Complaints, gripes, kvetches...

[Paelos]

Here's some more info on the melee/ranged disparity.

[Paelos]

I will point out that in that melee/ranged disparity they used my least favorite word of all time in regards to development.

Guess which one!

[Miasma]

Either "BEES!!!" or "meaningful"...

I'm melee and I don't like the repair cost "fix" either.  I get pissed off enough when I die as it is, I don't think that change will stick around very long.

[Xanthippe]

It's a shitty way to 'fix' the disparity. Way to make me not want to play inferno even more.

[Paelos]

It is "meaningful."

Any time a developer uses that word, I automatically know they've lost touch with reality.

If players are zerging mobs because they are dying too much, the answer isn't to make dying cost more. The answer is looking at why players are dying so much. Are they undergeared? If they are undergeared, why? Is there a problem with lower levels of distribution?

Often these questions bring up much deeper problems with the system. Punishing players for dying too much doesn't make the problem go away, it just puts a brick wall at the end of the line for many people.

[Xanthippe]

If players are zerging mobs because they are dying too much, the answer isn't to make dying cost more. The answer is looking at why players are dying so much. Are they undergeared? If they are undergeared, why? Is there a problem with lower levels of distribution?

Obv they need to l2p amirite?

[Paelos]

Or even better, don't make zerging a viable strategy. Once you're off screen, have the mobs regen health completely. That would stop it more than just zerging around like an idiot.

[Xanthippe]

Another complaint I have read about on the general forum:

Diablo 3 has a problem with the old Diablo 2 trade scam. Many posts by players who got ripped off.

You'd think they would have a safeguard built in.

The general forum makes me hate the Diablo 3 community as much as I hate the WoW community. I recall a time when the WoW community was actually moderated (the first year or maybe two?) by real people, both forums and online. (I was warned by a CSR for typing "fuck" on public chat). Frankly, I don't understand why they can't pay an intern minimum wage to police /general chat for a while to get rid of the gold sellers, particularly since /reporting them doesn't put them on one's ignore list, and the devs decided to force people into /general every time one logs in.

Clownshoes.

[rk47]

Here's some more info on the melee/ranged disparity.

[Phred]

I'll be honest, I don't think it's because they designed around the AH, I think you're just seeing what happens when a Developer focuses on an MMO so intensely for 7 years.   It's a lack of talent and ability to think in the style of other games, nothing as Machiavellian as funneling people to the AH.   

The MMO thought and design process for encounters has bled in to the other studios and it really shows in Diablo III.   It's a current-gen DIKU in all but the loot drop mechanics.  The scripted encounters, the need to gear up or be splattered, the need to use specific skill rotations and combinations to succeed.   If you had a shared interaction space you'd be hard pressed to call it anything but an MMO.

I see absolutely no evidence that they used any of their mmo designers on D3. Otherwise how do you explain all the basic noob mistakes they've made?

[Merusk]

I'll be honest, I don't think it's because they designed around the AH, I think you're just seeing what happens when a Developer focuses on an MMO so intensely for 7 years.   It's a lack of talent and ability to think in the style of other games, nothing as Machiavellian as funneling people to the AH.  

The MMO thought and design process for encounters has bled in to the other studios and it really shows in Diablo III.   It's a current-gen DIKU in all but the loot drop mechanics.  The scripted encounters, the need to gear up or be splattered, the need to use specific skill rotations and combinations to succeed.   If you had a shared interaction space you'd be hard pressed to call it anything but an MMO.

It sure seems designed around the AH to me, given the drop rates of gear to use for the next act (which seems to approach zero).

Which also mirrors their MMO-Endgame philosophy.  You don't kill bosses now to be able to kill the next tier.  You kill them for loot that makes it easier on THIS tier.  Then you go to the next tier and spend the required time wiping and struggling for loot, incrementally upgrading until it gets easier and easier.

If WoW allowed all gear to be sold on the AH you'd see the same thing.

I see absolutely no evidence that they used any of their mmo designers on D3. Otherwise how do you explain all the basic noob mistakes they've made?

The same designers don't have to be used for a philosophy to be company-wide. Just the same bosses.  I see it all the time here. One guy oversees the design studio so while all the projects look different and have different programs, if you know what to look for you quickly see they all have the same language.

[apocrypha]

If players are zerging mobs because they are dying too much, the answer isn't to make dying cost more. The answer is looking at why players are dying so much. Are they undergeared? If they are undergeared, why? Is there a problem with lower levels of distribution?

But they're already addressing that - they're reducing the damage in Acts II-IV, reducing the extra damage for more players *and* improving loot distribution in Act I.

The insta-heal if mobs go off-screen idea would be a shitty way to fix death zerging since there'd be so many times that would happen accidentally. Plus punishing the occasional death by forcing you to start on a pack all over again doesn't sound like much fun either.

The current repair cost is only prohibitive because of the frequency of deaths. Reduce that frequency and increasing the cost has no net effect if they get the numbers right.

[Ingmar]

I'll be honest, I don't think it's because they designed around the AH, I think you're just seeing what happens when a Developer focuses on an MMO so intensely for 7 years.   It's a lack of talent and ability to think in the style of other games, nothing as Machiavellian as funneling people to the AH.   

The MMO thought and design process for encounters has bled in to the other studios and it really shows in Diablo III.   It's a current-gen DIKU in all but the loot drop mechanics.  The scripted encounters, the need to gear up or be splattered, the need to use specific skill rotations and combinations to succeed.   If you had a shared interaction space you'd be hard pressed to call it anything but an MMO.

Other than the scripted boss encounters, everything you say is also true of D2.

[Maledict]

The concept that 'the game begins at max level' is *totally* foreign to Diablo and has been brought over wholesale from WoW. Heck even he level cap is the same.

In diablo 2 you could start farming once you hit nightmare mode, and indeed many players never even went into hell. We used to call nightmare mephisto the 'shopping trolley'. In d3 it's *impossible* to farm until you hit max level because of the drop rates and requirement for Nephalim valour.

In essence, because of the dumb drop rates thee entirety of nightmare and hell mode is a speed bump on the way to max level.

[kildorn]

I could have sworn the D2 game began when your build's skills became available, and until then you were just kind of suffering through not having spent any points (this changed in later patches when they figured out that was stupid gameplay)

[Khaldun]

I think I hit the wall today. Just could not get interested in playing the game. I see too much of the same things that have bored me silly in WoW. Zynga-esque operant-conditioning hooks with almost no tactically interesting play. Do ideal rotation, get loot; if tough mobs, kite, get loot; if really bad combination, kite, evade and move on.

[MuffinMan]

I think I'm taking time off until the new patch. Even if I forget and don't play again until an expansion, I consider 70 hours worth the $60.

[Merusk]

I'll be honest, I don't think it's because they designed around the AH, I think you're just seeing what happens when a Developer focuses on an MMO so intensely for 7 years.   It's a lack of talent and ability to think in the style of other games, nothing as Machiavellian as funneling people to the AH.   

The MMO thought and design process for encounters has bled in to the other studios and it really shows in Diablo III.   It's a current-gen DIKU in all but the loot drop mechanics.  The scripted encounters, the need to gear up or be splattered, the need to use specific skill rotations and combinations to succeed.   If you had a shared interaction space you'd be hard pressed to call it anything but an MMO.

Other than the scripted boss encounters, everything you say is also true of D2.

I hated (and still do) D2 and never got through more than the 1st boss of Act1 without hacking into the end. Even then I didn't find the 'end' fun, so I wouldn't have a frame of reference there.

What Kild just said sounds a lot more like what I've heard D2 players say over the years than relating it back to current MMOs. 

[Rokal]

My Inferno Act 2 progress on my Barbarian was short lived. I think I just got lucky on rare/champion mob modifiers for the first few times I stepped into Act 2. Ever since then it's been bullshit like shielding fast horde bees. My response to that pack in particular was to run back to the waypoint and exit the game for the night.

I generally like difficult games, but Diablo 3 feels like a JRPG where the solution to any difficulty is "grind more" rather than "get better". There is no room to get better when the game, as melee, is about stacking defensive items and abilities until you can brute-force the content. The gameplay is visually/audibly satisfying, but underneath that shiny exterior it's really not any better than hotbar MMO combat (and is in some ways less satisfying than combat in something like WoW).

I did have fun in Inferno act 1 though. I think the loot system finally starts working at that point. Maybe after they make the 1.0.3 changes the rest of Inferno will just just as fun/addictive. At this point I haven't logged in for about a week and have instead been catching up on Netflix.

[Setanta]

With Hell being as far as I've progressed (54 Barb and a 40 DH in NM) I think I'm done with the game.

I'm sick of the reliance on the AH to progress. Progression should come from what I do, not what others do.
I'm sick of shitty drops
I'm sick of boss fights being meaningless
I'm sick of affixes that take away skill from the equation. No seriously - you beat that champ by running from it?
(I'm also sick of bees)

The honeymoon is over.

[Sjofn]

Another complaint I have read about on the general forum:

Diablo 3 has a problem with the old Diablo 2 trade scam. Many posts by players who got ripped off.

You'd think they would have a safeguard built in.

How are they getting ripped off, out of curiousity? You can trade stuff without dropping it on the ground, but I don't think many people even realize that.

[Rendakor]

Like Setanta I think I'm putting D3 down for a while. Made it to Act 2 Hell on my ~55 Wizard, and haven't logged on in more than a week with no real interest in doing so. I could give a long list of reasons why but most of them have been repeated ad nauseum so I'll just say that kiting elite/champions around for 20m is not fun. Running around Normal and NM in nearly perma-Archon and turning packs of mobs into loot pinatas was awesome, however that playstyle is simply not viable in Hell nor (I imagine) Inferno.

That said, I had fun and will probably come back once they fix some problems. In all honestly this is about as far as I got in D2 (never made it past Act 3 NM).

[Xanthippe]

How are they getting ripped off, out of curiousity? You can trade stuff without dropping it on the ground, but I don't think many people even realize that.

Using the trade UI. They take their item out after putting it in and hitting accept, then they hit accept. (via macro). They do this after hitting cancel on the trade a few times to make the other guy think there is a glitch and to take them off guard.

Not sure why people trade rather than use the auction house.

[Sjofn]

Bleh!

But yeah, that's one more point for the AH I guess.

[Yegolev]

Did someone complain about being put into General chat whenever the game starts?  I'm doing it.

[Setanta]

Did someone complain about being put into General chat whenever the game starts?  I'm doing it.

Yup - and when you report spam/farmers and shitty little 12yo's with foul mouths, it doesn't block future spam from them. FFS Blizzard, you had this in WoW, would it be too hard to implement?

[Phred]

Did someone complain about being put into General chat whenever the game starts?  I'm doing it.

Yup - and when you report spam/farmers and shitty little 12yo's with foul mouths, it doesn't block future spam from them. FFS Blizzard, you had this in WoW, would it be too hard to implement?

Appearantly it's a bug. Reporting spam is supposed to ignore them too. I guess it got very little testing as without being forced who in their right mind would join general.

[Dren]

They can have their General chat in all its own glory, but if I leave I don't want to be automatically put back in it the next time I log in.  That is getting really old. 

If anyone knows of a setting that will give me my wish, I'll think of you fondly.

[Pennilenko]

I believe that there are some really legitimate complaints about the game here, and certainly there are things that need to be addressed, but good god some of you(and i mean a few) are seriously delusional about how terrible you are at the game.

[Amaron]

but good god some of you(and i mean a few) are seriously delusional about how terrible you are at the game.

What?  I don't remember a single complaint that could of been alleviated by being a better player.

[MuffinMan]

That's a lot of words when you can just type l2p.

[Margalis]

I believe that there are some really legitimate complaints about the game here, and certainly there are things that need to be addressed, but good god some of you(and i mean a few) are seriously delusional about how terrible you are at the game.

Yeah, because higher skill will somehow make you avoid error 37, fix in-game lag, fix drop tables, change the game back to a loot game from a money collecting game, fix UI issues, make you not join gen chat at startup, etc.

The only type of player skill that would address the complaints in this thread would be enough skill to program your own better game.

[Lightstalker]

Having been encouraged into ever more unbalanced builds to continue progressing as a Wizard...  I just have to say FFS, understand your own game.  I just don't have the mitigation abilities to make anything else viable, most of the wizard abilities are about controlling time and space and I die quickly when the opposition negate that control (grab-smack combo kills, charging from off-screen, teleport and vortex).  When you are in melee you don't care how fast things move, you don't care how much they bounce you around (within limits, ground effects are much more important).  You are already assuming you are going to take hits and not just 1 or 2, your entire class is built around mitigating the damage those hits cause rather than the ability of the opposition to deal those hits at all.  When you've got a passive ability called Glass Cannon it really isn't sensible to complain when people play glass cannons. 

I don't think these guys are qualified to work on this game.  They rebuilt an old game, made it pretty, but still don't understand what made it work in the first place.  Somebody kickstart Diablo 1 so I can play offline again. 

I can boost DPS, but I cannot boost health or mitigation into a viable level with the available gear that drops or I can afford on the AH.  When single hits clock in at over 250k pegging my life total at 30k or 50k is largely irrelevant.  Across those life totals I do have a relevant decision to make, I can have 30k or 15k DPS which certainly impacts my ability to mitigate incoming damage (by melting mobs before they get to touch me).  Blaming players for making due with the tools you have made available is really weak tea.   

[KallDrexx]

This is fucking stupid.  I just got back from a 2 week vacation and load the game up.  I'm not even looking at loot anymore, I just pick up anything blue + and immediately vendor it because it's shitty compared to what I paid 5k in the AH before I left. 

Seriouisly, this game needs to scale shit to your level (with a % modifier based on what difficulty you are playing).  It's stupid that at level 21 in act 2 my monk just got my first legendary, a crappy level 14 bow......

Sure I can try and just play the game without going to the auction house, but I have literally never gotten one item my level since about halfway into act 1.  So sure, I could intentionally gimp myself ignoring thet auction house so that I'm always wearing loot that is 5-6 levels below me, but that's just as dumb.

[calapine]

I don't see the problem, once you play Inferno - Act III you get loot for your level!