if you think popularity = quality you are out of your mind.
Popularity is a direct measure of people voting with their actions (as opposed to people just blowing hot air around).
If Nike makes shitty shoes but somehow manages to out-sell Reebok well, as much as you don't like it, they're somehow successful. Logic would dictate that low-quality products wouldn't generally become popular anyway. If Blizzard released D3 and it couldn't install and it randomly crashed and they didn't quickly fix it... it most likely wouldn't be a popular game.
If you think that popularity isn't indicative of what people think of something then you're kidding yourself. That argument is the last bastion of trendy hipsters who refuse to do anything "mainstream" ever. The people who would stop eating a lollipop if they found out that more than 7 other people liked that brand of lollipop.
Nothing irks me more than the mindset that the more "underground" something is the better it is. It's simply not true. It's just anti-mainstream rabble-rousing stupidity.
Don't use Google, it's too mainstream. Use Blekko because nobody has heard of it, therefore it's superior.
I don't even like the Biebs, but I'm not going to shit all over him because other people do. I'm content to let that ship sail without going to some internet forums and saying that Bieber isn't talented, or is some kind of hack, or whatever. He's got a product that millions of people like. I don't like it but who cares? Good for him for doing well in this day and age.
Shaggy you have some concepts wrong.
Popularity is not a measure of what people think, it's a measure of what some people think based on what other minority sub-group of people say they think. It's the herd thinking at it's finest. It doesn't indicate or determine if the product is any good or bad.
And when you say: "If Blizzard released D3 and it couldn't install and it randomly crashed and they didn't quickly fix it... it most likely wouldn't be a popular game", you are letting out of the equation a lot of important factors, like in this case (and the main problem a lot of 50+ hours D3 gamers have) a total and complete lack of rewarding end-game.
This article just screams "linkbait" to me. The whole purpose of this article was to get people linking to it. I side with Blizzard on this....how can it be "delayed" if it hasn't even been announced. Blizzard still has a lot of work to do on D3 before pushing the expansion out.
With that said, I would like to see patch 1.0.9 sometime in 2013.
Updated: A Blizzard spokesman said to GamesBeat, "We haven't officially announced an expansion to D3, so there's no release date."] Blizzard takes issue with the word “delay” in our story, as they say they never announced a date and by virtue of that fact, they can’t miss the date. But we stand by our description, as we believe the expansion has been pushed back.
Blizzard never announced a date. Using logic would mean that they couldn't delay something that wasn't set in the first place. So stupid.
It will be the best selling x-pac of all time. I wonder what the chatter will be like after the sales figures come out? All these people for a year have called D3 "dead" and a total failure. I wonder how they will explain the record sales?
I know that 2014 is a vague figure and (bummer alert) it may well get pushed back off that mark. However, so long as it releases in the first 3/4 of 2014, I don't consider that too long of a wait.
The coming 1.09 content patch has to be huge. It has to be sweeping and above any expectations. This patch (along with any others between now and x-pac) will make the wait for the xpac worth it IMO. I've said it all along, history will regard this game very highly.
10 millions bought d3, more then 9/10 left to never return. I wouldn't call that a success.
10 millions bought d3, more then 9/10 left to never return. I wouldn't call that a success.
... for a non-subscription game, I'd expect 90% of purchasers to have stopped playing after a year. Unless you're asserting that Blizzard set out to make a game that would keep most of its players going for hundreds of hours, there's no way to conclude that 10% participation after a year is any kind of failure. The fact that D3 can keep some of us occupied for so long is probably a combination of Blizzard's design and what would have manifested as mild mental illness prior to the silicon age
So i was wrong, 1/12 left, sorry to pop your bubble fanboys.
Yep. 3 million unique players log into D3 every month, out of the 12 million that have bought that game. That's 1/12... ish... kinda. You win. I'm not sure what you win... maybe a bronze medal for not reading the article? A pat on the head for being so brave on a D3 fan forum? Anyway, carry on fighting the good fight!
Go be a dark ages nerd somewhere else god dammit!!!
I really wish there was a self-found SC mode or something similar so I can play with my guy Maka. I just don't have the self-control to not use the AH....I'm so weak of will.
75% of the population is bored after nearly a year of grinding two weeks' worth of content... what a surprise. Clearly never happened with the earlier Diablo games.
There's a reason the series has never gotten MMO level support.
Yeah, you can't compare Nike and Blizzard... because the hype around Nike shoes is bigger than their quality. A proper comparison to Nike would be Call of Duty with new overpriced releases every year.
And just stop saying D3 was no success for the players. 25% still active every month? Even more players active after every patch? Numbers every other game (including Diablo 2) just could dream of.
You talk about "facts" and "real stuff" and "not something u dream at night" but all you do is rant, vent, and ignore the facts that have been mentioned in this thread. All your talk about this forum is shitty and so on - you just present your opinion as fact, ignore other people's opinion and even facts presented to you, and do all this in a very derogative and impolite manner. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing - hell, it's even necessary to have people who disagree for the sake of having a discussion - but you should stop swearing and change the tone of your posts in order to convince others with your arguments. Try again.
Yet so many of the decisions in the game were made to accommodate those players.
Now they're gone. And we're stuck cleaning the mess.
Feels good, doesn't it?
No one is forcing you to play, it's not like you are paying for monthly fees or for every patch or support they still offer, and i personally don't feel like i'm "cleaning" any mess, i play because i want and i have fun, if you don't, just become one of those that are gone and go have fun on another game. ^^
OT: I think everyone knew xpack was not comming this year, hopefully 1.09 (with new endgame mode and char costumization) and 1.1 (pvp) still get released this year.
People can piss all they want on d3, the fact remains that it's a great game even with all the flaws it has, proof of that is that ppl come to fan forums to whine about the game they supposely hate, i don't go to forums of games i hate to rant, just go try out marvel heroes which just came out and compare it to D3 or PoE with it's shitty animations and redundant combat.
That said diablo is certainly not perfect and needs alot of work, but this is blizzard, not some underground recently started company and blizz has always delivered great games for 20 years, yeah sometimes it takes alot of time and that sucks, i'm still waiting on proper pvp modes and an endgame mode like survival horde or infinite dungeon, but i know we will get it eventually, and a kick ass xpack, can people say the same about other companies games which no one even plays after a couple months?
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Those Who Do Not Know True Pain Cannot Possibly Understand True Peace...
Yeah, you can't compare Nike and Blizzard... because the hype around Nike shoes is bigger than their quality. A proper comparison to Nike would be Call of Duty with new overpriced releases every year.
I'm gonna have to kinda disagree with you for the first time Bagstone
I understand why people say the yearly CoD are just reskinned clones (they kinda are), but if you did try out all their games since Modern Warfare 1 (CoD 4), you notice there has been quite some changes from one version to another (both in singleplayer and multiplayer). Enough to keep things fresh, but not to mutate the franchise into something it simply isn't.
In particular the last Black Ops 2 (could write a big paragraph about each). Significant changes to how the campaign plays out, you can choose loadouts, choose if you're gonna do side missions, things you do in each mission (decisions and actions while playing normally) have consequences in the story for the first time in a CoD - and that's all extremely well done. Significant changes to multiplayer as well - absolute rebalancing of weapons, attachments and perks (completely different from all previous CoDs and actually good for the first time imho), as well as a completely new system (the pick 10) for setting up your class, an extremely flexible system.
They keep the skeleton (same engine, fast paced combat, slick animations, campaign and multiplayer structure) because that's what makes the franchise so compelling. There's no point in adding bullet drop for instance, call it a new feature, and have it break the settled gameplay.
If they simply had added (for instance) vehicles to multiplayer 2-3 versions ago, that's such a huge change that it could have broken the IP. Or remade the engine every 2 years, that's another pointless thing. The graphics did improve, people just don't recognize things like new effects and newer DirectX features.
Radical gameplay and structural changes (like the ones D3 underwent) are hard stuff to implement correctly, and sometimes change an IP too much. To the point of breaking it.
What they're trying this particular year is destructible maps/environments and more visual character customization. If it works, they'll probably keep it on next installments, if it doesn't it might be removed. It's this "baby steps" philosophy that has made the franchise such the huge IP it still is today (despite all the hate).
My 2 cents on that matter.
And just stop saying D3 was no success for the players. 25% still active every month? Even more players active after every patch? Numbers every other game (including Diablo 2) just could dream of.
If D3 has as many active players as it seems to have (judging from the amount of public games and general AH activity) it's probably beating other big names like DotA 2, Stacraft 2 and Call of Duty(consoles)/Battlefield 3 - even taking into account the bots.
Such a failure of a game, uh? People need to understand not everyone bought D3 with a MMORPG mindset for it ("gotta play 1k+ hours!!!!").
I have at least 5 friends that played Normal only (2 of them with all classes) and found the game absolutely amazing; and still play every 3-5 months just for lulz. They don't even know the whole "D3 was a failure" drama. And I assume a lot of similar gamers don't as well.
Yeah, you can't compare Nike and Blizzard... because the hype around Nike shoes is bigger than their quality. A proper comparison to Nike would be Call of Duty with new overpriced releases every year.
I'm gonna have to kinda disagree with you for the first time Bagstone
D'oh. I just got burned.
Lemme just find a mod to tell you to stop your off-topic re... oh wait a sec. Damn! ;-)
To be fair, I expected that someone would jump on that argument, but from a different angle - to defend Nike.
Lemme just find a mod to tell you to stop your off-topic re... oh wait a sec. Damn! ;-)
To be fair, I expected that someone would jump on that argument, but from a different angle - to defend Nike.
I like Nike too. But mostly their 10 dollar workout Tshirts that I bought on an Outlet on New Jersey.
There you go
I just hate the whole "witch hunt" against Call of Duty. It's blind hatred, and I simply cannot stand blind hatred. People who actually play the franchise and enjoy shooters know they change some stuff every year, they know the graphics have improved and the acual gameplay has changed.
Sometimes it really seems like most of the hate the series gets is just because it's has annual releases (similar to what's been happening to Assassin's Creed - check videos/news about it on Gamespot/IGN, so much hate). Or because people get destroyed in multiplayer and proceed to complain about lag on every youtube comment for the next 5 years.
What you said remains as idiotic as it was when it was written: the game was shaped in such a way to please players that would play 40 hours and then drop it. That makes no sense, except from a financial point of view.
Com'on man, you just know that's not true.
That's a consequence of how people play games nowadays. Most people never even tried the different difficulties in God of War games, just because that's how people play games today (not cause the game was bad or anything).
Just to get to Inferno in the first weeks people spent about 80 hours, most spent even more (specially if they didn't use the AH). And then, I'm sure you remember this too, people proceeded to farm another 100-150 hours just to progress into Acts 2-3.
And you have to admit everything they added afterwards (monster power, ubers, new legendaries, demonic essences crafting) definitely added playtime too. It took me about 50 hours to craft my first Hellfire Ring (I never was Jaetch-lvl material). It took me about another 50 hours to get most of my characters to MP 5+ lvl.
There are people out there with 1.5-2k hours played, and they're not even remotely close to having THE BiS items (aka maximum rolls on everything) on every slot. And these people, despite being almighty, can still die in MP10 if they're careless. An action RPG that rivals most MMORPGs in playtime? That's hardly casual if you ask me
I'd also add that the gaming landscape in 2010+ is a lot different than it was in 2000.
Back in the time of D2 we didn't have flash games. Nowadays I can entertain myself ALL FUCKIN DAY LONG just with web-based flash games. Jesus, I can't even tell you how many days of my life I've lost to Sporcle. The amount of competition (especially for quick stuff to amuse you for an hour here or there) is sky-high. This extends to phones and tablets too. Hell, I was playing Nimble Quest for about an hour on Sunday. D2 sure didn't have to compete with Nimble Quest.
There's also the market penetration of broadband internet. Back when D2 was released the majority of the world was still on dial-up. Dial-up meant that, while Blizzard could release patches, they had to be kept small which meant that content was primarily distributed via physical media. It also meant that an offline mode was 100% mandatory. Nowadays many games don't bother with the development costs and time associated with offline mode (PoE is a prime example) and are also able to offer patches as they see fit without worrying about our shitty 56k internet connections.
The changes to the internet also mean that people are much more at their will to try out many games and play many games. Before shareware was the name of the game because they could give you a teaser version of the game that was downloadable. Again, because of bandwidth. I'm sure some of you remember downloading a full game on your 56k connection. You know, 27 zip files. Each one would take an hour to download. Last month when I tried out Neverwinter I downloaded several gigs in about 3 hours.
There are SO MANY FEWER barriers for a gaming developer to get their game in front of our faces nowadays, and that's a great thing. But it also means that it's harder than ever to design a game that's supposed to entertain people for what amounts to thousands of hours. It's going to require more than just one expansion over 10 years to keep people in D3. That's a reality everyone is going to have to live with.
@zero: everything you mention was done post-launch. Think about it: how many times have you read blue posts saying that "feature so-and-so will confuse newcomers" ? Hell, we even saw it the other day: Travis Day (or someone else) said he's opposed to more options because it'll confuse the new players. The new players!!! Over a year after the game's been out, he's worried about confusing new players.
They made a clear demographic choice when deciding what the game would look like at launch. I don't even understand how you can deny that.
I'd be willing to bet that someone, somewhere at Blizzard HQ was thinking along these lines: "if we release the game like this, millions of "40-hour-people" will buy it. But don't worry: even if the fans of the franchise don't really like it at first, they'll wait for the stuff we'll release later. We'll get the best of both worlds". And that's not something I can stomach easily.
I wouldn't go that far. Id say they definitely made choices that affected the game negatively and catered more to a casual player base that really doesn't get into the nitty gritty numbers game, but I feel like they gave us some options on how to play and tried their hardest to make sure it was enjoyable to both. I feel like the people on this forum who talk bad about the game feel 100% dissapointed/let-down and now fully hate the game and don't give it the light of day, even thought most of the post-launch material has been overwhelmingly helpful and fun, not to mention enhancing the experience and better balancing the game. I still have faith in D3 I play it on and off but there's still room for improvement. I just see no reason why we have to beat the dead horse on how it was catered to newcomers, which it clearly was to a degree.
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@zero: everything you mention was done post-launch. Think about it: how many times have you read blue posts saying that "feature so-and-so will confuse newcomers" ? Hell, we even saw it the other day: Travis Day (or someone else) said he's opposed to more options because it'll confuse the new players. The new players!!! Over a year after the game's been out, he's worried about confusing new players. They made a clear demographic choice when deciding what the game would look like at launch. I don't even understand how you can deny that.
I'd be willing to bet that someone, somewhere at Blizzard HQ was thinking along these lines: "if we release the game like this, millions of "40-hour-people" will buy it. But don't worry: even if the fans of the franchise don't really like it at first, they'll wait for the stuff we'll release later. We'll get the best of both worlds". And that's not something I can stomach easily.
I understand your point, and you're right about their stance and post-launch content.
But I still think the way the game shipped was more than 40 hours of gameplay, even with just one character (I had about 100 on the first weeks, but spread out through multiple characters).
I mean, take into account how people abused the game back then (hours farming infinite resplandecent chest and goblins, infinite kiting and zerging, infinite Smokescreen), and even those guys with 250+ hours before the first patch hit still had a ton of room to improve their characters plus they were nowhere close to farming Inferno effectively (without zerging or abusing some skillsets).
That's where I think your statement is a bit exaggerate. 200-300 hour game (with a not so fun grind because of crappy legendaries and low chance of ilvl 63 items)? Sure.
40 hour game? Not something I agree with
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Shaggy you have some concepts wrong.
Popularity is not a measure of what people think, it's a measure of what some people think based on what other minority sub-group of people say they think. It's the herd thinking at it's finest. It doesn't indicate or determine if the product is any good or bad.
And when you say: "If Blizzard released D3 and it couldn't install and it randomly crashed and they didn't quickly fix it... it most likely wouldn't be a popular game", you are letting out of the equation a lot of important factors, like in this case (and the main problem a lot of 50+ hours D3 gamers have) a total and complete lack of rewarding end-game.
With that said, I would like to see patch 1.0.9 sometime in 2013.
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Blizzard never announced a date. Using logic would mean that they couldn't delay something that wasn't set in the first place. So stupid.
Your numbers are pulled from thine ass.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
... for a non-subscription game, I'd expect 90% of purchasers to have stopped playing after a year. Unless you're asserting that Blizzard set out to make a game that would keep most of its players going for hundreds of hours, there's no way to conclude that 10% participation after a year is any kind of failure. The fact that D3 can keep some of us occupied for so long is probably a combination of Blizzard's design and what would have manifested as mild mental illness prior to the silicon age
But here:
http://news.softpedi...12-327841.shtml
http://www.slashgear...a-day-01275994/
So i was wrong, 1/12 left, sorry to pop your bubble fanboys.
Yep. 3 million unique players log into D3 every month, out of the 12 million that have bought that game. That's 1/12... ish... kinda. You win. I'm not sure what you win... maybe a bronze medal for not reading the article? A pat on the head for being so brave on a D3 fan forum? Anyway, carry on fighting the good fight!
I'm not exactly a medieval linguist.
Go be a dark ages nerd somewhere else god dammit!!!
I really wish there was a self-found SC mode or something similar so I can play with my guy Maka. I just don't have the self-control to not use the AH....I'm so weak of will.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
There's a reason the series has never gotten MMO level support.
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Taliesyn-2517/hero/66020932
Yeah, you can't compare Nike and Blizzard... because the hype around Nike shoes is bigger than their quality. A proper comparison to Nike would be Call of Duty with new overpriced releases every year.
And just stop saying D3 was no success for the players. 25% still active every month? Even more players active after every patch? Numbers every other game (including Diablo 2) just could dream of.
You talk about "facts" and "real stuff" and "not something u dream at night" but all you do is rant, vent, and ignore the facts that have been mentioned in this thread. All your talk about this forum is shitty and so on - you just present your opinion as fact, ignore other people's opinion and even facts presented to you, and do all this in a very derogative and impolite manner. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing - hell, it's even necessary to have people who disagree for the sake of having a discussion - but you should stop swearing and change the tone of your posts in order to convince others with your arguments. Try again.
No one is forcing you to play, it's not like you are paying for monthly fees or for every patch or support they still offer, and i personally don't feel like i'm "cleaning" any mess, i play because i want and i have fun, if you don't, just become one of those that are gone and go have fun on another game. ^^
OT: I think everyone knew xpack was not comming this year, hopefully 1.09 (with new endgame mode and char costumization) and 1.1 (pvp) still get released this year.
People can piss all they want on d3, the fact remains that it's a great game even with all the flaws it has, proof of that is that ppl come to fan forums to whine about the game they supposely hate, i don't go to forums of games i hate to rant, just go try out marvel heroes which just came out and compare it to D3 or PoE with it's shitty animations and redundant combat.
That said diablo is certainly not perfect and needs alot of work, but this is blizzard, not some underground recently started company and blizz has always delivered great games for 20 years, yeah sometimes it takes alot of time and that sucks, i'm still waiting on proper pvp modes and an endgame mode like survival horde or infinite dungeon, but i know we will get it eventually, and a kick ass xpack, can people say the same about other companies games which no one even plays after a couple months?
Those Who Do Not Know True Pain Cannot Possibly Understand True Peace...
I understand why people say the yearly CoD are just reskinned clones (they kinda are), but if you did try out all their games since Modern Warfare 1 (CoD 4), you notice there has been quite some changes from one version to another (both in singleplayer and multiplayer). Enough to keep things fresh, but not to mutate the franchise into something it simply isn't.
In particular the last Black Ops 2 (could write a big paragraph about each). Significant changes to how the campaign plays out, you can choose loadouts, choose if you're gonna do side missions, things you do in each mission (decisions and actions while playing normally) have consequences in the story for the first time in a CoD - and that's all extremely well done. Significant changes to multiplayer as well - absolute rebalancing of weapons, attachments and perks (completely different from all previous CoDs and actually good for the first time imho), as well as a completely new system (the pick 10) for setting up your class, an extremely flexible system.
They keep the skeleton (same engine, fast paced combat, slick animations, campaign and multiplayer structure) because that's what makes the franchise so compelling. There's no point in adding bullet drop for instance, call it a new feature, and have it break the settled gameplay.
If they simply had added (for instance) vehicles to multiplayer 2-3 versions ago, that's such a huge change that it could have broken the IP. Or remade the engine every 2 years, that's another pointless thing. The graphics did improve, people just don't recognize things like new effects and newer DirectX features.
Radical gameplay and structural changes (like the ones D3 underwent) are hard stuff to implement correctly, and sometimes change an IP too much. To the point of breaking it.
What they're trying this particular year is destructible maps/environments and more visual character customization. If it works, they'll probably keep it on next installments, if it doesn't it might be removed. It's this "baby steps" philosophy that has made the franchise such the huge IP it still is today (despite all the hate).
My 2 cents on that matter.
If D3 has as many active players as it seems to have (judging from the amount of public games and general AH activity) it's probably beating other big names like DotA 2, Stacraft 2 and Call of Duty(consoles)/Battlefield 3 - even taking into account the bots.
Such a failure of a game, uh? People need to understand not everyone bought D3 with a MMORPG mindset for it ("gotta play 1k+ hours!!!!").
I have at least 5 friends that played Normal only (2 of them with all classes) and found the game absolutely amazing; and still play every 3-5 months just for lulz. They don't even know the whole "D3 was a failure" drama. And I assume a lot of similar gamers don't as well.
D'oh. I just got burned.
Lemme just find a mod to tell you to stop your off-topic re... oh wait a sec. Damn! ;-)
To be fair, I expected that someone would jump on that argument, but from a different angle - to defend Nike.
There you go
I just hate the whole "witch hunt" against Call of Duty. It's blind hatred, and I simply cannot stand blind hatred. People who actually play the franchise and enjoy shooters know they change some stuff every year, they know the graphics have improved and the acual gameplay has changed.
Sometimes it really seems like most of the hate the series gets is just because it's has annual releases (similar to what's been happening to Assassin's Creed - check videos/news about it on Gamespot/IGN, so much hate). Or because people get destroyed in multiplayer and proceed to complain about lag on every youtube comment for the next 5 years.
That's a consequence of how people play games nowadays. Most people never even tried the different difficulties in God of War games, just because that's how people play games today (not cause the game was bad or anything).
Just to get to Inferno in the first weeks people spent about 80 hours, most spent even more (specially if they didn't use the AH). And then, I'm sure you remember this too, people proceeded to farm another 100-150 hours just to progress into Acts 2-3.
And you have to admit everything they added afterwards (monster power, ubers, new legendaries, demonic essences crafting) definitely added playtime too. It took me about 50 hours to craft my first Hellfire Ring (I never was Jaetch-lvl material). It took me about another 50 hours to get most of my characters to MP 5+ lvl.
There are people out there with 1.5-2k hours played, and they're not even remotely close to having THE BiS items (aka maximum rolls on everything) on every slot. And these people, despite being almighty, can still die in MP10 if they're careless. An action RPG that rivals most MMORPGs in playtime? That's hardly casual if you ask me
Back in the time of D2 we didn't have flash games. Nowadays I can entertain myself ALL FUCKIN DAY LONG just with web-based flash games. Jesus, I can't even tell you how many days of my life I've lost to Sporcle. The amount of competition (especially for quick stuff to amuse you for an hour here or there) is sky-high. This extends to phones and tablets too. Hell, I was playing Nimble Quest for about an hour on Sunday. D2 sure didn't have to compete with Nimble Quest.
There's also the market penetration of broadband internet. Back when D2 was released the majority of the world was still on dial-up. Dial-up meant that, while Blizzard could release patches, they had to be kept small which meant that content was primarily distributed via physical media. It also meant that an offline mode was 100% mandatory. Nowadays many games don't bother with the development costs and time associated with offline mode (PoE is a prime example) and are also able to offer patches as they see fit without worrying about our shitty 56k internet connections.
The changes to the internet also mean that people are much more at their will to try out many games and play many games. Before shareware was the name of the game because they could give you a teaser version of the game that was downloadable. Again, because of bandwidth. I'm sure some of you remember downloading a full game on your 56k connection. You know, 27 zip files. Each one would take an hour to download. Last month when I tried out Neverwinter I downloaded several gigs in about 3 hours.
There are SO MANY FEWER barriers for a gaming developer to get their game in front of our faces nowadays, and that's a great thing. But it also means that it's harder than ever to design a game that's supposed to entertain people for what amounts to thousands of hours. It's going to require more than just one expansion over 10 years to keep people in D3. That's a reality everyone is going to have to live with.
I wouldn't go that far. Id say they definitely made choices that affected the game negatively and catered more to a casual player base that really doesn't get into the nitty gritty numbers game, but I feel like they gave us some options on how to play and tried their hardest to make sure it was enjoyable to both. I feel like the people on this forum who talk bad about the game feel 100% dissapointed/let-down and now fully hate the game and don't give it the light of day, even thought most of the post-launch material has been overwhelmingly helpful and fun, not to mention enhancing the experience and better balancing the game. I still have faith in D3 I play it on and off but there's still room for improvement. I just see no reason why we have to beat the dead horse on how it was catered to newcomers, which it clearly was to a degree.
But I still think the way the game shipped was more than 40 hours of gameplay, even with just one character (I had about 100 on the first weeks, but spread out through multiple characters).
I mean, take into account how people abused the game back then (hours farming infinite resplandecent chest and goblins, infinite kiting and zerging, infinite Smokescreen), and even those guys with 250+ hours before the first patch hit still had a ton of room to improve their characters plus they were nowhere close to farming Inferno effectively (without zerging or abusing some skillsets).
That's where I think your statement is a bit exaggerate. 200-300 hour game (with a not so fun grind because of crappy legendaries and low chance of ilvl 63 items)? Sure.
40 hour game? Not something I agree with