DiabloFans

The AMD is cheaper...the Intel is more powerful. Pick your poison.

If this is purely for Diablo 3, save yourself the $$ and get the AMD. If you are just upgrading in general, get the Intel.

If it was me, I would get the 2500k (in fact, I did :P)

Most people won't notice the performance difference between the 2500k and the 3570k. However, if you plan on overclocking, the Ivy Bridge will probably be able to achive higher overclocks.

But really, unless you are going to SLI/Crossfire high end GPU's (which you don't appear to be), the 2500k is more than enough.

If you can wait, then definitely go for the 3570k (they aren't coming until April). Otherwise, stick with the 2500k.

Alienware is a waste of money in my opinion.

It's between the XPS17 and the Sager. Based on the prices and the specs you gave me, I'd say the Sager is a better deal. They make great quality laptops (from what I've read, never owned one).

Sager gets my vote.

Actually this is not the case. You will NOT have to go into another Core stat to get defensive. They will be handled by secondary stats. At least, that is what I gatherered from Bashiok's post.

EDIT: This was directed at Ferret.

Don't forget that there are "secondary" stats too: Crit, Crit Chance, Dodge, Armor, ect...

Quote from Keiser

Losing lottery tickets are useless. I think they should remove those from state lotteries.

Or you can kill countless monsters and have NOTHING drop at all, I bet that would be exciting. Personally I'd rather have mounds of stuff hitting the ground, as it would be if I was cutting a swath through a horde of hell fiends.

Except white items aren't like the losing lottery tickets. Losing would be the monster not dropping anything at all (like you not winning anything on a lottery ticket).

White items are more like winning a pile of garbage. Who wants to win a pile of garbage on their lottery ticket?

Didn't they (Blizzard) say that the game could be released right now (as in the game is "finished")? The main reason it's not is because they weren't happy with a few of the core systems (Runestones) and wanted to try some different iterations.

Based on that, I think that a Q1 release is still very plausible. I'm going with my original estimate of: Announcement on Feb. 28 for a release date of March 27.

Posting to confirm lack of beta invite. Of course I won't be invited even when the next wave goes out, so I'm a bad marker for comparison

I had the pleasure of meeting Bashiok (and his big bushy mustache) at PAX East earlier today and he was nice enough to answer some of my Inferno difficulty related questions. I didn't record our conversation and these are not absolute direct quotes so you'll have to trust me, haha.

-As of now the maximum monster level in Inferno is specifically 64, not just "somewhere around 65(?)" as mentioned in his Inferno post.
Not mindblowing but interesting

-I asked him about how in what I saw of a tiny bit of what looked like Hell or Inferno footage in the Blizzcon 2011 Gameplay & Auction House Panel the monsters moved REALLY fast and would not just attack the player from where they approached but actually run past him/her and sort of do a quick slingshot and attack from an unexpected direction (http://www.youtube.c...JfTfktc#t=3077s is the footage). It took a while for him to process what I was getting at but he did (re)confirm that monsters move faster in later difficulties and that they will have behaviors like 'stop for a bit, then come at you'.

-I mentioned the "internal bets" on how many "months" it would take to beat Inferno. He now believes that it's now a "few weeks"; not months. This was after I pressed him on the whole 'what if the person goes through the auction house and accelerates his gearing that way'.

-He's not aware of any real changes in health globe mechanics (drop rates, heal amounts) across the difficulties. He did mention the passive skills that help with globes- I imagine those will help quite a bit in endgame.

-He reiterated that you need to build up your defenses for Inferno via gear and skill choices. No surprise there.

-I asked him about the whole "bullet hell" mechanics (mentioned at Blizzcon 2010 panel I believe?) where you have to sort of dodge projectiles to avoid damage (I would imagine there would be a lot of them in Inferno). He said there are certainly such things but stressed that it's really more about getting the best gear and building up your defense than that.

-Right now in internal testing he said people are finding endgame solo play more preferable to party play. He attributes this to the scaling of monsters to the amount of players not making things any easier (implying that if one person messes up and dies, it just makes it harder on everyone else). I asked him if he thinks people will make 4 player parties and try to create "roles" with their builds and successfully tackle Inferno that way. He was agreeable to the concept.



I don't think he was totally prepared for the questions I suddenly threw at him but he was great (and patient with me despite all the stuff happening around with the D3 line and a couple other guys who were talking with him)

I also want to mention that the Runic guys (who were standing around on their side of the D3/T2 area)
are awesome and Torchlight II looks and plays great too! It's a great time to be an action RPG fan.

When it's done... getting as old as arrow to the knee

Quote from Kblavkalash

Vlad Adrian Stefan:

@Angryrobotics any good news from Asia?

Jay:
Asia is not what's holding us back. You'll see soon enough.


https://twitter.com/...639098232061952

Key word here is "soon"

Soon: Copyright 2004-2012 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. "Soon" does not imply any particular date, time, decade, century, or millennia in the past, present, and certainly not the future. "Soon" shall make no contract or warranty between Blizzard Entertainment and the end user. "Soon" will arrive some day, Blizzard does guarantee that "soon" will be here before the end of time. Maybe. Do not make plans based on "soon" as Blizzard will not be liable for any misuse, use, or even casual glancing at "soon."
Now ←-------------- Very Soon -------- Soon ---------------→ End of Time

From what I understand from the situation, the committe never revealed which day exactly they were gonna handle the rating. But, with meetings being held on wednesdays and fridays, people automatically assumed that it would be on wednesday.

Anyway, heres what little I know about the situation.
Before the current GRB came to place, the VRB[video rating board] has been in charge of the rating of games, movies, music etc. The reason the VRB was scrapped was because it was respondible for passing the game 'Seastory' http://cfs15.tistory...7/498acd1ccc62d
yeah, I know, most of the Korean populace was thinking the same thing. 'WTF?'

When the game became controversial due to illegal modifications investigations were put into place and.. as it turns out, there were bribes and manipulations of rules behind the passing of this 'legal slot machine' [which was responsible for wrecking several families] and thus the GRB was born and we can see here why it would be sensitive about issues that concern real money.

But this organization has also brought up some controversies of it's own.
First, the rating progress is overly complicated and the fees attached are unreasonably high, there is no clear guidlines in how a game is rated so there's no way for game companies to know if they have been rated fairly. And there's also the problem that this board is not really up to date on the fast paced change of the gaming industry.
Second, the board had promised to rate game only up to last year and transfer the rights to rate games to the public but they backed out of that promise and applied for a new budget last year and the national assembly approved it.

Furthermore, Blizzard could not have chosen a worse timing to bring up the RMAH in Korea [not that there's anything they could have done about the situation]

Last november, a new law was proposed that would illegalize any real money trade in games that underages are able to play. And yes, the [legal] real money trading sites are doing all they can to fight against this but things don't look bright for them. There was also an incident of a middle school student suicide to which games were somewhat related to during July.
So we pretty much have a really screwed up situation here, and the GRB isn't doing any help to make things less complicated.

You see Blizzard, being aware of the new law against underage real money trade, had applied for a mature rating for Diablo 3. And yet the GRB held the 'anti-gambling'stance claiming that those of underage 'might' still play the game.
Yeah, what kind of phail-logic is that? Why the f- do they rate games anyway if they're going to consider the possibility of someone underage playing despite the mature rating?

But nonetheless Diablo 3 has been dragged into the 'real money in games' issue and the GRB is in a tricky situation to try to prove the need of their existance through this issue.'
Some think that this is all because of bribes to protect the domestic game industry, some people think it's because of the lack of bribes on Blizzard's part.
But if the reason is the latter, I [a Korean if you haven't figured that out yet] personally hope that Blizzard will give the GRB a good ol middle finger and pass Korea. The worthless low-end bureaucracy here is really f'd up and it would be bad if they're spoiled more than they already are [sheesh, at least the high-end works their ass's off]
As for me.. don't know. IF that is to happen I guess I'll just have to get a US copy and proxy or something

The official community site adds another random object to click on that does nothing to give the user any known benefit but is still clicked on endlessly because users are fascinated by the unknown of it all. Now that's what Blizzard calls a little something fun!!

My personal favorite idea is a little web game where there are three heads that pop up out of a waypoint symbol randomly and quickly that are the heads of Mike Morhaime, Jay Wilson, and Chris Metzen with their smuggest of headshots. Users get to try to beat these three over the head with Wirt’s leg to get out their frustrations over being more or less completely in the dark about when they’ll actually get a release date for the game. Leaderboards are established to track the day’s best scores.

Ironically, people who have a great deal of experience playing the WoW auction house for profit, or people who have stock trading/investment experience in RL, will have the best chance of making money. It will NOT be about playing and selling stuff. EVERYONE will be doing that. In fact, everyone will be buying and reselling too (the primary way of making money in the WoW AH). The trick will be recognizing and exploiting trends, which will be difficult, mostly because one bad buy of any significant quantity will lose you tons of money.

I would like to reiterate that I seriously doubt anyone but a tiny percentage of the game population will make any real money. A lot of people in the community seem to think it will be easy.

It will require at least three of the following to get a reasonable return (IE more than 25 cents an hour)

large initial cash investment (and if you don't have other stuff to back this up, goodbye cash)
luck
strong investing/business skill, including associated tracking of price fluctuations and price points
a fuckton of grinding
a trading network (I'm thinking clan-wide)

I respect anyone who can successfully make a reasonable profit from the cash AH, it's not going to be a cakewalk.

Quote from Molster

I think we are running low on tin-foil hats..

Do me a favor, stop callously insulting people on this forum for trying to have an intelligent discussion. I personally expect more from moderators, but maybe I shouldn't.

Quote from Molster

Most companies dont even bother to give half the information blizzard does. Blizzard cares about keep us up to date, and people that seem to not understand things change, that cause blizzard to give "time frames" instead of dates now.

Keep believing that Blizzard is so great for "graciously" providing us such a priceless wealth of "information." For a large group of customers, their "information" is anything but informative; it's frustrating, misleading, and un-necessary. In my experience, this kind of continual, intentionally vague, vapor-speak is intended to keep an immature, un-empowered customer base ignorant but engaged. I've worked in software a long time, as a technical marketing engineer, test engineer, development engineer, and in sales. There isn't any paranoia at work. They are literally not allowed to say anything of substance without going through a serious approval chain (just read a day in the life of Bashiok).

I find it particularly cynical your opinion that corporations are impervious from any criticism or accountability to their paying customers. If Blizzard is going to engage their customers by announcing a game 4 years in advance, they have a responsibility to effectively inform their customers, or else their customers are going to get pissed off... which is exactly what happened. Why is this such a travesty to you?

Where there's smoke, there's fire. Where there's a ton of pissed off customers, there is a company that needs to improve their marketing and PR. In my opinion, most people don't think that highly of Blizzard as a company, they only think highly of Blizzard games. That's a fairly fragile brand loyalty.

Now you might argue that in order for them to keep making great games, they will always have to alienate their "impatient" customer base. That could not be farther from the truth. Again, how cynical do you have to be to believe that Blizzard can't have both great PR AND great games?

Quote from Molster

You know back in the day, blizzard gave exact planed dates, 100% exact to what they were hoping for, but they have to push them back and people would complain over and over about this, so what is the solution? blizzard no longer gives us exact dates until the game is pretty much going gold. And when they try to give "basic ideas" and "thoughts" about a release goal, we STILL get people QQing about everything they can about how they are giving us no information now, and how everything they are saying is to just "keep us happy"...

It's a good point to bring up, that people holding Blizzard accountable to their release dates is what caused Blizzard to STOP giving release dates. But don't be naiive. The PROBLEM was Blizzard missing release dates because they suck at project management they don't value discrete project management deadlines like most other companies do.. The problem was NEVER the customer, because all we ever did was hold Blizzard accountable to their own word. Guess that's a giant inconvenience to them.

The conversation goes roughly like this:
Us: "Hey Blizzard, you said the game was gonna be released <date1>. Now you're just gonna push release to <date2>? How can I trust you now?"
(2 weeks later)
Blizzard: "Trust us. Oh, btw, we're gonna miss <date2>, it's <date3> now. Aren't you glad I communicate with you so much? You should be thankful!"
Us: "Why? Some companies announce a game is in development, give concrete dates, meet those dates."
Blizzard: "Because we give you waaaay more information than those companies, and we make better games than them."
Us: "Well, you do make better games. But maybe I don't need information if it's not accurate, reliable, or even really saying anything we didn't already know..."
Blizzard: "But we really want to engage our fans, we love you guys!"
Us: "Cool. Well in that case, I have a few questions. How far along are you guys in development? What's going well? What's not? How's testing going?"
(2 weeks later)
Blizzard: "We're making design decisions and polishing the game, it's looking great. We're in the home stretch."
Us: "um.. you MUST be aware that you didn't answer the question at all."
(2 weeks later)
Blizzard: "Well runestones are pretty weird, it's possible we've made a decision about runestones now. We're in the home stretch of runestone decision making."
Us: "You guys are re-writing runestones? Ok. Well, what's the verdict?"
Blizzard: "We have several solutions and we're polishing things up, it's looking great and we're really close. Home stretch."
Us: "So, hey how about a release date? I mean, we know you are very protective of quality, but you MUST have internal deadlines, right? C'mon, gimme a little something.. you love me, remember?"
(2 weeks later)
Blizzard: "Early 2012."
Us: "What does that mean? Q1? First two months? First half? Jan 17th? wtf?"
Blizzard: "It means we pushed release back to 2012"
Us: "Ok that's actually MORE vague than 'early 2012', which is an amazing achievement in vagueness."
Blizzard fanboy: "Wow dude, stop being such an entitled, whiny little bitch. You should be kissing Blizzard's hairy beanbag just for talking to you at all."

I could keep going.

Quote from Molster

ps: you should reread the guy's post I replied to, as I understood it.

I tried to understand your point of view, I just can't extract your opinion out of his words.