Diablo® III

All of the footprints lead to the AH

01/20/2013 09:34 PMPosted by ShinAlboma

Result of no clear goal in the team's collective mind. Easily shifted by the community.

This is inaccurate. They did things that some in the community asked for but for the most part they completely ignore the community.

This started with difficulty being nerfed but they handled it wrong because of the rmah. The issue with Inferno being so hard was because the loot dropping in Act 1 was garbage. I was getting lvl 55 gear for crying out loud. This was of course intentional because they wanted you to use the ah to gear up. Soo... everyone had terrible gear and coudln't aford to buy the upgrades needed to get further so misguided they begged for the difficulty to be nerfed and got it.

The game is designed around directing you to the AH and once there the transition to the rmah is seamless.

90% of what the community has asked for for months is totally ignored. The fact that some things that some asked for actually were changed is coincidental. These changes came from developer strategy to once again drive traffic to the ah not because we asked.

They lowered difficulty because it was driving the newbs who are the most likely to use the rmah away.

Thank you very much.

And who's to say I'm not a certified developer? You should base your judgement off the content of the text, not the alias of the poster.

lol you'd have to reach the mental age of reason and all you're post tend to indicate that you haven't.

Is there a reason you quoted me saying thanks before saying I'm not of age to reason? I was simply appreciating the one person at the time that recognized significance in my post as others will do as well later.

I may not have handled the trolls in the most effective and non-feeding way possible. But Jay Wilson didn't either and he directed this game (and now he's gone).

And for anyone to think that any of the developers making Diablo now knows what is right with this game, then how come they have to release a Public Test Realm now before almost every significant update they implement? Did they do that in Diablo II? Clearly, they are the ones that have no idea what they are doing, so they have to check and make sure that they didn't massively f-up every time they try and change the game.

Trust me, if I had the same funding they received, my game would be very similar to theirs, but don't suck nearly as much because of the imbalance.

You can never reason with the unreasonable, and you can mark these unreasonable people by their lack of intent in their post by properly stating their opinions and backing it up with supporting details. They only know how to put people down without real reasoning and also use terrible grammar. It's your, not you're. You're obviously not of age to reason to begin with.

I agree. Developers simply cannot listen to all players because everyone wants different things.

What they need to do is stick true to the roots of Diablo, which are really quite simple. The game must have fun repetitive components and tons of demons to slay. The game must have lots of great loots for all levels of play. The player needs to feel as if they are being appropriately rewarded for their gametime. And there must be lots of godlies and markets to sell them to so that trade is encouraged.

That's it. That's all one needs to do to create a successful Diablo game. Yet somehow the devs totally dropped the ball. And it's not only the devs I blame, but also the playtesters. How could playtesters not tell this game was crap over the long term through internal testing/qa?

01/20/2013 09:15 PMPosted by Sol

Diablo III is doomed to lose its popularity

It already has, a long time ago.

The problem is they didn't stick to the true roots of Diablo. You are absolutely correct. How they dropped the ball because they clearly aren't as creative and motivated as Blizzard North. And you are also right when you say they clearly didn't do enough testing on their own. Like I just posted about the PTR.

01/21/2013 10:07 AMPosted by Paz

Diablo III is doomed to lose its popularity

It already has, a long time ago.

*All of it.

Very interesting ideas, especially the auction house chat. It definitely does feel quite a bit closed-off at the moment.

*This game isn't a lottery, it's a game. You're supposed to have fun all the way to the top, not grind like a slave until you find one good "opportunity".

THIS.

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*This game isn't a lottery, it's a game.

Diablo has always been a lottery. The problem right now is that you don't have all that much to win considering we don't have charms/runes/jewels/socketed grays in the economy, only one market to sell to (other treasure hunters), and huge supply because there are no alternative activities which would take people away from treasure hunting and as a result would decrease item supply and increase the value of items you find.

I.m just getting sick of the fact that EVERY class looks for the SAME items just with a different base stat. They need more class specific (would LOVE to have awesome legendary fist weapons on my monk) items that are actually good and worth using.

*This game isn't a lottery, it's a game. You're supposed to have fun all the way to the top, not grind like a slave until you find one good "opportunity".THIS.

sadly what u need is a console single player game if u wanna have fun all the way to the top.

pity the real gamers and untapped gamers market that want to play diablo3 at the hardest point ( 2-3weeks after release , after the fixed the SS ez mode bug etc etc )

nerfs came too fast and as u can see ... whatever "improvements" that were made didnt work
the numbers dont lie ... and that is all.

01/21/2013 10:44 AMPosted by Zaxxon23

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*This game isn't a lottery, it's a game.

Diablo has always been a lottery.

No. They (Diablo II) balanced it to not follow the same concept as a lottery. You actually got gradually better loot because the drop table is actually balanced where a healthy number of useful items dropped occasionally, and the amount of drops were lower. Now it's about hundreds of useless items and one useful, which makes you farm endlessly at very ineffective speeds because the majority of items you find are crap.

While with a balanced system you are never grinding for nothing because your gear is constantly being modified and making you slightly more effective, giving you incentive to actually farm more because you know the road ahead is short to finding another cool, unique item, rather than looking at an endless road to finding useless stuff for weeks or even months, stuck at your original state because you haven't found anything else.

And if you don't want to do all the useless farming, you're forced to use the AH and allow Blizzard to profit, when all along they could have if they balanced the loot table so things are always reasonably sellable since it was your useful find before the new more unique you've found now.

Had they correctly balanced it, it would've been tenfolds more effective, even with the Auction House. You can predict this because the more fun/less grindy the game is, the more people will want to play, and since loot is actually balanced, everyone can progress up the ladder without getting stuck after getting some upgrades from the AH and having no cash left and never finding any actual upgrades yourself.

If people found good items more regularly, but less items that just dominated all items, then you would have the majority of the players finding items they want to keep, selling their old item, and then eventually saving up to make a large upgrade to one slot by using the Auction House. Ideally, you would probably be buying many pieces of Legendaries from the Auction House, by selling your worthy rares slowly as you progress through the game. The Legendaries you find would all most likely be keepers except for ones that aren't for your class. If the loot was actually balanced, most items in the Auction House would be of very useful rares since the general trash item was actually acceptable to a degree, then the actually market would be mainly composed of actually good Legendaries rather than tens of pages of useless ones.

If they took the time to map out the progress of their players and how they should go about slowly pushing the general player up the chain to make them continue playing, they would still have their full fan base from the last game and all the new fans that were eager to see this game that was send to hold so much potential.

01/21/2013 10:55 AMPosted by Sol

Now it's about hundreds of useless items and one useful, which makes you farm endlessly at very ineffective speeds because the majority of items you find are crap.

I'm not arguing that. That's a problem that needs to be fixed, primarily through itemization in hell to prep for inferno.

None the less, Diablo still comes down to a slot machine that you can effect through magic find. The difference is that you win more often than a slot machine jackpot. It's like 100s of $1million winners versus one $1 billlion winner.

Now that does bring into question the itemization scheme of high variance itemization versus the lower variance of D2. For example a windforce was all the same minus mana steal and slight variations in base weapon damage. Whereas D3 is much more varied and you see crappy items a lot more.

I'm ok with that because you see a lot more windforces, but good ones drop about as often as they did in D2. That's why more itemization to get the game on par with LOD itemization would be extremely beneficial and mitigate many of the issues of people not finding stuff. Markets and alternative playstyles are also very important to the overall picture of a Diablo economy.

Now it's about hundreds of useless items and one useful, which makes you farm endlessly at very ineffective speeds because the majority of items you find are crap.

It's like 100s of $1million winners versus one $1 billlion winner.

Now that does bring into question the itemization scheme of high variance itemization versus the lower variance of D2. For example a windforce was all the same minus mana steal and slight variations in base weapon damage. Whereas D3 is much more varied and you see crappy items a lot more.

I'm ok with that because you see a lot more windforces, but good ones drop about as often as they did in D2. That's why more itemization to get the game on par with LOD itemization would be extremely beneficial and mitigate many of the issues of people not finding stuff. Markets and alternative playstyles are also very important to the overall picture of a Diablo economy.

That's the problem right there.

Yes, like I said in the post, there needs a be a combo system, especially for Legendaries, where rolled affixes actually benefit the player in one way significantly, rather than a flat roll across the board of anything random and you hope for a perfect roll of affixes.

Say for Legendaries, 80% of the time you get a 2 combo item, 15% you get 3 combo, and 5% gets 4-6 combo. And for rares, 65% of the time 2 combo, 20% 3-5 combo, 10% 5 combo, 5% 6 combo. It's easy as that to create a perfectly healthy roll algorithm that helps all players progress somewhat.

On top of that, being a given really, not only do you have a chance to roll combos, the chance of getting the highest rollable value in an affix is also relatively low, but at a distinctly more gradual curvature. This way, say if the chance of you rolling the absolute highest value in an affix were to be like 5%, you would have 5% of the 5% of getting 6 separate rolls, making it significantly rare for an item to roll almost perfectly, being balanced, similar to how it is now.

The only difference is the curvature in the middle of the graph if you were to graph the loot values, currently is 97% likely to roll a completely useless item because there is no correlation between the stats it rolls.

by the time you took to write this.. edit it... re-read it... re-edit it... make sure everything was as crystal clear as it could have been... you would have been up another 2 paragon levels.

no matter what your complaints are .. you have good dps and up in the 80s paragon. Whether the grind is too boring or not. Welcome to Diablo. Some will compare grinding here to the other versions and they are different. There are many differences between versions of which have already been talked about numerous times. What is common is "grinding".

good luck with it all.

I'm level 87 Paragon, I perhaps would've have gotten nearly 1. But I feel like if I were to make a large enough impact in the players' mind as to what is actually wrong with the game, who knows, maybe it'll get better. Not just for me, but everyone.

Diablo II had grind, but it was enjoyable grind, because you knew ahead of you, very near, would be another cool item to look at and evaluate. Rather than grinding for a full inventory of "rare" items (please take that word's definition literally) and finding absolutely all trash, then repeating that about 20 times before finding an item barely worth anything...

No. The kids are the ignorant, therefore they don't know what they want, they just said they wanted more drops not as in literally more numbers of loot, rather they want to be impressed by their loot. Quantity < Quality but they took the prior over the ladder, their biggest mistake.

They know that everybody wanted better loot instead of more crappy loot. But they decided to go 'more crappy loot' anyway just to feed the AH even more.

Little did they realize the more people that play the more items that sell as well.

I have an advice for u who say the game is boring because 99.9% of the drops are trash, pick up only legendaries, rings and amulets. you wil waste a lot less time identifying and it will be more fun, and more profitable.