DiabloFans

Quote from succubus_queen

Also, Diablo III will never be taken seriously as a cometitive game.

1. It's a top down, single unit control, click to move game. This setup has some strengths but its not optimal for dueling or versus. People who are serious about player versus player are going to gravitate toward FPS, RTS, and other setups. So put design focus on something your game can't possibly be best at?

2. Dueling viability is not determined solely by skill (like in most competition games) but is instead largely determined by gear.

3. The gear in point 2, drops based on luck. So your dueling capability is also determined largely by the luck of the drop.

4. Even worse, you can buy the gear with real money. So you have a supposedly serious competition game, where the deciding factors largely money and luck. Does anyone see the inherent problem?

Diablo from the control scheme on up is designed to be a one versus many, or co-op, PvM hack and slash. It can not, and will not, be an esport. And Blizzard does have games built from the ground up for the purpose of esport. Starcraft series has always been a major player in esport. Diablo has always been the king of hack and slash pvm. Why jump product category with Diablo, to compete in a market segment that you already have covered?

Quote from succubus_queen

Quote from Mac_an_tSaoir

D2 Dueling, WoW PvP eSport, SC1 eSport of a nation? SC2, eSport of a nation? WC3 eSport, which then leads to the creation of DotA, which leads to the creation of a new genre of PvP games known as MOBA. The ripple effect creates LoL eSport (although a joke) HoN, DotA and DotA 2 and soon Blizzard DotA

SC and Warcraft are irrelevent. They are different series, designed to be an esport. That's the point of having multiple series- so you can appeal to different player types. Saying Diablo 3 should have a strong PvP focus because Starcraft II does, would be like saying "Capcom should make Megamax XXXIII a tournament fighter, because street fighter was great."

If something is a direct sequel, with an actual sequel number, it should be a continuation. It should follow the design principles and focus of the series. In Diablo, development focus has been very much PvM. In Diablo I and II, a PvM was designed, and then a "Hostile" button was added for dueling, and that was pretty much that. But people enjoyed it. The point is that you don't have to have a highly tuned, perfectly balanced, PvP focused system, to make PvP an interesting element of the game.

Even if BLizzard decided to balance PvP seperately, I think people underestimate how much effort it would take. Look at Starcraft II. There are three races. Each are capable of building several units and several upgrades. Balancing all of it was probably a major part of the development. Now look at Diablo 3, with 5 classes, a crazy number of skills, then each can be runed, then gear that dertmines the strength of the rune effect. modifies the attack rate and damage, changes all your stats, etc, etc. Balancing that specifically for competition would be a massive undertaking, probably worse than the entire balancing phase of Starcraft II development.

Blizzard does not have unlimited resources. And think about this. This is not a subscription game. Blizzard takes in the initial sale price and RMAH fees , then they are responsiblle for tuning PvM, providing server space, security and hack ressistance. On top of that, they will be planing the expansion. Adding "seperately balance PvP to competition level tuning" to the list seems a bit unreasonable. It has taken so many years to develop this game. Do we want expansions and fixes delayed because the Diablo team is basically juggling resources to balance PvM and PvP at the same? It would be nice to have the best of everything but in the real world, you have to pick your focus and do it well.

Quote from ecutruin

Quote from Mac_an_tSaoir

Thats not the PvP players fault, thats the game developers fault for not making abilities behave different in pve and pvp.

Ability X Does 100 dmg and does and 60% slow for 5 seconds PVE
Ability X does 80 dmg and does a 60% slow for 3 seconds PvP

holy shit, the ability to balance, without PvE effecting pvp balance.

the problem is blizzard thinks that their avg user base is too stupid to comprehend and excel having abilities perform 2 different ways (which is true) and that they have become too lazy to implement this balance (in wow)

In a dev interview they said they wanted to have abilities perform 2 different ways based on if you're in pvp or pve for d3, thats probly whats taking them so long. Because they slacked off with re balancing WoW this way, when it came to d3, this is the first stab at it.

PvE was never affected by PvP in rift, now you're talking out of your ass. PvP suffered for PvE for the longest time, still slightly now.

You still seem to be missing a very specific issue with the idea of balancing both PvE and PvP completely separated that I've touched on a few times in this thread now. Blizzard doesn't have infinite resources. What you're essentially asking Blizzard to do is make two versions of Diablo 3 that are similar but distinctly different and somehow manage to still provide continual content for both. To do that they would need a PvE team and a PvP team, each developing content. The investment would be huge, and would only appeal to a minor subset of their players...how is that a good idea?

To be honest, why it likely 'took so long' is that its gotten the least amount of development attention. It has always kind of been last on the to-do list. Their goal has been to finalize the PvE story and gameplay and add casual PvP afterwards. PvP will have some balancing tweaks to it in order to tame down things like crowd control and most likely some of the really high damage abilities. It won't be all that balanced though, and it won't be extremely competitive. Welcome to Diablo 3.

Quote from Odin

If you want PvP and PvP balance please go back to Counterstrike or any other FPS.

The only "PvP" Diablo needed was the one implemented in D2. Even Blizzard himself stated that Arena has been the biggest mistake they've ever made, so take it for what its worth.

Reason why PvE players "hate" PvP is simple, PvPers are a loud and very vocal minority wanting 100 % balance all the time, therefore crying for buffs/nerfs destroying PvE for everyone else. I've seen this crowd ruining games like Rift, WoW and Everquest so you shouldn't feel offended if people hate PvP.

I would have no problem if there were special PvP rulesets for games and duel function but things like Arena will kill the game for PvE players since you can't play it offline or with LAN therefore you have to accept every patch..