DiabloFans

I don't have time to right now... I'm juggling quite a bit of work-related stuff IRL.

The one I'm referring to was a few weeks prior to the 2.1 PTR (I think). Wyatt made it very clear that *he* didn't see it necessary to revisit old legendaries and that his solution would be just to introduce more (presumably less-sucky) legendaries and leave the old ones alone. I know there was a thread here where Ruksak, specifically, voiced his displeasure with that statement.

Blizzard, as a whole, quickly made it known that they wanted to do the opposite. Probably because Wyatt's statement was just THAT stupid. It was so glaringly contrary to what we wanted... hell, it was so glaringly contrary to what Josh sold us on with 2.0 and RoS that I imagine someone had to give him a dressing-down over it.

Quote from Bagstone

Just stop saying "they're out of touch" or whatever.

I think it's basically a fact that Wyatt is out-of-touch at this point.

He's made several cringeworthy statements that prove his "vision" simply doesn't mesh with what players want. The most recent was when he said he didn't want to go back and fix stat stick legendaries but would prefer just to add more. To me that's a major problem. It shows that he, as a developer, really doesn't understand the game he's making, or at least why *we* want more Starmetal Kukiris and less Angel Hair Braids.

I don't agree that the entire development team is "out-of-touch" because, clearly, they didn't follow his "lead" on that subject. So, someone, somewhere, realized that what he said was not only stupid but wouldn't really resonate with *us* if they went down that path. But it still strikes me that someone so high up could be that.... blockheaded.... about such an important subject. It shouldn't require Josh to take him into his office and paddle his ass to get him in line on something like that.

I still can't even understand what would spur on the initial comment.

Mod note: This thread was split from a discussion from another thread. It's off-topic to the 2.1 release date discussion which was the intention of the thread, but it is an important and interesting discussion to be had. So... posts above this one are taken from this thread.

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Quote from SerinMaximus

Be prepared to be disappointed then

Oh, I'm well prepared.

I was very much looking forward to Legendary Gems. I do not like the new upgrade rules. It's taken something I really was excited for and made it such that I'm completely indifferent about them. Such a shame.

Wyatt is quickly becoming one of my least-favorite people out there. He's so fucking out-of-touch it's not even funny.

Quote from Glowpipe_

Quote from martonapoo

Blue Post : This month
So... Couple weak+ This month = August 19 or 26

Really hoping for the 19th. But doubtful. I guess 26.
Diablo is dead atm. Ive been playing nonstop the last 6 days to get ready for 2.1 and there is no activity. My clan is dead. All the communities im in is dead. General chat is dead, cept the the disease ridden assspammers. And public games hardly got peeps in it

Most people on Reddit believe that the PTR isn't even close to being ready.

For example, Blizzard recently asked the players how they would scale difficulty without simply making massive HP/damage increases. If they were serious about that for Greater Rifts, which most posters had hoped they were, there's no way they could overhaul difficulty scaling in GRifts and still release it "this month." But if they aren't serious about that then we get something that people are NOT excited about: ridiculous HP/damage scaling. Eventually you will reach a GR level where, without an arcane (or lightning) immunity neck you will simply get one-shotted by jailer or thunderstorm. To me, and many others, that sounds pretty fuckin stupid. Getting one-shotted by something you can't avoid doesn't sound fun. It sounds like an asinine "and then we doubled it" gone even more wrong than Jay's Inferno.

Monks are still not exactly in a good place.

There are still numerous sets that need attention. Helltooth, Nat's, and Slayer's come to mind immediately.

The most recent PTR build made legendary gems bad enough that many people won't even use them now. There's tons of backlash about their touted "design philosophy" and how they promised infinitely-upgradable gems and now they are literally hard-capped based on what GRift level you can get to. There have been dozens of suggestions as to how to fix this, but none of them will ever be implemented if they are seriously considering pushing 2.1 live in August.

M6 is seriously one of the paragons (pardon the pun?) of item design. It gives you the option of completely changing up how you play. I liken it to Grin Reaper which similarly allows you to put abilities on your bar that you aren't going to use, but your clones will be using... frequently.

The issue is, simply, most of the rest of the items aren't nearly as game-changing as M6 and they should be... because M6 is fucking GENIUS. It breaks the mold. It gives the player a way to truly think out-of-the-box. It's what all item design should strive to be. We need more things like M6 and less things like Helltooth!

The recent legendary gem/GRift changes have me about as excited for 2.1 as I am for a sharp stick to the eye.

I used to be pretty excited about legendary gems in particular. This most recent PTR build put the kibosh on that with an efficiency previously unknown to Blizzard customers.

It's rude for people to kick someone, especially after they've just opened a rift or a Uber portal or whatever.

But I think this whole "dirty, stinking casuals" stuff is the gamers version of the n-word or the "fag" word. I get that you're frustrated because some people dicked you over. I just don't think that kind of stereotypical outburst helps your position out. Think about it this way. A guy could get up and make a speech about racial inequalities, and be 100% accurate, compelling, and articulate, but if he uses the n-word or, conversely, refers to white people as "crackers" it really distracts from the issue at hand.

Ultimately what you experienced doesn't really have to do with a casual player or a hardcore player. It has to do with a few people being douchebags. That's the start and end of it, really.

More on-topic:
This really is how public games work. It's not that different from most other games. If you run LFR or LFD in WoW sometimes you get a great group, sometimes it's a bunch of mouthbreathers who have no gems in their gear, no enchants, no glyphs, and have absolutely no idea how to play their class or how the encounters work. Those are the pitfalls of being randomly matched with other players.

Quote from Bagstone

I think the second big issue in this thread is that BoA implicitly leads to a different game experience, and that's not for everyone. It's not the one that shaggy likes, it's not the one that any of the people enjoy who liked the auction house or D3V in general, it's not the one that anyone who participated in public trading in D2 likes.

It's not that I don't like it. I fully acknowledge that BoA > AH. My issue is that, personally, if I were to put them on a continuum of "goodness" it would look like this:

AH ---- BoA --------------------------------------- item-for-item bartering

And it's that way because I don't give two fucks about 3rd party sites or anything like that. It doesn't factor into my opinion on the situation. I think it's ridiculous to worry about the "sanctity" of the top 5000 players in standard.

That being said, I'd FULLY support BoA for seasons because there is some "sanctity" there to preserve. But, while I think BoA is an improvement over the AH, I don't think it has any place in the non-competitive part of the game. I don't go to diabloprogress and think "wow, those guys earned it" .... because things like loot-sharing games still exist, RiF still exists, split-farmed bounties still exist. People with high paragon still got it from dubious methods. There are still tons of work-arounds so BoA doesn't preserve anything. The list is still majorly tainted with people finding their own ways to "cheat."

Anyone wearing a RoRG they got from split-farming bounties "earned" that about as much as someone who went into a D2 game and got a freebie Vamp Gaze. Anyone wearing items gambled with blood shards from RiF (or any other manner of gratuitously sharing keystrone fragments) or from a loot-sharing game (where you stack the odds in your favor by having 4 of one class) "earned" that about as much as someone who duped a few SoJs to trade for a Windforce. It's one and the same. To look with disdain on one but not the other is hypocritical.

Quote from ruksak

For this issue I chose not to make guesses and suppositions. I just cited what I've seen, what I've witnessed. That being, the majority of players who do play this game, who espouse a desire to continue playing this game, seem to land in a majority support for the Bind On Account system.

But that's exactly a confirmation bias.

OF COURSE people who are still playing don't have a (generally) negative opinion on BoA. But that's probably because the inclusion of BoA drove away many people who dislike the system. So it's not really telling us anything we don't know.

It's like surveying roulette players on roulette and then concluding that, because 95% of roulette players like roulette that people who dislike roulette are in the minority. Only a complete fucking moron would actually try to argue that because, CLEARLY, it's a very biased sample. Likewise, polling people who continue to play post-BoA about BoA doesn't really provide an accurate opinion on the matter because it marginalizes and, in many cases, outright ignores the dissenting opinion due to circumstantial factors that automatically squelch their opinion.

It's very similar to how we're repeatedly told by Blizzard that only a small fraction of the playerbase even uses the forums. It's a cautionary tale not to extrapolate on things like this. A couple hundred votes on a fansite can be insightful, but it's very much not sufficient to make any kind of conclusion as to what the "majority" of D3 players think.... particularly on a divisive issue like BoA which may very well have driven a certain segment of the playerbase away from the game (and the forums).

In order to prove this I only need to point back to last year when Josh dropped the bomb and it was basically a 50/50 issue. You don't really think it's a 75/25 issue now because half of the haters suddenly fell in love with BoA, do you? Like I said, the traffic on all fansites is very low at this point in time. It's very unlikely that people who have a negative view about something so big as BoA are anywhere around here anymore. The people who are still here are almost certainly people who are actively playing the game and not just hanging around for patch notes. So why is it surprising that when you poll that subset of people you get such a breakdown? To me it's completely logical, and is very well-explained without making the false correlation that dissenters are in the minority.

Quote from ruksak

If you don't like or accept BoA, you have to come to terms with the facts. You are in the minority, most people disagree with you.

That's actually not true.

Unless you actually can prove that <forumgoers> are a representative subset of <Diablo players>.

Which, to anyone with an objective mind, they clearly are not. And, in terms of polling, the less-representative the sample is the larger the error. Even meticulously-conducted polls, like what they do during presidential races, still have 3-5% error.

The most-glaring thing that really jacks up this discussion is that most people who dislike BoA probably didn't buy RoS and aren't frequenting forums. Most of the people that I know who picked up D3V and RoS actually played D3V longer. Almost EVERYONE I know who plays D3 does *not* visit the forums, yet of that subset <D3 players Nick knows> every single one of them thinks that BoA is a bad idea.

Now, that's not scientific. It's purely anecdotal. But it makes good sense. And I'm not arguing that BoA is good/bad for the game here. But I am arguing that a poll conducted five months post-RoS, and six+ months post-2.0 surely isn't going to be representative of <Diablo players>. Hell, the forum is barely representative of <People who are active> let alone people who haven't played the game in a few months.

My one friend knows developers at Blizzard. He told them that he thought D3V sucked ass, so he didn't buy RoS. They gave him a free copy and asked him to give RoS a shot and let them know what he thought of it. His response was that RoS is worse than D3V and that whomever came up with BoA should be fired on the spot. I guarantee he doesn't visit this site, hasn't voted in this poll, and probably doesn't do a ton of other things that *we* consider "normal."

My guess is that "BoA is not a good idea" is a much more prevalent opinion among people who bought RoS and have since quit playing, or even among people who played 2.0 and didn't buy RoS than among active players. Whether inactive players matter could be debated from now until the cows come home. But I have a gut feeling that if you polled all however-many million people actually purchased and played RoS on the subject you'd find that the "minority" is actually people who like BoA.

If the "majority" of RoS purchasers loved BoA it would stand to reason that there would be a lot more active people. The posts on this forum, along with the official forums, incgamers, and reddit all tell the tale that activity in the community is at a pretty low point. For better or worse. Only time will tell.

But you are completely right that this discussion is completely pointless. The ship has sailed on it. The ship sailed on it long before Josh even announced BoA to us. He had his mind made up on the subject even before he was hired to replace Jay, if you ask me. In fact, my guess is that he made a pretty hard sell on it at his interview. "He could sell a ketchup Popsicle to a woman in white gloves!"

Quote from Bleu42

So that's a pretty sweet little tirade you went on there, off of my quote. Did you mean to quote someone else? I never said the loot was perfect, I was commenting on BoA, and how I personally like it.

No, just voicing my opinion.

You think it's boner-inducing that you might never find an item in a season.

I, on the other hand, gained no satisfaction from it in practice. That rarity didn't make me bust a nut when I finally got a Rhen'ho Flayer. In fact, it was just the opposite. I felt like RNG had beat the fuck out of me and the experience was not rewarding even when it did drop mostly because of the massive amount of completely worthless immediately-to-the-salvage-yard junk that I slogged through in the meantime.

I think the difference here is basically masochism. Well and a degree of schadenfreude.

If I hadn't been duly rewarded with dozens of Angel Hair Braids for a single Rhen'ho Flayer then maybe my opinion would be different. But I simply think it's bad design to make me "appreciate" rare items by giving me dump trucks full of bad items. I'm OK with rare items. I don't hate rare items. I don't even hate the fact that it took so long to get a Rhen'ho Flayer. What I truly resent is how lackluster the means to that end were. And Catalept very adequately articulated why.

They gave us BoA, but they didn't give us enough "build-changing" items to make BoA feel very good for most players. Most of my friends who played D3C actually gave up on RoS faster than D3C. Even though the AH was evil, it still gave an means to an end. It gave you more than "keep spending those blood shards, eventually that Tasker and Theo will drop for you!"

BoA could be great, I'm sure. But it really shouldn't take a second re-work of legendaries 5+ months later (remember, Wyatt initially said they didn't even want to re-visit existing items, they just wanted to make new items) to fix the system. 2.0 was supposed to do that. They had, quite literally, over a year to get it right and yet so many legendaries are flat-out wrong. But they got that BoA in there to shut down those 3rd party sites. They got in the part that mattered to them... but they flopped on the other half, which was key to making it work.

Imagine how very few people would really complain about BoA if we truly had a lot of items that were viable... and you weren't JUST hunting those rare items plus a few sets and a RoRG. Imagine that game. That sounds like a good game to me.

Doing A1 bounties until your eyeballs bleed to get a RoRG so that you can gamble up X set pieces ... not nearly as good. But that's exactly where we're at because Josh half-assed the vaunted legendary rework. They had the opportunity to do it right. Now, just like Jay, Josh needs a "do-over" proving that as much as things have changed, they really haven't changed all that much.

Sometimes I really think that Wyatt may be the actual problem. His comment about not wanting to fix old legendaries, but instead wanting to just introduce new legendaries, was unbelievably offensive. It's impossible for anyone who actually plays the game to hold that opinion.

Quote from Bleu42

I defend it because it's made the game far more enjoyable for me. I barely have a couple hours a week now to play it, and knowing that there's super rare items that I might not even see during a season excites me, because if I do find it, it was because of my own playing, and not because I got frustrated and bought it.

It took me well over 500 hours to find a Rhen'ho Flayer. I still have yet to find a Starmetal Kukiri.

Meanwhile I've found dozens of Angel Hair Braids and Kills, and Scrimshaws, and Slave Bonds, and Rondal's Lockets, and on and on ad infinatum.

None of this "excites" me. In fact it makes me rather apathetic and disenfranchised by the loot system. These are the SAME EXACT problems we had in Loot 1.0.... except that now we can't trade. It's like taking the worst of both scenarios and combining them into one and somehow trying to pretend that it's a great result.

As Catalept said (and I'm inferring above) BoA without many more DESIRABLE legendaries... BoA in a landscape dominated by RoRG and set items... BoA in a system where you can go MONTHS and MONTHS of playing without finding the items that really change how you play is giving half a solution to a problem. It doesn't make a goddamned bit of sense. I'm happy that they're re-re-re-re-doing legendaries in 2.1, but when Josh gave the hard sell on BoA and then gave us a set of legendaries where 80% of them are salvage fodder, I don't see much defensible about that.

This is the kind of shit that was commonplace in the Jay Wilson era... and yet it hasn't changed with Josh. These are things that SHOULDN'T be half-assed, but it seemed that 2.0 was more about erasing Jay's legacy and establishing Josh's legacy than it was about putting the nose to the grindstone and really delivering on the promises. The initial 2.0 drop rates were a complete joke.

I don't find it remotely exciting to know that I may never see a Starmetal Kukiri but that I will be inundated with THOUSANDS of completely-undesirable orange/green items because Josh and his team couldn't find the time to deliver on the itemization that they promised. As it stands, a DH without M6 is basically a piece of shit. Is that REALLY the itemization we want? Josh promised us the moon and the stars and the sky and he didn't come close to delivering it.

Jay didn't get a pass for fumbling legendary re-works. Why should Josh? It's time we hold that motherfucker's feet to the fire. Less talk, more action. If you're going to sell RoS on these awesome build-changing legendaries then what kind of cruel fucking joke is it to make almost all of the most-common legendaries total garbage? Why defend it? We deserve far better. So far most of what we're getting is a lot of hot air.

Somehow, through all this, weapon emeralds didn't get addressed, even though 2.0 was the perfect opportunity to do so. Somehow 2hers were not fixed in 2.0, even though it was the perfect opportunity to do so. Why? Why is the timetable for expansion release so rushed that we're not even close to getting the full set of changes that we were sold on?

I just want the bluespeak to stop and the team, as a whole, to step it the fuck up and take RoS from a B- to an A. Sure vanilla might have been a C+ and a B- is a step up from a C+, but the way Josh talked about BoA saving the game anything short of an A is a complete fucking failure and a case study in execuspeak.

Quote from mister_p88

1. Blizzard have tried to make this game last longer and they have done a pretty decent job of it. The problem is in doing so, they have made some aspects of the game too slow, tedious and boring. They could have done a better job but then again, maybe not.

And therein lies the double-edged sword nature of people wanting Blizzard to deliver on "longevity."

There is no way to purposefully and deliberately add "longevity" to the game without simultaneously making the game too tedious and boring for some segment of the playerbase.

The best way to add longevity to a game is simply to make replaying it fun.

What fun does the 500th rift bring?

What fun does the 2500th bounty bring?

What fun does taking a 2nd/3rd/4th/5th character through the gear/difficulty progression bring?

Now those are all rhetorical questions, but you will automatically create "longevity" when you have people POSITIVELY responding to them. For me doing rifts ad infinatum (and, more specifically with Rifts being extended to Greater Rifts) is that after a while it doesn't become THAT much more engaging than doing your 200th Alkaizer run. Sure the scenery and monsters are different, but by focusing on rifts (and leaving the rest of adventure mode, and campaign mode in the dust) eventually people get rather ho-hum about them.

Greater Rifts are cool. But deep down I find myself wondering why Greater Rifts don't simply REPLACE rifts altogether. It's nice to see new features, but re-hashing the same content but with a different ruleset can only keep the game "fresh" for so long. You can only add so many new legendaries and force people to reroll so many times and funnel everyone through the Nephalem Rift portal so many times before it becomes more a chore than something enjoyable.

There exists a degree of "games like this are about the grind" and that's correct. But it's sloppy and lazy to not realize that Greater Rifts are so inherently similar to Rifts that they are just going to lead to burnout faster for the average player. Variety is the spice of life and Greater Rifts, aside from the randomization, completely lack any semblance of variety.

If the developers really care about "longevity" they'd understand that Greater Rifts probably will be great in the short-term but in the long-term they're even less compelling than Rifts because they're like a schizophrenic copy/paste job.

Two enthusiastic thumbs up.

Quote from MeatHeadMikhail

There are several spreadsheets out there showing mathematically that at some point of main stat (around 10k or so I believe) CC, CD, and AS contribute more to overall damage. I think you'll understand when you start seeing HF amulets with CC, CD, elemental, SOCKET.

I fully understand that. But at no point does Paragon "make up" for anything.

At any given Paragon level you're looking at X less main stat where X is the roll on the amulet. No matter how many Paragon levels you tack on, you will still be short X.

The question is not whether you can "make up" for a lack of mainstat with Paragon, because you clearly cannot... no matter what you do you'll be missing the roll on an item. The only question that needs to be answered is which is better X main stat or Y <other stat>. That is the only relevant discussion.

Trying to say you can "make up" for it with Paragon is misleading. It just doesn't ever need to be brought up because it's a fallacious line of thinking. What you're saying is that you can take 5% CHC off your gear because Paragon levels will "make up" for it. It just doesn't work that way unless you're hitting a hard cap.