DiabloFans

Quote from jwylie311

The point is, without an in game auction house, Blizzard does not endorse it and doesn't have to balance the game around it.

I still don't see any examples of game-changing occurrences that related to the AH whatsoever. If a self-found person abused attack speed when it was overpowered, they got nerfed too. If someone spent money on a clearly imbalanced mechanic, that's their problem. They DID nerf attack speed, so they are clearly willing to do it, they just want to direct the anger of people who abuse broken mechanics to another place.

I mean, tell me a change they couldn't do because it would upset AH users too much.

If they don't like the idea of meddling with things that people spent real currency on, then they should remove the RMAH, not the normal AH.

Critical Mass and One With Everything are two very prominent abilities that haven't been touched because people have bought gear to make them work to ridiculous levels. These passives are amazing when geared correctly and thanks to the AH it's easy to gear them right, but it can pigeonhole the players into needing only specific gear which means finding interesting upgrades is very difficult.

They've spent months telling us how they want to fix OWE but they haven't been able to because they acknowledge that it would be unfair to everyone that spent their cash into it. Ever since IAS Blizzard has been gun shy about changing loot affixes because they dont' ever want someone to buy something and feel like Blizzard just pulled a "Bait and Switch" on them. You haven't seen any examples of game changing occurrences because they aren't making those decisions due to the AH.

Yes a self found person could have found the right setup and gotten lucky, but a self found person didn't spend hard earned cash. Truth is, a self found person probably wouldn't have bothered with OWE (at least to the degree it was used) because it needs such very specific gear that it wouldn't be thinkable unless you got very lucky.

Quote from maka

I don't know who this PiousFlea is, but he has some good ideas.

I'm KageKaze and I approve this message.
This post brought to you by the coalition for people who agree with what PiousFlea just said.. *cough*

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile, I gotta get the silly out sometimes.

NOTE: YouTube is taking forever to process the video, but the visual component is just filler as this really is a podcast. Feel free to "stay a while and listen" and not worry about the vid quality

Ladies and Gentlemen I have been gone and quiet for a long time. I think it's time I start getting back into the forums and being active with D3 again, it's a pretty exciting time with a looming expansion.

I've made another Video Podcast and I'm focusing on the removal of the Auction House this time around (isn't everyone?) because I think it has far reaching implications for Blizzard beyond the whole "buy gear now, lose carrot on a stick" issue we've been seeing.

As always, because I love Diablofans and this is a forum, I'll give a synopsis here.

When Diablo 3 hit there was a lot wrong with the game, but certainly there was a lot right. Gameplay, music, sound, animations, everything that made a game feel good to play was there. The game, however, was plagued by always online requirements, impossibly high difficulty walls, and loot that gave no real satisfaction.

Many issues have been resolved and while I bear no hatred to Jay Wilson, I'm glad to see the Diablo 3 team moving in a positive direction with the new expansion pack. With Loot 2.0, we're going to see it become easier to get loot that's self found and we're going to see items that offer changes in how we play the game. This creates a problem with an Auction House.

So when they add in all these cool procs, the first thing someone's going to do is find out which is more efficient and players will go buy that item. They will forget about all the other cool procs and how they could make fun builds and just go for what works the best, it just seems to be in human nature. I submit that not having an Auction House will cause people to experiment more. They will have a hodgepodge set of gear that isn't optimal and they will find a set of skills they find fun and start enjoying the game.

The second issue I see being resolved is the hard to balance skills and items that have plagued Blizzard since day 1. When IAS was nerfed there was a huge outcry, and I can't help but wonder if this would have been such a big deal if people hadn't gone out and bought all this gear to be efficient. If it was a nice to have stat that you had to find for yourself, would you have cared if it was nerfed?

Let's take that a step further and look at the Monk skill One With Everything. This skill has been a terror for Blizzard because most monks use it and they can't nerf it without making all that gear people BOUGHT become useless. So they tell us over and over again they want to change it but can't figure out how to do it fairly. Now that the AH is going away, it's going to be harder and harder to find that perfect set of gear to use with One With Everything and it's going to lose it stature and people will start finding other skills to use.

I think this is probably the biggest obstacle that Blizzard had to remove. Without the Auction House, Blizzard is free to think about skills and gear without worrying about what people bought, without having to be fair about what you traded for it. They can make changes that they feel will balance out the game as well as open up some creativity with how some of these skills work. They won't have to worry about "what happens if someone stacks this type of gear" because it will be rare. Certainly there will still be trading and 3rd party sites will pop up, but that's not Blizzard's problem anymore. If someone trades or buys on a 3rd party site, Blizzard isn't responsible for that transaction and doesn't have to change their skills to reflect that anymore.

I, for one, am really interested to see how this will play out and think Diablo 3 can have a bright future. Now Blizzard just has to follow up with some good gear for the xpack. Diablo 2 didn't become the game people know and love until after Lord of Destruction, so let's see if Diablo 3 can follow suit. Diablo 2 had about 3-4 years of tuning (expansion pack and additional content after), so it's not like there isn't time.

So now that I've brought this discussion into play, I'm interested to see if it's changed your thoughts on the AH going away for good or ill. Please by all means leave some feedback and discussion I'll be actively watching here and on the YT comments. <3 to Diablofans.

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Video Description (and time stamps):

I'm gonna say I'm amused at how many people say this is a huge fuck up and it's ruined the game for who still plays it.. meanwhile I'm just sitting here, polishing my self found gear wondering what all the hubub is about. <3

Quote from tanis0

I don't understand all the hate toward Kongor in this thread. If you don't like his videos, don't watch them. He's not wrong though. This is a massive failure on Blizzard's part and they obviously need to reevaluate their testing process. QA should have caught this, and there's really no excuse.

But in any case, the AH is now offline. I'm surprised they didn't just take the whole game down because they are obviously going to have to roll stuff back. I'm not sure how they are going to handle the real money transactions though. Presumably, they'll have to refund everyone who bought or sold anything during this time-frame. I assume they have a process in place to do this because the alternative is that they're semi-trained baboons masquerading as software developers.

While it is a tester's job to break things while they test, usually when a patch itiration such as this comes along, testing is usually confined to things that were changed. In this case the only changes in place were tooltips and the price of gold was adjusted. As a tester I certainly wouldn't have though them adding an extra zero would affect how the posting and revoking of auctions would be affected.

This probably only got noticed because someone did it accidentally then decided to use it to their own advantage. Eventually word spread. All it takes is one enterprising person to try something unique and unexpected. You cant expect QA to think of every idea any human will ever try, or in this case stuff that just happens on accident.

They were quick to take it down, they will correct it, getting out the torches because an error was missed isn't needed. Was it a mistake? Yes. Does it cost them? yes. Does human error occur? yes. Have other companies made far worse mistakes? hell yes. It happens, we move on.

EDIT: Also I just caught the start of the video... "Biggest fail in the history of gaming" is so far from true, it's pretty comical. I guess hyperbole and bliz bashing is what gets views though. I think SimCity has been much worse and even that probably isn't the worst. You want some epic fail, take a look at Big Rigs Over the Road Racing. That game didn't even work 90% of the time.

Speaking on the idea of preorders, I have to admit to hating them and yet also partaking of them at the same time. See I like the idea that I can preorder a game I know I'm going to want at a store. I can do a layaway, put $5 here and $10 there and the game eventually gets paid off over time before release.

What I hate is now they do these exclusives. They drive you to a specific store to get what you want. It first came to a head for me when Batman Arkham City came out. I normally preorder at my local gamestop, but they didn't have the Robin DLC for preorders they had a challenge map instead. I wanted the extra character so I had to go to Best Buy to preorder there. Best Buy in the past was not known for being good about releases, but I guess they got better because I didn't have any problems, but the point remains I had to go out of my way to go to another store to get what I wanted and later the map I passed up on would be purchasable (as would robin) to the general public. Add to this there were many costumes to the game that were at the time only available through preorders. It was ridiculous.

Typically I only preorder specific titles that I know I'm interested in and that I have strong faith in. This means that I do tend to lose out on bonuses for games that I might want later becuase I didn't fall into their marketing ploy and that does tend to feel bad. But look at what happened with Aliens: Colonial Marine. People bought that game sight unseen and tons of people were very unhappy. If you bought it at gamestop you might be able to just get another game because you can shift your funds but you can't do that on Steam. You get trapped unless you leap through hoops and I think they only let you do changes like that only so often.

Want to take that a step further, what about War Z? There's another game people paid money for sight unseen and look how ugly that got. Didn't help that the company seemed to be trying to find every way they could to get a buck rather than fix the game.

These are my issues with preorders as they exist today. I was always slightly unhappy about the being pressured to pre order for a bonus item.. but when those bonuses almost feel mandetory and then they start going into forcing you to shop at certain stores, I think it just goes too far.

This all being said, I'll honestly say that the D3 console preorder is kind of tame. An XP bonus is really not a huge deal when you consider it probably has limited stats and there's tons of ways to get more XP when you're 60. All and all I don't really care about this preorder bonus and it's one I can shrug off as being fully 'optional'.

If you really want to see an explination for why preorders can be bad, check out Totalbiscuit's video regarding preorders. He feels way stronger than I on the subject and I can't really fault his arguments.

Thanks for that, Enkeria. It's quite helpful encouragement Also thanks to everyone that's stopped by and joined the conversation, I think there's some good discussion here. It's why I tend to post and read the forums here over the Blizzard ones.

As long as I can find something to be long winded about I'll continue to put out what I can. honestly I'm really hoping for expansion news in the future. I would love to be able to cover the beta for it if possible. Fingers crossed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am back! Wooo! once again I am late to the table, but you can't blame me for wanting to put out a Neverwinter media blitz, can you? Of course you can't, you can't stay mad at me. Of course it didn't help that I got pretty sick between these episodes as well...

Well here it is, a round up of articles and opinions from the news taken from the headlines right here at Diablofans. This project is a merger of my typical patch notes coverage as well as some thoughts on the Ask the Devs answers. In the video you will also find side by side comparisons of some areas with the new monster density from live to 1.0.8

I hope you enjoy and please feel free to leave feedback here, on YouTube, or on the Email account listed. If you do find it at all interesting or entertaining, please don't forget to give it a thumbs up to help it get noticed, that's always appreciated.

EDIT/Update: I'm hoping this is well recieved and really want to stress I'll be looking at feedback. This one took a very long time to produce due to the large amounts of video streams and editing that took place. It even took my video software 4 hours to encode it. It was a massive piece of work, but I think it paid off.

Here's the video description which indexes the entire video with time stamps:

What saddens me is that this thread seems to have a lot of people assuming there is one "golden" or true way to code and it is the only way. Even worse that people think testing means just making sure the game plays and is beatable. There's so much more, a tester's job is to break stuff, not just do the "standard" stuff. You go out, you try something unorthodox in order to get it to break. If they just played the game normally they could miss many bugs.

Let's also look at why PTRs exist and why there is so much testing. What happens if you have a pool of 100 testers and the game breaks for just one of them? By some of the posts I've seen here, many of you would say that's fine. Okay, now let's take that number up to live and assume 1 million are playing now. That is a multiplaction of x10,000. That means that now 10,000 people can't play because something was broken. It's a small percentage, sure, but when you apply a real number to it, you can see why they wouldn't want to let that happen.

Sometimes bugs don't occur untill after several attempts or sometimes they occur once and never again. It's the nature of the beast for them to be cautious, especially when ANY minor change to a program this huge could somehow break something else. And make no mistake, this is no small change. Monster spawn locations have to be added and then you have to make sure they work like they're supposed to especially with the randomization system. This isn't like some Tabletop RPG when you can just say "oh I'll throw in another orc here".

There's so many assumptions going on here and bickering that I almost didn't even want to say anything, but so many people who have never even tried programming make too many assumptions and I feel like the misinformation has to stop. Even more troubling is a self proclaimed programmer coming in and saying it's no big deal. I don't even fathom that one, maybe you're lucky and you happen to have a really good team that has software that's exceptionally portable and modular, but don't assume everything that you do in your code is easily carried over to a game engine. We don't know how it's programmed, how easy or hard it is.

I'm more inclined to believe the gentleman who came in and talked about meetings on top of meetings.. coding changes and revisions taking forever due to QA and testing and even more revisions and meetings, etc onto oblivion. Why do I believe that? Because buracracy. Blizzard isn't an agile team. They do their best to make sure all their changes work and even that isn't always enough. They're always talking about what they want to do and how they tackle problems. Just look at all the ideas they throw out that never make it. They've probably thrown out more ideas than many of us could think of.

Make no mistake, this by no means should indicate that I believe Blizzard has all the right answers. They've proven that to be false many times. But I really hate to see people call their development team lazy because they feel patches aren't comming out fast enough. Considering how much they have to go through to get a patch approved for release, we've actually seen a lot of changes and updates over the course of the last year.

Okay, rant over.. carry on.

Wow this thread is still trucking along. I've only been able to skim through most posts from how far behind I got.

I wanted to chime in on the question on what kept D2 going or kept players playing for several years to come. For me, it was really bursts of playing the game followed by long breaks between. I would usually come back after a major patch and try it out and play for awhile. I really think the same thing is happening with D3, patches get released it introduces a new enthusasim and then it dies down again. Some people will keep playing and others take breaks.

It wasn't that I didn't like D2, far from it, but after doing anything for long periods of time you'll start to get bored. I think it's only natural to want to step away and then you'll get that itch to play again. For those times when I was playing a lot it was really in hopes to find that really awesome piece of gear for a different build.

So in the end I guess it just came down to the item hunt for me. Something that D3 really does still struggle with which might be systemic with the way they did the affixes. They are working on it and it sounds like they have some great ideas, but i'm not going to worry about it too much until an expansion. After all, LoD is what really made D2 shine, perhaps the same will happen here.

To that end, I would like to say that because I like hunting items, I rarely use the AH. I feel it's good to be there for those who want it, but I fear it ruined the game for people like me who hunted for items but didn't realize that once the item hunt was gone what it would do to their play experience. It wouldn't be nearly as bad if there were more unique or interesting (or useful) affixes on gear, then perhaps you might have gear that works for one build really well but not others and players might trade gear more often because of this.

lastly, I think there needs to be more incentive to remove items from the economy. Crafting was supposed to be that system, but it didn't do the job, only because there was nothing worth crafting. Because the market floods with items, the prices change wildly. If there was a reason to get rid of items (especially gems) then prices might stabalize. You have no reason to destroy gems like you did in D2 so everyone just keeps making better and better gems. The Marquis gem is only a bandaid for this problem, they should really add more crafting recipes that mirror the old horalric cube tranmutes so there's a reason to take them out of the economy.

I don't think streamlining items was at its core a bad idea, I just think they went too far with it. It removed the uniqueness that really made each game of D2 interesting.

All this comes from a lover of D3. I still come back right now just for the smooth combat and to try new builds or classes. I haven't played all 5 classes to 60 yet so I still have lots to keep me going forwards, even if it is at a slower pace.

Aww man, I am not on tv? Your post makes me want to go cry in the corner, your so mean!
Not really
I do understand you making sure, there are no hurt feelings. Sometimes people take things to personaly.

Now with that out of the way once again thanks! For you not having much sleep, it was a good read for sure. Like you said, it is hard to get good useful feedback. I am not taking what you said about the facecams, with a grain of salt, but to heart. I'm also not saying that one persons opinion is going to stop me, but I will remember it. If more people seem to feel the same way though, things could chage. While I do know what you mean when you say "with a grain of salt". We both know that people or even a persons opinion is very valuable, maybe not everyones "trolls". But this I can tell, you are not.

To answer your semi-rhetorical question. You didn't make an ass of your self and you were helpful.

I like the fact that you brought up Force. I have been watching him since almost day one. I know recently he mentioned in his latest "New PC Releases & Content" that he was thinking of droping the facecam, for the Force Feed. He had a big backlash to that idea, and wisely decide against it. No im not saying this is a sole reason to keep using one (for like you said he is not showing his face during footage), but did find it to be enlightening. So I'll be trying to get more feed back on the topic and see what comes up.

With all this talk of YouTube, I think i will go check one of your videos out, I have some spare time. See what kind of commentaries you do(steal all your good ideas Moo-who-ha-ha-ha-ha).

Once again thanks for the well thought out answers, and taking the time to write it all down!

Chrome On Rust

First off let me say thanks, great post, and well thought out! That's the kind of info I am looking for (I read it twice). I would have to agree with you about the presentation being dry.

If you dont mind my asking of a few questions. What about the facecam do you not like? Im not saying with my videos in particular (I see what you mean about me not being very engaging or showing much interest). Do you feel it just includes a element that is not needed or is a distraction from the topic?

Also, when you said videos like this, what exactaly were you referring to. Are you talking about all or at least most video game content in general? If not with all video game content, when would you think it to be a good idea to use one?

Thanks again!

I've done it naked... but my character was fully geared

Douchebucket

Quote from KageKaze

I have to admit, I only heard of this guy recently and I just can't seem to understand the popularity. Maybe it's a tiny bit of jealousy, but I have two major issues with this video. One is that he's somewhat hard to understand at times, I can't really hold that against him due to accents and what not.. but the other... He's accusing blizzard of want us to spend all sorts of money to be super geared. Really, if blizzard wanted money from the RMAH they could easily make changes that would force us to use it. As it is right now, it's all about personal choice and how fast do you want your gear rather than trying to farm it yourself.

As for the topic at hand, regarding the ring, it's fine. The ring has good stats and any proc that gives you raw damage is an amazing bonus on top of that. It also appears to be designed around getting characters leveled up in paragon faster (so it's probably going to be passed around alts a lot) so it would be horrible to have it as over powered as it was. The ring should NOT scale due to player power. The reason for this is that it makes any other gear that could fit into that slot effectively useless. What I mean by that, is if Blizz releases new levels of gear in an expansion pack (including new legendaries) why would you care because you have a ring that scales with everything else, so you'd never lose it.

I'm not sure why everyone's so up in arms about it. The bleed damage on items doesn't scale, it's static. In fact nothing on items that procs really scales with your damage, so why should it start now?

Eh, I dunno. I'm done ranting, I've still got some sedatives in my system from my hospital visit so I might not be thinking 100% clearly. don't mind me too much, and if I offended anyone, I apologize now.

Its the same guy that said that Blizzard nerfed the tornado barbarian build so people would spend more money at the RMAH so blizzard would make more money.

I'm not a fan of the guy, he isn't very objective in nature in my opinion.

The proc is just supposed to be a small/random spell, which is more for low level characters, in my opinion they nerfed it just right.

Even with a 50% nerf people would just stack up on resist/LoH/vit and wait for procs, it would be a game breaker in my opinion.

No item should be that powerful period.