A few ideas of how to save D3

[Treesh]

From what I understand, they don't care about "professional" PvP. It's going to be for fun only, not some competitive event. As for Guild Chat, yes that would be nice. I'm sure we'll see something like that in a patch eventually. For now, I'm more concerned with the AH.

I think this is a commonly misrepresented possition. From what I've seen weighing all of the available comments by Blizzard representatives is that they are very interested in creating an environment that lends itself to "professional" PvP. What they are not interested in is actively investing or promoting it like they did in WoW. In WoW they essentially took their weight and shoved it around into the professional competitive gaming scene forcing it to be included into the tournament scenes by doing most, if not all, of the promotion by themselves. And after investing all of that into WoW arena it still faded out. They aren't going to repeat that.

They do, however, still want the PvP to be fun and engaging and hope that if there is a strong infrastructure that lends itself to professional competetive play the players themselves will create the competitive scene.

I'm trying to find the exact interview I saw where Jay said, specifically, that they don't want D3 to become an e-sport. I have found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E452S_fJwA where he does talk about more casual PVP, but that's not the one I saw where he spelled it out.

[Chesspiece_face]

I'm trying to find the exact interview I saw where Jay said, specifically, that they don't want D3 to become an e-sport. I have found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E452S_fJwA where he does talk about more casual PVP, but that's not the one I saw where he spelled it out.

Found this snippet where Jay acknowledges that players are going to try to push to make it an e-sport, but that Blizzard isn't going to support it for D3. And yes, you can ignore the last minute of the damned video where the uploader tacked on a song instead of just ending the video.

Yes. That was the interview that everyone goes to when they raise the flags for "No serious PvP". It's also an interview that is nearly a year old, far before they pushed PvP off of release day. Many of the newer interviews and comments about PvP show a much greater focus on infrastructure for it (which is what I mentioned above) including the final Dev Diary they published in the run-up to D3s release:

(~3:00ish)

[Roland]

I'm trying to find the exact interview I saw where Jay said, specifically, that they don't want D3 to become an e-sport. I have found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E452S_fJwA where he does talk about more casual PVP, but that's not the one I saw where he spelled it out.

Seconding Treesh's comment, I remember that same quote. That doesn't have anything to do with wanting proper infrastructure for PvP (that's a completely separate issue), but rather they want it to be casual - not professional. They don't want to have to deal with all the balancing issues inherent with competitive PvP, thus casual. They obviously want to balance for PvE, but as GW found out it's virtually impossible to balance for both at the same time without creating two sets of skills - PvP and PvE. Thus, I stand by my original statement - don't expect professional / competitive / whatever-you-want-to-call-it PvP. It's not likely.

[Treesh]

Yes. That was the interview that everyone goes to when they raise the flags for "No serious PvP". It's also an interview that is nearly a year old, far before they pushed PvP off of release day. Many of the newer interviews and comments about PvP show a much greater focus on infrastructure for it (which is what I mentioned above) including the final Dev Diary they published in the run-up to D3s release:

(~3:00ish)

That's why I was trying to find the other one I saw that was more recent. =) However, even in that old one I linked, there was still talk of infrastructure for PvP to help enable PvP more in D3 than it was in D2 and D1 (well, consensual pvp). There's quite a difference between making sure you have something available for folks who enjoy that and really supporting the fanatics. They had systems in place for variant play in 1 and 2, but they didn't really focus on it. It's a similar situation to me. We'll just have to see what the players will do when it finally hits. =)

[FoxBat]

Banning items from the gold AH but allowing them on the RMAH is not a real solution. You can sell/buy gold for real currency anyway, so gold farmers will just convert to blizzard balance and then spend that on whatever super uniques. The conversion process will raise their price a little, but not really have the kind of effect you wanted.

If Blizzard wants this kind of thing they would just do some bind-on-equip/pickup type items. This was something that was planned for a while for D3 but eventually dropped in favor of hoping the blacksmith salvage would keep the economy in check. (Meaning I think they only ever saw BoP/E as an inflation check, not something to ensure item finding fun.)

I still haven't used the AH yet and the idea of it does feel a little cheap, I will probably look into it upon hitting the Inferno "wall", but I still don't feel great about it.

Many of the newer interviews and comments about PvP show a much greater focus on infrastructure for it (which is what I mentioned above) including the final Dev Diary they published in the run-up to D3s release:

I don't see how that really contradicts anything said before.

Everything I've read suggests you will hit "join PvP!" and the game will automatically pair you with other players for team deathmatch. The pairing is based on an internal ELO-style ranking (it is never made publically viewable.) The only public swag is grind-based "you won X times" type of account stats. There are no tournaments, there are no premade teams, there's nothing "professional" or competitive about this about this setup. However, it still takes effort to make sure the programming and matchmaking is working OK, making sure everyone spawns and respawns correctly, making sure there isn't anything weird when you apply player skills to other players instead of mobs, etc. And this casual arena is vastly more pvp support than any previous Diablo game had. It is a separate game mode with its own matchmaking and ranking system completely different from public co-op games, and thus it requires its own infrastructure.

It's also their top priority right now because it's a major feature they wanted in for ship and had to push off for patch, so that is what they have been working on since the release content was locked down. Although, I can see it getting delayed further now between all the auction house instability and whine about items/economy.

[RTM]

My impression on PvP was that they wanted to ensure that the capability was there, that it worked well, and that it was fun, but that they weren't going to rebalance skills around it. Whether or not that actually is the case remains to be seen.

[FireIceTalon]

They need to implement a custom PvP system where people can make specific games so they can duel with their friends, and have a "spectator" mode so that other friends can watch on the sidelines. I dont want to just hit "join arena" and duel with random people. I want to duel with people I know.

[MongoJerry]

I have an idea on how to reach a good balance on items and the economy:

Keep everything the way it is, except make it so that the very best class specific legendaries only come from crafting *and* make it so that the result of these crafts are account bound. That way, you can continue to fill all of the other slots on your character using the AH, if you want. However, if you want the best class specific items, you have to spend the time crafting them at your blacksmith. These items should take a large amount of materials and gold to craft (making this an excellent gold sink) and they should have a large amount of randomness in their stats, making it so that you have to craft them multiple times to get a good one and perhaps hundreds of time to get a nearly "perfect" one. This will keep gold and raw materials valuable going forward, make it so that a person can't just buy all the best gear the first day they buy the game, and still keep the AH a valuable place both to fill all of the other equipment slots and to purchase more raw materials for crafting.

Note that the "account bound" mechanics are already in place. For example, the materials for the Staff of Herding are all account bound.

[MonTy]

Hooooooly cow. Anyone else get hit by the wall that is Inferno Act 2? Nope. No thank you. Not doing that. Have a good day.

[Lissa]

Hooooooly cow. Anyone else get hit by the wall that is Inferno Act 2? Nope. No thank you. Not doing that. Have a good day.

Not there yet, but I've heard that each act in inferno is an exponential increase over the last where as gear scales linearly between the acts. Not sure how well things will go over in inferno with the way they step up the mobs in the acts.

[MonTy]

For a Barbarian it feels like a new difficulty, not a new act. I've upped my resistances to over 600 (from 200), health nearing 40k(from 29k), damage reduction by 73%(from 68), and DPS almost 12k(from 8). Still not enough after farming two days of Act 1 Inferno and Auction House shenanigans.

I'm all for a challenge, but I have no desire to farm Act 1 Inferno or Act 4 hell from this point on. I completely expected this kind of difficulty, especially after the game only being out for almost two weeks, but the gameplay is not compelling enough to keep me entertained.

I want to point fingers at the skill system, as I find being limited to six skills so constrictive when in Inferno you've got to designate a good amount to defense.

Anyhow, the Jury's still out and my original post was more of a goofy "holy cow this is hard" statement. I'll be sure to give it more time and I'm thinking grouping up with some range DPS will help.

Hooooooly cow. Anyone else get hit by the wall that is Inferno Act 2? Nope. No thank you. Not doing that. Have a good day.

Not there yet, but I've heard that each act in inferno is an exponential increase over the last where as gear scales linearly between the acts. Not sure how well things will go over in inferno with the way they step up the mobs in the acts.

[Skandranon]

For my part I've played maybe fifteen minutes of D3 in the last few days. Everyone else I know in Inferno is hitting the same wall and nearly everyone is leveling an alt or not playing. Bravo, Blizzard.

[MonTy]

For my part I've played maybe fifteen minutes of D3 in the last few days. Everyone is hitting the same wall and nearly everyone is leveling an alt or not playing. Bravo, Blizzard.

There's so many sides to the discussion. The game hasn't been out long and most people are rushing through the hardest difficulty.

Then again I've hit harder walls in Median XL (the Diablo 2 mod) and enjoyed the hell out of farming zones for days upon days to go back and beat that uberlevel. I'm not feeling the same for this, so far. I'm hoping once more people hit Inferno I'll be able to group with them and it'll be more fun.

[Mavfin]

Game's been out less than two weeks, and people are complaining that they can't full clear the difficulty that the game's designers said they wouldn't be able to do that fast. Imagine that. But the response is to ask for nerfs? From the same people that lambast Blizzard for nerfing anything in WoW, too. What ever happened to "But you need to work for it!"

Act II Inferno is to Act I Inferno as Hell is to Nightmare. So, the game really has seven difficulties. Normal, Nightmare, Hell and Inferno Acts 1-4. Inferno isn't meant to be done linearly with the rest w/o extensive farming. It's *for the people who want to farm*, not just roll through it WoW-raid style.

I don't see the problem, really. Keep in mind that less than 1% have even entered inferno, so you're talking somewhere under 60K out of 6+ million. Not a huge demographic at all.

Yes, some have chain-died and chain-resurrected to get through the questlines and bosses in Inferno, but that's not the same thing at all.

In a more on-topic comment, I'm not sure D3 needs 'saving', looks pretty good from here. Oh, sure, there's a few fixes needed here and there, and the AH is shaky still, but, that's not unexpected, especially when they sold a year's projected copies in a week. Blizzard supported D2 and SC1 for over 10 years, I'm sure they'll keep this one up a while, too.

[Roland]

Anyhow, the Jury's still out and my original post was more of a goofy "holy cow this is hard" statement. I'll be sure to give it more time and I'm thinking grouping up with some range DPS will help.

Get me an ~800 base DPS weapon, then we'll talk. I'm bidding on a ~630 DPS weapon (current one is ~530), so that should boost me up pretty close to 13k DPS. I'm hoping that will allow me to farm Act I Inferno for mats, gold, etc. (remember, DH's have to kite like mad, so you need more DPS because you have zero sustain).

OTOH, I guess that proves to me that no amount of defense is going to save my poor DH. There's just no way I can approach that kind of tanking, so I might as well go full-boat offense. We'll see what happens. I'm hoping to keep upgrading my gems (currently sporting 50/50 Flawless Square / Perfect Square), and just incrementally upgrade my weapon (and other stats where I can). At least I got to Inferno on my own - that's something.

[Skandranon]

Game's been out less than two weeks, and people are complaining that they can't full clear the difficulty that the game's designers said they wouldn't be able to do that fast. Imagine that. But the response is to ask for nerfs? From the same people that lambast Blizzard for nerfing anything in WoW, too. What ever happened to "But you need to work for it!"

Act II Inferno is to Act I Inferno as Hell is to Nightmare. So, the game really has seven difficulties. Normal, Nightmare, Hell and Inferno Acts 1-4. Inferno isn't meant to be done linearly with the rest w/o extensive farming. It's *for the people who want to farm*, not just roll through it WoW-raid style.

I was going to be done with this thread but I can't let this go without response. I understand that people who aren't there yet don't understand the problem, so let me try to outline it as best I can.

Everyone's approaching this as a "just farm more, stop whining" type problem. Except it isn't that simple. Firstly, none of the gear you actually get helps. Anything that might actually drop for you is too weak to help you continue. People are advancing slowly into farther acts of Inferno, but only armed with AHed gear from Act 4 Inferno. In essence, what you are doing when you "farm" is that you're picking up gear to sell to people stuck on walls behind you, so that you can buy gear from people ahead of you (most of whom got there through abuse of now nerfed skills, so you cannot repeat what they did), in order to hit something like an appropriate gear threshold.

Secondly, "farming", by the very use of the word, implies a sedate, placid sort of activity. Maybe even pleasant. If it was just a matter of farming, I'd have done it. Playing through Inferno does not, in any way, resemble farming. Instead it's angering and frustrating and sometimes quite literally painful, through arm strain. Farming was fine in D1/2 because the activity itself was at least sort of fun. "Farming" in Inferno is not any fun. I could "farm" inferno right now, I have a build that will do it (at least until it gets nerfed too) and I've done so for a few days. I got tired of it, because not only was it not fun but there was almost no actual skill involved, and yet it always required my full attention or I'd die. If I came across a pack with modifiers I could handle, great! I will now kite for 15 to 20 minutes to kill it. If I cannot handle it I have to kite it and strand it, if possible, and if I cannot do that I have to restart the game. To give a recent example, I managed, over the course of two hours, to obtain five stacks of Nephalem Valor and then advanced toward Maghda to get loot. At the gates of Alcarnus I found myself trapped between two unkillable packs and was forced to leave the game and lose all my stacks. In ten attempts at "farming" I had to terminate the attempt before racking up any more than repair bills eight times because I had run out of space to ditch unkillable packs. There's no challenge here - it's either the game says "you lose" (and you do) or it doesn't and it's merely boring instead.

Since you brought up WoW, I'll tell you what this reminds me of: raiding Burning Crusade 2.0, when everything was overtuned and frustrating and impossible to kill, and to top it all off when the epics dropped they were worse itemized than dungeon blues. The 2.0 nerfs were greeted with a massive sigh of relief by the raiding community, nobody complained in the least, because the game wasn't fun. At least there you had social cohesion to help hold people together until the nerfs went in, but Inferno has a solution for that too! I played almost all of Inferno Act 1 with three other people in a four-person team and it was difficult but doable. In Act 2, grouping up makes it so difficult that we literally cannot group or we won't get anywhere.

Your point about very few players in Inferno is well taken, but it isn't going to be less of an issue when more players get there. And it's not like WoW raiding - everyone IS going to get to Inferno at some point, and if they're presented with frustrating and angering gameplay I can't imagine many players not having the same reaction. And if, as you say, and I agree with, there doesn't seem much else wrong with the game, what other problem should they work on?

[Occhidiangela]

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*

[NotSoDarklord]

Most of the inferno frustration is from people attempting to cram 3 months worth of farm into a week. Gear is much more important in D3 than it ever was in WoW.

It's a bit premature to say where the game will be once characters are geared to the teeth. It's also worth mentioning there has been a blue post hinting that inferno will gradually become easier. A statement I interpreted to mean that higher affixes like 50-75% damage will begin to drop. Speculation on my part but it would be reminiscent of old Sunwell progression gating. Holding back gear in the place of impassable gates that unlock every few weeks. Of course the post could just be a reference to rising gear levels as time passes.

[FireIceTalon]

^^Well I hope they do something, because I finally tried Inferno today, and I have to say, I agree with the masses: it is a joke. It is not challenging at all, because its difficulty is entirely centered around an "artificial" system that simply removes ALL control away from the player, and it makes for a frustrating experience. I've been saying this for a day or so here now, as the experience was more or less the same in hell difficulty, it's just more extreme in Inferno. First rare pack I came across had Jailer, Freeze, Teleport, Arcane Sentry, Extra Health, and Molten. 2-shotted, 0% chance to win. Left the game. I think I want my money back. If this is Blizzard's idea of making the game challenging, they REALLY need to go back to the drawing board. As I've said a million times, challenging and tedious are not the same thing. Inferno difficulty is the latter, and it is epic fail. I play games for fun, not to do chores. I really hope Blizz nerfs it or something, because when people aren't having fun anymore, thats indication of a flawed and/or broken system. This game has so much potential to be the best game blizz ever made, but this system will kill the replayability for lots of people. Sadly, I doubt Blizz cares, they have our money already. This is what I waited almost 11 years for? Diablo is a game made for you to kill stuff. If I can't kill stuff, why play? SMH at Blizz. If I wanted a game where I stood no chance at achieving victory (at least not without having frustration to the point where I dont want to play anymore), I'd just play a Nintendo game from the 80's.

[Skandranon]

Most of the inferno frustration is from people attempting to cram 3 months worth of farm into a week.

No it's not. I'm derailing this thread so much right now, but I feel compelled to step in every time someone tries to perpetuate this myth. If it was just farming I'd be fine with it. I would be okay being stopped here for 3 months if the activity was fun. It's not. That's the bottom line.

Really, NSD, you're the last person I'd have thought would go in for this line of argument.