A few ideas of how to save D3

[kandrathe]

There is a world of difference between one or two aspects of the game being broken, and the whole game being broken.

I seem to remember times when it was just unsafe to have a public game in D2 due to griefing via various exploits. The good thing was that many trusted friendships developed. Of course then, Battlenet was about the only show in town.

As for slogging through the quests... How many times have I clicked the quest from Charsi, or Ankara? Hundreds? Thousands? I don't even know. It's not like we even listen to their spiel anymore and we skip the cut-scenes having seen them once, twice maybe. The story is ok, but it's not the game. It's the window trimming in which the game is framed. The game is essentially a characters dance to the edge of death... the closer they can balance the risk/reward ratio and amp up your blood pressure doing it, the closer they get to designing a more perfect repeatable game. I wouldn't bore you with Von Neumann's proofs using Brouwer's fixed-point theorem on continuous mappings into compact convex sets, but... there is a method to the madness. Success results in leet items, and the ability to make progress, failure (in soft-core) results in 10% hit to equipment durability resulting in the expenditure of resources. But, just like in the casino, Blizzard will be sure to glorify whomever has the most powerful character and the shiniest shiny objects as motivation for the rest of us losers to continue to put our coins into the slot machine. The *real* game ultimately will be higher tech version of "King of the Hill".