Game Design Update

[Merusk]

And it sucks with no off line play!  Bastards!!!  Not all of USA has decent high speed internet.

I continue to be amused at the rage on this issue when I was told I was being unreasonable for bitching about it when first announced.

[Ironwood]

I think RMAH at this point is a fucking pipe dream.

[FieryBalrog]

Well, sure, but to enter the system there's an initial cost.  And a recurring cost for every upgrade.

You do realize that all forms of gems drop right? Not just cracked.

All forms ?  Every type of gems drop ?  Because that's not what I had read.  Hmmm.

Everything but the top 2 tiers out of 10.

[Amaron]

This is always going to be an issue, you are never going to have equivalence between a guy relying on his own drops and a guy relying on all the drops in all of North America.

I don't care about some other guy.   The point was that the drop rate is far worse than D2 was.   They did that to compensate for the AH.

[Ingmar]

I don't know if it is *all* types but certainly they drop pretty far up the chain - I've seen as high as square and I'm in act 1 hell.

[Malakili]

 The point was that the drop rate is far worse than D2 was.   They did that to compensate for the AH.

I keep hearing this but is it actually true?  The drop rate for useful gear in Diablo 2 was pretty abysmal.  I just played through with my friend the couple of weeks before D3 came out as a last hurrah and the drops were utter shit to the point where I was gambling to try and get a reasonable bow to use as an amazon in act 3/4.     I doubt the drop rates are precisely the same, but at the same time there is a large amount of randomness in what you get, whether or not it is useful, and so forth and it doesn't strike me that, having just played through D2 normal mode prior to D3 release, there is a great deal of difference in terms of drop rate.

[Amaron]

I keep hearing this but is it actually true? 

Blizz admitted it in a blue post.  It's not so obvious while leveling because you keep finding higher level gear.   When you actually get down to farming 60 stuff though it's painfully obvious.

[Malakili]

I keep hearing this but is it actually true? 

Blizz admitted it in a blue post.  It's not so obvious while leveling because you keep finding higher level gear.   When you actually get down to farming 60 stuff though it's painfully obvious.

Alright, fair enough I guess, but i'm not really sure how in practice I see much difference at this point.  Over the years I got almost total crap in D2, so far in D3 I've gotten also mostly crap at level 60 also, with a few good items between my friend and I that have been playing together.  My feeling is that despite drop rates and loot issues, a huge amount of the problem has to do with the fact that people are remembering their D2 experiencing really really wrong. It isn't like D2 boss runs were regularly spitting out high end items, even in Hell.

[Arinon]

My beef with the AH and balancing around its presence is that advancing in Inferno pretty much requires a decent understanding of the economy and an ability to evaluate the gold value of items for all five classes.  Either that or an insanely unreasonable amount of grinding.

All these well rolled items will stick around forever as well so as the game matures I see the AH becoming the primary source of gear rather than drops.

[Amaron]

It isn't like D2 boss runs were regularly spitting out high end items, even in Hell.

I remember the drop rate as being horrible as well.   The problem was mitigated in D2 though as you'd just jump to act 5 and leech xp until you were strong enough to start getting serious about farming.   With Inferno you're basically forced to start farming crappy gear on purpose.   After you've farmed you're crappy gear you can move to a place where you can farm slightly less crappy gear.   Do that four times and you can finally farm for real.

Doing that with a drop rate even slightly worse than D2 is a nightmare.   Thus ignoring the AH is pretty impossible.

[Azuredream]

farm for real.

What's the difference between farming in a fake manner and farming for real..?

[Amaron]

farm for real.

What's the difference between farming in a fake manner and farming for real..?

Results.

[calapine]

farm for real.

What's the difference between farming in a fake manner and farming for real..?

I think he means fake farming is farming gear so you can farm other gear while farming for real is farming the gear you actually want.

Easy!

[Azuredream]

Even if you're farming gear that lets you farm better gear, it's still progress and something to be happy about. It's like, I have to get to level 2 to get to 3 and onwards all the way to 60, but I'm still happy with each level I attain.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

I don't really see it as "fundamental" change. It just needs BoE items like the AH in WoW. Perhaps that is fundamental to some, but I remember when I first put on an item in D3, and saw I could then sell it later? That seemed wrong to me as a player. Frankly, why they tried to reinvent the wheel on this issue is ridiculous.

The irony here is just mind-fucking-blowing.

Bind on equip is a recent 'innovation' unique to MMOs. No ARPG that I am aware of has ever had BoE or even vaguely equivalent systems (though I haven't played them all, I guess it wouldn't surprise me if some more recent ones have adopted it for the same reason it feels 'wrong' to you as a player.)

Anyways, presumably the hope is that gear inflation will somehow match up with gold inflation in a perfect balance. The comment about how new players will still need to get gold ignores the fact that if gear never cycles out of the game -- and therefore gets cheaper over time for identical gear -- then the amount of gold a new player needs to get in order to buy ideal items will get lower over time. In some theoretically eternally-played version of the game, the lower bound on prices would presumably be the smallest price somebody would bother posting to the AH at all -- i.e. if a 95th percentile rare is worth 500 gold, nobody will bother selling them, or even identifying them.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

It isn't like D2 boss runs were regularly spitting out high end items, even in Hell.

They were when it was a SP game and I could mod the drop rate to something that gave me a remotely pleasant experience playing the game by myself.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Bind on equip is a recent 'innovation' unique to MMOs. No ARPG that I am aware of has ever had BoE or even vaguely equivalent systems

D3 is an MMO

[Sjofn]

Oh Lord.

[Ingmar]

Bind on equip is a recent 'innovation' unique to MMOs. No ARPG that I am aware of has ever had BoE or even vaguely equivalent systems

D3 is an MMO

Calling D3 an MMO stretches the term to the point of uselessness.

[01101010]

D3 is an MMO

Calling D3 an MMO stretches the term to the point of uselessness.

Thought that was the point?

[Paelos]

Yall really are dumb enough to fall for this are you.

ARE YOU?

[Lakov_Sanite]

Not trolling with that.  Take out the first M if you want but diablo is an online game from the ground up.  Yes you can only play with four people at a time but how many people did any of you actually play swtor with or guild wars with? sure wow could be the exception but D3 is as persistant as any modern day mmo, if anything its like mmo-lite with less systems and more monster bashing.

...except the higher level you get, the less monster bashing and more "chip away at health and EVENTUALLY bash a monster" it is.

[Tarami]

Frankly, why they tried to reinvent the wheel on this issue is ridiculous. The WoW [whatever] model was there, battle-tested, and player approved.

It's funny, this. Not just in regards to AH and binding, but lots of small things that have been in WoW for ages yet they manage to reinvent and screw up in some small way. Like item linking, that works badly and sometimes not at all. Chat system, same deal - replies don't work the way they do in WoW. Multiple stacks of potions do not combine in the action slot. No way of purchasing multiple items (like potions, or dyes) at once.

Why didn't you copy these features literally from your most popular game? To me it seems like they didn't dare do things the WoW way precisely because it is WoW.

Then there are inconsistencies, like the salvaging using left mouse button, rather than right (that has cost me quite a few items.) Interaction with dyes is not consistent with gems, eventhough you're trying to do the same thing - use an item on another item. The AH displays stats differently in the tooltip than in the listing (one includes gems, the other doesn't.) Followers can't be respecced without resetting them entirely (and from a weird place, the right-click menu of their portrait.) Several panes and tooltips and frames overlap with eachother in awkward ways (like the AH tooltips).

The UI in general seems to have been programmed by a thousand different monkeys, all with a personal (or no) idea of how it's supposed to work.

Yeah, they're all really minor quibbles, but rub me in that thoughtless, "amateur hour" way.

Even if you're farming gear that lets you farm better gear, it's still progress and something to be happy about. It's like, I have to get to level 2 to get to 3 and onwards all the way to 60, but I'm still happy with each level I attain.

Not necessarily. It might be a progression in survivability, but early farming in Inferno feels like a regression in power. I have no hard data (obviously), but I wouldn't be surprised if early Inferno characters (melee in particular) are superficially less powerful than late Hell ones simply because of the rather hard turn in priorities you have to make. It leads to dumping a lot of abilties that explode shit for abilties that make you take x% less damage and it's a long, boring way to make up for it so you can go back to exploding shit. Inferno isn't a good case for your Average Joe but that's where the farming starts. Normal through Hell can be done pretty much straight on with brief pitstops in the gold AH.

[Rendakor]

D3 is an MMO

trolling is a art

[Jeff Kelly]

Some of those monster affix combos are beyond ridiculous. Had fast, arcane, invincible minions once and vortex molten vampiric.

They should have blacklisted certain broken combinations.

[Sjofn]

But ... but that's the point.

[ezrast]

Every time someone complains about those being broken it's a different set of modifiers. They're supposed to kill you.

Also, D3 has less persistence than most single-player games.

[Jeff Kelly]

To add to the UI complaints, they should have copied more liberally from WoW. It's annoying how many things are worse than in MMO.

I can't select single gems to unsocket so I always have to for example unsocket 3 gems on a chestpiece just to upgrade one gem. AH in WoW is orders of magnitude better and they should at least copied that feature verbatin if nothing else.

In fact they should have used the whole WoW backend code. Load balancing, chat system, AH system and interface, item linking and budgeting, net code. just redo the design to make it not look like WoW for the user visible parts.

They also need to explain to me why the Diablo 3 game launcher urges me to go and buy Diablo 3, I thought I already did.

[Jeff Kelly]

No, they are supposed to be challenging. They are not supposed to be next to impossible to do for certain classes. (Yeah L2P I know, my point still stands)

[Sjofn]

Every time someone complains about those being broken it's a different set of modifiers.

This is so delightfully true. <3

I can't remember the combo of the boss pack I kited for like a half hour, crying the entire time, but it wasn't even that mean. It just happened to be a combo that I, personally, suck against (it was like ... illusionist/vampiric/plagued or something on a naturally fast mob type). What's sort of a bummer is when the mob type is already fast on its own, so sometimes it's like it has a bonus thing to go with its other bullshit.

[Phred]

[
It's funny, this. Not just in regards to AH and binding, but lots of small things that have been in WoW for ages yet they manage to reinvent and screw up in some small way. Like item linking, that works badly and sometimes not at all. Chat system, same deal - replies don't work the way they do in WoW. Multiple stacks of potions do not combine in the action slot. No way of purchasing multiple items (like potions, or dyes) at once.

Why didn't you copy these features literally from your most popular game? To me it seems like they didn't dare do things the WoW way precisely because it is WoW.

Maybe because the programmers for D3 are different people than the ones for WoW? Some of them may even never have played WoW. Was D3 even made in the same studio where WoW is maintained?

[Paelos]

For me it was shielded arcane decorating burrowers. They would drop shit all over creation, burrow, then shield, and you were left with major 5s of actual damage time as they leapt about. Then, when they shielded, you had to dance the dance of life to keep out of the whirly balls of doom and the red glowing pockets of doom.

[Jeff Kelly]

Well the sensible path would be to use as much of the code base of your massively multiplayer game as possible. You know because the code base is proven to be able to handle > 10 million players online at the same time, has most of the backend and social features you want already integrated, is tested and "battle-proven", has gone through countless iterations so that it has most of the features people want and has most of the kinks ironed out.

It would also save you man-decades of work that you would otherwise need to spend to implement and test something that is essentially already there and finished.

If I were project lead for Diablo I wouldn't think twice and try to get my hands on that code base if political infights or other corporate bullshit isn't preventing me from using it. Even if it took some indecent proposals.

WoW's development team needed two or three years after release until they had server spanning auction houses down pat for example, so that they ran without item dupe problems, had no bandwidth and latency issues and it even handles the load from auction skimming add ons like auctioneer. That's a few millions off of your development and maintenance budget that you could save just on that feature. The suits like that.

In fact copy even more. Copy and adapt the maintenance workflow, copy the patch roll out strategies, have workshops with the security and anti-cheating teams from WoW.

I would book people of the WoW team as consultants for as much as I could get away with or until several leads complained if it could save me literally decades of work on back-end issues that I could then spend on game design or content.

[Ingmar]

I tend to doubt that WoW's concurrent numbers are anywhere near 10 million at a time, that's just subscribed people. If I had to guess I'd say D3 concurrent users are probably blowing away the norm for WoW.

[Trippy]

I tend to doubt that WoW's concurrent numbers are anywhere near 10 million at a time, that's just subscribed people. If I had to guess I'd say D3 concurrent users are probably blowing away the norm for WoW.

WoW has had well over 3 million PCU during its heyday.