DiabloFans

Quote from huertgenwald»

Yes, it's a known bug for almost 2 years now and nobody at diablofans seems to care about it. Along with the problem of the unsorted gear list.

That's not entirely true For some reason just always something different came up (owner changes, shutdown, re-opening, and so on)... I've highlighted it once more. Let's hope something's gonna be done about it this time though. It's been too long indeed, I'll agree with you on that.

There were general login issues with the battle.net launcher. Asia started (to my knowledge) on time.

Also: gratz, @BehindTimes to a successful start on Asia! I kept a close eye on the leaderboards during the start, and I believe you were #6 at 70. Was interesting to see how things unfolded.

1) Looking for a specific bounty, usually. But it depends on the strategy, so which guides specifically are you referring to? There's many different strategies.

2) You can upgrade gear before or after reset, doesn't make a huge difference.

3) That kind of "snapshotting" is one strategy, yes. I see a lot of people planning to do that. I have some concerns:

i) If lots of people do this, the servers will go nuts and you will wait a minute or so before being able to create a new game. It simply doesn't work if too many people do this kind of quick game recreation strategy. Always have a backup strategy that does not require a new game.

ii) This requires lots of coordination, planning, and practice. If you don't know exactly what you're doing, it won't be any more efficient than just doing what you usually do (kill streaks or rifts). This is an advanced strategy for min/maxers.

iii) The person who does the snapshotting will have a lower level, and hit level 70 quite a bit later. This imbalance is difficult to handle. In general, many people focus way too much on the 1-70 race, when it's actually a 1-Chapter IV race. /u/behindtimes on Reddit made a very nice post about this.

Quote from nuzo»

Also, I've been told that people should create their seasonal character always first before completing the Challenge Rift so that you get the cache on your seasonal character. I've never bothered to test anything otherwise, so that might also be important in your tips there.

That's not necessary, you don't need to create a character. See here, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW96_m6lABM

Quote from Dropz»

You just necroed a 10 year old thread :-D

Someone did, yeah. I've deleted their response and locked the thread. Maybe a heads-up:

Spam bots have changed over the years. Their most recent strategy is the following:

1) Make a new account

2) Post in a really old thread with some auto-generated, semi-relevant gibberish

3) A few days or weeks later, said comment will be edited to include the links to whatever URL said spammer wants to advertise

Please don't respond, just report it as a thread necro. We'll delete it and it looks as if nothing ever happened

Heya! Always nice to see oldschool people. I've not been around as long as you, but quite a while at this point. But I love delving in history, so together with Aerisot - who, based on his account date, has even been around for longer - we went through the timeline of Dfans a while ago. Here's the crude picture:

• June 2005: DiabloFans was founded as Diablo3.com
• May 1, 2008: Diablo3.com was bought by Blizzard and the site officially became DiabloFans.com
• Summer 2008: DiabloFans acquired by Curse
• September 27, 2011: Molster joins Curse and becomes DiabloFans admin
• May 15, 2012: Diablo 3 is released
• March 25, 2014: Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls is released
• August 16, 2016: Amazon (Twitch) acquire Curse
• December 2018: Curse Media is bought by Wikia/Fandom
• March 21, 2019: DiabloFans is officially shut down
• June 12, 2019: DiabloFans is re-opened after it was being purchased by Magic Find (along with Hearthpwn and a few other old parts of Curse)

I personally joined in September 2012. I'm not gonna re-tell the story of why I joined, because I've written about it here when DiabloFans closed. I also don't remember when I became a mod, but I can tell you that the peak of DiabloFans wasn't shortly after release, but it was around 2015/2016. That is because we often forget that Reaper of Souls really "fixed" Diablo 3 and turned it into the game we all wanted, and the Diablo 3 that we got to enjoy shortly after RoS release was probably the most pure and true successor to Diablo 2 that we always wanted. The game now is in a good state, it's just that many of us have "over-played" it at thousands of hours in, and a stupidly amount of power creep has made the game evolve into an endgame where people can't even comprehend the numbers anymore, and Blizzard recently openly admitted that they now take "paragon 5000" as the average competitive power level. Long before anyone cared, I warned about the destructive impact of paragon power creep, and in 2018 I concluded that for me, the Blizzard I grew up with ceased to exist.

But alas, I disgress. As I said, the "peak" of Diablofans was absolutely in 2015/2016. The site saw an incredible surge of users after RoS release as all of the sudden the removal of the AH and the more balanced approach of RoS, thanks to Josh Mosqueira, brought more opportunity for discussions and debate to the game, and the playerbase exploded. We had tons of build discussions, and as a result there was need to create better ways to share builds. As Molster had developed a deck sharing system for Hearthpwn, it was later on adapted into the build tool for DiabloFans. I don't know when exactly it launched, but it was the prime contributor to the spike in users throughout 2015/2016, as there was very little patch activity (cf. seasons overview), but the competitive playerbase was interested in exploring the development of the "meta", and casual players were constantly on the lookout for those juicy cookie cutter builds. The forums were also insanely active, and members like Jaetch and Loroese (wizard theorycrafting masters) are among those who I personally miss the most, among with many many others who just disappeared.

At the same time of the peak of these forums, in 2015/2016 Blizzard also had scaled down the Diablo development team - as we know now, it was when they scrapped the second expansion and instead decided to create DLCs (and later on decided to even release only one DLC, the Necro in summer 2017, and the rest as content patches). The result was that communication died off completely; from regular developer interaction across all media, including "play your way" panels with the devs, we went to a total silence. The paragon power creep then saw the potential for botters to exploit this, starting in season 4, and Blizzard never really stepped in; every few months there's a few banwaves, but they really only ever catch a fraction of botters, at most. To this day there are people openly mocking Blizzard, having bot references in clan names and character names while occupying top spots on the leaderboards. The silence of Blizzard is deafening, and every year or so we get an apology with "we will improve our communication"... and then again vanishing into the nether for a year. It'd be comical if it wasn't so sad. But in the end, this caused the playerbase to decline steadily, to a bare skeleton. Every so often players come back for a new season, a new patch, or an announcement - like Diablo 4 - but it's never for more than a few days at most.

DiabloFans specifically got hit hard by this lack of communication because Blizzard also stopped engaging with and promoting fan sites (with the exception of Reddit, where they became actually more active than on their own forums). So everyone moved over to Reddit and our forums became a bit barren. There were times where I was the only active mod checking in for weeks, and mostly looking at bot posts ;-)

DiabloFans changed owners at their peak, so I can't blame the new owners for shutting it down in 2019, as from their point of view it was in a steady decline, and there was no signs of Diablo 4 at that point (keep in mind, this was half a year after Blizzard literally gave the finger to all Diablo fans with their Diablo: Immortal announcement disaster). But the damage of said closure was probably more than we imagined: the build tool not being available for one season meant that people went elsewhere and removed their bookmarks. Another reason why everything here is quite empty is that when Fandom bought DiabloFans in 2019, they wiped every post and user who didn't explicitly consent to transferring their data (I guess to comply with GDPR).

The combination of all those factors make it quite difficult to get DiabloFans back on their feet. In the end there's only so much we can do; there needs to be a constantly engaging game that a lot of people play and want to discuss to even give us enough meat to revive the forums back to their old life. And then we need to acknowledge that Reddit, because it is graced by the presence of the developers, is favored so much more by the playerbase these days. But... we are trying, and we aren't giving up.

Here's to hoping that Diablo 4 will help return DiabloFans to its old glory!

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/turbohud-bannable-or-not/8943/13

No idea what exactly is coming, could just be a smokescreen, but I hope this is true.

Quote from Blessed Mother»

I just want to say that you guys really f'ed up by doing this.

Just to highlight when you say "YOU", all the people who were responsible for this are gone - this was a thing between Curse (who sold DiabloFans) to Fandom (who purchased DiabloFans). Especially the mods (Aerisot and me) have absolutely nothing to do with nor access to this kind of system-level of accounts.

I hate this just as much as you. Many people who I enjoyed having discussions with are gone. But by now "going away" you'd be really just punishing the wrong people.

Nevalistis is sick and hasn't been able to post the news.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/improved-communication-isn-t-what-is-happening-zero-clarity-on-patch-changes/6751/65

It's pretty safe to say that season will start next week Friday (Nov 22). This week would be too early with no heads-up anymore (basically patch would already be live on the US as patch day is usually on Tuesday) - and the week after it's Black Friday. But we don't know for sure.

Other sources say S19 starts when sun and moon kiss while the snake dances around the fox.

Yeah, I agree with Mob Dylan. To be honest, in that video I hear no real arguments, it's just "MTX are just bad" and then goes on in circular arguments.

D3 sold extremely well, like millions of copies, but now we're in a situation where we have free transmogs and almost no updates. I'd much rather have more in-depth patches and smaller content updates (like trying to fix paragon or balance faster+more frequently) than what we see right now, about one real meta shake up per year at most. PoE is a good example for MTX that do not affect the game's power at all, and I'm sure D4 is going the same route.

I know a lot of people are vigorously unequivocally against MTX in any way, form, or shape - but then you also will have a game that after release will only see very infrequent minor patches and nothing else, which makes seasons very quickly very boring. You can't have it all. Imho, not introducing MTX into RoS was D3's downfall. Just let me pay for stash tab, wings, pets, portrait frames; or even new stuff like character looks or so.

And some more VODs. I know there's more streamers and also Youtubers who uploaded their reactions; if you have anything please share, let's create a collection of links! Preferably mirrors that will not disappear after a while, like the Twitch VODs (I hope many of them will mirror those on Youtube).

They asked this in the press conference, and the said they plan to support controllers on PC:

I think they might be aware of it, they also mentioned how they don't want too colorful spell effects - and then the gameplay had lots of visuals going on, in a full party it might be like PoE (which sometimes becomes a crazy clusterfuck with a million colors and effects). I hope they turn it down. It might also have something to do with console compatibility, highlighting selected monsters.

Whatever it is, I agree with you that it should be turned down, in general - less is more. Even in this demo of one players vs a few monsters it was sometimes a lot of visual clutter. Diablo I, admittedly in a different era of PC gaming, had almost none of that.

You also mention sound which I've stressed in multiple places today is really important. I have no idea what the sound in D4 is gonna be like though, haven't really paid attention to the demo sound and it's only one zone anyways.

Added a couple more links - if anyone has other VODs or so post them here!

Just posting this here:

https://twitter.com/Dayntee/status/1190393877376561153

It’s okay to have healthy skepticism. Honestly, I encourage it. It’s an early look, and there’s still much to do. We just couldn’t wait any longer to share our passion with you all, and hope you’re as hopeful and excited as we are for the future!

This game is so so so so so far from finished. Just bring forward your criticism constructively. As you might have seen on the public forums, they will provide quarterly updates. And they really seem to listen. The game right now looks to me like early D3 screenshots. So much can (and will) change!