DiabloFans

Oh, the possibilities with the Diablo Armory... http://www.wowstead.com/wow/characters/10470548-cherubdown

Especially since Blizzard has become more and more relaxed with giving out their APIs.

Regarding the gamescon 2010 demo: the attendees only have 15-20 min with the game. A demo starts in a specific area at a specific lvl not at lvl 1 at the beginning like the beta would. the main question is, if you only have 15-20 mins with a game like diablo would you rather start at lvl 1 with no cool spells/abilitys, 90 fallen and 5 zombies to fight or lvl 10 with tons of fun spells/abilitys to play with and lots of fun different mobs to fight? It takes time to set up a demo that I personally don't think the Dev team has to devote to a convention demo with the beta on the doorstep

ok this is going to drive me crazy. You guys put alot of convo into drop items, but you forgot the fact that one monster is not always going to drop just one item for one player. Is it not possible that one monster can drop one item for each of the 4 chars playing or 2 of the four. There are going to be more items on the field when playing multiplayer not because you kill more faster(although that may help) but guess what your barb or mage ally are not going to just find stuff for themselves they are going to find stuff useful for you their friend and share that. I think it would be silly if the boss only dropped for one char based of what you guys said that is how you made drop items sound like they were going to work. there will be more items dropping, but the ones you "see" drop for you will be the same. sorry for any errors in typing i did not proof this . I am at work

Ok here is a reason to solo over co-op: You can take the content at your own rate and not have to speed up or slow down for your party.

Great stuff guys!!!! In the middle of it.

Quote from akainu

Ok here is a reason to solo over co-op: You can take the content at your own rate and not have to speed up or slow down for your party.

wow that's the same reason i drink alone.........lol jk

Quote from akainu

Ok here is a reason to solo over co-op: You can take the content at your own rate and not have to speed up or slow down for your party.

Absolutely agree with this. I want to understand everything that's going on and enjoy the game instead of rush

But after solo-ing through the game myself (or playing with another person / people who want to take it at my speed maybe) I will no doubt play with full parties.

Excellent podcast. This is the first I've listened to and a lot of important information was covered. While I already knew all of it because I read this site far too often, it's a good resource to people who are off the hook from time to time.

On a side note, item scaling in relation to party size in Diablo II never EVER effected the quality nor chance of specific item type to drop. The only thing that was altered was the number of drops on monster death.

P.S. - If I happen to find my way into the beta, I will most certainly be recording and uploading videos as much as possible. I've never done streaming before but could try that too. I want to rip this game apart from the inside out!

Quote from Absolut

Quote from akainu

Ok here is a reason to solo over co-op: You can take the content at your own rate and not have to speed up or slow down for your party.

Absolutely agree with this. I want to understand everything that's going on and enjoy the game instead of rush

But after solo-ing through the game myself (or playing with another person / people who want to take it at my speed maybe) I will no doubt play with full parties.

I would think surely those who want to take the game at a slow pace (like myself) and enjoy it, could find 1 to 3 other people who also want to take the game at the same pace. That way no one's rushing around and yet you still get to play co-op with friends or people who want to enjoy it as much as you.

I've only listened to certain portions of the podcast but I did enjoy the convo that was there. Nice work!

Why would a toggle option be a joke? If your saying MOST people would end up toggling off inspect and the inspect feature would become obsolete, Aren't you just providing an argument FOR NOT having an inspect feature or at least having a toggle option (majority rule)?

And a little more about this whole inspect thing. Yeh, I get it, you Diablocast guys played WoW and loved it, but dammit Diablo isn't WoW. What worked in WoW won't necessarily work in Diablo. WoW isn't nearly as build heavy as Diablo. You aren't even going to have a ton of players googling at your gear in-game because its not an MMO.

And because you are relating Diablo to WoW you are assuming cookie cutter builds will dominate. Not true, I would bet my car that: without an inspect feature, cookie cutter builds will not dominate. Wana know why, because games like Diablo that are based heavily on builds get a flood of random players and random builds each countering each other. Without an inspect, the builds that are doing somewhat better than average don't necessarily get discovered---in other words everything stays random.- What in the world is wrong with playing with essentially random players and builds?? True some builds/team strategy get posted online but most players don't end up doing that. Mathematically that means cookie cutter builds will probablistically take a long time to be found if at all (In other words, the chance a user finds a build that works well above average without a current counter combined with the chance that the same user likes to post all of his builds online is very small).

Again, my characters will go naked to protest if theres no toggle..

And for the last time Diablo is not WoW, If one person replies anything like "But Inspect works great in WoW! Thats how you know it will be great for Diablo" I swear to God Ill kick a kitten.

Quote from Doomscream

so cookie-cutter builds will be really hard to find or even to determine because of the immensly large skill combinations and team set-ups, you will simply beat some team set-ups while others will beat you for example. Determing which builds are cookie-cutters from 97 billion combinations is something that I actually want to see.

You are only providing more arguments against inspection, or at least FOR a toggle option. If as you say, cookie-cutter builds will be impossible to determine in the first place (which I think is not true), but if what you say is correct, Then whats the purpose for inspect feature at all? All people will do is glance at someone's build aaaaand thats it because they can't determine if its godly good or not. Hell, you could probably just get a better representation of how good their build is by simpply playing with them.

Of course who knows, maybe the next feature they release is an AI player feature where other players can not only look at your build, But play with an AI version of your character and build too! It would be just like playing with a real person and their build except it'd be AI controlled! wouldn't that be awesome!?

BTW thnx for not mentioning WoW

Quote from Doomscream

The point of such a feature is to easily share your gear set-up or your skills/traits with others or even show-off a little bit. It's always fun too see some item on someone that you never even thought that it existed in the first place.


Sorry I added something about WoW :|

UH huh thats one kitten as good as kicked,

So i think its fine to share your gear as you please, but not everyone has the "flaunt my stuff to the public" kind of personality. I don't think that we should be Forced to show everyone our gear and build. I personally see no benefit to the Diablo gameplay by forcing people to reveal their build. Think of it as playing poker with the cards face up.

Thats why Im hoping they include a toggle option. THe guys in the diablocast apparently are still programmed on WoW thinking and believe a toggle option is a bad idea.

I personally do not feel strongly about these features one way or another. I suppose that it will be interesting to investigate what other people are wearing, and I don't really care if people see my stuff. The ability to see other people's gear may promote "cookie cutter" builds, but they will come about anyway so that doesn't really matter.

There will be a few annoyances that come along with the feature. For instance, I don't want to join games (or watch other people join games) and get bombarded with "why are you wearing that with that you noob!" or "You're a WW Barb, you should be using different boots idiot!" If we can see eachother's gear at a click, then there will be a lot of that going around.

Another annoyance will have to do with trading. I do not want to find and equip some godly piece of gear just so that I can get spammed by whispers from people that want to trade for it. Not exactly sure how the trading system is going to work, but something like this would definitely be possible.

Quote from Doomscream

I always wondered why people are afreid of that. You were simply out of luck of that was a personal choice. Some hipster reply will work "What do you know about which items I should use for my buid".

I'm not afraid of it, and honestly won't mind it all that much. But it will be a bit of an annoyance nonetheless.

Quote from Doomscream

I don't think all of the players you will encounter are going to have a Master Degree in PvE/PvP.

No, but 95% of them will think that they do. And, anonymity tends to make people obnoxious and rude. Not a huge deal, just annoying.

Quote from Akuma_Gin

I lol at some of you people who are so against having other people look at your items/builds/skills that you even start becoming so angry and aggressive... Relax, it's just a game, it's not like someone is gonna eat your cookies or something.

"Oh no someone just took a look at my super hyper mega secret build that I don't want to share with anyone what am I going to do naaaooooooo...." Wow, that's a worldwide disaster, no one is ever going to recover and nothing will be the same again...

Get a grip. This is not going to affect YOUR games in absolutely any way and it will not take the fun away from you so... And people are always going to find out about your super secret builds in one way or another. Just enjoy the game, mkay? Hell, if I find some great build that no one has tried before the first thing I would do will be to share it with all of you guys and girls here.

That's why we are a COMMUNITY to SHARE stuff about our most beloved game with one another and not to hide our own accomplishments as if we are 5 year olds. Grow up.

To each his own bud. Chill out.

It may be your view to have a communal-sharing game. but some people prefer Competitive gameplay to Communal-fun-loving gameplay. Sure D3 will be a community but only so far as each user is playing the same game. And there will likely be sub-communities beneath that where people will share a little bit more. But even between sub-communities (lets just call them clans) I would argue people will be wanting a competitive edge.

So what's wrong with having a toggle option? No one can seem to answer this with logical justification. Again I dont think people should be FORCED to display their stuff if they don't want to. The option can be there to allow for Communal-fun-loving gamers like you but there should also be an option suited for more competitive gamers.

Quote from Akuma_Gin

I have nothing against a toggle option. In fact I am all for such an option. But you never know IF there will be such an option. That's what I'm trying to say: don't go slamming doors or keybords if such an option doesn't exist for the release of the game. The truth is that sooner or later all of those "super secret" builds that people like you will try to hide for themselves WILL eventually be found out and played by millions of players all over the world

I don't really see what the whole fuss is all about.

But you are definitely right that people should be presented with the choice to toggle on or off this function and no one should be forced to do anything against their will.

But explain to me why hiding your builds is that important cause I don't really understand the reason behind it.

There are other reasons out there but for me its mainly two things: If I can see your hand I can beat you; and vise-versa. I personally don't like getting beat I don't take it that seriously, but when you are doing Diablo tournaments (which will likely happen either officially or un-officially ) and a PvP ladder, winning and losing does hold some merit. Say I create a build where Im winning 75% of the time, people take notice and inspect me, they like it and post on a website. Now with multiple people using this successful build my winning % drops to say 50%, not terrible but definitley not as fun as winning 75% of the time. 1st problem: Now people develop a counter to it and now the winning % drops to 30%. This is where in most build-based games you just have to move on and make a new build. And here's the second problem: re-building. In order to make a new build, Id either have to make an entirely different character or respec my old char, either way a Complete pain-in-the-ass.

Of course Im guessing your next argument is that this kind of trouble can still happen without the inspect feature, on Diablo fan sites. And this is where you'd be dead wrong. Only a select few people actually post on fan sites, not every user of a game. And the chance that someone has the exact same build as me and that someone posts builds on fansites is extremely small.

Either way this is my own competitive perspective and I sincerely hope Blizzard includes a toggle option. The only reason I posted in here was because for some reason the Diablocast guys thought a toggle option was a ridiculous idea yet they provided no explanation why.

I really like the idea of an Armory where you can share your char's progress with public/or just friends. I remember discussing endless hours on builds and ideas with friends back in our D2 days.

Time is changed since then and we now have a world with smartphones and internet access all over the globe. I'm embracing this new technology and I think it would be a fun way to share my advancements with my friends this way.

But since not everyone has the same thought on this subject a toggle would be ideal. maybe you could filter it down to allow only access to those within your friend list.

I think armory on Diablo III is pretty cool. I can't wait to see every system they have in place, like the marketplace/auction house.

Quote from Doomscream

Everyone is talking like the toggle options has no downsides. How about if someone is racketeering me before allowing me to see his build, no way I am playing him. Eventually every could start naming a price to allow to inspect them. Think about that.

I sorry i can't understand... Can you elaborate this better because right now i can't see one downsides in the toogle option. It should definetly exist for the sake of high level pvp.

Quote from youwillneverknow

So what's wrong with having a toggle option? No one can seem to answer this with logical justification.

There is a downside and it can lead to a reduction in the rate new builds are created, established builds are countered and the general inventiveness of the entire diablo community. Here's why:

If there is an option to toggle whether your gear and skills show or not, then we can assume most good players will choose this option for the very reasons you stated: if they don't show their build, people aren't sure of what to expect and it will be harder and take longer to counter it, leading to good win records for those with the best builds. The best can form their own enclaves amongst themselves, and whatever knowledge is generated there will only trickle down to the general fanbase if said people choose to post any of their findings in public forums. There will of course be guides posted online, but much information will also be withheld.

With no toggle option, even the best players will be forced to reveal what skill and gear setup they use to every player. This will facilitate a faster response time in builds, as a dominant build can quickly be laid out and analyzed, by an opponent or anyone, and thus a build adapted to it can more quickly be developed, or the playstyle can be adjusted accordingly.

This does not equalize matches between evenly specced character however, as knowing the composition of a build does not tell you how to play it effectively. The best players will have to excel in execution as well as planning to win and not have to depend on build surprise to win.

I'd say your poker analogy doesn't work here, as poker is a game focused around chance and the gambling mechanic, aspects which are severely downplayed in D3 gameplay. A more apt comparison is that of a market. Each player represents a CEO, their characters are their companies and the build their respective products. Disallowing a toggle option brings the entire market closer to perfect competition while allowing toggling is akin to patent protection or another form of guarding product specifications from competitors. More public information will in this case create a more open and fair playing environment.

Will a toggle feature single-handedly make or break an interesting PvP scene? I don't know, but there is no doubt that it will have an impact.