DiabloFans

Quote from stevedoctor

There's a fish around here somewhere, I can smell it.

Believe as you wish, just forwarding the information and explaining that there is such a thing as collateral damage so others who may play like this know it can happen.

Not trying to start an argument, more of a PSA.

This is really unfair, but a long time 10-year in-game friend of mine (who is a late 50s disabled mother) was recently tagged with permanent account closure. I met her during WoW Vanilla and have played with her and her son ever since. Until today, we've played Diablo 3 as a group for the past 2 months whenever we could or were all on together.

She stays at home while her S.O. and son go to work, she's been unable to work since her last hospital stay the year before last. So she has nothing to do while home, and she's always been an avid gamer that stays online all day whenever she's not sleeping. She loved doing bounties, helping other friends of ours powerlevel characters or just helping out. Essentially, when she's not asleep, she's been playing D3 and was always happy when we would take her into T5 or 6 and help her get some gear (she's not the best player, but she's always grateful).

She was slapped with permanent account closure today. After call-ins, web-based chat, and correspondence, she was closed because she is logged in far too much, and according to the person on the phone, "Nobody plays like that". In her case, it was nearly 18 hours a day being logged into the game and somedays I know she never logged out of the main screen because she was on whether it was early morning or when I got home, and didn't realize she sat in front of the game THAT much and she always stayed logged into the game (doesn't shut down at night for whatever reason). Either way, requests for review were fruitless, and they're going to go with a full on ban for playing the game too much. I know, sounds like a bot, but that's simply not the case I can assure you that.

I'm only posting this because I know there are far more important D3 badguys out there, but come on, a disabled mother who's entertainment is video games? She played Warcraft like this, and Rift, and about everything else she joins in on. Further, if you're a person who plays like this, watch it, Blizzard seems to not give a care who you are. I'd just like to say that if they don't want you playing the game that much, then caution us.

Hope this helps others protect their account.

My favorite part of that video was in the background - Jay's been at Blizzard long enough to receive his sword, it took that long to produce the game to release.

They never do full disclosure, but Jace was CEO of Monolith, which was also where Jay cut his teeth in game making working FOR Jace. Jay was the Lead Designer of Blood II, and for those interested you should read the "critical reception" of Blood II on Wikipedia to get a better idea. I think it sounds eerie and should somewhat scare anyone that's a fan of Diablo.

PvP in a Deathmatch style sounds interesting, but it's not an FPS. I personally would like 1v1s and the ability to duel friends in there or elsewhere in the game. Arena play sounds interesting but unless it comes with superior rewards like titles, auras, ladders, and possible PvP levels it's just not going to tickle my fancy or keep most people's attention. Additionally, they need to homogenize legendaries rather than making everything so vastly random that it would encourage nothing but RMAH to get anywhere in PvP. D2 at least offered you the opportunity to locate BIS that most people could have access to - like uniques with very limited variable stats - and have some slots up for well rolled rares like rings, amulets, gloves, bracers, belts. By doing this they would insure that prices would settle to where the average player could possibly buy something not priced at 100 million to be competitive or spend 1000 hours farming.

They won't be buffing the stupid wings, so everyone can relax. There is no pay for buffs outside of the RMAH, yet.

And I believe they will be part of the stupid MOP CE, something I won't be buying. I own the last 4 CE's to WoW, and I backed out at the last minute for the D3 one (something told me I would regret the purchase later) and I can see them throwing this bonus into the game. It wouldn't surprise me if the MOP CE also has in-game wings for within WoW, just to enrage everyone that sees them. Remember, this is not the old Blizzard, it's now a part of a host company that has always specialized in very advanced marketing techniques... or exploitation... take your pick of words. Regardless they make money and get shoutouts on FBN and CNBC all the time.

Now something they SHOULD be selling in the Pay to Win column - tabs 4 and 5 of the stupid bank. "Get 30 days access to the 4th tab for only 14.99! Big Boy Shuggo approved!" Or the everneeded - "For 15 days you can cancel your auctions before they expire for only 29.99! Be an AH pro!"

I somewhat agree with their stance on legendaries, they should potentially buff them but they also need to reduce the drop rate on them. A Windforce back during D2 1.08-1.09 required 720 MF to recieve about 1 in 44,000 chance of dropping. That much MF was no small feat to stack and was unachieveable until the expansion.

Also the 1.9% of characters figure is a little cheesed. But given that it's gaming I'm going to just use basic common sense here and say about 5% of accounts are sitting in Act 1 Inferno. WoW had it's 5%, which were people who during Classic and TBC were in the highest echelon of raiding at any given time. Given I'm a veteran Diablo player, that also means I'm older than dirt to most of you, so I have real responsibilities. If you have time to play a video game more than 3 hours a day then that's great for you, I unlocked Inferno late last week. Most of my friends of similar age are in the same boats. But I guarantee you we're not complaining at all about the game play right now, we're all working the Auction House because it makes trading so much easier. If you never traded in D2, you have absolutely NO right to complain about the state of getting gear.

It's only been 2 weeks and the game takes a while to get through - unless you are just blowing through the content and not bothering to clear the zones.

So now we know the truth. The people losing stuff have taken absolutely no precautions to anti-hack measures. Good for you guys, keep spamming the forums about how Blizz sucks and you never visited any sites looking for hacks to play the game which resulted in you getting a nice keylogger because you're also too cheap to install some virus and internet protection.

It's rather irritating to read people still posting they got hacked when in the reality of things a 5 dollar item or downloadable app would handle all these problems. I'm going to err with Blizzard on this one, get some protection. It's not that they are looking to make more money, they are implementing something to protect their customers and the stupid. 12 years of Blizzard games and not a single loss of items due to hacking. And in all of their games I've routinely been someone you would want to hack, that is, one of the wealthiest players in their games... it's what I do. I got my authenticator as soon as possible (when they weren't running out of stock). Annoying to use sometimes, but guess what? I'm not one of the people sitting around waiting on account restoration, my free gaming time is worth more than 5 bucks!

And I'm no fanboy, I'm more critical of this game and the company than I've been in any game of theirs in the past.

You should put a BIG SPOILER ALERT at the top of this page and possibly mask the contest, I like many other very long time fans and Hardcore mode players chose not to follow the announcements of Blizzard and fansites because we enjoy playing the game through to find out the lore. Not everyone is interested in learning the story before they see it unfold.

I learned last night the story of a major lore character for the first time and was very surprised. Until I logged in and read the contest details I was not aware that this character was actually going to even be a boss (masking my own statements so others don't have their lore experience wrecked further).

Come on, gang. They do their best. The problem is they had more show up to the party than RSVP'd. Happens all the time. You simply have to know the company and be a true-blue long time fan that's done this dance once or eight times.

What you do on most every Blizzard release day - just add a day to the date, take that one off. You'll have plenty of time to slap demons around for the next 10 years. I went to bed on-time and will get home from work on-time. Tomorrow I expect servers to be stable and up as I have my day off to play all day and evening.

If they make the game guide like the current Arreat Summit, the game will be perfect. By that, I mean, nobody ever went there except to find stats, variances, and some runeword you couldn't remember the order of. The majority of us that were serious about the mechanics in the game (specifically some of the menutia that I've seen asked for here like drop calculation, item generation, magic find, etc) used to hit up the Lurker Lounge.

Basically, it would be like going to learn about WoW on the official site, and then heading over to ElitistJerks to crunch some numbers and get serious among Diablo players that were 178% more hardcore about grammar and solid content than EJ ever was. The new AS should give a cursory explaination of most game mechanics, and like all games they made back in the day keep us in the dark. The vast majority of players that became addicted to Diablo did so because of the puzzle that it was. Conversely, you could go into those mechanics on the new site, but only the Hardcores will pay attention. Interesting debate I'm having with myself here.

Just my 2 cents.

Probably some of the dumbest commenting in the world on this whole issue right here. Either people were 7 or 8 years old when D1 or D2 was around or they seem to forget something very, very important. The idiocy that is current Warcraft has shown you what happens when things get released when they aren't ready - bugs, dupes, exploits, and other trash play. People want their instant gratification like little children.

There is no delay when the game isn't ready yet. Delay implies something is in the way, they are merely making last minute changes. If you were in the Beta you would see what they've changed the past 6 months, it's a shitload of things needing checked. I remember the D2 initial release, it was an absolute mess. Get over yourselves and go outside. I don't care if it takes another year for release.

"We will release the game when it is ready."

Anyone remember the wait for 1.09 to 1.10? The accompanying cartoon from Blizzard stated "Hell has frozen over, Patch 1.10". Pretty sure the bulk of people here don't remember that but that is typical Blizzard.

The PA piece was interesting, basically able to sum it up with Who cares? and Did they ever play any of the Diablo franchise game? Diablo is not an MMO; there are no raids, no defined end game, no complex dps rotations, no defined roles except DPS, and bosses don't require you to dance like your standard MMO. Beta has shown that the game will play out exactly like the preceding games, with some big changes. Anyone looking for an MMO when they play D3 will be really, really let down.

What is in the end-game of D3 is building your character to be as strong as possible and kill monsters like a machine, regardless of Softcore or Hardcore play, while beating your head against the keyboard trying to locate new gear. That's why the grey market appeared in D2. If you wanted to make a small fortune for playing a video game, D2 was the last time the average person could do it unhindered (until Ebay turned it off in 2006). This encouraged massive botting operations, duping, exploits, and other ugly things Blizz doesn't like.

Offline play also allowed for people to reverse engineer the game, leading up to things like porting offline characters into the Battle.net world or creating hacked items (Iths, Occy rings, Constricting Rings, "bugged" Valors, Windforces, etc) because all of the game's assets were on one side and not completely server side. Keeping it completely online makes it easier to secure the game itself.

There's no conspiracy in place as I sense from the video, it is merely Blizzard recognizing that people in the real world part with government backed currency to achieve more in a video game. Even if they didn't offer RMAH, the grey market would pop up and fill the vacuum. If they nip that in the bud and control it, they can eliminate all the spam, bogus transactions, duped items, poofing items, and put actual customer support in place offering a better experience for everyone. Welcome to the next evolution. Take it from someone who sold during D2, people want to buy the most elite items and pay big bucks to get them.

I got mine through the opt-in option and signed up for it back whenever it was first available. I don't bother with Facebook. I got the invite email on Monday night.

Here's what I did prior to getting it - went about my regular business. After getting the invite I play only D3 now. The game is everything you dreamed it would be. Since getting in I've gotten every class to 13 (max level for beta) and gotten all the achievements for the beta with the exception of one that's buggy (there's a special series!).

There are a lot of haters out there, and I think these are usually people that didn't play D2 from the beginning nor did they play it consistently although they say they did. The content we are allowed to play is incredibly easy if you are a D2 vet. Basically it reminds me of Classic D2's design. Either way, this game is going to be a big seller. Blizz did the right thing - they kept with the design and feel of D1 and D2 and improved on the stuff that wasn't fun. You'll have a use for everything you find in the game now. Loot is NOT shared and is specific to you (incredible idea there). The graphics are perfect for the genre. I forced myself not to read anything about it until I got the Beta key, which is something I normally do with games anyhow - I like surprises. From the time I logged in it was like opening 500 presents on Christmas morning, all addressed to me.