People who buy games on the fly without any intent to play them with any level of commitment or longevity (better known as "Game-Hoppers"), people who play too many FPS games (this is where the annoying filler system really hits hard: It feels like blizzard is subtely attempting to attract FPS players with this system, similar to the way you'd repeatedly fire a gun), and people who buy games for other people with no knowledge of what's fun or not.
I do not believe there is a war versus casuals or hardcore players as many do, because I've seen a number of games or skeletons thereof which can support both without fail. But, I always believed the rampant game-hopping where you purchase a game for $50-60, play it for a month or two, then drop it mindlessly and move on to the next popular title would stay away from MMO and ARPG gaming. Again, there are many legendary games such as those everyone idolizes, but they are legendary because of their fantastic stories and characters that live on forever in people's hearts (the SNES dreamteam of Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and FF's). But I've started to understand that era is dead, and we now have this new business oriented gaming where companies have ****ty game after ****ty game fed to the community which crowds of people hope will be the big game that everyone sticks around on and plays for years, and becomes famous, only to be disappointed. Get your hopes up for the expansion or DLC or sequel or competitor's title and find out the same: that it sucks.
And as for a penultimate review of Diablo 3: It lacks exploration, depth, any scheme of replayability, any level of number balance across the boards, and it ultimately feels like it was built from scrapyard parts of the real series.
If this is the new direction of PC/MMO gaming, count me out.
I never said the prices of items would go for what they go for today. I said they would go for as much as that economy could support. Proportionally, it would be the same as it is now - way too much.
Really, sound economic models work for 2 people to billions. There is no "different economic model" that works for different sizes of populations. That is silly. If your economy doesn't work with 10 million, it sure as hell won't work for 10 or 10,000 either.
Bots don't destroy economies either. They only accelerate problems in the design of the game that exist whether the bots were there or not. I don't like bots. In fact, I hate them. But even if bots didn't exist, the problems would still exist if the game were to remain exactly the same. Bots merely accelerate the economy by making it more productive, so if there are problems with its design, the bots will uncover those design problems much more quickly than the player base will.
The only thing that is going to fix the economy is a measured amount of incentives to destroy items - probably for crafting supplies for an entirely new crafting system - and bind on equip on all rares and up. Whether bots exists in this economy or not, the item saturation would slow down to a crawl and items would maintain their value for much longer periods of time. I am not saying they would always maintain their exact value - it would still depreciate, but not nearly as fast. In fact, there would be a bottom for many items if the crafting components were always desirable, and the goal would be to create so many craftables that even garbage items would be valuable to some extent in large quantities.
Typically in games where crafting is always a good thing to be doing, the bottom for the crappiest items is actually quite high, and they may even see higher value as a ladder season were to go on. This is not unheard of. Crafting components in d2 were worth more as the season went on, even with the existence of bots, so this is already proven to be true. Crafting just has to be desirable for this to happen, and in d2, it was.
Of course, even very high 5- and 6-property rares and higher quality legendaries should salvage to the best crafting components. The combination of high-rolled mods should dictate what craftables you should get. This makes all items useful to some extent. Even if you get a highly rolled bleeding, thorns, life on kill, etc. item, it may salvage to a really nice craftable. You can have themes where combinations of certain properties produce a very specific craftable, like a combo of life on kill, life steal and life on hit.
And those near-perfect rare shoulders that are always outclassed by Vile Wards could potentially salvage into one of the best crafting supplies, making it much more useful than it is today currently.
There should be lots of unique crafting recipes to take advantage of all of these permutations of craftables. All of the recipes should be worth making, and offer different things that you can't find on dropped gear. These recipies should make use of lots of common craftables - perhaps 10 or 15 different kinds - or just a few very rare crafting components. Some of the best crafts will be a combination of them. You want to enrich the itemization of the game and make the item find more enjoyable while also improving the state of the economy.
Having gold sinks, like crafting, enchanting, socketing, buffs, etc. will also help, but item saturation is a bigger problem which item destruction and binding both take care of. If gold continues to inflate, at least you'll be able to find safe-havens in commodities and unbounded, quality gear with the kind of system I'm talking about. You'll be able to leave the game for a month and not have half of your wealth wiped out.
the system i'm suggesting is taken exactly from WoW and many other games and they have very successful economies.
I agree that we need crafting, enchanting, socketing and many other things but I still believe that huge unchecked economies in a totally randomized game full of botting is very bad. I've played many, many MMO and similarly styled games and almost all of them have servers which are broken up into smaller "countries" so to speak. I've never played a game until now with a running economy that was purely randomized, where gear was just spit out into the masses and cheapened rapidly. It "progresses" people when they shouldn't be "progressed".
A really succesful 400k dps barbarian can chuck out a weapon just a few tiers worse than his for a very cheap price, and somebody who's running mp0 or mp1-2 could buy it when they shouldn't be able to afford it.
Today I can gear up a char with a few million gold that I couldn't even begin to do just a few months ago. I'm not asking for progression raiding in Diablo 3 but linking veteran players who have no need for moderately good gear with newbie players or casuals is really bad and destructive when the game can be cleared so easily on the hardest difficulty, because not many things have any value.
This is also partially due to the game being too easy.
Splitting up the player base will not solve economic problems. If the economy model doesn't work for million players, it will be even worse if there are less players. Imagine an economy of 10 players. Once those 10 people get the best gear, everything they find is even more worthless than it probably is now. At least with newer players, the gear they pickup might have been valuable to someone. You will basically have 10 people compete for the best items, so you can expect items to go for insane amounts in ratio to what that economy has produced up to that point.
The best way to solve the economy is to have purposeful item destruction and binding. It needs to be designed to work with 10 players or 10 million.
That's not only incorrect but unrealistic.
You're assuming 10 people all play an extremely high amount and found top-tear gear after a few hundred to thousand hours (Think that millions of people even now with their combined playtime haven't flooded the AH with perfect gear, so 10 people might take years and years)
Realistically you'd have something like 1-2 people who play lots every day, 2-4 people that play on average a few hours a week (medium) and the rest of the players who only play somewhat.
In the current economy, botters and people at the top level farm and spam out tons of midtear gear for incredibly cheap, trickling their progression down much faster.
Items can't go for more than the 10 players can afford, and since there would be significantly less gold inflation, the most ridiculous price would probably be nothing near what we see today. Rate of gold making by farming and grinding barely increases, but the amount of gold in the server goes sky-high with the number of players sharing a server.
However yes, some gear breaking and BoE items are nice, but not every item should be BoE.
and just to throw an example on the table economy wise - even on a big market as the actual EU server - there was a Norse player with a topic here on diablo fans bragging about his 6000 eur gain on rmah - and part of his achievement was the fact that at a certain time he bought every high end echoing fury that entered the market in order to keep the price of this type of item at his desired (high) price...
so - he had a monopole on echoing fury - bad for the market as one had to pay an inflated price.
in a way bigger market that player should not have had the power to buy all those items. neither one or two players... the market should be so big that it would be free and the price would be regulated by a pure demand and offer.
the same thing is happening now with leoric signet.... there are maybe 10 players tops that hold most of these items (probably hardcore farmers that ran act 2 normal mp10 milions of times to get them). One can easily spot this fact - there are at least 20 items 18-19mil a piece all posted/reposted at the same time...
cut the number of players down or servers up and these kind of people would have a better chance at making business at the expense of the average player who gathers money through gameplay to spend on 1 or 2 good items not snipping the ah for countless hours for bargains.
or maybe Crashhh1 is one of these players having the fun on the ah not the game and is lobbying for better conditions for his type of fun time
uh.... what? how can someone have a monopoly on something in diablo 3? it doesn't make any sense
what you just described was someone farming an item in a standard working economy and making a profit off of it because other people weren't doing that, aka how the real world works.
if you cut the number of players you'd have a fraction of the gold inflation and the average player would be able to afford things just by playing the game. do you.. understand economics at all?
seems like you're someone who enjoys a game with zero economy and likes having 99% of items worthless.
btw lots of people enjoy playing the game of economics, that's what an economist is. look it up.
Having considered it. I think this would actually be the best way to fix both the economy and botting issue.
I would support a diablo 3 where there were many servers, which locked after a certain max population of characters. There could be a variety of sizes from big to small servers. They could unlock if characters were deleted. New ones could be created if necessitated, and transfers to other servers could be allowed similar to WoW.
I believe diablo 3's economy is not designed well for numbers in the millions, neither is it designed for extremely smallscale play. I could be okay with droprate altering for different servers.
This would be great for the economy because extremely old characters would be less likely to affect new characters, and gold inflation on an old server would not be linked to a normal, booming economy on a new server.
This would be absolutely gold for hardcore servers because you'd always have a chance to enter an old server when a character dies (if the game isn't too easy as it currently is).
I believe the key to combatting botting isn't to try to stop very small scale botting, but massive scale organized botting which can be stopped or slowed or prevented if a server were locked, and it would be much much easier to spot in smaller localized servers. Blizzard themselves could clear out servers a few at a time and move on. Economies would strongly benefit.
The final benefit of this is that it would give incentive to reroll even without stat/skillpoints on both softcore and hardcore - if you got tired of an aged, locked server, you could start anew with a friend on a fresh economic server.
It would create endgame replayability and PvE incentive to continue playing without wiping servers because you might get excited to try to be the first paragon 100 on a different server, or find the best item there first.
I would personally expand on this by then allowing open world PvP so that an element of community can be brought back into the game. (Small localized servers + PvP = competition & community)
Afaik, the number doesn't come from Blizzard but was mentioned in a D3 fan blog, along with their own calculation, so I assumed it's not coming from Blizzard.
Anyways: Of course there aren't 3 billion *useful* combinations, but there are certainly more than 2, once they fix the imbalance of some spells and make other neglected spells more viable. It's by the way what they're doing for 15 years now, every patch tries to nerf overpowered or buff underpowered spells (in WoW or D2) to some extent.
Ah, there's a huge problem here and it's the illusion of combinations.
Whenever you need a guide on creating strong variety and flavor in games, just look no further than Dota 2 or League of Legends style MOBA games.
The key is to create a limited number of choices in skills, but a high variety of situations and complexity.
For example if I was forced between taking a healing skill and a passive skill which reduced damage, I would call this two different skill builds. If I encountered a boss that silenced me, or drained my mana, I might rather have the passive skill that reduced damage. If there was a boss that only dealt huge, one shotting attacks, I might abandon both the heal and the passive and take a damage skill.
I call this variety.
The problem in diablo 3 is that there are too many generic damaging abilities, but many of them cannot be used at the same time. Other skills have too large of a CD or are only useful when coupled with passives that gimp a build too much. Many skills have stuns which are not useful in PvE, and some other strange skills which have no purpose in the game. Again, adding this to bad mechanic designs like armor reducing all types of damage, or all resist being a stat, or elemental damage having no place in the game, or being able to dodge spells.. you've got a bad game there.
Furthermore, many classes have large staples that need to be taken, like huge self-buffs and big cooldowns.
No one ever said dota 2 or League of Legends said "there's not enough variety in these heroes" or "these heroes are too permanent, I need to be able to swap skills on the fly."
It's about layers of permanence and limits, and skills that have their place and use. That's how enjoyable classes and characters are made.
No one will pay $60 for a one act expansion now either. It will have to be a huge expansion, or a very cheap one.
I don't think they'll charge 60 for it, but even if they would charge 100, many people would buy it; probably even me. Because you know what - I'm a DiabloFan, and I still have faith in Blizzard. And seeing you giving "complete dogshit" still a "4/10", I wouldn't be surprised if we'd see you around as well. Because let's face it - there are many games which are worse than "dogshit" and on a one to ten scale would have a hard time to even scratch at the one.
The only point I can agree on with you, and the reason why probably many people here don't vote for the higher options of their level of satisfcation, is that Blizzard set extreme expectations they haven't met. I wouldn't say they disappointed me as much as they did for you, but given how great some of their old games were and how much time I spent on their games in the 90s, I expected more. I knew that SC2 would be nothing for me because it's all about micro and esports, but even the interface was a huge disappointment; and similarly is not finished yet in my eyes (and the interface isn't either). But it's still a good game and better than many others. The bad ratings are all about expectations, in my opinion.
The expectations came from basic assumptions promised by blizzard
-Bot control
-Gold being valuable and not extremely inflated
-Stat and skill points that gave the user control over his characters' build
-More content and features than d2, not less.
Many people are exaggerating the effect of nostalgia and expectations on the diablo 3 ratings given. I've always known d2 was a pretty good game (7-8 in my eyes) with many problems that could've been a 9.5-10 if it had more work put into it. I still wouldn't go back to diablo 2 even though I liked it a great deal. I would be bored.
It's standard to expect that when a sequel is released, it will improve and innovate a great deal on the previous title, there were many obvious directions that diablo could have taken. I wouldn't have minded if it went in a direction more like a 2d, isometric MMO (not full on MMO), or any other direction. The simple fact, though, is diablo 3 has significantly less than the fans required of a new age sequel to an oldschool game that was very well received.
Blizzard was a much smaller company when diablo 1&2 was created and there was a great deal of laxity with d2's problems.
Furthermore, the entire concept of an MMO was just starting to come to life on the internet.
It had the proper look and feel of a dark, gothic game, it had stat points, skill points, and the acts were roughly the same length as d3.
We had charms, realistic effects like a limit of arrows/quivers, jewels and skulls to socket, a horadric cube, et cetera.
Many fans of the time imagined that a diablo 3 would take these functions and others, and create a massive series with more content and playtime and continue growing.
I may have even played diablo 2 longer than I enjoyed it with the imagination that in the future, it would be expanded upon. What we got was a very late sequel that was slapped together unthoughtfully.
Right now it's all about maxing out damage and efficiency, therefore you either go Archon or you have fun and try out the other 3 billion builds.
No offense, I normally dont take ppl serious that say this, they're usually simpletons that get bedazzled by number combinations with slightly altered graphics from the blizz team. There are a select few things that cause real variation amongst builds, and no matter how many numbers you throw at them, they don't change. Blizzard did not do great with them.
Barb and wizard are okay classes, not amazing but playable and somewhat fun.
Monk and WD are atrocious to play, it's hard to even log on to them. Don't know how anyone stands it.
Never played DH but it seems like it's between the two.
I would rate the game at a generous 4/10 as of now, to me its complete dogshit. Anyone following the game since 2008 has known that they did not deliver most of what was promised, and the game in general took 7-8 years to be released with less content than d2.
I played the game for approximately 1 month and haven't returned for more than an hour or two at a time per month.
Without even going into the deeper problems I would call it a stagnant trashcan of a game. I don't think d2 was perfect by a longshot and even back in the early 2000's I said it needed work. But expectations were that a very long development cycle would lead to a great game that would continue by building on the weaknesses and strengths of d2.
What was produced was very disappointing, and after a few band-aids nothing has improved it. It does seem that blizzards' "when it's done" attitude simply does not pay off. Seems the game was a massive joke.
Having watched some of the developers' 'in the making' videos and kept up with the game since 2008, blizzard seems to allow it's employees to simply screw around and throw paper balls at eachother in the office all day, repeatedly develop systems and then throw them away with no real goal or purpose in the game until people finally get fed up and a game is released which is still unsatisfactory.
I haven't enjoyed any blizzard games since diablo2/starcraft 2 era, WoW being a very boring game in itself. SC2 was okay but redundant and un-innovative.
"It is boring and I have stopped playing until it becomes better in the future."
Of course, I've stopped playing since the end-ish of May, and it still doesn't look like they are going to fix the game, or add on to it in a meaningful way. Most likely, Blizzard is saving anything substantial for the inevitable expansion. The question is, will that expansion actually improve this game? Right now, there is nothing redeeming about this game. There is nothing done in this game that improves upon the genre, and nearly every other ARPG out now (and coming out from the looks of it) does it better.
I have hopes that this game will change for the better, but those hopes are not high, nor are they realistic.
Yes, many completely free games like path of exile are actually going to be able to compete with D3. Torchlight 2's open modding is probably the only thing that made it lose out and not compete.
D3 seems like a game that might've had a chance in the 2006-2007 era, maybe late 2008, but now it feels very weak.
No one will pay $60 for a one act expansion now either. It will have to be a huge expansion, or a very cheap one.
The Monk had potential to be awesome, but Jay Wilson designed it to forever live in the Barbarian's shadow. I like my Demon Hunter but I would much rather have the Assassin from D2 replace it. A lot of D3 is copy pasta from WoW, why didn't Wilson add the cool classes from it as well?
Yes unfortunately there are many direct skillports from WoW for example Ignore Pain (shield wall),
Many names were directly copied too
I feel it's too hard to make a character that excels at just a few things very much and has large weaknesses. Runes across the board are all extremely similar. Most of them just add a moderate chance for a small effect, or a minor dps change.
Talents are mostly very badly designed and very limiting in all the wrong ways.
They started off nicely with the wiz and barb being the more interesting of the classes, having some cool skills like leap and slow time,, but they didn't take them and make their skills niche and useful, and then the next 3 classes were utter garbage. I feel it could've been much different.
High CC builds, utility builds, defensive and supportive builds all seem to lack a place in the game. Many skills, runes, and talents and are very very similar and don't add anything to the game at all. I would rate the witch doctor as the most garbage class ever invented.
Elements being meaningful were scratched out from all resist, too.
Builds with things like reflect/thorns or high mobility seem to be very much a joke build with no real point. The only niche is damage. Boss design and not overinflating damage on items and weapons could have changed this.
0
I can currently clear inferno on my severely "undergeared" char because the gear on this game is so strong, and inferno has been so nerfed.
This would be okay if there were good pvp + ladder + a thriving economy + character building and skill trees/stat points, but none of that really exists.
Since I can farm mp0-1 inferno with like, 1mil in gear, I don't really understand where my incentive is.
What do you guys do in diablo 3 to make it fun? Are there any hardcore players? Is it better than softcore?
I was originally really looking forward to playing hardcore with some level of difficulty and risk when the game was released, but now it feels so easy and unchallenging for no real purpose. Currently my only two incentive I suppose are trying to max paragon level and power up my character for higher MP's, but in the auction house I see 50 pages of every legendary not selling, so I don't really understand the purpose of being that efficient.
3
I strongly agree with you here. The standard for most games is to recieve continual improvement and patching/light content changes, even for games with NO commodity store and NO long term playability.
D3 is a game with heavy Real money trasaction, costs as much as 3 top quality steam games, and every content patch benefits their wallets. It's also a huge title with popularity behind it. Zero patching/content would be a bad idea for developers' money flow, as well as very cheap on their parts considering the amount of money this game has raked in from launch to now. (how many millions of copies sold multiplied by $60, and 7 months of raw RMAH transactions).
Please understand this is not some selfless improvement the company is doing on a waning game; they want you to buy RMAH items and that means upgrading things like gems and gear. Even if it weren't, it's simply standard in this day even for cheap games and non subscription games to receive some quality treatment from the devs after launch. They want you to stay around and buy an expansion and ultimately buy more RMAH items.
Obviously the company is a business, and they want to make money, but please don't treat them like a charity company who grinds away their free time thanklessly to improve the game for the users.
0
Since your post touched on the main point of my post, I'l address you. I feel it's actually a step further than games just being a night's entertainment to be thrown away. I feel that games are purposefully designed for people who don't look for any depth in games andare carless with their money.
It's like gaming companies are moving towards impulse buyers. I believe they are basically "scamming" players into buying poorly made games where very little effort was put into them.
Even simplistic games such as Pokemon took advantage of aspects like elemental damage being a large part of the game. Were the diablo 3 developers really that bad at creating a meaningful, depth-filled game? No, there's no way. They must have intentionally aimed at creating a shallow game, and I should have caught on to this from the annual pass. Why exactly was this annual pass deal created? The developers wanted players to purchase diablo, play it for a month, buy a few items on the RMAH, get bored, and then ultimately go back to WoW.
Cha-Ching! they make money because you're now playing both of their games, where if Diablo had a great amount of replayability and depth then some users might give WoW up, for a f2p game. That's not good for their wallets.
As for the rest of you, you really need to rethink your concept of an MMORPG.
http://www.urbandict...php?term=mmorpg
" 1. MMORPG 837 up, 194 down
An acronym for "Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game". Players play the video game competing against and cooperating with other players connected to an online network. Most require players to purchase the software and pay a subscription fee to participate. "
Diablo 3 fits every single one of these descriptions, and 837 people agree that this description is the accurate definition of an MMORPG. Therefore, Diablo 3 is in fact an MMORPG the same way Diablo 2 was. If you can argue this with verifiable facts, you can stay in the discussion.
The term has been around since the 1990's, for most any game where you sink large amounts of time interconnected in a 'persistent' world (Read: A static world you can log in and log out of). I've been playing games since the early 80's, so I think I know the difference,
If you define a persistent world only as a game where you're always logged in to the same server, then I guess raiding on WoW is not an MMORPG either, because an instanced server === creating a game on diablo.
0
As I agree with you that it can be considered a hybrid, I don't believe whatsoever that it isn't an MMO considering that it came down from 8 players in diablo 2 with full stat allocation and skill trees, and in regards to a persistent world, it's hardly different from logging into a raid instance that resets. With that said the classification isn't relevant, and the game isn't changing to meet our needs based solely on how we classify it. but, the ultimate review of the game is whether it has improved or not from diablo 2. What matters is that what was expected, and what was told to us throughout development (I could cite far too many things), and what was delivered were very different things.
I do believe the game, from a business perspective, was designed not to be as fun as it could have been. Quite frankly, any game where the DPS of a character ranges from 10-20k to 200-400k in the same difficulty is very badly designed.
On the same note, the core designs of the game are very, very flawed. It would need a full makeover inside to out in order to be anything decent. I feel most negative reviews are actually very easygoing when they give it a 4-5/10. I would rate it in the area of a 2/10 to 3/10 at best.
So you're basically saying that any game that isn't turn based from the 1990's is an ARPG? Think again. If I made a checklist of what you've just posted, almost every game in recent memory would be an ARPG.
An MMO is simply any game where many players are interconnected in a (mostly) persistent world, and usually revolving around the creation of a character. Diablo has always fit into this category. This is in comparison to single players games/co-op games, or RTS style games, or simulation games, or FPS games.
0
D3 is in fact an MMO, because the entire economy is linked together and has a resulting effect on all players, who may all join eachothers' game.
2
To me, small subscription fees were incredibly cheap even to very low income people and in turn you got limitless freedom to play MMO games with huge amounts of depth. An entire year of gaming, plus the base cost of the game, might only rack up something like $150.
What you got from this subscription fee were regular updates and content management, protection from outside forces such as bots and hacks, timely bug and exploit control and TIMELY patches. The game was treated more like something you'd invest time into with the promise that in-game economies were handled delicately, or random stat affixes wouldn't suddenly be changed.
I was quite sure that the horizon would have competitive, in-depth MMO games that would make World of Warcraft look bad.
As time went on, however, I began to see an odd change in the gaming industry: Trends of companies whipping out very short-term games with f2p models but zero replayability and content, and very poor design. Trends of things like the RMAH, or cosmetic pay items.
Don't get me wrong, I loved many legendary games which weren't MMO games or ARPGS and lacked replayability, such as Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasies.
but, I have to say: I saw atleast some level of subscription based, deeper games with overarching stories that took on more commitment.
It seems the model for the gaming industry, to me, is that they simply want to whip out as many ****ty games as possible, with garbage stories and no depth, and when they've ran their course, the companies simply move on to the next ****ty game with the same promises of amazing gameplay and features that either never come into play or are nothing that they're chalked up to be. I firmly believe Diablo 3 is one of these ****ty games. I also believe the game was basically designed to get boring relatively fast intentionally except to the extreme fans (of which I used classify myself) who would hang around.
I don't think blizzard wanted the game to overshadow WoW or the future Titan, because it becomes great, they need to keep a level of commitment to mentoring the game that wouldn't be profitable if it took sales away from other games.
If blizzard can dupe players into buying a ****ty diablo 3, maybe spending some money on the RMAH, and then ultimately quitting for promises of better games like Mists of Pandaria or Titan, they've succeeded in selling you two products instead of one. Maybe I'm wrong.
I only played for the first month or so, and I made a good amount off the RMAH, so I have nothing to complain over.. but looking at the evidence:
-Annual Pass system at launch appeared to be an omen of bad faith from blizzard, ensuring players wouldn't stick around for 'too long' on diablo 3.
-A number of incredibly cheap band-aid fixes such as when they simply implemented 'rolling blackouts' on the AH because of too much traffic, making the game feel like some kind of a garbage freeware program
-Blatant lies to the more simple minded communitarians: When discussing stat and skill trees, blizzard frequently uses VERY flawed, and very poor arguments, sometimes that don't even make sense. What exactly is 'artificial complexity' ? An entire video game IS artificial complexity. Does blizzard seek to woo High-Schoolers with big words that chalk up to nothing?
When discussing stat/skill trees, blizzard hands out samples packets of fallacies to it's userbase, stating things like "they just don't work" or "one mistake and your character is wasted" or the absolute worst "everyone just ends up using cookie builds anyway". Does blizzard really want to attempt to disprove Linear Algebra? because that's all a stat point system is.
I could write an entire essay on why this system has worked for MANY games, and does so without ever alienating a casual playerbase, and most importantly, how it creates an evolutionary metagame by adding a static and unchanging portion "stats and skills" of your customizable character, to a fast paced and frequently changing portion that you swap out all the time "gear".
I could argue how many games have never had a single 'cookie cutter' build through their lifetime, much like MOBA games never have a cookie cutter build on heroes.. because, yes, MOBA games have stat systems too and they're wildly successful. I don't think I need to write it out, however.
-Blizzard threw in the garbage huge, promised portions of the game after spending years 'iterating' (the word they love to use) on their game, even when most of the game was complete in 2008 and it mysteriously took another 4 years to be released without explanation.
-Blizzard introduced very, very depthless and very boring classes into d3 that really don't belong except to simpletons that are fresh from WoW, and even copied many world of warcraft skills and names.
-Blizzard had a master skeleton of a game from diablo 2, A game which could have evolved into a transition between an MMO and an ARPG without losing the Diablo feel, and ultimately they settled for extremely dimensionless mechanics such as 'Armor reducing all types of damage', 'stats like All Resist', and ridiculously watered down mechanics such as 'Dodge allowing spells to miss'. This "roll all stats into one big SURVIVABILITY stat" mindset, in conjunction with poorly thought out systems such as weapon damage effecting all spells, makes for a game with absolutely no depth whatsoever.
When I look at this game, and it's irritating 'FILLER SPELL' idea where you spam a 1-mana cost skill over and over after mana dumping, I've got to say that it feels like it has a very large and specific target audience: People who buy games on the fly without any intent to play them with any level of commitment or longevity (better known as "Game-Hoppers"), people who play too many FPS games (this is where the annoying filler system really hits hard: It feels like blizzard is subtely attempting to attract FPS players with this system, similar to the way you'd repeatedly fire a gun), and people who buy games for other people with no knowledge of what's fun or not.
I do not believe there is a war versus casuals or hardcore players as many do, because I've seen a number of games or skeletons thereof which can support both without fail. But, I always believed the rampant game-hopping where you purchase a game for $50-60, play it for a month or two, then drop it mindlessly and move on to the next popular title would stay away from MMO and ARPG gaming. Again, there are many legendary games such as those everyone idolizes, but they are legendary because of their fantastic stories and characters that live on forever in people's hearts (the SNES dreamteam of Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and FF's).
But I've started to understand that era is dead, and we now have this new business oriented gaming where companies have ****ty game after ****ty game fed to the community which crowds of people hope will be the big game that everyone sticks around on and plays for years, and becomes famous, only to be disappointed. Get your hopes up for the expansion or DLC or sequel or competitor's title and find out the same: that it sucks.
And as for a penultimate review of Diablo 3: It lacks exploration, depth, any scheme of replayability, any level of number balance across the boards, and it ultimately feels like it was built from scrapyard parts of the real series.
If this is the new direction of PC/MMO gaming, count me out.
0
the system i'm suggesting is taken exactly from WoW and many other games and they have very successful economies.
I agree that we need crafting, enchanting, socketing and many other things but I still believe that huge unchecked economies in a totally randomized game full of botting is very bad. I've played many, many MMO and similarly styled games and almost all of them have servers which are broken up into smaller "countries" so to speak. I've never played a game until now with a running economy that was purely randomized, where gear was just spit out into the masses and cheapened rapidly. It "progresses" people when they shouldn't be "progressed".
A really succesful 400k dps barbarian can chuck out a weapon just a few tiers worse than his for a very cheap price, and somebody who's running mp0 or mp1-2 could buy it when they shouldn't be able to afford it.
Today I can gear up a char with a few million gold that I couldn't even begin to do just a few months ago. I'm not asking for progression raiding in Diablo 3 but linking veteran players who have no need for moderately good gear with newbie players or casuals is really bad and destructive when the game can be cleared so easily on the hardest difficulty, because not many things have any value.
This is also partially due to the game being too easy.
0
That's not only incorrect but unrealistic.
You're assuming 10 people all play an extremely high amount and found top-tear gear after a few hundred to thousand hours (Think that millions of people even now with their combined playtime haven't flooded the AH with perfect gear, so 10 people might take years and years)
Realistically you'd have something like 1-2 people who play lots every day, 2-4 people that play on average a few hours a week (medium) and the rest of the players who only play somewhat.
In the current economy, botters and people at the top level farm and spam out tons of midtear gear for incredibly cheap, trickling their progression down much faster.
Items can't go for more than the 10 players can afford, and since there would be significantly less gold inflation, the most ridiculous price would probably be nothing near what we see today. Rate of gold making by farming and grinding barely increases, but the amount of gold in the server goes sky-high with the number of players sharing a server.
However yes, some gear breaking and BoE items are nice, but not every item should be BoE.
0
uh.... what? how can someone have a monopoly on something in diablo 3? it doesn't make any sense
what you just described was someone farming an item in a standard working economy and making a profit off of it because other people weren't doing that, aka how the real world works.
if you cut the number of players you'd have a fraction of the gold inflation and the average player would be able to afford things just by playing the game. do you.. understand economics at all?
seems like you're someone who enjoys a game with zero economy and likes having 99% of items worthless.
btw lots of people enjoy playing the game of economics, that's what an economist is. look it up.
0
I would support a diablo 3 where there were many servers, which locked after a certain max population of characters. There could be a variety of sizes from big to small servers. They could unlock if characters were deleted. New ones could be created if necessitated, and transfers to other servers could be allowed similar to WoW.
I believe diablo 3's economy is not designed well for numbers in the millions, neither is it designed for extremely smallscale play. I could be okay with droprate altering for different servers.
This would be great for the economy because extremely old characters would be less likely to affect new characters, and gold inflation on an old server would not be linked to a normal, booming economy on a new server.
This would be absolutely gold for hardcore servers because you'd always have a chance to enter an old server when a character dies (if the game isn't too easy as it currently is).
I believe the key to combatting botting isn't to try to stop very small scale botting, but massive scale organized botting which can be stopped or slowed or prevented if a server were locked, and it would be much much easier to spot in smaller localized servers. Blizzard themselves could clear out servers a few at a time and move on. Economies would strongly benefit.
The final benefit of this is that it would give incentive to reroll even without stat/skillpoints on both softcore and hardcore - if you got tired of an aged, locked server, you could start anew with a friend on a fresh economic server.
It would create endgame replayability and PvE incentive to continue playing without wiping servers because you might get excited to try to be the first paragon 100 on a different server, or find the best item there first.
I would personally expand on this by then allowing open world PvP so that an element of community can be brought back into the game. (Small localized servers + PvP = competition & community)
What are others' thoughts on this?
0
Ah, there's a huge problem here and it's the illusion of combinations.
Whenever you need a guide on creating strong variety and flavor in games, just look no further than Dota 2 or League of Legends style MOBA games.
The key is to create a limited number of choices in skills, but a high variety of situations and complexity.
For example if I was forced between taking a healing skill and a passive skill which reduced damage, I would call this two different skill builds. If I encountered a boss that silenced me, or drained my mana, I might rather have the passive skill that reduced damage. If there was a boss that only dealt huge, one shotting attacks, I might abandon both the heal and the passive and take a damage skill.
I call this variety.
The problem in diablo 3 is that there are too many generic damaging abilities, but many of them cannot be used at the same time. Other skills have too large of a CD or are only useful when coupled with passives that gimp a build too much. Many skills have stuns which are not useful in PvE, and some other strange skills which have no purpose in the game. Again, adding this to bad mechanic designs like armor reducing all types of damage, or all resist being a stat, or elemental damage having no place in the game, or being able to dodge spells.. you've got a bad game there.
Furthermore, many classes have large staples that need to be taken, like huge self-buffs and big cooldowns.
No one ever said dota 2 or League of Legends said "there's not enough variety in these heroes" or "these heroes are too permanent, I need to be able to swap skills on the fly."
It's about layers of permanence and limits, and skills that have their place and use. That's how enjoyable classes and characters are made.
0
The expectations came from basic assumptions promised by blizzard
-Bot control
-Gold being valuable and not extremely inflated
-Stat and skill points that gave the user control over his characters' build
-More content and features than d2, not less.
Many people are exaggerating the effect of nostalgia and expectations on the diablo 3 ratings given. I've always known d2 was a pretty good game (7-8 in my eyes) with many problems that could've been a 9.5-10 if it had more work put into it. I still wouldn't go back to diablo 2 even though I liked it a great deal. I would be bored.
It's standard to expect that when a sequel is released, it will improve and innovate a great deal on the previous title, there were many obvious directions that diablo could have taken. I wouldn't have minded if it went in a direction more like a 2d, isometric MMO (not full on MMO), or any other direction. The simple fact, though, is diablo 3 has significantly less than the fans required of a new age sequel to an oldschool game that was very well received.
Blizzard was a much smaller company when diablo 1&2 was created and there was a great deal of laxity with d2's problems.
Furthermore, the entire concept of an MMO was just starting to come to life on the internet.
It had the proper look and feel of a dark, gothic game, it had stat points, skill points, and the acts were roughly the same length as d3.
We had charms, realistic effects like a limit of arrows/quivers, jewels and skulls to socket, a horadric cube, et cetera.
Many fans of the time imagined that a diablo 3 would take these functions and others, and create a massive series with more content and playtime and continue growing.
I may have even played diablo 2 longer than I enjoyed it with the imagination that in the future, it would be expanded upon. What we got was a very late sequel that was slapped together unthoughtfully.
0
Barb and wizard are okay classes, not amazing but playable and somewhat fun.
Monk and WD are atrocious to play, it's hard to even log on to them. Don't know how anyone stands it.
Never played DH but it seems like it's between the two.
0
I played the game for approximately 1 month and haven't returned for more than an hour or two at a time per month.
Without even going into the deeper problems I would call it a stagnant trashcan of a game. I don't think d2 was perfect by a longshot and even back in the early 2000's I said it needed work. But expectations were that a very long development cycle would lead to a great game that would continue by building on the weaknesses and strengths of d2.
What was produced was very disappointing, and after a few band-aids nothing has improved it. It does seem that blizzards' "when it's done" attitude simply does not pay off. Seems the game was a massive joke.
Having watched some of the developers' 'in the making' videos and kept up with the game since 2008, blizzard seems to allow it's employees to simply screw around and throw paper balls at eachother in the office all day, repeatedly develop systems and then throw them away with no real goal or purpose in the game until people finally get fed up and a game is released which is still unsatisfactory.
I haven't enjoyed any blizzard games since diablo2/starcraft 2 era, WoW being a very boring game in itself. SC2 was okay but redundant and un-innovative.
Yes, many completely free games like path of exile are actually going to be able to compete with D3. Torchlight 2's open modding is probably the only thing that made it lose out and not compete.
D3 seems like a game that might've had a chance in the 2006-2007 era, maybe late 2008, but now it feels very weak.
No one will pay $60 for a one act expansion now either. It will have to be a huge expansion, or a very cheap one.
0
Yes unfortunately there are many direct skillports from WoW for example Ignore Pain (shield wall),
Many names were directly copied too
I feel it's too hard to make a character that excels at just a few things very much and has large weaknesses. Runes across the board are all extremely similar. Most of them just add a moderate chance for a small effect, or a minor dps change.
Talents are mostly very badly designed and very limiting in all the wrong ways.
They started off nicely with the wiz and barb being the more interesting of the classes, having some cool skills like leap and slow time,, but they didn't take them and make their skills niche and useful, and then the next 3 classes were utter garbage. I feel it could've been much different.
High CC builds, utility builds, defensive and supportive builds all seem to lack a place in the game. Many skills, runes, and talents and are very very similar and don't add anything to the game at all. I would rate the witch doctor as the most garbage class ever invented.
Elements being meaningful were scratched out from all resist, too.
Builds with things like reflect/thorns or high mobility seem to be very much a joke build with no real point. The only niche is damage. Boss design and not overinflating damage on items and weapons could have changed this.