A few ideas of how to save D3

[Ashock]

Uh, if two weeks is the shelf life of "fun" for this game, allow me to chortle since I still don't have a machine that will run it. Borrowed my son's laptop yesterday and today grope through Act I with no idea of anything. Wasn't in the beta. Took seven deaths to kill the B at the end of Act I, thanks to monkeying around with the skill mix on my lady wizard and her templar, then her scoundrel, merc. Reminds me a bit of how first encountering the Diablo I B, before the "trick" was learned.

I doubt I'll finish Hell Diff before the Summer is over, what with work, travel, family, work on the house, and needing to finalize my machine versus cost decisions.

But this was fun. I got one tip from my son: boost the crafting talents of the smith early. It appears that from the comments above, his advice was good. I also bought another row of stash to ensure I can, now that I've enjoyed the story, be a bit more efficient with the Monk who is up next.

Sorry to hear the game needs saving. I just had a few hours of immersive and extremely enjoyable game play, as I groped about trying to get comfortable with a new skill system.

Visuals: nice. Also glad to see that Jarulf is still an Iron Wolf in good standing.

*back to lurk mode*

The game does not need saving from a standpoint of being a fun game for a month or two. It needs saving from the standpoint of lasting for a few years like D1 and D2. I think people seem to be too defensive about their Diablo baby. As is, this game will be shelved long before the expansion comes out that could or will fix most things that are broken, IMO.
They need to address major issues NOW, before ppl lose interest.

Again, on your first playthrough and even in Nightmare, the game is fine.

However, it get tedious later on.

I am only lvl 54 and in Act1 of Hell, but I already can't see myself playing past killing D on Inferno, whenever that happens, except maybe PVP.

There is no more incentive. No reason to item hunt, since you can just AH it. No more leveling, since you will be lvl 60.

Also, b/c of the repetitive nature of hardcoded quests, I can not see myself rolling another toon.

[Yricyn]

I don't understand the outlook of; "there is no more incentive".

Once you beat Diablo in hell mode of d2 what was the incentive? Anyone could whirlwind their way to victory with nothing but a couple dual leech rings and a massive pole arm.

But I saw people doing all sorts of variant games and team builds. Playing with known "bad" skills on purpose. Playing "no twink" was my personal favorite. To that end I can envision people doing similar things in D3. You can choose to use the AH for "easy mode" or you can play by whatever self imposed rules you like. And please, when you do some crazy should be impossible build and self imposed limitation, come by here or the amazon basin and post about it.

Granted I'm not through the game yet, but to this point I find D3 to be what I hoped for. It is for my money essentially upgraded D2 graphics, with new but similar mechanics. The game can be whatever I want it to be.

[Mavfin]

The game can be whatever I want it to be.

That's exactly it.

If you only play by the "Inferno is everything and I can't hold back my buddies, so I have to buy gear", then well, you've already made your choice and you'll have to live with that. Or if the loot isn't 'enough incentive'. That's something brought about by WoW, imo. Didn't belong in D2, and doesn't belong in D3, unless you want it to.

Just don't post the conclusions from your own choices/attitudes as 'fact', as some here are so fond of doing.

Edit: Or as I said to someone else: Just because you play with a raft of assumptions, don't assume I play with the same ones.

[kandrathe]

I am only lvl 54 and in Act1 of Hell, but I already can't see myself playing past killing D on Inferno, whenever that happens, except maybe PVP.

... and, this is a big if... Blizzard doesn't add anything more to the game in the next 12 months... See http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/0...cromancer/ Diablo II saw many additions and changes in it's time, and I wouldn't expect less for DIII.

There is no more incentive. No reason to item hunt, since you can just AH it. No more leveling, since you will be lvl 60.

I'm not sure I really even know the limits of what legendary items are available. My oldest char is nearing the end of Normal, and I'm looking forward to the challenge of Nightmare.

Also, b/c of the repetitive nature of hardcoded quests, I can not see myself rolling another toon.

I rolled one of each class right away, knowing I'd want to get a sense for playing each type. It wasn't because I wanted to do the quests multiple times. More important to replay-ability are the randomness of the dungeon events, champion packs, and rare (and beyond) loot drops. It would be cool if the quests forked in a myriad of directions, but then that would be a different game.

A good game is replay-able because the game play is different each time, even when the parameters and rules stay the same. Why is chess still popular?

[LochnarITB]

Why is chess still popular?

I blame it on computers! We should never have taught them how to play. They are so enamored of the game, they threatened to strike if it didn't stay popular and where would we be if all the computers quit?!

[Ashock]

I am only lvl 54 and in Act1 of Hell, but I already can't see myself playing past killing D on Inferno, whenever that happens, except maybe PVP.

... and, this is a big if... Blizzard doesn't add anything more to the game in the next 12 months... See http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/0...cromancer/ Diablo II saw many additions and changes in it's time, and I wouldn't expect less for DIII.

There is no more incentive. No reason to item hunt, since you can just AH it. No more leveling, since you will be lvl 60.

I'm not sure I really even know the limits of what legendary items are available. My oldest char is nearing the end of Normal, and I'm looking forward to the challenge of Nightmare.

Also, b/c of the repetitive nature of hardcoded quests, I can not see myself rolling another toon.

I rolled one of each class right away, knowing I'd want to get a sense for playing each type. It wasn't because I wanted to do the quests multiple times. More important to replay-ability are the randomness of the dungeon events, champion packs, and rare (and beyond) loot drops. It would be cool if the quests forked in a myriad of directions, but then that would be a different game.

A good game is replay-able because the game play is different each time, even when the parameters and rules stay the same. Why is chess still popular?

Diablo 2 had a much higher level cap right off the bat, and it was close to impossible to reach it. In fact it took 2 teams to level their characters to max level pre-LOD. Once you reach 60 here, you're done.

As far as rolling that many toons at the same time:

1. That's not for everyone
2. GL doing these same quests over and over... and over.


Chess is popular because you can have infinite or almost infinite combinations, depending on the players and the openings they choose. Even in chess however, at a high enough level btw, you only have a few ways that a game can branch out and then only after 30+ moves. However.....

....D3 is all the same for all classes. If there is no streamlined questing system, you can choose to get to the end though many different means. However, with the questing system in D3, you have to do everything in the same order for every quest and difficulty.

Also, the almost complete randomness of D1 and D2 is not nearly as random in D3. This is also a major problem.
This is not WOW light, this is Diablo, but the designers seem to not understand that there is a difference between the two franchises. This game looks like it's been designed by WOW guys, not Diablo guys.

Time will tell, of course.

However D2 never had the same kind of negativity related to it. Just look at the number of "dissapointing game" posts on the official forums. Not annoyed at a particular feature or lack of it, but the whole game.

[Jester]

However D2 never had the same kind of negativity related to it. Just look at the number of "dissapointing game" posts on the official forums. Not annoyed at a particular feature or lack of it, but the whole game.

Really? I remember reading that, between WW barbarians and corpse explosion, that D2 on release was unbalanced as could be, and people were not shy about saying so...

-Jester

[Mavfin]

However D2 never had the same kind of negativity related to it. Just look at the number of "dissapointing game" posts on the official forums. Not annoyed at a particular feature or lack of it, but the whole game.

Really? I remember reading that, between WW barbarians and corpse explosion, that D2 on release was unbalanced as could be, and people were not shy about saying so...

-Jester

And the expansion had the same. I remember moderating this forum at LOD time, and lots of "OMG THIS GAME SUCKS!" threads got moderated or edited, if only so the whole front page was more than just those threads.

Nostalgia is a great memory-changer, evidently.

[Archon_Wing]

The internet was not as widespread in 1999, and if you wanted to compile a list of Diablo 2 bitching posts, you'd still find a mountain on merely the battle.net forums. Nowadays, people with an axe to grind can do it with the convenience of their phones.

Anyhow, this requires some time. It's a bit too early to determine the absolutes of the meta-game and of course they will take care to patch as they always do. In LoD, Necromancer minions were unplayable almost until they were heavily boosted in 1.10, for example. Starcraft didn't become anything remotely balanced until the final balance patch of Brood War.

The Public Game features are horribly lacking though. 4 players in a game feels really lame especially if some are afk. The chat system is pathetic, though not as pathetic as in sc2.

My main concern currently is having the servers actually work and the AH as well, instead of wasting time nerfing certain skills into oblivion.

[Ashock]

However D2 never had the same kind of negativity related to it. Just look at the number of "dissapointing game" posts on the official forums. Not annoyed at a particular feature or lack of it, but the whole game.

Really? I remember reading that, between WW barbarians and corpse explosion, that D2 on release was unbalanced as could be, and people were not shy about saying so...

-Jester

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

[Mavfin]

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

If you think the whole game is broken, maybe you're playing the wrong game, and just need to delete it.

If it's that broken, why are you still even here talking about it, and why did you play so much so as to get to Inferno?

That's like the guy telling the cook that his food was horrible, after cleaning his plate.

I felt like I was on the official forums for a moment, Ashock.

[Ashock]

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

If you think the whole game is broken, maybe you're playing the wrong game, and just need to delete it.

If it's that broken, why are you still even here talking about it, and why did you play so much so as to get to Inferno?

Because I still hope that the game can be salvaged. If you actually read my OP.... carefully, you will see that I did not say that the game is terrible now. I just said that I dont see it being long-lived w/o quick and brutal changes.
I am still kind of enjoying it, but I can see the end in a few weeks. For a Diablo fanatic like me and some of my friends, that is an incredible and previously invonceivable notion after less than 2 weeks of the game being live, Mavfin.

[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".

[MongoJerry]

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

One or two? Wow, how memory fades. Class balance in D2 and LOD on their releases was either a couple of completely overpowered builds that allowed players to clear 8-player mode solo with ease or skills so terrible that they couldn't kill a normal mob in 1-player hell. People remember the corpse explosion necromancers and lance barbs, but how about my being able to static field whole screenfuls of mobs down to a sliver of health in a few seconds? Or for that matter, my sorceress being able to kill Diablo in 8-player hell solo in 3 seconds? Or the great bow bug limited Amazons at first and then when the bows got fixed, the great multi-zon uber builds. Or the fact that Paladins had no comparatively effective builds in the beginning, and then later smashed through everything with hammerdin after certain bugs were fixed and skills altered.

How about people's ability to get to level 99 on the first day of LOD without threat by running the first level of Act V over and over? Or being able to get all the best gear in the game without threat by running Pindle over and over?

What about the fact that the game was never hard? Ever. My God, I no geared no skill assigned punched a sorceress through Act I and someone else at the Amazon Basin managed to do it through all of Normal difficulty?

What about all of the dupes and bots running around destroying what existed of a trade economy?

And then, there was all of the incredible server instability that I would have gladly exchanged for what the D3 servers are going through.

D3 is a *far* more polished game than D2 has ever been even after years of patching. No, D3 is not perfect and can never be everything to everyone. But we already know about some changes coming down the pipeline (pvp, legendary changes, etc.), and I feel good that Blizzard is going to continue to support the game. And the fact that D2 managed to stay popular despite how broken it was makes me feel good about the prospects for D3, which is already a better game than D2 ever was.

[Ashock]

Again, I think you guys are missing my point. It's not certain aspects that do not work. It's not balance between classes. It's not the difficulty.

D2 had lots of issues. However, the overall game's concept was FUN.
D3 smells of boring. If many of those who are complaining were not such huge fans of the first two games, we'd be putting it down already.

Anyway, let's see what kind of changes they make in the near future.

D1 and D2 in the first couple of YEARS meant playing them exclusively.

Let's see what most ppl in this thread think about this game in 2 months.

[Taelas]

Personally, I find D3 to be more fun than D2 ever was.

But that's just me; I was never into D2 to the level most of the Lurkers have been or even anything close to it.

[Treesh]

Again, I think you guys are missing my point. It's not certain aspects that do not work. It's not balance between classes. It's not the difficulty.

D2 had lots of issues. However, the overall game's concept was FUN.
D3 smells of boring. If many of those who are complaining were not such huge fans of the first two games, we'd be putting it down already.

Anyway, let's see what kind of changes they make in the near future.

D1 and D2 in the first couple of YEARS meant playing them exclusively.

Let's see what most ppl in this thread think about this game in 2 months.

To you, it may smell of boring. To me, it's exactly what I want. I have replayed the beginning on everything but a barb multiple times and enjoy it each time. Still haven't even seen act 4. I treat hardcore like softcore because it just really doesn't bother me to start over; in fact, I rather like it. I've never been the type of person who says "Oh, the game doesn't even start until you hit the end game!" I didn't in WoW and certainly never bothered to cap out a character in D2. If all people try to do is make D3 into D2 again (which is what the majority of your suggestions feel like), I won't play it as long as I did D2 or D1. Maybe it's not the game that you want to actually play, but don't try to ruin it for those of us who ARE enjoying it. The biggest reason why I buy Blizzard games is because I frequently play it the way the devs seem to think it should play. Then come all the whiners that are the vocal minority, blizzard caves to the whines and then the game goes downhill for me and those whiners find something new to whine about instead of being happy for getting what they thought they wanted. Just leave it alone. Fix bugs, fix glaring balance issues, but leave the general gameplay stuff the hell alone!

[NuurAbSaal]

Fix bugs, fix glaring balance issues, but leave the general gameplay stuff the hell alone!

This, in my humble opinion. I'm enjoying the hell (har har) out of the game.

If you're not having fun playing D3, don't play it?

take care
Tarabulus

[FireIceTalon]

Again, I think you guys are missing my point. It's not certain aspects that do not work. It's not balance between classes. It's not the difficulty.

D2 had lots of issues. However, the overall game's concept was FUN.
D3 smells of boring. If many of those who are complaining were not such huge fans of the first two games, we'd be putting it down already.

Anyway, let's see what kind of changes they make in the near future.

D1 and D2 in the first couple of YEARS meant playing them exclusively.

Let's see what most ppl in this thread think about this game in 2 months.

To you, it may smell of boring. To me, it's exactly what I want. I have replayed the beginning on everything but a barb multiple times and enjoy it each time. Still haven't even seen act 4. I treat hardcore like softcore because it just really doesn't bother me to start over; in fact, I rather like it. I've never been the type of person who says "Oh, the game doesn't even start until you hit the end game!" I didn't in WoW and certainly never bothered to cap out a character in D2. If all people try to do is make D3 into D2 again (which is what the majority of your suggestions feel like), I won't play it as long as I did D2 or D1. Maybe it's not the game that you want to actually play, but don't try to ruin it for those of us who ARE enjoying it. The biggest reason why I buy Blizzard games is because I frequently play it the way the devs seem to think it should play. Then come all the whiners that are the vocal minority, blizzard caves to the whines and then the game goes downhill for me and those whiners find something new to whine about instead of being happy for getting what they thought they wanted. Just leave it alone. Fix bugs, fix glaring balance issues, but leave the general gameplay stuff the hell alone!

You should really reserve such thoughts until you have tried Inferno mode. I also saw D3 in rose colored glasses upon release, and I still think in many respects it is a great game. But I also see the flawed system that is Inferno. Face it, forums are here for people to express their dislikes as well as their likes. The fact is, at LEAST HALF of the people on Inferno right now do not find it to be enjoyable, and I think telling them to "go play another game" then is downright snide if not unrealistic or naive. They, like you, waited 11 years or so for the game, paid hard earned money for it, therefore their voice has just as much validity as yours. Some of the complaints are legit, some not so much (those who complain about the skill system but have never heard of Elective Mode for instance). In the case of Inferno, most of the gripes are legitimate as I see it, and as someone who is in that difficulty, my opinion holds weight on that issue. Should I go play another game when I spent money on this one, and waited for it for many years, and actually still like the game overall but just recognize some serious flaws that need fixing, and would make the game more enjoyable for most people? No, I shouldn't have to. Blizz SHOULD give in to our demands and do whatever it takes to see that their customers are satisfied. Sure, you cant please everyone, but in this particular case, it isn't just a few unhappy people. It is MANY, MANY unhappy people - which is indication that there is a problem that needs fixin'.

The "whiners" arent necessarily so much the miniority, as they are the ones who play and take the game much more seriously. Those who post on the forums should be taken seriously, because they know more than the average casual gamer who just buys every hot title in sight, doesnt post on any forums, and usually plays a game for a month or two then moves on. The people on the forums usually represent the core audience of the game and usually have a much better understanding of how it works because they are more serious gamers than the average person. And the fact of the matter is, many of them (at least half, if not more) are seeing the flaws of the loot sytem and Inferno difficulty.

[Chesspiece_face]

By your own logic: 50% of the people in Inferno are dissatisfied. People who are actually in Inferno are the extreme minority of people playing the game. Thus, people that are dissatisfied with Inferno are, in fact, the vast minority.

Even if you want to extrapolate that position to exclude people not in Inferno you are still making the argument that blizzard should cater to half of their players over the other half. Wonder why you think they should cater to that 50%. Oh yeah, because that is the side you are on.