This decision is largely fueled by the fact that we should not have to start new character to respec in d3. The skill system obviously reflects that, but the skill system alone does not guarantee someone didn't accidentally put all their points into vitality and forget the other stats, obstructing them from equipping any worthwhile gear.
The downside is pretty much what everyone here has already mentioned. This means less customization, or perhaps a lesser feeling of true character progression.
For me personally, I don't think that dying my armor a different color really makes my character different. I want to know that I made different decisions with my monk than all the other level 60 monks out there. I want to feel like maybe I didn't do the best speccing, and that there is always room to make a better character. Well making that better character is now as simple as changing your primary and passive skills around. Less risk = Less reward in my opinion, but I can see why others would disagree.
I'm a Software Engineer in Silicon Valley! I'm glad to see such a diverse group though, and not just a giant group of nerds like myself :-) There are so many occupations that you all listed that I would have loved to study as well though, like sports science and psychology, and economics. Props to you guys for being so stinking awesome.
I was sad to see the Paladin and the Druid go away. I was a very defensive player, so all the skills that jacked up my defense and resistances were awesome. I also loved using conversion to make the enemies my minions.
I understand that many of the new classes also have many defense buffs to allow me to be defensive again. But the cool thing about the Pally and Druid was that the buffs helped my teammates too. I loved being the support guy that made everyone else want to play near me or my pets!
I did not have most of those builds (I played the game for gross amounts of time), and I imagine that most others did not either. Of course the more hardcore players might have had Enigma on all their toons, but the typical player was far from having any rune words at all. Honestly, unless you were buying items online, the rarity of the items kept the average player well away from the extremely high end gear.
Maybe 5% (or some other arbitrarily small percentage) of players had really high end gear, yet it seemed like everybody did because those are the type of people you played with, traded with, or talked to in the global chat channels. It's a psychological anchor built up in your mind by your own experience.
Guardian was the most useful fire spell. The graphics were more realistic in D1 than D2, and the spell was just more powerful than Hydra in D2. You could easily unleash a slew of level 15 guardians to take out the hardest enemies in hell (non fire-immune that is). But your Hydra in D2 would need tons of extra enhancements if it was going to do any realistic amount of damage.
Of course with the immunities, you could not just rely on a fire spell. Chain lightning was possibly the no brainer pick of the lightning spells. In Diablo 1, you may recall the enemies called "hidden" or "unseen". They were invisible much of the time and impossible to see coming, but chain lightning could find them regardless. Unleashing chain lightning in a room full of mobs was a quick way to clear it.
Come to think of it, I dont know why I always played as the warrior, because he could never clear enemies nearly as quickly.
No, Matt Uelmen is not involved in the soundtrack to Diablo 3. A very hairy guy named Russell Brower is in charge of the project for Diablo 3. Blizzard must be very comfortable with him, as he did much of the work on the soundtracks for all of the World of Warcraft expansions thus far, as well as the Starcraft 2 soundtrack. He first became famous by composing music for the Animaniacs, and the Batman cartoon series. He is an Emmy winner!
Much of the soundtrack preserves the sound from the rest of the Diablo series, including borrowing some of the old tracks (the Tristram theme for instance) with some modifications.
The main theme (the Overture), and probably some other tracks, were recorded by Eminence Symphony Orchestra, from Sydney, Australia. They are big on video game music, anime soundtracks, and film soundtracks.
The most addictive aspect is the fact that your character can always be more powerful. You are on an endless quest to find the best gear, which one day will help you defeat the ubers. You can never be satisfied with where you are at. Your full Tal Rasha set can still be upgraded. Your runewords aren't the best runewords. The idea of character progression is what keeps most RPG gamers hooked, and Diablo is famous for making it extremely difficult to progress to the point where you cannot progress any further. In no other game are items so rare.
So if you ever felt particularly courageous, you could go deeper in the dungeon a few levels (just go to the stairs as soon as you find them). You quickly find the enemies getting much stronger, thus they are awarding you much more exp.
Unfortunately, sometimes I would go a bit too far, and suddenly I couldn't kill anything. Upon returning to levels of the dungeon where I could still win battles, I would be disappointed to find that the monsters didn't give me much experience anymore. It's so bizarre. Simply by visiting a deeper dungeon, the easier dungeon levels would grant less experience.
Does anyone know if this was on purpose? Why didn't Diablo 1 scale the experience granted solely on the character level as compared to the enemy's level?
When you start a new game on single player, go to the center of town where Cain is (at the well). If you see that the well is colored green, you have to start a new game b/c that indicates that the Leoric quest is not in your game. You are right to say that you can't get all quests in MP. In fact you can hardly get any quests in MP. Pretty much you just have the butcher, leoric (although you don't get the chamber of bone that he's normally in, he's just part of the level 3 dungeon in multiplayer), lazarus, and diablo. I always wanted the other quests in MP because it was much more fun playing with my brother.
Btw Leoric's crown is not worth the trouble it takes to kill him and his hordes. Do you tend to run and kite him away from his minions, or do you tend to take him down right away among his skeleton followers (Fire wall rocks here!).
You can't really get around the latency issue if you want to play with people on the other side of the world. As a US player, if I want to ping a server located in China, I should expect on average 200-300 ms latency. The converse is also true. This is not even accounting for high-volume high-traffic parts of the day/week. In game design, there are many "predictive" algorithms that an engineer could use to create the illussion of a smaller ping.
One example that you probably see all the time is in modern-day MMORPGs, you often never see *exactly* where a player is if they are moving. You often just see an approximation of the player based on where your computer knew for sure he was a few hundred milliseconds ago, his velocity at that time, and how much time has passed since then. Then your computer shows you a prediction of where he is at any point in time. Eventually the server says "nope, your prediction was wrong, here is the right location", and then your computer will slowly move the player to that point to make it appear seamless, as if your computer never got it wrong in the first place.
There are lots of tricks like this to get past communication delays. But a 300ms ping is *really* hard to engineer around if the goal is to provide a seamless playing environment.
With current technology, it just makes sense to play with others in your quadrant of the world, on a server located a close as possible.
At first glance it seems like it depends on whether people are more interested in getting great gear drops to help themselves (their toons), or their wallets.
If a market gets over-saturated, it's certainly within Blizzards power to decrease the drop-rate of items. But that cannot be done without consequence. Upping the rarity means decreasing the supply, which ultimately leads to an increase in the asking price for the items.
Blizzard needs to start hiring economics majors!
However if people are more interested in equipping their toons with the best gear, I'd imagine the supply for rare items will decrease, since people are more likely to use the items for their own toons. At the same time, the demand would increase, because fewer people would be selling the rare items. Perhaps both events cancel each other out. Again, econ majors needed!
Ultimately diablofans.com is interested in building its community. Yes at some point it translates to a bottom line of $$, but also it's a fan site. People don't make fansites for the heck of it (certainly not for the very small profits they'd get in ads); I'd imagine that the people/person in charge genuinely wanted to build a community around a game he/she loves. I used to want to own a hobby shop because it brought together groups of people around a common interest. Hobby shops don't really make money either!
Anyway, that being said, while the 'beta key' contest is going to increase the traffic to the site, I think it has a more long-term goal of building community here, whether that be more forum regulars, or just higher quality posts in general. I can vouch for that as someone who generally only reads the posts in a forum but never participates. I've certainly been motivated to participate more.
Also, I'm surprised that you, Aerisot, don't have a key already given your 400+ posts. We gotta get you one. My post will now bump this for you haha :-)
I remember in Diablo 1 single player just figuring out that I could duplicate items by hiding them behind a town portal, then walking through the portal while picking up the item simultaneously. Duped! I was super stoked, I showed my mom. Yes I was pretty young.
Also I was legit scared of the Skeleton King. Like my stress level went through the roof every time I ran into him, because remember he was in a random location on the 3rd level of the dungeon. You had no idea which door you opened would have Leoric!
Also, I can still pretty much quote word-for-word the guy outside of the sanctuary who was dying from the butcher. "Please Listen to me, The archbishop lazarus he led us down here to find the lost prince. ...."
Oh, and running the poison well quest a hundred times because the ring you get as a reward sold for like 2000g (if you remembered to identify it).
My first zodiac armor. It was like +17 to all stats. Nice!!!
... I'd be embarrassed to have items in the AH that sell for anywhere near that much. I don't want people I play with to associate me as the person who is trying to rip everyone off in a game. Seems like bad mantra.
Anyway, whether its $200 / day or $200 / month, I'd imagine that not even the best bots could get gear that fast. Maybe the trick is to have multiple copies of the game, and play them all at once.
I wonder if you have 2 copies of the game (2 keys), if you'd be able to up the limit to $400. Just transfer items around and sell on different characters.
I dont know if anyone remembers the game Dark stone, but it was a very diablo-esque game that looked pretty good for its time. Anyway, Monk and Priest was the way to go in that game. I stand by that today
Also, Hellfire (the Diablo 1 expansion that I for some reason never beat the boss in the Hole), had the monk. I thought he was pretty sick. I just don't want to be the typical every-day barb, since there will be a million of them.
Another thing to think about is the fact that in HC, some classes will be way more popular b/c of survivability. That means that auction house prices will be jacked for certain classes as a result of the higher demand.
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This decision is largely fueled by the fact that we should not have to start new character to respec in d3. The skill system obviously reflects that, but the skill system alone does not guarantee someone didn't accidentally put all their points into vitality and forget the other stats, obstructing them from equipping any worthwhile gear.
The downside is pretty much what everyone here has already mentioned. This means less customization, or perhaps a lesser feeling of true character progression.
For me personally, I don't think that dying my armor a different color really makes my character different. I want to know that I made different decisions with my monk than all the other level 60 monks out there. I want to feel like maybe I didn't do the best speccing, and that there is always room to make a better character. Well making that better character is now as simple as changing your primary and passive skills around. Less risk = Less reward in my opinion, but I can see why others would disagree.
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I understand that many of the new classes also have many defense buffs to allow me to be defensive again. But the cool thing about the Pally and Druid was that the buffs helped my teammates too. I loved being the support guy that made everyone else want to play near me or my pets!
0
Maybe 5% (or some other arbitrarily small percentage) of players had really high end gear, yet it seemed like everybody did because those are the type of people you played with, traded with, or talked to in the global chat channels. It's a psychological anchor built up in your mind by your own experience.
0
Of course with the immunities, you could not just rely on a fire spell. Chain lightning was possibly the no brainer pick of the lightning spells. In Diablo 1, you may recall the enemies called "hidden" or "unseen". They were invisible much of the time and impossible to see coming, but chain lightning could find them regardless. Unleashing chain lightning in a room full of mobs was a quick way to clear it.
Come to think of it, I dont know why I always played as the warrior, because he could never clear enemies nearly as quickly.
0
Much of the soundtrack preserves the sound from the rest of the Diablo series, including borrowing some of the old tracks (the Tristram theme for instance) with some modifications.
The main theme (the Overture), and probably some other tracks, were recorded by Eminence Symphony Orchestra, from Sydney, Australia. They are big on video game music, anime soundtracks, and film soundtracks.
My source is wikipedia
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0
So if you ever felt particularly courageous, you could go deeper in the dungeon a few levels (just go to the stairs as soon as you find them). You quickly find the enemies getting much stronger, thus they are awarding you much more exp.
Unfortunately, sometimes I would go a bit too far, and suddenly I couldn't kill anything. Upon returning to levels of the dungeon where I could still win battles, I would be disappointed to find that the monsters didn't give me much experience anymore. It's so bizarre. Simply by visiting a deeper dungeon, the easier dungeon levels would grant less experience.
Does anyone know if this was on purpose? Why didn't Diablo 1 scale the experience granted solely on the character level as compared to the enemy's level?
0
Btw Leoric's crown is not worth the trouble it takes to kill him and his hordes. Do you tend to run and kite him away from his minions, or do you tend to take him down right away among his skeleton followers (Fire wall rocks here!).
0
One example that you probably see all the time is in modern-day MMORPGs, you often never see *exactly* where a player is if they are moving. You often just see an approximation of the player based on where your computer knew for sure he was a few hundred milliseconds ago, his velocity at that time, and how much time has passed since then. Then your computer shows you a prediction of where he is at any point in time. Eventually the server says "nope, your prediction was wrong, here is the right location", and then your computer will slowly move the player to that point to make it appear seamless, as if your computer never got it wrong in the first place.
There are lots of tricks like this to get past communication delays. But a 300ms ping is *really* hard to engineer around if the goal is to provide a seamless playing environment.
With current technology, it just makes sense to play with others in your quadrant of the world, on a server located a close as possible.
0
If a market gets over-saturated, it's certainly within Blizzards power to decrease the drop-rate of items. But that cannot be done without consequence. Upping the rarity means decreasing the supply, which ultimately leads to an increase in the asking price for the items.
Blizzard needs to start hiring economics majors!
However if people are more interested in equipping their toons with the best gear, I'd imagine the supply for rare items will decrease, since people are more likely to use the items for their own toons. At the same time, the demand would increase, because fewer people would be selling the rare items. Perhaps both events cancel each other out. Again, econ majors needed!
0
Anyway, that being said, while the 'beta key' contest is going to increase the traffic to the site, I think it has a more long-term goal of building community here, whether that be more forum regulars, or just higher quality posts in general. I can vouch for that as someone who generally only reads the posts in a forum but never participates. I've certainly been motivated to participate more.
Also, I'm surprised that you, Aerisot, don't have a key already given your 400+ posts. We gotta get you one. My post will now bump this for you haha :-)
0
Also I was legit scared of the Skeleton King. Like my stress level went through the roof every time I ran into him, because remember he was in a random location on the 3rd level of the dungeon. You had no idea which door you opened would have Leoric!
Also, I can still pretty much quote word-for-word the guy outside of the sanctuary who was dying from the butcher. "Please Listen to me, The archbishop lazarus he led us down here to find the lost prince. ...."
Oh, and running the poison well quest a hundred times because the ring you get as a reward sold for like 2000g (if you remembered to identify it).
My first zodiac armor. It was like +17 to all stats. Nice!!!
0
Anyway, whether its $200 / day or $200 / month, I'd imagine that not even the best bots could get gear that fast. Maybe the trick is to have multiple copies of the game, and play them all at once.
I wonder if you have 2 copies of the game (2 keys), if you'd be able to up the limit to $400. Just transfer items around and sell on different characters.
*plotting*
0
Also, Hellfire (the Diablo 1 expansion that I for some reason never beat the boss in the Hole), had the monk. I thought he was pretty sick. I just don't want to be the typical every-day barb, since there will be a million of them.
Another thing to think about is the fact that in HC, some classes will be way more popular b/c of survivability. That means that auction house prices will be jacked for certain classes as a result of the higher demand.
Just something to think about.