Blizzard gain a flash of insight?

[smegged]

It's getting really dark and cold in here. I truly hope I am wrong.

Because if you are still enjoying the game, posting here about it is a complete waste of time. If you don't like the game, fine, you're entitled to your opinion, but, anyone who likes the game has pretty much been driven off the forums now, having been told they couldn't possibly think the game is OK, and if they do think it's OK, they're accused of kissing Blizzard's ass, etc. One poster told me that I *couldn't possibly* disagree with his points.

Yeah, it's dark and cold.

Have fun bashing everything, as that's all that's left here.

(Not so much you, Archon, more in general.)

Which reminds me of the other hope for Diablo 3.

Currently, there's just no community unless you met people outside of the game. Private channels and clan channels help foster common interests and organized play. Battle.net is a rather deserted place even though it's not, in which you can try public games but even that tends to get more and more sparse.

So what the hell does that have to do with anything?

Well, it's created a community that's effectively isolated from each other. It's really only them, pub channel spam, and the Auction House. The downswing in pubbie games causes this game to become a large scale single player fest. It's fine for those that stuck to single player, but as we can see here, there's just no sense of community. The insertion of real money has caused quite a few people to be driven by greed and well, once something "ruins business" they tend to get a bit agitated when things don't go around properly. The result is a highly explosive situation.

It's partially Blizzard's fault for not knowing how to deliver calming messages to the masses and the fault of the fanbase for screaming at the first sign of difficulty. I understand you can't please everyone, but someone's going to have to brave the fire. It's not easy. There's currently a pretty volatile situation and nobody wants to take responsibility for it. But someone has to compromise somewhere.

If they want to revitalize the game, then community features must be a priority. Or else this will get even worse.

The community really isn't that bad. They're very passionate about what they got involved with, and many are just angry because this franchise stood for something they loved. If this was random forgettable game of the year, nobody would have made such a fuss. It's just that this passion has gone the wrong way, and battle.net 2.0's lacking features shares some of this blame. Without hope, there's only apathy and rage.

Battle.Net 2 was terrible for Starcraft 2 for a while. They slowly made improvements to it and now it's passable. Some of the features (facebook real ID integration) would have been very nice in Diablo, but for many people Diablo had always been a single player game, or a game that they would kick around with a few friends at a LAN. Blizzard seriously misstepped when they made D3 online only and then made the online experience feel deserted.

I got good value out of the game. It was worth the money I paid for it, but it represents the first time that Blizzard have made a game with a very limited shelf life since the Blackthorne days. I think that, more than anything else is what's bothering people. Diablo 3 is a very good game, but it's not a very long game. Or at least it doesn't feel very long because if you don't stop when you hit 60 the game becomes a tedious drag.

It's a real shame, because if it had have been a game brought out by random company X under a different title, I'm sure I (and many others) would see it differently. As it is, the first and last impressions that many of us got both tasted bad, so we forget the juicy goodness in the middle.