Yeah, I don't see this happening on a large scale. Sure, maybe some people do this. But it is a completely different problem than the AH.
The AH allowed for quick upgrades, easy access to a lot of items, and incremental upgrades for little money and no effort. The AH was all about min/maxing and making your character stronger every day.
Trading entire accounts means that you will always have a minimum fee (D3+RoS license have to be paid for, after all). It means that you reset your entire progress (you can't take any legendaries or enforged rares from your old account with you). You cannot min/max an existing char, but only re-roll from your character to a new, super OP character for a large amount of money, and there's no way of re-selling it as simple as using the AH. And with all of these purchases there's always the danger that the seller takes the account back by inquiring Blizzard (CD key, old password, security question, and address, and claiming that the account was hacked).
The risk is incredibly high for a one-time, expensive reward. The AH was the absolute opposite.
You say BoA solves nothing? I say BoA solves just about everything. But it's my opinion :-)
na you're right in a way......what I was envisioning in my mind was the "pay to win model" that fuels the botters ; instead of making money from items and gold they will have to make money from entire accounts......trading accounts is WAY less convenient than what tools we have in place now. BoA will certainly dent the hell out of the whole shitty operation.......thank god...
I think the bot your friend tried left some very clear coding signs of it, that's why they could ban him so quickly. But as I said, some bots nowadays work a lot like real people, they "read" the screen and just act (with very similar mouse clicks and button presses) much like a normal player.
I've been banned/restricted by the LoL tribunal myself 2 times. In one I got a chat restriction, because apparently speaking with sarcasm (with people who have no clue what they're doing) is a bannable offense. Even though your in-game stats show that you're carrying, initiating, ganking and buying wards more than everyone else.
The second one because I consistently met "premade parties" while solo queuing. And most of these like to force a specific hero role on you. "Hey you, we're on a party, get hero X... oh you don't have it or don't wanna pick it? We're gonna screw the game and report you for refusing to cooperate"... And no, I wouldn't do what they wanted. Got a 7 day suspension from it.
Any "community" driven judging system will be plagued by people judging others with a very limited amount of info (while the devs can have some other info), and with anINSANEamount of immature prejudice. Imagine the Lord of Flies here. A judging system which depends on the maturity and reason of a couple hundred 12 year olds, and their own childish views of how people should behave. Yeah, that certainly works.
The LoL tribunal is a placebo.It follows the following mantra: simply ban everyone. They'll get so scared of doing anything that they'll become void apathic shells. Even pro gamers started getting banned/restricted left and right for losing their temper with much worse players. That's a matchmaking problem, pairing braindead players with extremely good ones. But the devs won't admit that, let alone solve it. It's a bit of an off-topic issue, but since you asked.. And no, I don't think at all a "report system" would ever work in a game like D3. It can be a good way to "point" devs to what they need to look for (like watch a specific account's behaviour if it has been reported too much), but not as a be-all-end-all banning system.
lol thats a neat write up. my tribunal experience is different then yours I've never received a punishment or warning from it (luckily), and interestingly enough, when i was judging cases it was kinda tiring. I felt they gave a WEALTH of info to the "jury" and after combing though it I found I was not voting to punish many players at all.......lots of anger....lots of trash talk.....but the scores and the timing of the games rarely exposed a loser.
oh sometimes there was some truly clear cut cases....oh my god CRYSTAL clear....heh!
I've seen how quickly Blizzard can deal with individuals who break the rules when they put their mind to it. A friend of mine had his entire account deleted into fucking OBLIVION for trying a wow botting program for all of 45 seconds. He did not even figure it out. He just got cold feet and scrapped the whole idea. His account was nuked and paved on the spot.
Isn't that a contradiction? They are giving cheaters absolutely NO freedom, as you can see with this example of 45 seconds of bot usage and getting banned. (Regardless of the fact that I think there's more to the story, there are also warnings for minor offenses.)
Just like I said earlier, and as Zero said as well - it is close to impossible to detect cheaters because some of the bots work exactly the same way as "efficient players". You can't just go ahead and ban the top 1000 elite kills players at Diabloprogress. Are many of them bots? Absolutely yes. Are all of them bots? No. There are even some of the 24/7 streamers pretty high on that list, and they have thousands of hours of Twitch footage to prove that they didn't use a bot software.
After all, bots don't have as much of an impact as they had in other games, and with the AH gone and legendaries BoA their impact will be close to zero in a few weeks.
Well because I mentioned 2 experiences so vastly far apart and vastly different I can see why they would appear as a contradiction
and no there is not more to the story. I know i'll probably never convince you or anyone of that...but thats how it went down:
he installed a bot program, attempted to configure it, then allow it to drive his character with the WoW Client logged in for about 45 seconds...got squirrely about it due to the common knowledge of botters being banned, but that was enough to earn a ban. An instant and irreversible ban. no pleading for a naked character replacement, no paying a fee to lift the ban. no laws, no rights, no nothing. just a great big "fuck you, go buy a new account" as swift and as harsh a justice as you can imagine. And he deserved it. No one felt sorry for him. blizzard made the rules clear. there was no high emotion...it was just taken in by all of us as what happened...but my god we laugh about it to this day LOL!!
Banning the entire diablo-progress roster would be a laughably stupid move. As would be ignoring the clues inevitably baked into that same roster.
no one would even suggest to ban the entire top 1000, no one would ever do it, no one would even think of doing it its not even in the realm of possibility. personally I feel that not using the data gathered from that site among god knows how many other varied sources is also a stupid move......its allowing the game to be raped...
Also its been predicted that BoA will solve nothing. Entire accounts will trade hands. Another wild and lucrative operation that probably contain clues....
clues that may sit in plain view for all to see that could lead to punishment for breaking that rules that probably wont.....
maybe your right though maybe the impact of botting is not as crazy as I think.....
maybe I take it to much to heart.....but if I made a game from scratch that was the scope of D3 and within a year people were selling items for several fold over the TWO BILLION gold predicted limit per piece....I'd probably actually cry....
I'm a pretty huge fan of video games and its basically RPG/Strategy/Sandbox games and not much else. Im a big fan of the rules as well ideally I feel that everyone if following the rules creates the games universe. To me its a fun thing to think about and know about to view the games population and stories, for the same reason people follow hockey franchises. all the good and bad players all the ups and downs are a story and an experience. And cheaters fuck that story up. Not unlike a cheating scandal in a sports organization....Oh i guess its happened before....I guess I need to brush up on my sports knowledge lol......
anyways this is interesting....i gotta learn more about this insane "colour reading" bot.....thats pretty nuts.....
They should get a little more creative and a little more pushy so that cheaters have a little less freedom. Seems cheaters have far to much.
Obviously resting on the fat haunches ofproof do littleto deter idiot cheaters from polluting a rule bound game universe..... I've seen how quickly Blizzard can deal with individuals who break the rules when they put their mind to it. A friend of mine had his entire account deleted into fucking OBLIVION for trying a wow botting program for all of 45 seconds. He did not even figure it out. He just got cold feet and scrapped the whole idea. His account was nuked and paved on the spot. We often teased him for suffering through the biggest screw-job in Warcraft history......months of raid time flushed into the toilet for not a single copper piece.
I find it hard to believe that blizzard cannot brainstorm a solution to cheaters in the game that they built 100% from the ground up. every single pixel is there becuase the wrote the code for it to be there....
i find it sad to hear that they actually let the botters grow and grow and farm away for months at a time. bot farms absolutely raking in dough....
I remember following a guy around in WoW. I tagged mobs he was going to "melee" to death for 40 minutes at level 75. i denied 100% of his experience gain and he did not whisper me, he did not look at me, he did not type anything at all. he just kept sitting drinking eating after every mob was tagged for the entire length of time. He also ignored 50 whispers and probably 100 party requests. All with out even glancing at me even one time
and he was in the same zone doing the exact same thing for multiple days. good thing he was treated as a legitimate player....
but yea...I cant prove any thing so I guess thats how a legit player plays the game. and with the huge spotlight diabloprogress cast on the game?
Characters with unthinkably high amounts of kills.........nope. no proof. they are all legit.
Again, nice job sidestepping the Disgaea series (and games that basically copied its formula). How many titles do they have, now, 10? More? I guess having an entire series of games whose playerbase expects to grind them for years doesn't really support your argument.
Not sidestepping. The Disgaea series is completely fucking irrelevant to this discussion.
It took them almost NINE YEARS (across multiple games) to sell 1.7 million units. Diablo 1, in half the time, sold almost 1 million more units. The audience is night-and-day different, and that's exactly what I've been trying to get across to you. You can make a niche game if you're OK with 400k sales. You can cater to very specific expectations if you're only ever expecting 100k players.
But, dating back to Brevik and the Schaefers, that's never been the goal. They said in an interview that their goal was basically to reverse the niche that RPGs had become due to their overly-complex and numbers-oriented gameplay and, instead, substitute it with an experience where your focus is primarily killing things. They wanted to open the RPG genre back up to the masses. They didn't want Diablo 1, 2, or any other Diablo title, to be some little secluded nook for 10,000 players.
So to not understand their audience leads to statements like how you don't care what the average gamer believes. You may not give two shits about the average gamer, but Blizzard does, and they do because Brevik and the Schaefers proved that by NOT catering to the RPG crowd they could create a majorly-successful game in D1 and even moreso in its sequel. You can't create a successful game like that by ignoring what the average gamer wants and to try to say that the average person who picked up Skyrim EXPECTED 12+ months of playtime is completely delusional. It might be your expectation, but it's not the expectation of the average gamer.
And, frankly, if you don't like that, the ship sailed 20+ years ago when Brevik first showed his idea for Diablo to the Schaefers and then they pitched it to the boys at Blizzard. So, unless you want to take Dave Brevik on about how wrong he was to try to mainstream a genre that was shrinking, you're just going to have to live with the fact that the original designers of the Diablo series set out specifically NOT to make a game like Disgaea. This is not a new design philosophy, it's something that the progenitors established that clearly has carried over and has even influenced other games that Blizzard has created.
Every time someone says a Blizzard product is "dumbed down" that comes back to exactly why Diablo was so ridiculously successful.
Give it a good read. Try to understand that Disgaea represents exactly what Brevik was trying NOT to create with Diablo 1 - specifically that it's complex for the sake of being complex which leads directly to it having a niche audience. It's INACCESSIBLE to most gamers. So, frankly, using Disgaea as an example only serves to disprove what you're trying to prove.
The most striking quote to me came from Erik:
"We noticed that anyone could pretty much play, even people’s moms."
Remember that was THEIR design philosophy. This isn't some new thing. This isn't Jay Wilson's invention. It's not Josh Mosquera's invention. It's not some corporate pitch that Bobby Kotick gives them every three months. This is how the people who the D3 haters have touted as the demigods of ARPGs approached D1 and D2. They viewed niched RPGs as a bad thing that needed an alternative. They viewed Diablo as the ANSWER to the PROBLEMS that games, like Disgaea, created.
So, with that in mind, exactly what does it matter that Disgaea fans EXPECT to play those games for 12+ months? Blizzard has never been trying to cater to that mindset because it's very much different from that of the mainstream gamer. So why should they start now?
I always looked at the ease of use of the Diablo series as something that ran alongside It's potentially massive depth.
the game is EXTREMELY easy to get into, basically put your hand on the mouse and click monsters. just a few months ago I absolutely recommended D3 to my sister based purely on how simple it was. put your hand on the mouse and click things. you dont have to figure out shit.
But that has very little effect on the potential depth of the game. I would love to sit and have a beer with those founders; I'd want to find out more about how they felt the game series unfolded.
Because D2 was so easy to play that yes my sister could play it, and I'm sure one could argue that it was successfully "adopted by the mainstream" it was arguably the most critically successful title of the 3. If it belonged anywhere it was in the moldiest darkest basements on earth. I'd be willing to bet the people that loved D2 also owned Disgaea, were the people most eagerly anticipating D3 and were inevitably left dissapointed.
I just dont think that the success of Diablo 3 is so fully understood in a technical sense, because its not really a thing you can measure.
The transformers movie is a prime example.
Is it an amazing movie? Is it a hunk of shit?
Was it a success?
Hard to say definitively, but im sure it made truck loads of money, was enjoyed by hoards of children,
and pissed alot of people who grew up with the series off. it depends on what your goal was when you made the movie...:P
I'm really starting to feel the enchanting legacy items is being blown out of the water.
Would I have liked to enchant some current gear or enchant some items from my stash? Sure, it would be fun experimenting early on, having fun, then run train on monsters.
But apart of me feels like this is turning into a huge distraction. There are plenty of things to address and I'm not sure exerting all this energy on enchanting legacy items is worth it. The main idea behind it is simple, just make loot 2.0 epic, and most people will shrug off legacy items.
We already ran how many hours with a witching hour? Just make the new loot as epic. Easier said then done, but hey I'm not the one making a fortune for making the game, I'm the guy giving you money to hopefully deliver me an epic game. A
I think people are angry at the philosophy. I think those angry after having discovered the trick to create wildly overpowered level 60 items will get angry and their anger has no weight. I think that's why they made this rule, to cut the legs off of those tricksters. so in that respect its OK to put in a hard fast rule
But it does not address the underlying model of the game.
They keep resetting the gear. first they design legendaries during development. and they fucking SUCK. Then the redesign them, and a very small portion of them surge past the rest in terms of power. Many still completely suck. Then trifecta gear absolutely steamrolls all other gear, all other gear sucks then they roll out "demonic Essence gear" which is kind fun to chase after for a while. but 90% of all the crafting still sucks from the beginning.
So now whats their next plan? lets take 100% of all the items ever generated pre patch, and 100% of peoples interest in the game voraciously tracking these items down and ban them from our next "gear block" which also happens to be the most interesting one. It includes the brand new enchanting system.
it just seems like FFS....they are the "game masters" overseeing our table top adventure....so....get with it and master the fucking game. It seems like they are zig zagging all over the place with out a clue in the world. as if they have never made a world consuming large scale online rolepayign game before. except they have. probably more than once LOL.
what about the Ivory tower? theres probably a billion of those and they are all worse than dog shit. same could be said about many MANY legendaries that they apparently took the time to create, but forgot to make even half way appealing....that's rather unfortunate to say the least...
when I view the game's item situation as it has been from vanilla until present day,
what I see is an item spectrum that they (blizzard) have fumbled around with, fucked up and ignored overall.
to me the item stats, particularily those to be found on legendary items are bland and boring beyond comprehension.
the math generated behind "trifecta items" should not exist. its as if combing those 3 or 4 stats on each item and its mathematical result was a mystery until players found it. and that should not have been the case.
they should not have left such mathematical extremes march on untested into the game.
they should not have made legendary items so boring that they all need to be overhauled
they should not have finished their redesign of those legendarys so short of desirable outcome
and overall I feel all of these fuck ups has lead us to what we now get to face; the entirety of the items generated on the earth within the first years, which will probably be the busiest, all cut out of the entire enchanting system.
is their something about this I dont understande correctly?
or is that the cut and dry description:
That all pre expansion items are 100% unenchantable due to their unanticipated power when it happens? well if thats the case its pretty unfortunate.
even if the issue is circumvented with character progression right from the get go at the beginning of the expansion, the problem and the solution seem to rear their ugly heads due to incompetence...
as far as the damage control for everyone snatching up low damage weapons with high stats?
good that they did not let everyone so easily leap into amazing weapons....
but bad that that's the size of bandage they have put over the gaping wound...
it's as if the crafting system is "2+2=4, so lets go buy a bunch of 1's before we can't buy em anymore so we all have 4's anyway
oh look blizzard made it so you cant add anything to the 1's....
To me the music in this game, and probably many others....but 3 in particular is absolutely stunning.
sure music is subjective....but you can really sense that this was created by a real orchestra in a professional setting.
when I hear this music I envision "rebellious" orchestra. in the same way that the lore in this game is really eclectic. angels and demons being artistically re-envisioned. elements of stale human lore being thrown in the blender....well so is the music!!! and my hat goes off to them for it!!!!
Ghom, Lord of Gluttony is one of my all time favorite songs ever.....i love it.
One of my characters was a warrior named Malekai. Through reading books I learned about the existence of The Grandfather, and I made a descision to go and find it. Talk about an adventure! I still remember moments as if they were yesterday. From the intense force of a carefully shrine levelled Chain lighting to the self-found Demonspike Coat, which was the very foundation of my ability to take down Diablo for the first time, on the first few runs through the dungeon. All of the items and ability I read about people cheating to acquire, I was discovering honestly on my own. Flaws truly became features. A wildly eclectic mix of usable spells, and incredibly powerful items; items just imperfect enough to make me appreciate them all that much more; My most reliable sword was a Kings Claymore of The Ages. Not the best base weapon, not the best stats. But indestructible, usable on ALL levels of cathedral and catacombs while requiring no gold for repairs, and artwork FAR more appealing than the bastard sword. I’m sure I killed thousands of monsters with that weapon alone. "Malekai" was a weapon collector through and through. That was the history I created for him; and the absolute centerpiece of it all was his quest to find The Grandfather. After many months of searching, untold numbers of new games started and finished, creeping closer to what I perceived to be the end of my desire to press on, I found it. The most ancient and revered of all Greatswords. Truly one of my fondest memories....
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oh sometimes there was some truly clear cut cases....oh my god CRYSTAL clear....heh!
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and no there is not more to the story. I know i'll probably never convince you or anyone of that...but thats how it went down:
he installed a bot program, attempted to configure it, then allow it to drive his character with the WoW Client logged in for about 45 seconds...got squirrely about it due to the common knowledge of botters being banned, but that was enough to earn a ban. An instant and irreversible ban. no pleading for a naked character replacement, no paying a fee to lift the ban. no laws, no rights, no nothing. just a great big "fuck you, go buy a new account" as swift and as harsh a justice as you can imagine. And he deserved it. No one felt sorry for him. blizzard made the rules clear. there was no high emotion...it was just taken in by all of us as what happened...but my god we laugh about it to this day LOL!!
Banning the entire diablo-progress roster would be a laughably stupid move. As would be ignoring the clues inevitably baked into that same roster.
no one would even suggest to ban the entire top 1000, no one would ever do it, no one would even think of doing it its not even in the realm of possibility. personally I feel that not using the data gathered from that site among god knows how many other varied sources is also a stupid move......its allowing the game to be raped...
Also its been predicted that BoA will solve nothing. Entire accounts will trade hands. Another wild and lucrative operation that probably contain clues....
clues that may sit in plain view for all to see that could lead to punishment for breaking that rules that probably wont.....
maybe your right though maybe the impact of botting is not as crazy as I think.....
maybe I take it to much to heart.....but if I made a game from scratch that was the scope of D3 and within a year people were selling items for several fold over the TWO BILLION gold predicted limit per piece....I'd probably actually cry....
I'm a pretty huge fan of video games and its basically RPG/Strategy/Sandbox games and not much else. Im a big fan of the rules as well
anyways this is interesting....i gotta learn more about this insane "colour reading" bot.....thats pretty nuts.....
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Obviously resting on the fat haunches ofproof do littleto deter idiot cheaters from polluting a rule bound game universe.....
I've seen how quickly Blizzard can deal with individuals who break the rules when they put their mind to it.
A friend of mine had his entire account deleted into fucking OBLIVION for trying a wow botting program for all of 45 seconds. He did not even figure it out. He just got cold feet and scrapped the whole idea.
His account was nuked and paved on the spot.
We often teased him for suffering through the biggest screw-job in Warcraft history......months of raid time flushed into the toilet for not a single copper piece.
Whats your thoughts on the LoL Tribunal?
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i find it sad to hear that they actually let the botters grow and grow and farm away for months at a time. bot farms absolutely raking in dough....
I remember following a guy around in WoW. I tagged mobs he was going to "melee" to death for 40 minutes at level 75. i denied 100% of his experience gain and he did not whisper me, he did not look at me, he did not type anything at all. he just kept sitting drinking eating after every mob was tagged for the entire length of time. He also ignored 50 whispers and probably 100 party requests. All with out even glancing at me even one time
and he was in the same zone doing the exact same thing for multiple days. good thing he was treated as a legitimate player....
but yea...I cant prove any thing so I guess thats how a legit player plays the game. and with the huge spotlight diabloprogress cast on the game?
Characters with unthinkably high amounts of kills.........nope. no proof. they are all legit.
Nice.
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the game is EXTREMELY easy to get into, basically put your hand on the mouse and click monsters. just a few months ago I absolutely recommended D3 to my sister based purely on how simple it was. put your hand on the mouse and click things. you dont have to figure out shit.
But that has very little effect on the potential depth of the game. I would love to sit and have a beer with those founders; I'd want to find out more about how they felt the game series unfolded.
Because D2 was so easy to play that yes my sister could play it, and I'm sure one could argue that it was successfully "adopted by the mainstream" it was arguably the most critically successful title of the 3. If it belonged anywhere it was in the moldiest darkest basements on earth. I'd be willing to bet the people that loved D2 also owned Disgaea, were the people most eagerly anticipating D3 and were inevitably left dissapointed.
I just dont think that the success of Diablo 3 is so fully understood in a technical sense, because its not really a thing you can measure.
The transformers movie is a prime example.
Is it an amazing movie? Is it a hunk of shit?
Was it a success?
Hard to say definitively, but im sure it made truck loads of money, was enjoyed by hoards of children,
and pissed alot of people who grew up with the series off. it depends on what your goal was when you made the movie...:P
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But it does not address the underlying model of the game.
They keep resetting the gear. first they design legendaries during development. and they fucking SUCK. Then the redesign them, and a very small portion of them surge past the rest in terms of power. Many still completely suck. Then trifecta gear absolutely steamrolls all other gear, all other gear sucks then they roll out "demonic Essence gear" which is kind fun to chase after for a while. but 90% of all the crafting still sucks from the beginning.
So now whats their next plan? lets take 100% of all the items ever generated pre patch, and 100% of peoples interest in the game voraciously tracking these items down and ban them from our next "gear block" which also happens to be the most interesting one. It includes the brand new enchanting system.
it just seems like FFS....they are the "game masters" overseeing our table top adventure....so....get with it and master the fucking game. It seems like they are zig zagging all over the place with out a clue in the world. as if they have never made a world consuming large scale online rolepayign game before. except they have. probably more than once LOL.
TLDR: IMHO rah rah ****ing bullsh**t!! /angry !!
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what I see is an item spectrum that they (blizzard) have fumbled around with, fucked up and ignored overall.
to me the item stats, particularily those to be found on legendary items are bland and boring beyond comprehension.
the math generated behind "trifecta items" should not exist. its as if combing those 3 or 4 stats on each item and its mathematical result was a mystery until players found it. and that should not have been the case.
they should not have left such mathematical extremes march on untested into the game.
they should not have made legendary items so boring that they all need to be overhauled
they should not have finished their redesign of those legendarys so short of desirable outcome
and overall I feel all of these fuck ups has lead us to what we now get to face; the entirety of the items generated on the earth within the first years, which will probably be the busiest, all cut out of the entire enchanting system.
is their something about this I dont understande correctly?
or is that the cut and dry description:
That all pre expansion items are 100% unenchantable due to their unanticipated power when it happens? well if thats the case its pretty unfortunate.
even if the issue is circumvented with character progression right from the get go at the beginning of the expansion, the problem and the solution seem to rear their ugly heads due to incompetence...
as far as the damage control for everyone snatching up low damage weapons with high stats?
good that they did not let everyone so easily leap into amazing weapons....
but bad that that's the size of bandage they have put over the gaping wound...
it's as if the crafting system is "2+2=4, so lets go buy a bunch of 1's before we can't buy em anymore so we all have 4's anyway
oh look blizzard made it so you cant add anything to the 1's....
0
sure music is subjective....but you can really sense that this was created by a real orchestra in a professional setting.
when I hear this music I envision "rebellious" orchestra. in the same way that the lore in this game is really eclectic. angels and demons being artistically re-envisioned. elements of stale human lore being thrown in the blender....well so is the music!!! and my hat goes off to them for it!!!!
Ghom, Lord of Gluttony is one of my all time favorite songs ever.....i love it.
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