07-05-2012, 04:06 AM
Well, some things Blizzard got right, and people haven't even noticed or have a totally different view of the benefits.
See, one of the great things about the D2 stat/skill point allocation system was the amount of variety in builds and difference between characters -if you knew what you were doing.- To us here, that system could do no wrong. We all knew what we were doing except for brief periods after the game was totally overhauled (LoD, 1.10.) We got right back to it soon after that, though, too.
But for people, especially casual gamers, who didn't know the system? It was full of traps that would permanently ruin your character in some cases. Many skills were simply unviable. I wonder how many people put 20 points in Teeth (pre-1.10 when it gained a meaningful synergy) or Ravens and got to NM difficulty and figured out they made a very bad mistake? That could well be a deal breaker for a casual gamer. What if you didn't know target str/dex for endgame gear and over-spent on them not realising the returns were not worth it in most every case? Heck, for most builds, the amount of +mana available on gear made the entire Energy stat a trap. D3 solved all this by allocating stats automatically (and wisely removing their associated gear requirements) and by allowing infinite respeccing. Now if you try a skill and it's not viable, you can just switch to another.
The AH/RMAH? These are brilliant. Probably staples of gaming in years to come. Compare the system to D2 trading - even if you were trading with friends you knew and could trust, you still had to open a game up, both join, make sure you're in the same act, and so forth. If you were at all concerned about duped/hacked items, you couldn't even trade with the public at all. Gold was so useless there was the SoJ economy (which in turn had to be duped for enough of them to use as currency to exist.) The RMAH gives Blizzard a cut in exchange for much safer, less scam-laden trading than is usually possible for digital items. People were going to buy and sell items for real money anyhow, so just putting a secure interface directly into the game was smart.
Where they screwed up on this was twofold: 1) Instead of making AH/RMAH simply an easier way to manage trading, they built the entire game on reliance of the system, and then forced everyone online to where they always had AH/RMAH as an option so that they wouldn't have to balance drops for people who wanted to do silly things like one pass full clear. They could always defend the crappy drops by saying "That's what the AH is for, use it." 2) Selling gold in the RMAH - this kept the AH and RMAH from being separate. Things are so inflated on the AH that 20M is considered the baseline for the higher end L60 items. I've seen auctions up for 500M +. Sure, some of those are minimum bids, but I know some of them are real bids too. Numbers like that really devalue the gold you can get in game. Basically in order to get the amounts of gold needed to make high end gear purchases, you have to be selling high end gear to people who either bought gold, or have sold to people who have. Which means your entry into trading level gear is entirely luck dependent, and due to the incessant gear checks in the game, this means your progress is luck dependent.
I still haven't made it to Inferno, nor do I think I really care to, but from what I've heard between here and friends, I bet the difficulty is about spot-on, just for the wrong reasons. It should be about as hard as it is, but that difficulty should exist because of a skill barrier, not a gear barrier. Think Hell/Hell D1: even your most blatant cheaters could get screwed over. Even if they had 20M hp and an endless staff of apoc, one careless step and they could get stunlocked into oblivion. Conversely, people with enough skill could run characters loaded up with -cursed- items. D2 had stuff like Ember who had tiny defence and miniscule offence and could still finish 2/3rds of the game. Gear was good in those games, and gear could define a character (Burizons, anyone?) and yes it was possible to get gear that allowed for facerolling the game, but largely skill was a determining factor much more than gear. D3 reversing that and at the same time making the level cap attainable in one pass full clear was a recipe for disaster.
See, one of the great things about the D2 stat/skill point allocation system was the amount of variety in builds and difference between characters -if you knew what you were doing.- To us here, that system could do no wrong. We all knew what we were doing except for brief periods after the game was totally overhauled (LoD, 1.10.) We got right back to it soon after that, though, too.
But for people, especially casual gamers, who didn't know the system? It was full of traps that would permanently ruin your character in some cases. Many skills were simply unviable. I wonder how many people put 20 points in Teeth (pre-1.10 when it gained a meaningful synergy) or Ravens and got to NM difficulty and figured out they made a very bad mistake? That could well be a deal breaker for a casual gamer. What if you didn't know target str/dex for endgame gear and over-spent on them not realising the returns were not worth it in most every case? Heck, for most builds, the amount of +mana available on gear made the entire Energy stat a trap. D3 solved all this by allocating stats automatically (and wisely removing their associated gear requirements) and by allowing infinite respeccing. Now if you try a skill and it's not viable, you can just switch to another.
The AH/RMAH? These are brilliant. Probably staples of gaming in years to come. Compare the system to D2 trading - even if you were trading with friends you knew and could trust, you still had to open a game up, both join, make sure you're in the same act, and so forth. If you were at all concerned about duped/hacked items, you couldn't even trade with the public at all. Gold was so useless there was the SoJ economy (which in turn had to be duped for enough of them to use as currency to exist.) The RMAH gives Blizzard a cut in exchange for much safer, less scam-laden trading than is usually possible for digital items. People were going to buy and sell items for real money anyhow, so just putting a secure interface directly into the game was smart.
Where they screwed up on this was twofold: 1) Instead of making AH/RMAH simply an easier way to manage trading, they built the entire game on reliance of the system, and then forced everyone online to where they always had AH/RMAH as an option so that they wouldn't have to balance drops for people who wanted to do silly things like one pass full clear. They could always defend the crappy drops by saying "That's what the AH is for, use it." 2) Selling gold in the RMAH - this kept the AH and RMAH from being separate. Things are so inflated on the AH that 20M is considered the baseline for the higher end L60 items. I've seen auctions up for 500M +. Sure, some of those are minimum bids, but I know some of them are real bids too. Numbers like that really devalue the gold you can get in game. Basically in order to get the amounts of gold needed to make high end gear purchases, you have to be selling high end gear to people who either bought gold, or have sold to people who have. Which means your entry into trading level gear is entirely luck dependent, and due to the incessant gear checks in the game, this means your progress is luck dependent.
I still haven't made it to Inferno, nor do I think I really care to, but from what I've heard between here and friends, I bet the difficulty is about spot-on, just for the wrong reasons. It should be about as hard as it is, but that difficulty should exist because of a skill barrier, not a gear barrier. Think Hell/Hell D1: even your most blatant cheaters could get screwed over. Even if they had 20M hp and an endless staff of apoc, one careless step and they could get stunlocked into oblivion. Conversely, people with enough skill could run characters loaded up with -cursed- items. D2 had stuff like Ember who had tiny defence and miniscule offence and could still finish 2/3rds of the game. Gear was good in those games, and gear could define a character (Burizons, anyone?) and yes it was possible to get gear that allowed for facerolling the game, but largely skill was a determining factor much more than gear. D3 reversing that and at the same time making the level cap attainable in one pass full clear was a recipe for disaster.