This brings us to the BoE items. BoE are items that became permanently attached to that character. When you would un-equip the item, you are not allowed to trade it to another player for them to equip. If no longer needed, the only thing to do with it was to sell it to a vendor, essentially removing it from the economy. To not completely discourage players, it was said that in Diablo III, the BoE items actually bound themselves to your account so you could still equip it with other characters on your account. However, even with this advantage, many people still did not like the system. Whether it was because it discourages the item trading that is iconic of Diablo or because it was too similar to another game (I won't mention the name), not everyone was happy with this decision. Luckily for those people, Blizzard has, through their countless hours of iteration, decided that they to did not like this solution.
Official Blizzard Quote:
Yeah, we realized that binding is kind of a crappy way to pull items out of the economy. If you say that the average player produces 100 items an hour and maybe gets 1 upgrade in that time, then binding at best can account for removing 1% of items from the economy. And that's being very generous at high levels.
Binding isn't really substantial in making a viable economy, but it is really good at establishing item prestige. Which is how it's used in WoW.
We expect salvaging to be compelling enough to remove a good percentage of the most valuable items from the economy. High end components obtained from salvaging high end items are needed for high end crafting and enhancement.
We're not promising anything on patch content, but we also feel that keeping up on introducing new items consistently will keep it from being possible for a glut of the best items from building as 'the best' can be a constantly moving target.
Another tool they plan on using to help control the economy is through patching of the game. As Bashiok stated, if the desired and horded item that players want is constantly changing, then players are less likely to amass these items. Through patching, they can continuously add new items to the game so that players constantly have a new goal for end-game gear and this will help items from getting stagnant and building up through the years. Whether or not you were happy with BoE, it's nice to see that Blizzard is constantly testing, iterating, and changing the game to make sure that everything works best for Diablo III.
Moving on from BoE items, Bashiok also clarified some information about how set items will work. Just a little bit ago, we had gotten information that how set items were being implemented was still a work in progress. We even held a poll to see what you guys thought about set items and how you would like them to function. It seems that they have finally decided on how they wanted to implement the items (Sign of Beta).
Official Blizzard Quote:
Set items are now legendaries defined by a set bonus. They're crafted items while leveling (recipes can be found that grant the ability to craft all the items in a set), which allows someone to really invest in filling out a set before they out-level it. Then at max level we'll drop set pieces normally.
The second way to obtain set items will be through end-game loot drops. Actual set items will still be dropping in the later levels of the game for players to collect to create their full sets. This adds yet one more goal to complete at end-game, which they apparently still have plans for, so that we still have something to do after completing the game on Hell difficulty. It is important to note though that these set items will be dropping in addition to the crafting recipes so there will still be two ways to help complete a set for your character.
Now for those of you concerned about this increase of importance on crafting, not every item you will have on your character at end-game will all be obtained through crafting. Diablo has been and remains to be a game that is based on gearing your character through random loot drops. As Bashiok states, their plan is to have a well-rounded collection of item types that will be useful for your character.
Official Blizzard Quote:
It's one of the sources. If we do things right we'll see end-game players with a mix of legendary, rare, and crafted items.
Thanks to Cherubdown for bringing this Bashiok quote to my attention. If anyone finds any Diablo related news, you can always PM myself or anyone else on the news team with the info. It is always appreciated.
By Socket, there is a typo, it should say 'no' longer.. instead of longer, tried to edit it myself but don't see how.
Crafting will be like gambling in D2. They designed it to be a mix of the cube and gambling. Like I said, you choose the item type but the attributes will still be random (or at least some) just like gambling was in D2.
Well in d2 they looked different also, most of them. The icon for them in the inventory was always different.
I don't know about d3 though.
Make sure to scroll down through all the junk to find the separate posts of the interview. Nothing much revealed that we didn't know already. Some interesting talk about battle.net 2.0 though:
6. Is there anything you can share with us about battle.net2.0 for D3? any new feature that you think is exciting?that sc2 doesn't have?
Official Blizzard Quote:
Most focus for battle.net for D3 is around taking a lot of the features that we already have and adapting it to our own unique nature of Diablo. So...cooperative match making, is a big function, while there is a aspect of that in Starcraft 2, it's vastly different. Diablo3 is a little more dynamic, people can come into game and leave dynamicly, and there is no lobby system per se. There is no reason that when you start searching for a game, you can't just be immiately to be put in a game, and have to search in the background and continue to go. So, a lot of features focus around taking these thing and adapting. Messaging system, so you can open games up to other players. We have a system called "Arms", where we essentially broadcast the fact that you can broadcast to other people that you want them to come and join your game. So, there is a lot of features like that we focus on. Achievements are essentially a system that we are very happy with. We will continue to focus on content improvement. So, we are more focused on "let's make better quality achievements", that are more fun to get, that are better motivators for players, and less focused on....there is not a lot of hug features we want to add there. We mostly want to iterate the quality of that feature set. There are others things we are planning, but they are not announced yet.
And here's the translation from Google:
Blood Face Killer: battle net systems, Diablo 3, any new features, different from StarCraft 2? Incentives brought about by the achievement system is what? Title? Item? Or what?
Jay Wilson:
Official Blizzard Quote:
Diablo 3, Blizzard, and to some extent, more similar to StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, but the co-Battle is a very important part. StarCraft 2 there, but there is a very big difference. In Diablo 3 the player can freely enter or leave at any time in different rooms. However, in Star 2 will not work. Starcraft 2 Battle Battle need to search for matches, and Diablo 3, do not need.
In Diablo 3 has a unique information system in Arms (the word also need to listen and confirm), which is a broadcasting system, you can use this system to inform all online players, what you will do things such as start team or create games.
We are very satisfied with the current achievements of the system, our energy primarily on the achievements of the contents of the system can attract good players to complete these achievements. And not to do a lot of meaningful incentives to attract players.
Official Blizzard Quote:
If we do things right we'll see end-game players with a mix of legendary, rare, and crafted items.
Hell yeah.
If thats true, it doesnt matter if you play single-mode
I think that's reading into it a bit too much.
I think it's possible that many people will be wearing the same sort of things at the same levels, but that's also excluding the fact that there are other types of items to use. Granted, the benefit of the sets is in having more of their pieces, I distinctly remember not really caring for the sets in d2 exclusively. I think it's just as likely that people will be wearing the same combinations of uniques and rares (or close to the same combination) because they are combinations that meet a certain need or want.
This is Diablo and there are going to be a *ton* of options at every level, I think.