Complaints, gripes, kvetches...

[Setanta]

Lag on boss fights (Belial especially) and the fact that the game is down for maintenance every fucking night Aussie prime time gives this game a D for me. The number of friends I have who are no longer playing has plummeted.

Even if it was no-connection needed I doubt I'd rate it over a B-/C+. Item drops killed it completely for me - kill a boss and watch items that are only alt-worthy drop.

Blizzard dropped the ball on this game.

[Rokal]

You can be disappointed all you want but you can't proclaim failure or success. You aren't qualified.

The same goes for everyone on these forums, or most forums for that matter. Why are you posting again?

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

No shit. Welcome to the internet.

[Ingmar]

I imagine most of us started posting because we liked computer games. More and more that doesn't seem to be the case with people, and I don't think it's the games.

[Paelos]

The same goes for everyone on these forums, or most forums for that matter. Why are you posting again?

Not really, since it's been proven before you have no idea what actually makes a Blizzard game good. So I think you go beyond "everyone else" to "dangerously unqualified" to have an opinion that's remotely important.

But that hasn't stopped you from trying. I admire that at times. It's almost Cal Ripkin like.

[Job601]

Even if it was no-connection needed I doubt I'd rate it over a B-/C+. Item drops killed it completely for me - kill a boss and watch items that are only alt-worthy drop.

Blizzard dropped the ball on this game.

I just don't get this complaint -- this is the way loot has worked in every action rpg since forever.  You're never guaranteed an upgrade at any particular time, but you're guaranteed to find one eventually.  I guess it's true that if you don't like randomized loot, you won't like this game.

[Rokal]

If you think loot is where it needs to be, the game launched with the number of features it needed, and that the campaign is exactly what it needs to be, you're also entitled to your opinion.

My point was that my negative opinion is not just because I have aged 10 years. It's because Diablo hasn't. If I was 10 years younger and you handed Diablo 3 to teenage me, I'm sure I'd think it was great stuff. I'd probably also recognize that it was slim on features compared to other games I was playing, and that the loot system doesn't work great. As a AAA game in 2012 it is lacking.

Saying "we're too old to enjoy Diablo 3 the same way we enjoyed Diablo 2" is giving 3 a free pass for flaws it shouldn't have.

[Nebu]

I imagine most of us started posting because we liked computer games. More and more that doesn't seem to be the case with people, and I don't think it's the games.

I do think it is the games.  I primarily blame the publishers and investors more than I would ever fault the game designers.  With the lure of big $$$ comes the approach of trying to be all things to all people.  It has really watered down the experience that mainstream games bring. 

[Malakili]

I imagine most of us started posting because we liked computer games. More and more that doesn't seem to be the case with people, and I don't think it's the games.

I do think it is the games.  I primarily blame the publishers and investors more than I would ever fault the game designers.  With the lure of big $$$ comes the approach of trying to be all things to all people.  It has really watered down the experience that mainstream games bring. 

It certainly isn't only the games though.  Go start a brand new D2: LoD untwinked character right now and play it alongside D3.  This isn't just an thought experiment actually.  My friend and I played through D2 (just normal difficulty) one last time in the weeks before D3 and let me tell you that D3 is a really superior experience in that respect.  Sure, the late game/end game stuff in D3 is iffy/needs work, but how many of us are really hitting that full bore already?

I'm not saying its just nostalgia either.  I think a big part of it is that we want games to make us feel the way they made us felt 10 years ago.  When Diablo 2 came out it felt like the greatest thing in the world.  Diablo 3, regardless of how good it is, isn't going to seem like the greatest thing in the world to a 30something, or even a mid-late 20something, even if they are an avid gamer. 

I should say though that I am playing the hell out Diablo 3 and loving pretty much every minute of it.

[Rasix]

I imagine most of us started posting because we liked computer games. More and more that doesn't seem to be the case with people, and I don't think it's the games.

I do think it is the games.  I primarily blame the publishers and investors more than I would ever fault the game designers.  With the lure of big $$$ comes the approach of trying to be all things to all people.  It has really watered down the experience that mainstream games bring.  

I don't know, man, you admit to compulsively playing games you dislike.  

Maybe I've lost the ability to hyper critical of this crap, but I'm enjoying my gaming as much now as I did 15 years ago.  Granted, my sample size nowadays is a lot smaller and a lot more selective.  

I'm just not seeing the sharp knees.  I'm enjoying the shit out of this game and I really didn't like D2 at all and couldn't get into Titan Quest or Torchlight.  Shit, ARPGs have done nothing for me since D1.

Note: I'm not trying to discount the lag/locational issues some of you are having.  

[Merusk]

I tend to agree with Ingmar here.  Games are still pretty much the same, it's us who are older.  You're never going to recapture the magic of your youth in gaming or your first time with a game you really loved.

You're just setting yourself up for disappointment if you expect it, particularly 10 years later.

Not that I'm saying the game's perfect.  It's at least a 7.5/ 10, though.

[Sjofn]

Smoke Screen for DH's has been changed to 1s invuln/3s cooldown 2s/3s runed to prevent chaining.

Awwwwwww. I mean, I expected it, but not this fast. Dammit!

[Rokal]

Not that I'm saying the game's perfect.  It's at least a 7.5/ 10, though.

I'd also give it a solid 8. It's a good game. It's a better game than Diablo 2 even.

It's just not impressive for 2012 compared to other things I'm playing.

[Nebu]

I would give Diablo 3 a solid 8/10 as well.  The game is much more enjoyable than D2.  I just find that I can only take the game in short play sessions.  I felt the same way about SWTOR, which surprised me since I played the hell out of Rift and WAR.  I still enjoy games, I just find that I'm finding fewer games that really hit my sweet spot. 

[Paelos]

I'd give the game a 9/10.

The multiplayer options are insanely improved, the game is much more fluid, it fits my need to smash shit into bloody pieces to watch the goodies fall out.

Goodies need improvement. That would make it a 10/10.

[Ratman_tf]

Did they ever fix the damn templar shield bug? I've been not equipping his shield slot...

[Ingmar]

Yes, last week.

[Amaron]

http://www.diablofans.com/blizz-tracker/topic/224539-blizzard-did-you-even-test-inferno/

We purposely launched the game with Inferno being far more difficult than what we were able to progress in ourselves, assuming people would find it as difficult but with a few skilled players able to pull it off, or the difficulty would simply help root out problem skills and builds that allowed flaw-filled progression possibilities.

I think the main problem we're running into is people progress more or less linearly to Inferno, and the brick wall effect makes it seem like these broken skills were the correct way to overcome the difficulty because the belief is that Inferno must be an immediately surmountable challenge, which it isn't intended to be. Or the reverse, that because these skills allowed progression the classes that did not have them were too weak/broken, which isn't correct.

We'll provide a bit more info/context on Inferno tuning through an article we're working on for the front page.

Didn't think they'd actually admit they broke it on purpose.

[Tarami]

It's not just Inferno. Inferno might be uncircumventably (!) impossible, but all difficulties essentially suffer from the RNG putting up a brickwall via the elite mob packs. The problem is aggravated the higher the difficulty, since elites get an increasing number of affixes, but even in normal you can get things like mortar + plagued. It just spikes difficulty through the roof for no good reason. That you can get multiple packs with different abilities simultaneously is just icing. (Then you get a single blue item for your ten minutes of world-class kiting.)

I'm in act 4 of Hell now and it throws so ridiculously between facerolling and soulcrushing that I have to wonder if they only ever tested normal difficulty.

Edit:
I know everyone knows this, but I needed to say SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE because fuck it in its ass.

[Abelian75]

While I agree with most of the complaints being voiced here (legendary weirdness, lag issues, etc), and even find those things terribly annoying in some cases, as a whole I'd be crazy to pretend I don't love the game to a ridiculous degree.  I thought D2 was a great game, and I only ever played through the full campaign once (though I fiddled with it several times over the years).  In D3, I'm almost through Hell on my monk and about to start Nightmare on my Demon Hunter.  That is a whole lot of playing, and I suspect a great deal more will come.  It's pretty goddamn great.

[Phred]

I thought once you unlocked them on one toon, you had the choice to play them on your other ones.

Did you actually think about that or just assume some autoleveled mobs which people hate? How would it work, in your mind? Once you unlocked it on one toon you could start a new toon in nightmare? Where they would be one hit splat by the first zombie snacking on a corpse on the road?

[Phred]

(also, first time kills. Of bosses should ALWAYS have better loot on them, absolutely no idea why that stops after normal mode).

Ya, I'm ok with first time kills like it was in D2 where it was once per difficulty but this if fucking clown shoes retarded. I never heard this was their plan or I would have seriously thought about whether to buy the damn game or not.

[rk47]

You can be disappointed all you want but you can't proclaim failure or success. You aren't qualified.

The same goes for everyone on these forums, or most forums for that matter. Why are you posting again?

That's not the right question. The question is... what are the necessary qualification one has to achieve in order to declare a game as being a success or failure? The whole Diablo 3 fangasm has been pretty 'OK' so far on this forum, I'm nodding at some good and bad points and still withheld my purchase. But 'unqualified' to opine? What?

[Rendakor]

I just don't get this complaint -- this is the way loot has worked in every action rpg since forever.  You're never guaranteed an upgrade at any particular time, but you're guaranteed to find one eventually.  I guess it's true that if you don't like randomized loot, you won't like this game.

Except other ARPGs (I'm really just going to use D2 here) didn't have an AH to make access to good gear very easy. With no AH, even finding shit that's levels below you would eventually lead to an upgrade since drops are the primary (sole?) source of gear. However, the presence of an Auction House changes everything: since the level of loot obtained is always lower level than the player, it is rarely used by the player who obtains it and is instead listed on the AH. Combining this with a lack of soul-binding mechanic (or permanent gear degradation not that I'm encouraging either of these things) to make all gear infinitely reusable and the fact that most affixes are unimpressive, and you end up with a ton of gear on the AH for dirt cheap.

This leads to a situation where you can buy gear that's leaps and bounds more powerful than the drops your finding for very little money. In Normal you might be okay just ignoring the AH and using your drops, but in the higher difficulties that's simply not viable; you need the DPS and Vitality provided by level-appropriate equipment. In D2, you had to make due with what you found or try to trade for it (a much more difficult process than an AH, making self-farmed drops a viable alternative), particularly pre-endgame.

The crafting system (I mean Blacksmithing here, JC is fine) theoretically provides another avenue for gear, but the randomness of it and the relatively high gold cost make using the AH a simply better option. If crafting only took mats and not gold, at least you'd be recycling your drops into potentially more useful drops; the gold cost just makes it so you're screwing yourself over by crafting instead of just vendoring your blues and using the AH. Alternatively, if crafting was much more expensive (in terms of mats and/or gold) but let you have some control over the stats/affixes it would at least have its uses.

[Sjofn]

The monk apparently makes me click WAY WAY WAY more than wizard or DH, because my hand hurts after playing one for a while this evening. 

[Setanta]

Even if it was no-connection needed I doubt I'd rate it over a B-/C+. Item drops killed it completely for me - kill a boss and watch items that are only alt-worthy drop.

Blizzard dropped the ball on this game.

I just don't get this complaint -- this is the way loot has worked in every action rpg since forever.  You're never guaranteed an upgrade at any particular time, but you're guaranteed to find one eventually.  I guess it's true that if you don't like randomized loot, you won't like this game.

What's not to get? I don't care about itemisation on loot, but I do care if I need to be a certain character level to kill a boss only to have loot drop that is 5-6 clevels LOWER than that required level (and is generally shit/lower level) compared to the random blue drops that I used to get that kill. It's not about the random itemisation, it's about the fact that the gear is useless.

Example: My DH does a Butcher kill and Butcher drops a hand-xbow that is 5 levels lower than the shit that dropped off trash and can't compare to what I'm using as while it's stats are nice, they are superseded. It would be nice to be surprised by a piece of loot I can actually use if it fits my class.

[Ingmar]

I'm finding that AH twinking is not really a lot better than just self-twinking by saving drops I got from my first character through. (Which is of course what we all did in D2.)

The only thing where it really seems out of whack is gem prices, and even this probably wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the socketed-weapon-ruby effect.

[Llyse]

I'm finding that AH twinking is not really a lot better than just self-twinking by saving drops I got from my first character through. (Which is of course what we all did in D2.)

The only thing where it really seems out of whack is gem prices, and even this probably wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the socketed-weapon-ruby effect.

The other problem is that upgrading gems costs money which is ridiculous when the upgrading cost is higher than the AH price... they should just make upgrading gems free...

[Margalis]

I'm finding that AH twinking is not really a lot better than just self-twinking by saving drops I got from my first character through.

"Self-twinking" means having to have a second character who is below the level of your first character, and is still gated by the progress on your main character.

AH "twinking" is limited by the level of the single highest character in the entire game, and only requires that there be at least one player in the world at a higher level than you.

It's a major design issue to have a game centered around loot drops where the drops are mostly lame compared to what you can buy. And it's a hard problem to solve. In a game like this where almost every creature you kill drops some loot there is never going to be a scarcity of items that aren't good enough to bother equipping yourself but are really good for someone lower. It seems like the main "fix" is to use willpower and artificially make the game more fun and difficult by not using the auction house. It seems like the most fun way to play the game (for many people at least) is to refuse to use one of the major new systems.

Thought experiment: If there was a set of servers you could join that had no AH how popular do you think that would be? My guess is at least reasonably popular. If you give players the tools to gimp their own fun many players will do that, knowing full well that's what they are doing.

[Maledict]

I'm finding that AH twinking is not really a lot better than just self-twinking by saving drops I got from my first character through. (Which is of course what we all did in D2.)

The only thing where it really seems out of whack is gem prices, and even this probably wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the socketed-weapon-ruby effect.

The other problem is that upgrading gems costs money which is ridiculous when the upgrading cost is higher than the AH price... they should just make upgrading gems free...

Up until radiant squares that is, at which point the cost suddenly shoots up to 80K a game on the Euro servers. Am hoping that the cost to transmute perfect to radiant isn't higher than that.

Was disappointed to find its literally triple the cost to make squares and perfect squad though than buy them off the AH, but then all crafting seems broken that way. They've  said they are looking into it.

[Margalis]

The story is tacked on, the world is tiny and there's little depth in the combat system. Kiting seems like the only thing you can actually do tactics wise, and it's not much fun tbh.

A lot of games suffer from the problem of when you crank up the difficulty the best way to play the game is very tedious or exploity. Especially games where the skill of the player isn't the hugely overwhelming factor. Ideally what you want is when the difficulty goes up the best way to play the game is to kick ass and take names, get great at the game systems, and basically play the game the same way as before only cranked to 11 in terms of execution. But usually what happens is you exploit terrain or invincible frames or kite or do something like that.

[Margalis]

One other thing, about people being old and jaded and such. It's undeniable that D3 has a lot of problems, both technical and design, and that Blizzard of late has been very conservative in terms of game design. And while a lot of people say "Blizzard always just takes existing concepts and polishes them rather than innovating" I don't think that's really true until you get past Warcraft 3. Starcraft was not a complete revolution in design but it was in no way conservative either. Warcraft 3 was different from Warcraft 2 in some very fundamental ways. It's only in the post-WoW era that Blizzard games can accurately be called modernizations of older games.

A lot of that is probably because a lot of people working at Blizzard now are Blizzard fans - rather than making a great new game they love Starcraft or Diablo and want to make one of those. That's not some sort of cynical bean-counter thing, it's just that people who really love some older game are often perfectly happy recreating it rather than making something bolder.

For a $60 game D3 feels a little thin. That's coming from someone who paid more than $60 for some SNES games with his own paper route money. (Phantasy Star 4 for Genesis cost 100 dollars!!) But times have changed and the market has bifurcated - you either have a game that is $60 (and actually $70+) with a ton of production value and modes or, especially on the PC, you have a game that is heavily discounted. That said personally I get annoyed at "this doesn't feel like a $60 game" talk and I'll gladly pay $60 dollars for a fun game that feels like a $30 game (whatever that means) than $30 for some bombastic bore that feels $60. But, just given where the market is at right now, I think it's fair to say that were the game called something other than Diablo 3 and came from a company other than Blizzard most people would expect it to be heavily discounted quickly.

[Ironwood]

I agree with a lot of that.

[Maledict]

Um, I presume you aren't including World of Warcraft in your anology there. That game innovated more than any other post Ultima MMO except EVE and EQ I would suggest, and certainly was a lot more than a "polished" EQ.

[Tebonas]

This gets totally offtopic, and I apologize.

But huh?

I adored WoW, but how was it a lot more than a polished EQ? It was the concept of the Diku honed to perfection. But what was the innovation beyond that?

[Maledict]

Erm, it completely rewrote how the genre works?

Questing to max level?
Viable soloing for all classes?
Random drops off all mobs?
Moddable interface?
Completely redesigned the raid paradigm? (go play PoP or GoD and then run Onyxia)
Scaling damage for casters?
Talent specs? (and Respeccing!)
Complete removal of camping?
Dungeon crawls?
Fully instanced content?

From the major changes they made, to the minor ones (social animations and a working AH!), WoW was actually a really innovative and brave game. Before launch people were convinced that a lot of the above changes would lead to the game having a really short lifespan and lack stickyness. Hell, even 2 years later designers were calling WoW a 'beer and popcorn game' that people wouldn't stick with.

I never understand why people say WoW was just a polished EQ, and it does leave me wondering if people actually played EQ. I did for years, I raid led in EQ for years, and to say WoW is just a polished version of that is to ignore the massive fundamental changes it made to the genre - changes which have since become the standard for every other MMO. Unlike EQ for example.

People who say WoW was just EQ+ seem to have completely forgotten what the MMO market was like at the time, what other MMOs looked like, and the fact that it was generally believed that 450K subscriptions was the max for any online MMO. WoW rewrote the book.