DiabloFans

Quote from "psyfect" »

RP: The development cycle will be more like StarCraft 2. Wrath of the Lich King is an expansion set to a game that's very established in technology, pipeline, team, and everything else. Diablo III is a full-blown new product for us so it will be similar to StarCraft 2.

Whatever that means, heh.

Starcraft II went into development in 2003, and still does not have a release date pending. I'm guessing it comes out in time for Christmas, giving it a total development time of 5 years. If Diablo III has the same development time, that would give it a 2010 release date.

Diablo II was announced 3 years before it launched. Starcraft II was announced in 2007 and will probably come out 2 years after that announce date (according to my prediction). Thus, 2 years from Diablo III announce date also sounds reasonable.

Choosing a class is sort of like choosing your characters gender. It is an image. Not everyone wants to have a funky new image like a witch doctor or something just because it has a different skill set. I personally like to play as a knight, or paladin, it will never get old...im sure you'll get plenty of wacky new classes, thats what expansions are for, too. You have to give the meat and potatoes in the real game because you cant really sell an expansion containing "the warrior!!!!"

Barbarian, Witch Doctor, Sorcerer/Sorceress, Knight, and Reaper

Quote from "Karjalan" »

I am 100% for personalized drops. I think it's bullocks that I should miss out on loot based on where I live.

I do hope they have some way to link your items, or inspect players... Make trading a lot easier.

You don't have to miss out on loot because of where you live.

If you fight next to other people, you're choosing to sacrifice that drop for the ease of someone else's help in defeating the monster. If you want the drop, kill him yourself. Or, charge ahead into the foray a little bit so you can get some distance and get our own drops over there. This is what I've always done and it worked for me.

Another negative effect of personal drops is that you will have tons of worthless players trying to get into your party, following you around, and picking up free drops from every monster you kill. You cant kill them, because there is no PvP, and you cant quit the game without losing your own progress.

Gameplay videos make act 1 appear mind-numbingly easy, even compared to D1 and D2 act 1...which was pretty mind numbingly easily already.

Sure, there are no health potions...but who needs them when nobody, including bosses, can reduce your health below 80% ?

They have stated that the hordes are smaller, and its obvious from the videos that better mass-effect skills are available at lower levels...making even easier work of the smaller hordes.

I just hope they dont make you play through the entire game on kindgergarden difficult before allowing you to set it to a reasonable play level....that would just spoil all the surprises of the difficult bosses when theres no sport

Quote from "Normal" »

The main concern I have for D3 is fighting duplicate items. If they can be %100 prevented not only will d3 have an awesome trading environment - but actually having a non-item based currency system might be possible.

Indeed, this is important -- and it is possible to completely eliminate duping, for server stored characters. I trust that we will not have to worry about this in D3, as I think they resolved all the problems with the D2 system..and I know they are reworking it to cut down on cheating.

Quote from "Daemaro" »

I agreed until you wanted PKing and loot stealing.

If you can't battle someone on your own level that is equally prepared, that's just sad. You claim they're safety padding everything but isn't PKs only picking on low levels a way of them safety padding themselves?

PKing is only fun for one person. The PK.

For the record, I awaited Diablo 1 for about 6 months before it came out. It was my favorite game until Diablo 2 was released. Diablo 2 is still my favorite game. I was never very good at PKing. However, my most memorable experiences are all experiences related to ME being PK'ed, or getting tricked/ripped off. I was incredibly PISSED off when it happened, but they made lasting memories...they caused me to learn my lesson, and respect the game more.

Secondly, I am NOT advocating PvP EVERYWHERE outside of town like in D1. As I said in my original post, I am only advocating that there be certain designated PVP areas that have some "lure" such as more difficult enemies, better loot, more quests, or secret/difficult to find areas (randomly generated).

By having certain designated PVP areas, anyone who does not want to take the risk does not have to take the risk. But it will lure people who are WILLING to take the risk into them. This gives the PK'ers some fun because they can try to catch unprepared people. It gives the hunted players some fun, too, and they cant complain because they voluntarily took the risk.

Structured PvP battles were never much fun in D2.

Personal drops shouldn't effect you at all. Only greedy people will get mad over personal drops. You only see what's yours. If you want something that dropped for someone else, trade for it.

I specifically stated 2 reasons why personal drops affect the game negatively.

1) They necessarily result in less amount of items being visibly dropped from bosses, making the players will not well rewarded; or, alternatively, each boss simply produces more shit for each player, causing the economy to become quickly flooded due to cooperative play, which makes it easier to acquire the ultimate items. You might say "thats good," but its not..its really the exact same effect that DUPING has on the economy.

2) It reduces the excitement and potential backstabbing that you have when doing coop which allows people to bring their personalities into the game. Life is interesting because some people are nice, some people are mean...this is the spice of life. Finding good people. If everyone is forced into being a good person, its not so exciting.

This thread is for discussing suggestions relating to the balanced and thriving economy of D3. My critical points are as follows.

1) Money should have a value > 0. In D1, money had a very small value -- because sometimes Griz would have a good item to buy. In D2, money had no value whatsoever. Gambling was a joke. I sunk all my money into gambling and never got a single thing worth keeping...while taking 4 characters to level 90 and acquiring all the godliest items in the game over years of work. Obviously gambling statistics were designed in a flawed an useless way. There is nothing of high value that can be purchased for a large sum of money making it useless as a currency. Also characters were limited to carrying a small amount. To fix this money problem I suggest 2 things. Firstly, make higher denominations of money that are inventory items. eg, 1000 A = 1 B. 10000 B = 1 C, etc. This is sort of like runes, except that runes do not fit this role because the bottom runes could not be converted all the way to the top runes. Secondly, there needs to be at least 1 purpose for money to a level 99 character. All that is needed is a single purpose. This gives it a trade value and makes it exchangable for any other item. A general purpose use would be to have some type of item buff which can be applied to ANY item (eg, unique, set, whatever) to give it some small permanent improvement.

2) There should be an in-game system for communicating trades. The trading chats were miserable...text flashing by so fast that you could barely read it. Very inefficient. It wastes Bnet server bandwidth to have that kind of unecessary spam. But if you dont have a built in system for hooking up traders, thats what you get. There were the trading forums, but those dont work too well -- you have to coordinate when and where to meet, there is a large time delay, you're constantly minimizing the game...not fun. The only other option is to join channels where lots of people show off their loot. Then its just a crapshoot.

To solve this problem I propose an integrated database system for user created "shops." Users could post their items, sale terms, etc. Other users could search the database to find matches, and filter by who's online and who's not. Similar to the contract system and market in Eve Online, although it doesn't have to be that complicated. Hell, anything will do...anything is better than sitting in front of the trade chat for hours skimming for a rare item to fly by.


3) This should go without saying, but I really hope that the PLETHORA of awesome uniques, sets, and rune words is respected and expanded upon in the fashion of D2. There have been SO many potentially good Diablo clones and all have failed miserably, in my opinion the prime reason is poor design of items. Nobody cares about finding randomly generated items. Theres something wonderfully pleasant about the cool sheen of a gold unique item with a list of stats filling the page. And I'm not talking about boring "+X" stats. The existence of unique items that did interesting things is what made them interesting...like Cleglaws, and that sort of thing. Just look at WoW, Guild Wars, or Hellgate London. All 3 are boring primarily because they have no items that are interesting enough to worth questing over...yet the entire game is based around questing. So, please, keep up the good trend that you started with D1 and really drove home in D2.

4) On Magic Finding: I hope we all understand how essential this is and I hope that it still exists. It is NECESSARY to the economy to have items that are insanely hard to find, but worth it. It is NECESSARY to motivate a person to keep looking for those items by providing a way to increase your chances, other than simply playing for a longer duration of time. MF did the trick. It also adds a very interesting balance...are you planning for the near future, or the end game? Are you going to tough it out, and make all your battles more difficult by wearing more MF? Hell, I found myself questing for the perfect MF gear even after I had all the good stuff that could be found with MF. Its just fun to increase your drop rate.

5) Diablo has always incorporated a bit of loss. This adds spice and makes the game feel more alive. A little more exciting. Remember drop-trading...great adrenaline rush there, sometimes. Even in D2, I got ripped off a few time by clever traders who managed to swap a ring at the last moment...or something like that. Or the very clever person who manages to spy on you exhcanging gear between chars. The fear that your session might close out and delete your gear...when you couldnt log back in fast enough. Blizzard obviously views this sort of thing as a problem that needs to be solved. Thats why they made all those safeties in the trading window. And Ive read that they will make it easy to transfer items between characters in D3, and also that drops are now individual for each monster. They also changed it so that you cant steel loot from PK-ing.

What you don't realize, Blizzard, is that Diablo thrives on PVP aspects and if you safety -pad everything, you KILL the game. Hardcore mode is not really an excuse either. ITs too hardcore for most people, too much riding on your internet connection, not too much fun for most people. I'm talking about general play.

In D1, there was a sense of exhileration meeting a new adventurer in the Monastery that D2 just didn't have. This knight looks friendly, he's helping you...but at any moment he could take a slash at you like a posessed demon! Then you call in more friends to help. Perhaps he kills you and you need to go back to get your corpse. Yeah, you can say, "that sucked," but the fact is...you can be more careful if you need to be, but the existence of potential threat makes the game exciting. It also means you can build trust between players that is more meaningful than in a game where PvP doesnt happen.

There was a little bit of trust-building in D2 as well. Everyone needed to find some people to help them transfer items across characters. This was mostly a trust building thing and it raises the blood pressure sometimes too. If you make transfering between chars a simple secure transaction, you RUIN that exhileration and that trust building. Now its a kiddie farm and people get bored.

In D2, you had to think fast to pick up the good items before other people. You often had to move away from the pack and put yourself in more dangerous situations in order to get those good drops yourself. This was fun. Seeing a cool item drop...missing it...saying OH DAMNIT...yeah it sucked, but it made the game INTERESTING and fun.

Now there are personal drops. This sucks. It takes away from this fun aspect. Not only that, its worse for the economy, because monsters either have to drop N times less (for N players in the game), or they flood the economy with N times more wealth. If they drop less, players feel gyped. If they drop more, economy is flooded. It's not a good situation.

Whatever you do, just dont BIND items to players. Its bad enough that there were class-bound items in D2. Now all items will be class-bound in D3. This is quite a shame because it reduces the creativity that players can have in designing their arsenals. Yes, it does. Because you can only design a finite number of unique items, and if you divide that among P classes, that means there are only 1/P as many items per class as there could be WITHOUT class binding...and lets say you get to wear 5 items, the difference between (N choose 5) and (N/P choose 5) is pretty big. If you bind items to players, that just ruins the trade economy...nobody wnats to wear the items they find, or they arent happy with them because they cant switch to different char...just dont to it. It was a terrible design choice by the games that did it. Diablo has always been about trading dont ruin that.

6) Please bring some aspects of PK-ing back. I'm not talking about "PKing by choice." PKing by choice is not much fun because only well prepared characters will both agree. PKing is only fun if you're kicking someone elses ass, or exhilirating and memorable if someone is kicking YOUR ass. Of course, you will never voluntarily let them. What you need to have is gaming areas that have better loot probability but where PKing is allowed. This allows bold adventurers to venture into the risky area....at the increased RISK of having their head chopped off and their body looted to smitherenes. Make it a difficicult area so you cant just go in there with newb armor and be risk-free. You should have to risk what you wear being stolen to go there. This would be so much fun.

Thanks for listening