DiabloFans

You aren't the only one who has this complaint, but there's a misconception floating around that swords and axes will somehow be superior to wands and staffs. Caster weapons have lower DPS than other weapons, but to make up for it they have mods like "Increase wizard damage by 100%".

It makes sense from a lore standpoint to require a powerful weapon to cast powerful spells. Look at fantasy stories like lord of the rings and harry potter, the wizards need staffs and wands to cast their spells.

Here's mine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ks7ENzXvgc&

Haha I guess you can't really have a 'real contest' over the internet...

Unless the contest qualifies certain skills; like artistic skills, programming skills, Starcraft 2 skills, etc.

The development team of Grinding Gear Games, the makers of Path of Exile, do an outstanding job of communicating with the player base. In particular, their lead game designer and producer Chris Wilson responds to beta feedback on the forums on a daily basis, and occasionally even logs into the game to chat with players and give updates. Here's some samples of how he communicates:

I completely hear what you guys are saying and it's being addressed in the upcoming balance patch.

The goal of 0.9.2 was not to fix the skill balance. To do that properly requires stripping stuff back to bare bones and actually addressing underlying issues that have been in the system for too many years. That's what we're doing right now, because it is the most important problem with the game. We did include some skill changes in 0.9.2 as you know, for things that could be easily changed and tested. I am happy to make more changes in the coming days if needed. We're not going to try to stick you with the same patch for several weeks. There's another patch today, for example.

We're working hard on resolving the balance, but trying to do it in a long term way, rather than reactively reading a post about fireball being overpowered and turning it back down, which results in a rant from someone else about how it's now underpowered. It's better to know that we set Fireball correctly, and then get feedback on that, rather than solicit feedback on how loud other people's feedback was.

He understands the importance of giving players specific details about game mechanics, and is willing to answer questions regarding these mechanics:

We didn't change the monster difficulty (other than making bosses harder). Can you help work out what is causing it to feel like monsters are easier to kill? Are you using one of the skills that was boosted in damage?

The purpose of 0.9.3 is to fix the monster difficulty curve forever, so that we have a good point to balance around in the future.

Aside from the currency increase, the change regarding drops was a reduction from 18% to 17% drop rate. That means there should be 5% less items dropping (including 5% less rares/magics), which does appear to be the case. Are you seeing more than 5% less?

He gives accurate time frames and what content to expect in patches:

Three of our NZ developers went to PAX. The guys that went are all leads, so their respective departments worked without much supervision while we were gone. Two of us are back now, and hard at work reading feedback and checking the work that was done while we were away.

There were a lot of changes made while we were gone. A lot of new art has to be checked/improved by Erik (who should be back approximately Tuesday NZ time I hope). There are new skills that must be finished, tested and balanced. We haven't even started making any balance changes from 0.9.1 yet.

We have a choice between rushing out a small patch, or doing a proper job of actually making some meaningful balance changes. At this stage I'm more interested in doing it properly, and not just patching urgently because it has been a couple of weeks.

Once the patch is ready, it has to go through internal quality assurance for a few days, and then some external alpha testing. My best guess is that we will be able to deploy it around Monday 12 September.

It's important to note, however, that Grind Gear Games is an extremely small indie developer (and by extremely small I mean less than 20 people). They don't have any "community managers" like Blizzard does, so the developers interact directly with the players. This creates a much stronger bond between the game makers and game players, as there is no third party filter for communication.

Even though GGG is such a small company, they do have a pretty substantial community. There are around 500-1000 players in the beta, and hundreds more active users on the forum waiting for invites.

Before the dawn of man...

Ahem, let me start over. Before the the release push-back to early 2012 announcement made yesterday, there was a collective idea that they were going to announce the real release date at Blizzcon this October.

After the push-back, does this seem less likely? If Blizzard is unable to announce a set release date at Blizzcon, what else will they be able to announce at Blizzcon? A few things come to mind:

-Runestone system
-Alternate PvP modes
-Easter Egg content(?)

And of course, the beta key giveaways, which will probably be something like this...

LOL force needs to slow down you can tell he's sooo excited

Boy I can't wait til someone makes a playthrough video and actually gives commentary on the lore and storyline and quests you're doing instead of having a circle jerk over vent talking about random asinine bullcrap.

Quote from Stinkfist86

Quote from Highlander

"Commence" means to start, but the F&F beta 'commenced' last week. So if the message used that specific word today, then it just might be "A SIGN OF THE BETA!!!" or not...Oh well, back to doing something else more important. <_<

What could be more important than Diablo?

I was studying for an exam about an hour ago, and kept getting distracted by visions of New Tristram...

Yes! I will love using The Grandfather on a Barbarian who actually looks like a grandfather.

I'd love to have a raven companion! I would pretend I was Lord Commander Mormont of the Night's Watch. CORN! COORRN! SNOW!

Video of the new Monk ability, Cyclone Strike.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT7VcMN75Tk&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyso6DG-Xfw&feature=player_embedded

Everyone and their dog keeps making posts about Blizzard delaying release of Diablo for financial reasons. I'm going to ignore all the reasons that this idea is ridiculous.

AFTER listing them.

1.)Delaying past Christmas misses the biggest sales period of the year, which will surely lose them hundreds of thousands of sales

2.)Continuing production means paying all the developers working on it for that much longer, further decreasing the net profit

3.)The beta still has plenty of bugs, battlenet features are unfinished, and the runes system is still being fooled around with, so clearly it's not ready for release

4.)Delaying release makes stockholders nervous, and since information given to them is public, we know what they know, and they have been notified of no sinister delay conspiracy. So Blizzard would be devaluing its own stock.

5.)It's fucking Blizzard. Since when are long development cycles unusual?

But we're ignoring this, because the most ridiculous part isn't all the very obvious reasons why the idea is insane. The most ridiculous part is the fact that some people think that their own personal convenience means more than the budgets and development cycles and physical health of the development team.

People working on Diablo 3 have been in crunch time (60+ hour weeks) for something like eight months. The company has sank millions of dollars into the project. The development team has spent 5+ years of their lives putting their blood, sweat, and tears into the game.

But your own impatience overrules all objections. The game should be released NOW, because you're tired of waiting. It's not like there are any other things in your entire life you could be doing.

If that doesn't sound not only absurd, but incredibly callous, then you have some life issues to work out.

The problem that we face is that we can't pick anyone that uses any references (memes, pop culture, movies, etc.) from outside the series (everyone's first complaint), so that eliminates 95% of them. Then we got in trouble for picking one that focused on image usage and didn't include a caption, so we had to be sure entries had literal captions.

What are the rules, exactly? I mean - while I'm not complaining about losing - the last competition I entered, I apparently wasn't able to win from the moment I sent in my submission. This was largely due to the aforementioned rules of selection that were implemented after previous weeks (namely, the first winner). I wasn't aware of them at the time, and thus, made my submission accordingly.

I totally understand the decisions made, I don't think the contest was 'rigged', and I even found the winning submission to be somewhat amusing (though my own preferences lean elsewhere, even aside from my own) but I would've liked to be kept into the loop. Making a submission like the first winner's ended up making it impossible for me to win from the start, because of changes in the rules that I was not aware of. That is frustrating, to say the least. As such, I kind of want to avoid a repeat situation like that again, if at all possible.

For a moment while writing this, I asked myself if I was simply ignorant, or just making a big deal out of nothing. To ensure that I wasn't being biased in my perspectives, I went back to the third contest to examine it a bit more closely: http://www.diablofans.com/news/932-beta-key-contest-3/. I didn't see anything about no memes, or even no images. I suppose one could take the speech and thought bubbles aspect literally, and extrapolate that it cannot be anything except such, but then the actual winner technically wouldn't apply, for having subtext; this of course would be a silly proposition. Combine this with the fact that the first winner had an image, and you run into a situation of some rules obscurity.

I digress. What was done is done. But, that doesn't mean I won't learn from previous errors. So, now I ask, what are the rules for this? Outside references are no-no's, I assume. How 'short' is 'short'? Will I be disqualified for typing too much or too little? It's just really difficult to read between the lines now, and I'm worried that there's some hidden clause that will guarantee loss before I even submit a given piece of writing. I suppose the easy answer is "If you're worried about losing, then don't participate." Honestly, though, I'd like to. I have no problems with losing; It's the 'no chance' feeling that I'd rather not meet with again. Thus, I figured that opening the lanes of communication would be a good idea. There's no ill will, just confusion and caution, I suppose.

Thanks for reading, and preemptive thanks for any possible clarity on the matter.

http://d3db.com/article/read/blizzcon_2011_press_conference

Q. Can you talk a little bit more about the Halls of the Dead?

JW: The idea is when you lose a hardcore character, you don't really want that character to go away forever and you don't want it to take up a character slot. Well, it'll probably be optional where you can choose to free up the slot by archiving the dead character into the Halls of the Dead. You'll see the name, the gear on death, and maybe some other stuff.

Q. Is it actually part of the ui?

JW: It's part of your profile, so you just need to right click on your character to open up your profile and it tells you all about your character, your achievements and your progression.

Q. When you say Halls of the Dead I just imagined a hall where you walk around with statues of your characters.

JW: That would be awesome, but it's probably just going to be in the UI. Maybe someday it'll be a big awesome hall!

Q. Now that all spells are dependent on weapon speed and damage, are you getting rid of spell damage and increased cast rate?

JW: We are getting rid of increased cast rate, and increased weapon rate will replace it. Spell damage was a stat that only really appeared to the Witch Doctors and Wizards, we probably made this change for 2 reasons. The major one was we found casters were not valuing their weapons, that was a big problem with Diablo 2. The second one was Witch Doctor and Wizard randomly generated affixes were very confusing, our testers were coming back with questions like "What’s the math on this, when you say 20% increased damage does it apply to base damage, to spell damage?” If you can't understand it and can't understand which one is better than the other than that's a bad thing.

Q. What did you have to change in order to make followers viable in the end-game?

JW: The big one is we have to do a multiplier on your base stats, because you don't have the same item options as your character.

Q. So, do we still have to sacrifice passives to buff our followers? I remember back in the press event you said that.

JW: Oh, that what just an idea I had at the time, you won't have to sacrifice passives.

Q. What about the unattuned runestones on the homepage?

JW: Where is that system at? It's... interesting. It's not great, as one of our people said to us "It's kind of a new kind of horrible" because it just had different problems. It's really the last big system we have, the last big problem to solve.

Q. What's the biggest thing you've learned since the beta was released?

JW: Most of the beta has been useful to us from a technical standpoint, so there's not a lot of tuning stuff that the beta tells us about. The vast majority of feedback we've received has been "it's too easy". We really wanted the beta to test our hardware.

JAB: In the industry, it's really hard to test load and infrastructure without the players. Players play differently and are smart, our testing bots are not.

Q. Do you have to play through softcore to unlock hardcore?

JW: Oooh, good question, yes, you will have to play through to a certain point to unlock hardcore mode, I think it's through normal difficulty after you kill the end boss. I'm like 90% sure, so we could change our minds.

Q. We had a discussion on our forums about the color of resource systems, specifically the Demon Hunter and Monk, everyone got new resource systems other than the Witch Doctor who is stuck with mana. The same old blue orb, what are your thoughts on changing that to something more Witch Doctery like green?

JW: We like the Witch Doctor one the most, the biggest problem with green is its poison. So, if we put it in there that's going to be the reaction people have, like is that my poison vial... have I been poisoned? Some people have suggested we make the Monk orb Yellow, like the urine ball as opposed to the jizz ball. One of the suggestions we got for the Demon Hunter was to make it black... but that won't work since you just won't see it, and white is a massive contrast. If you do that you'll suddenly have a resource that you just can't see. So we were comfortable with the red and blue, they work better.

Q. Surely you have the resources to just add a new color to the spectrum.

JW: Umm, we have the power, but we don't have the will. (looks to JAB) You know it's true.

JAB: I don't know that.

Q. Are we going to be forced to use Real ID to add friends?

JW: No, and that's all I can say. We do have some plans; we aren't going to force you to be Real ID friends.

Q. With the banner system in Diablo III, are we going to start out with everything we see in the beta unlocked, or will we have to gain achievements to unlock them.

JW: It's just there for you to see, you'll have to gain achievements to unlock those.

Q. Do you have a number of achievements yet?

JW: Umm, no.

JAB: 12?

JW: No.

JAB: 13?

JW: More than 13.

JAB: 15?

JW: More than 15, would you like to take another shot?

JAB: 16.

JW: You're getting closer, very slowly. It'll be in the hundreds.

JAB: That was my next guess.

Q. How many hours do you anticipate the average player will have to invest to hit level 60 in Diablo III?

JW: This is a really hard question to answer, people ask me this all the time. The answer depends on how insane you are... I'm gonna say... I'm not even gonna guess, because if I do I know that's going to come back and haunt me. We're not really concerned about making 1-60 some ridiculously long grind. We're not douchebags, it'll be based upon what feels good.

Q. Compared to Diablo 2?

JW: Again, it's speculation that will come back to haunt me. It'll probably be shorter than Diablo II, but D2 also didn't have an end-game.

Q. With the rich lore and races of World of Warcraft, have you thought of incorporating some of that into Diablo III such as Dwarves?

JW: No, one of the things that is driving the Diablo universe is that it's a very human-centric place. Anything that isn't human is pretty much bad.

Q. Why isn't Diablo III supporting mods?

JW: There's a variety of reasons for that, one of the things people say a lot is "Oh, mods are such a hallmark of the previous games!" and I say... really?. There are mods, and there has been some developer support for those efforts, but that's not the same as us directly support it. To do that, we release tool sets and treat it like a product. We decided that the effort it would take to make mod tools would be a monumental effort. I know it seems like we're Blizzard and we have unlimited resources but we don't - we had to figure out our priorities to get the game out.


DTOID
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqbGG46plgQ&feature=player_embedded

GamerLiveTV
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LCHPoUnx7s&feature=player_embedded

Force
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk8M8xOnLdI&feature=feedu

Here are a few examples of the shots I took:

You can find them all here on Facebook (the gallery system here on Dfans won't let me create an album).

Also, I'll be getting some ninja videos of some PvP gameplay soon(tm).

Enjoy!

Anyone have good sign ideas for the D3 team or blizzcon in general?

were occupying blizzcon, everyone is welcome to join our comical and violent occupation

here is my sign, linked through twitter.

http://yfrog.com/obw42apj

Diablo Party Train!

Google "Click a lot!"

Helps finding the shapes 10x faster. Just turn it on and move your mouse around the picture quickly.