It's just how I feel about the guy. I don't think he "gets" the genre. I don't really feel like I'm playing an ARPG at this point. I feel like I'm playing an action-adventure game with a hell theme. What I mean by that is that, to me, one of the biggest things for an ARPG is that players have choices in things to do. As someone pointed out in this thread, or another, there actually were a lot of different things to do in D2 depending on what you actually wanted to farm. (EDIT: It's one of the issues I had with PoE and maps. What the fuck is the point of the entire rest of the game? A dumb story to get in the way of the real fun? To me "endgame" in an ARPG should be systems set in place ... like bounties, ubers, paragon, etc. ... that enhance the existing content and make it more tolerable when repeated ad infinatum and NOT completely-separate systems that rather invalidate the rest of the content. For me bounties are, generally a great idea, whereas rifts being the "best place to farm" is a horrible idea.)Quote from Bagstone
I disagree with your Josh rant. Towards the end of your post, you sound very similar to one of the bitter guys from the official forums. Yes, Josh might not have as much ARPG background as we wished the D3 Lead Director would have, but stating that he has never played an ARPG before makes it sound like RoS is a total failure in your eyes, and that's just ridiculous.
If you wanted to farm high runes you'd go to a different place than if you wanted to farm socketed gear to put them in. And, while I think specific boss farming (particularly any farming where you fire up a game for 90 seconds and create a new game) is generally bad, I am finding that I hate loading up a game just to do five rifts. Why is the endgame JUST rifts? Why isn't story mode remotely valid? Why doesn't adventure mode, aside from rifts/bounties, have any purpose? I mean they opened up the game so that all the acts were stitched together seamlessly (something I desperately thought the game needed) and then Josh buffs rifts so that the main meta-game is to spend as little time doing ANYTHING other than rifts as humanly possible.
As much as I wouldn't be interested in PvP, it's really sad that some very basic concerns (size of the brawling area, etc.) haven't been addressed yet. People do enjoy it and there's no doubt that NOT having it and NOT showing any intent to fix even the most simple aspects of it that people feel aren't working properly, actually hurts the longevity of the game.
And, honestly, I'm still not pleased at how many legendaries didn't have legendary properties. I had put much more faith in the team to know better than that, and they really left me down. I'd figured that given D3V and, moreso, the fact that Jay gave reworking legendaries a try and swung and missed, that they'd have been more detail-oriented on the subject. That they wouldn't have been content for half of the oranges that drop in RoS to be Skorns, Mempos, EFs, Angel Hair Braids, etc. It's almost like Josh has selective hearing. They want better legendaries.... check. What constitutes a bad legendary... NOT LISTENING.
I just don't get him. For me the RoS game isn't THAT much more playable than the vanilla game. Not because of BoA per se. But because the possibility that the game had with BoA was immense... and it just didn't live up to that. The game never should have went live with drop rates that were so low. BoA was supposed to, according to Josh, allow them to jack up drop rates so that we felt like we were finding things. I remember him saying 6 legendaries in a single act clear on Campaign Mode. We weren't remotely close to that in 2.0. Even after the anniversary buff becoming permanent we're arguably not close to that in Campaign Mode. Why did he make such a big deal about being able to increase drop rates being a benefit of BoA... and then go live with junky drop rates?
I thought BoA was supposed to allow them the freedom to go wild and get crazy with ideas. I haven't really seen that translate into anything revolutionary in RoS. If I saw him leading a team that really was thinking outside of the box and presenting me with those groundbreaking things that BoA was allegedly going to allow them to do, that they absolutely couldn't do with trading, then I'd probably STFU on the subject. But it really isn't there.
EDIT
The reality of the situation for me is that I agreed with him that BoA probably would let them do awesome things that they *may* not have been able to do without it. And I don't miss the AH. But in order for me to feel that BoA is justified, I want to see them go nuts. I want them to show me that BoA *is* the right choice by showing me all these mind-blowing ideas. I simply don't see ANYTHING mind-blowing about RoS. And that really rubs me the wrong way.
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Well of course the builds exist. You can do whatever you want in the game. That's what they will tell you. There are billions of builds. There are a vast array of different marriages of different elements all interweaving and looping and swirling around the multitide of skills and the limiteless variety of weapons, items and magical artifacts.
Except you actually get laughed at if you build for rediculous HP and toughness. If you join groups people accuse you of leaching because the mobs must die quickly in order to get that 1.2 legendary items per hour everyone is used to.
you are not allowed to go build a tank and stack a chunk of magic find and doddle around with decked out characters while spamming ground stomp, and they kill everything around you.
Oooh you can do it. But the game as they have programmed it has not taken those things into consideration as avenues for success. And this goes in the other direction where people insist that a certain character be built or perform a certain way to contribute to the party.
in fact up until this latest patch astronomically durable characters were far more scarce. There was no gold/wrap goggle-thorn gem build that multiplied your armor. the true potential of the support class was not quite as realized. and elemetal damage, as fucking elementary as it happens to be, did offer some measure of improvement...
there was no unity ring before the expansion. and as soon as they are deployed. its an instant rush to go get them ASAP. and not just those people who want them. no. in the case of Unity "EVERY one NEEDS it.
That's really the point I was hoping to make. That many avenues where not taken into consideration, instead very few were...
The sad part is that the players can see these mini-goals on the horizon. Trace amounts of these "objective oriented builds" exist. Just like you say. you can do them. you can ramp up your HP you can load up on attack speed, there are items that deal targeted damage to specific creature types there is "thorns" damage, there are taunts skills. Healing and buffing and debuffing....
there is crowd control, there are skills that convert monsters to fight for you. there are skill that drop you out of combat and stealth you, there is a whole fleet of these different types of character specializations. and they all have the following thing in common. they either are broken as fuck OP fucking ridiculous bullshit, like CM wizards 100% perma freezing whole fucking screen forever, or they exist in such trace amounts that people dont even give a shit that they are there. Such is the case for "bonus damage VS demons" etc. swords that block are there. but again. only in trace amounts.
This is why for the first two years people asked "where the fuck is the damage reflect build"
they asked "why the fuck are two handers so dreadfully underrepresented" why is it skorn or GTFO? and now after umpteen updates its "Furnace or GTFO" ??
That's why they asked "where are the pet builds? pets went from fucking useless to "One of the very very few high performing WD builds to pursue....
so although the game can sell people on the fact that "billions of builds exist" and that elemental damage opens the flood gates on jaw dropping piles of character personalization, I dont see mount rushmore, I see a fishbowl....and as soon as a drop of water trickles out of this fishbowl the whole fucking player base is lunging at the water flow to eagerly slurp up those few precious drops of water. some people are happy with what we have. some people dont even need or look for character customization at all. some people play first person shooters that do not have loadouts or ranks of RPG flavoured quests or items or experience levels and skill....some people are happy without all that.... some people crave all of it and want more... more....I would hazard a guess that many of those people assumed diablo would have a multitude of builds and elemental damage types gushing from Diablo's piss hole YEARS before it was even release, not waiting years after its release for that to be the case......
there should be a multitude of ways for people to grow their character. and a multitude of different things for that character to excel at in a combat scenario. Offering a slew of damage types and a half dozen legendary items to peruse is not a very stable answer to that yearning....so needless to say for me their sales pitch only worked once........
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They are out of touch with a certain crowd generally associated with Diablo 2 and its cousins and relatives..and in touch with a certain crowd generally associated with ...other games....not quite so tightly bound to the RPG genre purhaps.....all at the same time, generally.
the more you dig and examine the aspects of diablo 3 and how these things are admired or crucified by players the more elegant differences you discover WITHIN those players. And that's why these discussions are just a continuous traveling freight train of ideas and debates. a freight train looping and swirling around the country-side forever. just like politics.
you start with 2 groups of people and by the end everyone has branched off, advocating their customized template of beliefs in regards to what skill tree is best and what song is the worst.
When you finally have 2 people who agree on everything, one of them holds a belief that makes them splinter away from the last guy and the process just repeats itself.
that's why they have to do whats best for the quality of the game. not whats best for casuals or hardcore sociopaths, not whats best for simplicity or advanced complexity. not what looks the best or sounds the best...
they have to adopt a philosophy of attractiveness, for lack of a better word. That's why I feel they are out of touch.
if a class sucks make it attractive. make people want to use it.
if an item sucks make it attractive. make people want to use it.
if a skill sucks make it attractive. make people want to use it.
same goes for builds,areas, etc....
but they don't seem to place these things on a pedestal. and I feel that doing so would really drive the game's image upward.
is having the 5 gems good enough? no. make new ones. this was old news many many years ago. and here we wait.
is having dry under-powered legendary items good enough? no. make new ones. this was old news many many years ago. and here we wait.
is having everyone use the same 5 or 10 legendary items good enough? no. make new ones. this was old news many many years ago. and here we wait.
is rune XYZ being completely worthless shit for months good enough? no. make new ones. this was old news many many years ago. and here we wait.
it just seems like a deafening roar how boring things are and how much everyone wants to explore something new like weapons or items or builds, and how long it takes this new stuff to come out and how underwhelming and recycled it happens to be.......
they took lobbys out and hummed and hawed and wedged in clans and communities...
they took PvP out and hummed and hawed and gave us a brawling arena
they took charms and gems and jewels out and hummed and hawed and now are rolling out legendary gems.
they took stat assignment out and hummed and hawed and now you assign stats with Paragon...
they took wild cool legendarys out of the game and hummed and hawed and now are scrambling to give their legendaries fascinating powers...
all the while the forum has been blowing up about those topics screaming for jay wilsons head on a stick asking what the fuck they were thinking???
it just seems like a really sick sad merry-go-round overall.....even if they are on the brink of this big huge content patch....
legendary gems and legendary potions is not rocket science....it should have been a no-brainer YEARS ago...and yet....here we wait...twiddling our thumbs...i'll be using that expression more often...
and this decimates any notion that "the game is bought an paid for" or "these improvements are the icing on the cake.."
people want improvements forcefully injected into the game. they CRAVE interesting assets becuase these assets are tragically absent. And these people craving this stuff are not industry professionals by any stretch. it does not make their opinion less valid.
that craving for interesting assets is the very very beginning of any Role playing game ever created or you can fuck off and die. its that desire to graft a world that is interesting. and that when you the GM or game designer in Diablo 3's case gets to describe that world you so gleefully created to a person? CREATES A PERCEPTION OF THAT WORLD in their mind.
so when the D3 team is describing their world of sanctuary by having players run to town to "insta-brim" its legendary items because they are boring useless pieces of shit. Or allowing their characters "bank accounts" to swell up into the fucking BILLIONS of gold...or allowing them to blend through 20 thousand dumb fuck monsters while watching "Big Bang Theory" on TV......it really does not say a whole lot about them being in touch with the player base.....that's my take on it personally...that a massive amount of the changes they are celebrating as upcoming features? Are child's play. They are ancient history and they were deleted into fucking oblivion with the most incredible abandon and incredible ignorance.
my 18 year old brother doesnt concern himself with such nonsense. he just begs mom for her credit card and a lift to the fucking toy store to buy the ultimate evil edition version and play until level 25. this is actually happening. its real life shit.
If that's their goal and thats their idea of a great game, a "hack and slash ARPG" that accomplishes that with beautiful graphics and "stat sticks" and thatthey owe the players nothing more; to me personally, that's out of touch.
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it may be a long story but im sure it will be justified eventually by certain players why 750 main stat is better than at least one of the others you listed...even a brand new crazy powerful legendary gem.
Nothing is absolute.
1
Is it ok to agree with both you and shaggy? I can understand basically any and all of the tidbits laced all throughout both posts...
I think if any two of us printed our forum posts out, stuffed them in our back pockets, and bumped into each-other in real life we could whip those sheets out and have a discussion about them and it would be nothing but smiles and nods, because there would be a million times more checks and balances both in the message we hope to deliver in person and the message we hope to receive.
and I can say this about any staff member down in California. I've probably called each one of them a complete idiot several hundred times by now....but the fact remains...it does not mean that my values differ so strongly from theirs.
It's all just one big puddle of misinterpretation...
so basically when some one rants about the developers or rants that all MMORPGS are a boring influence, its really on me to figure out why the people who are writing that are writing it. When I don't figure that out. I've made a mistake...and I've made plenty. And so have lots of other people about my rants...
Even through my several hundred posts of hatred on official I can rant and rave about the wonders of Diablo 3. I can rant and rave about the beautiful music, the incredible character design as far as backstory and aesthetics.....
id say write it. everyone just write it all. if its nice or mean, hopefully the developers can draw inspiration from it.
The weapons in this game fucking suck. they do. they need work. and have needed work for a few years now clearly.
but that only means I want them to be amazing and interesting. it be a mis-step to think "oh he's just one of those assholes who can't be pleased...."
same goes with auction house, free trade, runes, character-builds...music, graphics, basically anything...if someone says "they fucking hate it" , they want it to be amazing.
I would put forward that the complete absence or the full inclusion of anything in this game holds it back....as general as that seems that's about as specific as a guiding philosophy can get....
too much cute? that's not good.
100% free trade? unfortunate.
Global instant AH. darn...
100% BoA legendary? there must be better options.
delete the entire AH? there must be better options...
anyways hopefully this comes off how it sounds in my head....
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I'm sure I was not the first to suggest the idea of legendary gems by a long shot. after all, in that game they had legendary potions and legendary maps etc.....
My thread received absolutely zero reply. As well any thread I passionately drummed up on the official forums received zero replies as well.
its pretty discouraging to say the least. So your thread with pictures and such is pretty wicked. And new ideas like this are tantalizing. I wish was still excited about this game to experience its fully fleshed out iteration if it happens to be ready in the upcoming years.
My Idea to chime in on your thread about new concepts related to gems, is this:
Recently they began to open the door on which runes are in effect at which time for which skill. IE: all runes are active for a particular skill, or one skill can trigger another skill etc....
I would like gems to add heavy boosts to specific runes and random skills and really tie them together in interesting ways. like for example......strafe rune missile effects transform into Impale rune effects. or triggering a strafe will conceal your character for its first 3 seconds
maybe strafe shots could trigger a mass confusion to certain mobs?
maybe Seismic slam knock back could effect elites and bosses 50% of the time?
Perhaps with a hard enough push with gems melee DH could become a force to be reckoned with?
Perhaps gems could critically alter the skills of the followers?
these item generator template website doo-hickeys are absolutely breathtaking as far as I'm concerned. as are any items people come up with.....a floodgate of cool ideas.
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It's probably not even fair for me to compare D3 weapons with MtG, but I was not hoping to compare MTG to D3 items, I was hoping to illustrate an idea; If the goal in the game (D3) is to do damage to monsters until they die and monsters do damage to you until you die you have to strain to make that simplified goal fun to achieve. And while weapons have begun to expand on that simplfied idea of "do more damage/give more EHP", there is much room to grow.
The heart of this discussion is the "build changing legendary" and I think we are in desparately short supply.
Is it the case over at MTG forums that players are complaining about a shortage in strategies or cards to choose from? sure they may have cards that are ridiculously desirable and powerful...but it really is a different beast. maybe these complaints were happening inthe first few years of the card game's life span? thats not very inspiring if that is the case...
Maybe rock/paper/scissors is a better analogy;
Diablo 3 has
Rock and Paper
the Expansion gave us
Rock 2
Paper 2
Seasons will give us access to
Rock 3
Paper 3...
And some players are wondering why they haven't made Scissors Lizard or Spock.......
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there's just for an example, probably not entirely accurate names or descriptions but you have:
deck types of varying colour, mixture of colours, how fast or slow they attack, decks that destroy the minions, decks that try to outlast the opposing player, or you can choose from a huge pool of minions to decide which ones work together the best based on abilites etc.
it does not seem likely that their is any best in slot cards for your deck, or that there is a best deck to play
I think this is how it should be for D3; not likely that there is any best in slot items to find no a best character to play.
its rock paper scissors on a grand scale. ideally
its a back and forth ebb and flow peak and valley system where you find gear that creates more peaks and valleys and find monsters that expose more strengths and weaknesses and build classes that bring positives and negatives to a party and to a boss fight
in this respect I feel the game has alot of room for improvement becuase these peaks and valleys are beginning to sprout now here and there
and in respect to items specifically there is even more room for improvement and peaks and valleys are just barely being planted.
this is my personal observation with how the item system has unfolded over the past few years, and why I refer to it without saying so directly this landscape of items should be a rich valley of chess games yearning for a few drops of water, and its basically a barren shit-hole.
its a shithole for how lush the valley could be and is not. not that the work they have done up to this point is not very very large scale.
they are on the motherfucking precipice to be sure...
three cheers for item flavour or new items that are interesting and a few boos for "OP best in slot for any class nonsense..."
--------------
EDIT:
Oh yea i forgot to mention. the guy above me mentioned that BiS will always exist. but if the game was planned out more thoroughly as in multitude of roles functions and challenging monster types it would usher in new items and item flavour and class flavour to counteract those differences. if your game is full of "creatures with life" and "dps" is the only yardstick....well.....yea unfortunately it seems BiS will rear it's fat head....if that makes sense..
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then the designers have the ability to say "we built a great big challenging game, and you the player simply got lost in the woods. enjoy."
Of course unquestionably a "sweet spot" must be found in terms of pack composition and challenge. But the sweet spot has to be a sweet spot among the entire player base really. and it has to be found by players, not given to them by default.
their has to be challenges to all types of players, ideally. so in effect it would be either a large sweet spot or multiple sweet spots waiting to be found.
if the makers of the game provide a big enough playground, all the different players should be happy. if they build it big enough then it dumps the onus on the players to find the appropriate area. If they provide few options then more players will feel frustrated; they would feel funnelled into a wood chipper while a select few would enjoy it and thrive many would not.
this pushes the concept of arcade mode in grand turismo, Ultra rapid fire mode in LoL, and brawling in D3. Even though brawling is not very popular among players, there are groups of players who enjoy it and excel in it and go out of their way to walk that path and be dominant. it's their playground. No surprise people want more and bigger PvP no surprise players clamoured to have "players 8" built back into the game. but brawling is better than nothing at all. They want more.
As soon as I jumped into brawling when it was released. a bunch of guys beat the fuck out of me non stop because i got to lazy and stupid chewing through tens of thousands of act 3 skeletons...it was awesome! I was back to the drawing board!
if they have scarce areas in the game and the monsters kick the shit out of players, and the players grow tired. the game designers, ideally, should be able to say "go to another spot in the game." as in maybe lower the difficulty or improve your character
so its a balancing act on the designers part to build lots of areas, lots of monsters and (character building options) and build a sporatic range of difficulty for those nail biting experiences. having a game were any build mows down monsters and having a game were only a very very select few can hope to live both pale in comparison to having a well planned scope of progress.
if they stop short and players run into "limited areas" or limited monsters or a limited range of challenge that is either a large surplus of to easy monsters or a huge blob of impossible monsters which result in do hard of spikes of difficulty to to long of a span of boredom.. it takes away from the quality of the game
fingers crossed its all put together with grace.
these reduced or scarce "spans of variation" are not good in this case. and yes on the flip side a huge nasty dump of extreme difficulty is not good either.....
1
imagine if sliders were in the option screen or a toggle switch....in contrast to if there was buffs or quests or something that produced or persuaded gear towards a players preference?
maybe items or skill points or a wild new system or area or NPC that was used to persuade certain gear?
all of the above give the players some control over items found. some are graceful some are absolutely not.
it just seems jarring to think of a setting in the options about what type of gear you get along side other options.
Not saying that that is specifically what is being cheered for, but just food for thought....
Exactly what items are found I feel is supposed to be the ultimate mystery and discovery in a players entire time with the game, and I feel that the design of it is right in line with the other IMHO absolute most delicate and important aspects; it just seems tied to the hip of exactly what the items are how they affect a character, how many there are, etc....
I'm glad I dont have to make the choice....lol.....but if i did, id treat the player base like royalty. because after all. its the GMs job to keep the players interested in the campaign....and I dont think all players are satisfied the same way.
Didn't Princess Di say something along the lines of "......everywhere I go, I smell fresh paint......"
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