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Their whole design of white items was to create the "loot pinata" effect. While im sure a lot of people groaned at this, it does have its merit; people like seeing loot, and what better loot than explosions of things falling onto the ground to pick up.

The problem is two fold though:

- People have started to get use to game designs that hide and/or get rid of unwanted loot. Diablo 2 had "3rd party" programs and mods that would deal with loot thresholds, this gave players options to remove clutter from their screen and game if they so choose. It went further when games like torchlight and torchlight 2 streamlined this functionality. WoW and other mmos have quick / mindless options to get rid of grey and unwanted loot without player interaction, or very little. Most games these days are starting to pull away from having "junk loot" altogether, or at the very least from bogging down the player experience and time. PoE for example, has an item system where every single item that drops has a purpose, even "junk loot" becomes a crafting material.

- Loot pinatas are only favorable if you know the loot in and of itself is desirable. Kids want to bash open that stuffed animal because they know its full of tasty candy. If it was full of Walmart coupons...they would be less enthusiastic. If you, as an adult, were hitting a pinata and all that was inside were pennies, I'm pretty sure the enthusiasm would decline just as much. While pennies are still useful currency ( Just like white items on the ground ) , the effort you would have to go through to exchange them outweighs the actual profit of having them. It's much less efficient to gather pennies ( and white items ) , to exchange them for more reasonable trade goods, than it would be to just leave them where they lay and spend that extra time being productive in another manner.

The "loot pinata" effect in Diablo 2 was superb because magic find made it so white and blue items were removed from the lists ( almost entirely ). This meant that the "trash loot" was rare quality goods, and potions/scrolls. It was also great because the targets of loot were actual pinatas (The bosses and named spawns), where all of the important and sought after items dropped from. Diablo 3 still has elite packs, but they only serve to give you better chances at rare quality loot. All gear drops from all mobs in Diablo 3, so there is no real "pinata" effect to enjoy. It's more like standing in a pool of water and hitting it with a stick..causing splashes to shoot upward. No matter where you hit...you are going to get lots of water shooting outwards...but there's nothing magical about the process or the results; it's just a bunch of water droplets flying everywhere.


So really, there should be an option to hide quality of loot ( White, Blue, Yellow, Misc / Potions, etc.) if the value of these items is merely to create some sort of visual effect. If not, then the value of these items needs to be more important (which is why having the item revamp as soon as possible is critical for this game).

And like it was said above, the whole "just take a break" comments we are starting to see often from blizzard is getting a tad "snotty" I believe. Its rather silly, because they would ONLY say that for a game like diablo 3, where there is no monthly sub ( or huge competitive eSport-like atmosphere like Starcraft 2) that they can lose. I still find it rather odd considering that they have really tried to push the RMAH since the game's second design, but it does seem like at least some of the blizzard staff are trying to wean the game off the AH, or are just tired of it themselves entirely to bother endorsing it; that's just an assumption on my part. But seriously though, you shouldn't be telling people, especially those that have paid for your product, to "stop using it" if they are not enjoying it or the service provided by said company. That would be like Jeep telling owners that if they are afraid of their vehicle possibly causing a fire if hit from behind, to just "take a break from it" .


Here's to hoping that they figure out a better method/use for white items and the like, and that the item revamp comes along nicely; when/if it comes out.

Quote from Bagstone

Quote from JoeShmo

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Thanks for your post, seems like you put a lot of thought into that. However, you still overlooked a few things:

1) Diablo 3 is not a subscription-based game. You cannot expect weekly updates. The reason why PoE gets weekly updates are because it's in beta, there's no money involved, and they don't have a million players that just play and leave for good if a patch in one week breaks the game.

I just had a feeling someone was going to take that sentense out of context. I never stated that Diablo 3 was a sub based game, I mearly stated that that sub based games are affected even greater by it. And yes, we can expect and we should very well expect weekly updates if they are relevant, like bug fixes and completed features. This is a problem that companies have done well to confused the playerbase about, and thats how frequent content updates can be.

Just because something doesnt have a monthly monetary fee, doesnt mean its value is any less; and if anything most monthly fees dont reward players with better value for their game, its very much an up and down curve depending on what part of a very long development cycle the company is at. This is why having frequent updates makes that monthly value reasonable.

The other problem is that companies dont feel required to further update a game if they are not recieving a possible profit from it, ala monthly fees, dlc, in game transactions, etc. This still doesnt devalue the need for frequent updates, it just means that companies have refused to support their game honorably after the initial release. How many companies shovel out a bad or unfinished game and then just quietly disapear, usually with a "we cannot afford to further develop the game" ? A metric ton. How many games can honestly say they are "complete" at release? Almost none of them. There are also games, like Diablo 3, that have stated that they will continue to develop the game for the years to come. So there is no clause that says "We do not have to be professional about our game support, you are not giving us money" . And yet they are recieving continued monetary support, just like a free to play game though via the RMAH.

Also, PoE hasnt been in beta for months and it has a ton of players. Also, LoL has a much higher player base than Diablo 3, and it has an almost annoyingly frequent amount of updates. The amount of games that actually do frequently update their game is not some small number, and not one thats religated to only niche genre or money.

2) Upon reading your post it becomes pretty obvious that you have no idea how difficult programming is. There is no such thing as "easy change" for anything in a game. If you change one line of code, such as the proc rate of a wizard's spell, all of the sudden their might be some phase beast champion affix that will 1-shot players in rare occasions. Don't believe that? Ask people who played WoW vanilla, they can tell you...

Thats a rather funny and ironic statement to make, considering you saying that shows that you do not have an idea in how programming works, or that your "expertise" in the field is fed solely from what game developers have told you in PR talks and what "a friend of a friend" have said. I in fact know very well how programming "works" . I do not claim to be the be all and end all of all things software, but I very well know the very basic rule that every computer science student or enthusiest learns when they start on the path for software development; you're code is only as good as you make it to be.

Just because blizzard made a lot of mistakes, and a lot of companies, in their coding process, who the hire, how they treat their workers, etc. does not mean that the "physics" of coding is some sort of unrulely dragon that you cannot fathom to saddle, that only god himself has the knowhow to write beautiful code. Changing 1 line of code does not break another line of code, unless you improperly wrote all the code. Giving a sword +5 to str accidently does not create 100 black dragons to spawn in a noob friendly zone, unless something went horribly horribly wrong in designing the game. Now, you can argue things like: causing memory leaks, runtime errors, eronious movement / controls , etc. , those are valid issues that come up with improper code and/or bad design. Having your armor turn blue when you pick up a rock does not qualify as "just how it works when you code".

Bad programmers make bad code, bad teachers make bad programmers, and bad bosses make bad workers. Code, only does what you tell it to do.

3) Since everything you change can affect anything else in the game, you need to do QA testing before you release it. For most of us it's not necessary because we don't care about the problems, but there are some players who really rely on QA testing. For example: hardcore players - if the phase beast in aforementioned example 1-shots a HC character, hundreds of hours of work and careful gearing go to waste, just because someone skipped QA. Or people who are top-geared and have characters worth the equivalent of thousands of dollars - regardless if they found the items, got the money via AH flipping, or credit card: it's just not right to make all their equipment worthless because you didn't want to test stat changes and its effects on the AH. Or casual players who are so annoyed of a new bug after a patch that they quit - forever.

Again, propper coding negates the need for heavy Q & A . Do we live in a world where everyone writes beautiful code? A lot of people do, but if someone who doesnt messes something up, of course things will break. Do I think having a testing phase is important? I sure do. I never stated it wasnt important, I only stated that that Blizzard's Q&A is laughable, and they still release errors that have been pointed out to them for weeks, and break things in the game that have no relation at all to what they were working on. Again, this is not something that "just happens" as a result from programming, its a result from poor workmanship. Q&A, as well as frequency of errors, can be improved by doing the job correctly the first time around, or at the very least focused more heavily on doing a propper job.

Im sure there are employees at blizzard that do their best, and some that dont realize that they are making mistakes or making unnessisary bloat to their game. Its still the job of blizzard and the employees to put forth an effort to correct and improve the quality of work, as well as comprehend preventative skills to keep things like this from becoming a hinderance.

Last but not least, this sentence here struck me: "This is like companies that delay releases of games because they keep working on new features to the game every week, which ends up with a game that has no focus and a lot of mediocre "inspiring" content, and dead wallets with pushy publishers." You can't possibly talking about Blizzard here. Blizzard is the one and only video game developer in the world that can tell their publishers to postpone a release as long as they want (happened for every game), reset a development (SC2, D3) or cancel a game (SC: Ghost, WC: Adventures, D3: MMORPG).

I don't believe you understand the statement you quoted, or the context of where you quoted it from. Blizzard "postponing a release as long as they want" , ' reset a development" and "cancel a game" are exaclty the issues I was talking about. Blizzard postpones releases of things "to create the best quality content" sure, but thats not even half of the real reason.

They postpone because they cant get a grip on what it is they are trying to create, they try too many different iterations of the same thing, the coding / development becomes a much bigger job than the workers can accomplish in the given time, someone changes thier focus part of the way through because of a sudden development, etc. etc. Preaching quality is a very admirable thing, but blizzard has been far from "quality" work for years now.

They have also admited several times (as shields against people getting angry about features not being released) , that they spend a lot of time reworking the same thing over and over, even to the detriment of the feature itself. They also spend a great deal of time trying to create features that either dont pan out as well as they had hoped (or us hoped) for , or dont even make it to finish. These are design resources that countless companies waste and get lost "in the heat of" when developing games, especially before a release of one. These are not examples of "making the game better" , they are examples of "going overboard in design" and creating development bloat.

Is it great and good for companies to want to experiment? Sure is. But you dont sacrafice the overarching progress of the game "to feel something out." . Too many companies, with kickstarter for example, create these huge stretch goals to "improve the game with better funding" , and bottom out shortly after wtih all that extra funding. They dont know how to properly manage their resources, and know when to "stop" or "let it go" , if even temporarly until a better time to work on it.

Titan is a great example at blizzard tryin to create something without a propper focus and desgin, and wasting a lot of manhours and resources (leaving the rest of their franchises with less manpower) , only to scrap it and start over with a smaller team. Does this happen? Yea, it happens, and its unfortunate. But blizzard has done this too frequently (ghost, diablo 3, content updates for wow, etc.) , that its no longer a "Hey, cut them a break, stuff happens." and its entirely "Hey, get your development teams and higher ups heads out of the sand."

They've shown full well that their last several years, and their comitments of "getting better" , have fallen flat. They need to actually change up and create a new system for development, or they will continue to waste time, effort, money; and delay, reset, and cancel games/content for the forseeable future.

Its a choice, not a condition, to stay the course when you are doing poorly at something.

So the players have needed an item revamp for a year now, we get the go-ahead that its in the works earlier this year, we for the most part expect that this item revamp should be pushed out next patch since it was hoped for 1.08 but didnt make it in since its a "big" project (while its not, since the first iteration of the item revamp was just changing drop tables and changing the range on item affix/prefix's, neither of which is complicated yet can be pretty tedious if you do them one at a time...hello batch files.), and they decided to pull one of the classic blunders of any company, feature bloat.

Blizzard is terrible when it comes to frequent patching; for years they have taken a backwards design approach to waiting until their "unique" features are finished before patching, which means hotfix's, bug squashes, simple changes, have to be delayed release until their "major" data files are ready to ship. This is like companies that delay releases of games because they keep working on new features to the game every week, which ends up with a game that has no focus and a lot of mediocre "inspiring" content, and dead wallets with pushy publishers.

Companies like Trion and GGG push patches out as soon as fix's and features are ready, they dont clump up every feature and change into a "mega patch". Players dont need to wait 3+ month cycles to get a change that only takes a toggle to fix, or a addition of a single character to fix a line of code. They also dont delay features because "something similar / related is in development too..." . The changes to the higher rolled stats and drop frequency doesnt require that the legendaries, sets, special goblin gopher, etc. to be included. , those affect the game in an entirely different manner; they are an addition to the game (just like the "new" legendaries we got last year).

The whole "we run the risk of breaking the game" is a sad cop-out. If you break the game, its because the people who wrote the code and handled the patch messed up, not because the patch was smaller and the process was more frequent. If you do it right the first time, ( which i know doesnt happen all of the time ) , then there's no need for extensive QA testing to make sure your RMAH doesnt break because of an error going from 1 mil gold to 10 mil gold. On that note, blizzard bundles everything up , and always creates a mess somehow, so the entire "view" of them creating less frequent and better systems to release content, doesnt pan out ever for them. Its even more amazing after a month+ on the PTR...with the problems being pointed out by the players for weeks, they still get rolled out with the "finalized" patch...and it breaks.

So again, the always better solution (unless a feature is absolutely critical to be delayed, which is rarely ever the case except to create "themed" content patches like introductions of new raid tiers, etc.) , is to create and release frequent smaller patches to your game / software. Because they are smaller, they are LESS likely to be put out with bugs that get hidden among all the other lines of code, they are less intrusive on players monthly bandwidth limits, you fix the game issues in a much more smoother manner than hamfisting changes a few times a year, and players are sated by having new features and "goodies" to play with all the time. This also prevents / slows down dead periods in player population, which is critical for games that require a monthly sub. Have we still not learned from other companies how to NOT create another ICC / DS fiasco for the company? Ill give a suggestion ( like i havent overstayed my welcome already with them) , dont create periods of months and months where nothing new happens to the game, it never ends well, ever; especially with today's populous that "gets over" things in a heartbeat if they are not constantly tugging at their faces.

I get that constantly sprinkling words of encouragement about the development of a game helps to keep the game relevant (yay marketing), but they are just words. When you release the content, then people can take something seriously. Dropping bread crumbs of "itemization changes coming!" for a year before it happens, is just shady , typical PR.

I really dislike how he states "I'm not a big fan of options", and elaborates that it complicates/clutters the UI as a result. If anything, the game needs to continue to receive an increase in options.

This is the common philosophy that blizzard has, and many companies share, that giving the players options and more information just creates unnecessary burdens and doesn't help to improve their games at all. That's like saying having an option to change your resolution size is a hindrance to the game. It's the same sort of arrogant stance they had with the buff/debuff UI elements, stating that if there's more than a few on the screen it makes the game increasingly unplayable visually.

That's why there's this thing called "options", and you let your players decide for themselves if they wish to use it or not. It's really annoying how they keep making "big brother" decisions based on their own "preferences" , instead of just enabling the option to use them or not in game. It's like they only see things in absolutes, like having a toggle is worse than not having the option to begin with.

Quote from bigamie

Quote from overneathe

Runes should've been in D2 since release. Took them so much time.

Don't forget the higher resolution.

The Rune system was an actual new/improved feature , along the lines of going beyond just the current gem system for d2. It added a stronger economy and customization that was fun and rewarding. If diablo 1 had a gem and rune system (or any game for that matter), then yes your point would be valid. You cant pick out a feature that was actually new to gaming, and use it as a "Burn!" to protect a game that came out 10+ years later with less features than its predecessor.

If Diablo 2 had come out with less features and inspiring mechanics / design than diablo 1 , we wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Sure Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 play different aesthetically, but where D2 branched off into its own game it actually inovated and improved on the franchise and gaming as a whole. D3 plays out just like Dungeon Siege 3 did with its franchise, It gutted the core mechanics of the game, added some "pretty graphics" and voiceover / cutscenes , and tanked. You dont go from Dungeon Siege 1 to 2 and then make 3 and play the "its the same game experience" card, just like Diablo 3.

What inspiring features has Diablo 3 introduced in comparison to Diablo 2, or gaming as a whole?

Its multiplayer is worse: less players per game, no real game creation customization (Even just having a naming system works better than having 3-4 static dropdown options that are vague for their intended use), the chat system still isnt on par with Bnet 1.0 standards, and Bnet as a whole still isnt on par with Bnet 1.0 (another example of how they didnt improve or inovate..they just made a glorified sequal).

Its loot system? How often did people find items in Diablo 3 that made them excited? They had to devote an entire patch (praising it as one of the major improvements in their timeline) to improving legendaries, and they still didnt get it right. Game now has weapon lots of fun weapon procs! Diablo 2 did it..and did it better. They have to do the same thing with the entire item system revamp in the future. Have they even mentioned set items yet? No. Dont even get me started on the magic find system for D3, and how they went out of their way to gut it from items and introduce hard caps.

The economy? Yea, gold use to be worthwhile at the beginning of diablo 2 too, and just like diablo 3 its become a worthless currency. SoJ were no better in that regard, but they were still a great currency because they had a physical space value, you couldnt just store an infinite supply of them on a single character, this curbed inflation quite a bit, and even so there was an actual bartering system in place, where items had actual values and worth. Inflation wasnt an issue after SoJ because you could trade dirrectly with the gear, so it didnt matter how many SoJs they were worth, the worth of a piece of gear never fluctuated to the extremes that we have in Diablo 3 with item revamps, introducing new "uber" item crafts, gems, etc. Like its an MMO.

Did the gameplay improve? It still plays like diablo. I dont see the real issue with having a limited selection of skills in comparison to the previous 2 games. Sure it stiffles creativity a bit and doesnt allow the player to be flexible on the go, but its true that at most points we only ever used a handful of skills at a time. The fluid looking and feel to combat is definitely improved, theres not a single point of inovation to the combat, but i dont feel like we regressed at all either.

How about customization? Yea...thats a pretty dead horse. I wont get into that.

Music...pow pow my ears? Ill be honest, after a while it all rather bleeds together to me because of how atmostpheric it has always been, so it makes great background music. All 3 of the games were good in this regard. No inspiring music that gets stuck in my head all day, and nothing that warrents a plethora of covers to be made on youtube, but that just goes along with blizzard sound scores, very mellow. Although I still can hum the tristram town music on queue, I blame diablo 1 for that.

New features! ...? Monster power was already done in diablo 2 with ' /players x ' as well as automatically via more players in multiplayer. Diablo 3 had part of that system in play at start, minus any bonuses players would recieve, and the ability to control it.

Mob density was never a problem in diablo 1 or two, but that was mostly because the focus was on bosses, cow level, chests and named mobs for loot. XP "sweet spots" was always based on your level, and every mob had its value, ignoring cow lvl powerleveling.

Multiplayer improvements, we're talking about adjusting the game numbers to make it feel more fun, thats just balance work. New chat channel? Go back to Bnet 1.0 example. Drop down menus for game preverences? Same as last sentence, been there done that.

PvP? .........

I mean, we could go on an on about this, but it comes down to blizzard cut out a lot of the game, or didnt have the time to implement/finish it. They had already scrapped the original version before too, and did some drastic changes in beta that were very "questionable / controversial" to players. For the last year they have been playing "catch-up" with the games "release" , that was delayed, delayed, revamped, and delayed. Sure they added quite a bit to the game since last year, but as others have said, this is stuff that SHOULD have been in the game in the beginning before it was released.

This wasnt content that shouldnt have been expected to be there, this isnt entitlement, these are core items that make the game function and even make the game fun. There was no "rune system" likeness introduced in the last year, or any feature for that matter that comes close to an actual inovation, other than the infernal machine and paragon levels, and those are just a different form of crafting with rehashed monsters as hoops and a very boring tacked on newgame+ . Theres nothing inspring about either of those two, but hopefully paragon gets the love that blizzard says it "wants to do" sooner or later. Oh, and speaking of infernal machine, Diablo 2 it it first and better, so i take that back. But hey, i do enjoy the "heirloom" quality of the ring, so theres that.


Oh and before i forget. What was the resolution standard in 2001? Ill give a hint, it wasnt a 4 digit number x 4 digit number. If someone has trouble with that one, think of how the internet looked in those days...and netscape.