Help Back to Mobile View
  • Crashhh1's avatar

    1

    Jan 15, 2013
    Crashhh1 posted a message on New patch, major let down.
    Quote from overneathe

    Quote from maka

    If you're strictly talking about giant companies, you might be correct. But if you're talking about all game developers, then you are very much mistaken.

    This. One of the biggest promises for a nice launch for smaller companies is listening to their fans. The semi-downside to this is that development tends to prolong a lot, but at the end of the day the loyal playerbase guarantees you some sales and the less people the less different opinions about features, which helps developers tremendously.

    Natural Selection 2 was given as example. It sold 144k copies but that wouldn't have been possible without closely communicating with their fanbase. For a company of so few people those numbers are not bad at all.

    For an enormous company with around 5000 employees I doubt you'll see many like Blizzard, who write blogs for all their games, years after they've came out, and also have so many community managers discussing said games on a daily basis. Sometimes even weekends! Not to mention the shelf life of these games due to iterative development and community involvement.

    Really? this stuff impresses you guys?
    They pay 2-3 ppl to log in once a week and make a one page blog or post and do PR stuff, and you guys are impressed..? lol?

    I guess these kinds of fans will be attracted to games like this. They don't understand that the game sold 10 million copies at $60 not including RMAH, That's $600 million dollars the game made before RMAH. It's one of the most anticipated games of the decade. You actually think that a billion dollar company hiring a few PR people to keep in touch with the game is special? It's not some charity move, they want your money and they want you to buy stuff on the RMAH. They're doing 1/10th of what they could be doing lol.
    Posted in: Diablo III General Discussion
  • Crashhh1's avatar

    3

    Jan 12, 2013
    Crashhh1 posted a message on New patch, major let down.
    Quote from Litheum

    Quote from gran0ls

    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.
    Posted in: Diablo III General Discussion
  • Crashhh1's avatar

    2

    Jan 11, 2013
    Crashhh1 posted a message on Was diablo 3 intended to be boring so players would not attach to it?
    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.
    Posted in: Diablo III General Discussion
  • To post a comment, please or register a new account.