Jay Wilson moving away from Diablo 3, Woo Ooo

[Ironwood]

I can see the console release working if they release it as a GOTY package including an expansion.

According to PAR: PS3 will have offline play, local multiplayer, no item shop.

Cunts.

[Malakili]

But wait, I thought that the technology just wasn't there. 

[Paelos]

There's no point in having it always online if money isn't involved.

They should have offered that option to people who didn't want to participate in the RMAH. I'm not exactly sure how that would have played with dupes, but they've proven horribly shitty at defending that anyway.

[Rendakor]

Wonder if they'll patch those "features" into the PC version when the PS3 one launches.

[Paelos]

Wonder if they'll patch those "features" into the PC version when the PS3 one launches.

They'd have to set up a completely different game mode that's unconnected to the RMAH. Expansion would be good for that.

[Ironwood]

Fuck them.  No more money from me ever.  Total fucking cunts.

[Paelos]

Fuck them.  No more money from me ever.  Total fucking cunts.

I think that's probably the only way Blizzard will ever stop this behavior of release, realize, correct. It's become pretty shameful as a company over the last 2 years that they've completely isolated a huge chunk of their players, offering less options instead of more options. Or even worse, tons of shitty options that don't address the player's desires.

[Reg]

Whatever magical spark they had that made Blizzard, Blizzard is long gone.  They might as well have been bought out by EA.

[Pennilenko]

Sadly, nobody can be the best or the biggest forever.

I'm hoping the good news is that eventually we get the next big addiction soon, and that it is fun and engaging. Who knows if any company has the ability to do something amazing anymore though.

[Rendakor]

Whatever magical spark they had that made Blizzard, Blizzard is long gone.  They might as well have been bought out by EA.

Activision is just as bad as EA. I'd have said worse until the Sim City fiasco but I think that about ties it up.

[Ironwood]

I think that's probably the only way Blizzard will ever stop this behavior of release, realize, correct. It's become pretty shameful as a company over the last 2 years that they've completely isolated a huge chunk of their players, offering less options instead of more options. Or even worse, tons of shitty options that don't address the player's desires.

Exactly.  I honestly thought I'd take it harder not shelling out for Heart of the Swarm.  Turns out, due to everyone's screaming, I realise I'd avoided yet another Ironwood rant as he realises he's been tricked again.  Trust me, even though that's good news for all the pricks that have to listen to me, no-one was happier than me.

I've shelled out more in the past couple of months for Minecraft and Mechwarrior and other smaller innovative companies than I ever will for this so called AAA piece of shit company.

Fuck them.

And Fuck That Loser.

[KallDrexx]

Everyone who thinks that they are making PS3 version offline because they've come to some realization that they were retarded.  They are making the PS3 version of D3 offline because Sony is requiring that single player games be playable offline.  If it was up to them they would be making it online only just so they could save face and not be in the "wtf blizzard" situation they are in now.

[Merusk]

Online-only was always about copy protection anyway. The RMAH was a smokescreen because even Blizzard isn't EA-Stupid about saying things like that.

[Ironwood]

If you pair think anyone doesn't already know that, you're mistaken.

We get that.  Which is why this is so very, very FUCK OFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.

 

[Paelos]

Online-only was always about copy protection anyway. The RMAH was a smokescreen because even Blizzard isn't EA-Stupid about saying things like that.

Of course it was, but it went deeper than that. I think they honestly believed they could control some of the scamming, duping, trading abuse in addition to making cash on transactions. It was a win-win for them in pretty much every meeting. They could remove the cheaters and get paid in their heads.

That's what makes this all so foolish with always online shit. If we want to play multiplayer ladders or traded, we'd have to log in anyway. They weren't stopping anything. People that pirate games don't suddenly buy games when they can't get cracked versions. They aren't a market. They aren't a drain. They were never ever ever going to pay you.

[Ingmar]

I don't believe it was about copy protection in any important sense in this particular case. Blizzard games have never had a big pirating problem. It was all about taking control of the secondary market.

[Fordel]

I don't believe it was about copy protection in any important sense in this particular case. Blizzard games have never had a big pirating problem. It was all about taking control of the secondary market.

The tens of millions of hacked SC1 and War3 serials would probably disagree. 

[Ingmar]

I apparently have blocked that out, but at least for Diablo 2, I mostly remember item dupes, client cheating and trade scams being the biggest problems.

[Fordel]

It's one of the reasons Dota spread like wild fire, any asshole could get an easy copy of War3 to run it.

[Malakili]

It's one of the reasons Dota spread like wild fire, any asshole could get an easy copy of War3 to run it.

Let's just say there is a reason DOTA is HUGE in both Russia and China.  (And why Valve is a genius for making it Free to Play with all the content available for free).

[Tannhauser]

They made it online because they had dreams of folks having to hit the AH to buy gear for their level. 

[Ironwood]

Hey, remember when Blizzard GAVE a copy of a game away so you could play with mates ?

They were the chaps that first introduced the multiplayer spawn copy.

Before the dark times.  Before the Empire.

[Rokal]

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/28/diablo-3-director-jay-wilson-auction-houses-really-hurt-game

Former Diablo 3 Game Director Jay Wilson admitted during a talk at GDC 2013 in San Francisco that both of Diablo 3's Auction Houses (both the real-money and the in-game gold item auction house) "really hurt the game." Wilson said that before Blizzard launched the game, the company had a few assumptions about how the Auction Houses would work: He thought they would help reduce fraud, that they'd provide a wanted service to players, that only a small percentage of players would use it and that the price of items would limit how many were listed and sold.

But he said that once the game went live, Blizzard realized it was completely wrong about those last two points. It turns out that nearly every one of the game's players (of which there are still about 1 million per day, and about 3 million per month, according to Wilson) made use of either house, and that over 50 percent of players used it regularly. That, said Wilson, made money a much higher motivator than the game's original motivation to simply kill Diablo, and "damaged item rewards" in the game. While a lot of the buzz around the game attacked the real money Auction House, "gold does much more damage than the other one does," according to Wilson, because more players use it and prices fluctuate much more.

"I think we would turn it off if we could," Wilson said during his talk. But the problem is "not as easy as that;" with all of Blizzard's current players, he says the company "has no idea" how many players like the system or hate it. Blizzard, Wilson said, doesn't want to remove a feature that lots of players will be unhappy to see go. But he did say that the team is working on a viable solution, without giving any other details about what that would be like.

 

[Tannhauser]

Really?  You design a game where the drops are vastly inferior to your level and you didn't expect folks to use the AH for level appropriate items?  Really?

Oh bullshit.  Bull-farking-pigs-fly-out-my-ass-shit.

[Malakili]

Really?  You design a game where the drops are vastly inferior to your level and you didn't expect folks to use the AH for level appropriate items?  Really?

Oh bullshit.  Bull-farking-pigs-fly-out-my-ass-shit.

I don't even think they really considered the leveling part of the game in general.

[Paelos]

I believe he's telling the truth. They wanted to decrease fraud and rake in the outside cash they were losing from 3rd party sales.

The problem is you have to have a finely tuned economy to pull that off, and D3 has absolutely no sinks of consequence to remove inflation from the system. Considering the complete lack of business sense most designers have, it's not shocking they can't anticipate an economy.

They need to take a cue from WoW and do more to encourage spending gold in the game. I'd use item gambling, ridiculously expensive cosmetic items/titles/unlockables, and revamps to crafting that require much more in materials, but much less in actual gold. Introduce more pets and companions you can buy with gold that provide perks. Hell, there's tons of sinks available, but they've just tried the dumb ones like increasing repair costs.

[Fordel]

There's never enough sinks, ever, not when money comes out of thin air, or zombies or whatever you kill in Diablo.

[Ingmar]

I believe he's telling the truth. They wanted to decrease fraud and rake in the outside cash they were losing from 3rd party sales.

The problem is you have to have a finely tuned economy to pull that off, and D3 has absolutely no sinks of consequence to remove inflation from the system. Considering the complete lack of business sense most designers have, it's not shocking they can't anticipate an economy.

They need to take a cue from WoW and do more to encourage spending gold in the game. I'd use item gambling, ridiculously expensive cosmetic items/titles/unlockables, and revamps to crafting that require much more in materials, but much less in actual gold. Introduce more pets and companions you can buy with gold that provide perks. Hell, there's tons of sinks available, but they've just tried the dumb ones like increasing repair costs.

They have gambling, they just called it crafting this time.

[Phred]

I believe he's telling the truth. They wanted to decrease fraud and rake in the outside cash they were losing from 3rd party sales.

The problem is you have to have a finely tuned economy to pull that off, and D3 has absolutely no sinks of consequence to remove inflation from the system. Considering the complete lack of business sense most designers have, it's not shocking they can't anticipate an economy.

They need to take a cue from WoW and do more to encourage spending gold in the game. I'd use item gambling, ridiculously expensive cosmetic items/titles/unlockables, and revamps to crafting that require much more in materials, but much less in actual gold. Introduce more pets and companions you can buy with gold that provide perks. Hell, there's tons of sinks available, but they've just tried the dumb ones like increasing repair costs.

They have gambling, they just called it crafting this time.

Ya but with gambling there was a chance of getting an actual item worth owning. Not so with crafting.

[Ingmar]

Actually the new BOA recipes turn out some really, really good stuff. But yeah the release recipes were not exciting.

[Malakili]

Actually the new BOA recipes turn out some really, really good stuff. But yeah the release recipes were not exciting.

Yeah, the new craftables are by and large able to craft best is slot items.  The problem really is that it still isn't a long term solution.  One of the reasons gambling was kind of good in D2 was you could gamble uniques, - particularly SoJs, which were the currency.  So gambling rings was a gold sink that was potentially useful eventually.  But that was more an accidental quirk of the system than a brilliant choice by Blizzard.


The drops still seem to be the biggest issue to me.  The people who can crush MP10 are basically playing a different game than everyone else, because uniques are usually shit.  The only way to really get good uniques is to get 100s of them and hope for a good roll.  In Diablo 2 more uniques had 100% chance of something useful, so if you got ANY Shaftstop for example (which could drop from Nightmare Mephisto for chrst's sake), you were golden.

[Yegolev]

the game's original motivation to simply kill Diablo

Bzzzt.  Talk about missing the mark. 

[Ironwood]

Either that guy really, really didn't have a fucking clue about his own game, or he's merely trying to cover up his own lack of courage in telling those above him to stop grabbing money.

What an utter cunt.  Every time we hear more, it's just more and more cuntery.  I think I've reached my cuntery watermark and lo, it floods again, with high cuntery.

[Simond]

Either that guy really, really didn't have a fucking clue about his own game...

Hint: It's this. That's why he's not working on D3 any more. The only reason he's not fired is because Blizzard doesn't (publicly) do that...so he'll be shunted off to make-work for a year or so then there'll be a quiet announcement about how he's 'decided to see new challenges elsewhere'.

[Tannhauser]

Yeah what Simond said.  I bet Wilson sold Blizzard a bill of goods and when they finally figured out he didn't know what the fuck he was doing it was too late.  I'd be very amazed if he was still at Blizzard six months from now. 

I say keep the AH.  You've already stained the franchise, might as well make all that money you hungered for now.  Plus you can quickly announce a D4 and, hat in hand, humbly admit mistakes were made but D4 will be the bees knees.  And the fanboys will lap it up.