f13.net forums - Are you done? Why?

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April 27, 2024, 09:43:50 PM

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Quote from: Paelos on August 22, 2012, 06:29:19 AM

Fast, unchecked growth and actually be more devestating for any corporation than anything. By the time the realization sets in that the corporate culture has been lost, and you've birthed this unwieldy behemoth that's leveraged to the hilt, a bad product release or a turn in the economy can sink the entire ship.

We have posters in quite a few of our stores that speak to the one dissatisfied customer will retell his or her story to nine friends.

On the internet it has to be worse by an order of five thousand.

Even despite the new patch, I cannot enjoy the game at max level. I've realised what I actually dislike is nephalim valour.

I *enjoyed* boss runs in D2. Every 5 minutes tops you got to pull the slot machine level and see what falls out.

Now I have to play for 30 minutes just to max out the potential drop rate, and I feel guilty for logging off. It's an entirely different experience, and I have to say I don't enjoy it anywhere near as much. 30 minutes might be the optimal time for aWoW instance, but Diablo should be much faster and in bite sized chunks.

As someone on another forum put it - games should encourage you to log on, not punish you for logging off.

Quote from: Maledict on August 22, 2012, 12:37:23 PM

I *enjoyed* boss runs in D2. Every 5 minutes tops you got to pull the slot machine level and see what falls out.

Now I have to play for 30 minutes just to max out the potential drop rate, and I feel guilty for logging off.

This is probably my biggest gripe with D3 at the end of the day. Itemization will get fixed, but I really DID enjoy boss runs in. I definitely having to clear an entire dungeon, particularly when playing alone. When I am playing with my friend (which I have more and more) I don't mind the full runs because we use voice chat and we get plenty of shots at good loot as we go. But there is something about sitting down with my morning coffee and blasting out a few mephisto runs before I start my day that I miss in Diablo 3.

EDIT: I should save that this maybe isn't great for the "Are you done" thread. Becomes it doesn't cuase me to not play the game. I do play the game, although admittedly less regularly than before. The difference is that I mainly enjoy multiplayer in D3, while I enjoyed multiplayer and single player in D2. So, the reason I play less is that I just don't always have osmeone to chat and play with. When I do, I enjoy it quite a lot. When I am just doing another solo Maghda run - less so.

Quote from: Maledict on August 22, 2012, 12:37:23 PM

I feel guilty for logging off.

Yeah I get this feeling too.

Quote from: Paelos on August 20, 2012, 04:04:56 PM

That's cause it's stupid. Nobody who follows games believes gaming journalism is actually journalism.

It's not journalism it's a way of life!
http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/8/21/3245100/polygon-press-reset-teaser-trailer

If anyone cares about the followup on Wilson's impulsive facebook insult, he has posted a wall of text apologizing for it:

Quote

As many of you probably know, I recently made a comment on Facebook about Dave Brevik. I want to make it clear that I am very sorry for what I said. I have higher expectations for myself than to express my feelings in such a rash way and disrespect a fellow developer like Dave, someone who deserves to be treated with greater respect.

What I said was expressed out of anger, and in defense of my team and the game. People can say what they want about me, but I don't take lightly when they disparage the commitment and passion of the Diablo III team. Dave is awesome. In Diablo and Diablo II, he made two of the games that have most affected me as a developer. I respect his vision for Diablo, but just like he said in his interview, the Diablo III team must drive a vision for the game that is true to us. We believe in Diablo and have stuck by it through years of hard development to make it a reality.

The foundation of the Diablo team was built from the remnants of Blizzard North: Our lead programmer, who built the basis of the Diablo III engine while at Blizzard North; our lead tech artist, who drove much of the combat visuals, FX, and skill direction of our classes and is one of the most avid Diablo II players you can find; our lead concept artist, who helped establish the core look of the game; Wyatt Cheng, our senior technical game designer, who writes many of our blogs and works tirelessly on the live game. All these people and many others made the commitment to Diablo even after Blizzard North shut down. It was hard for me to see their contributions be diminished by someone they worked alongside, and even harder for me not to try to jump to their defense. I only wish I'd done so in a more professional manner.

Joining the Diablo team was a dream come true for me. In my house, the name Diablo was always spoken in hushed tones. It meant late nights that turned into early mornings, moments of pure adrenaline and pure joy. It meant countless conversations, debates, scouring websites for good builds, and more than one or two sick days. :) When Diablo II was released, I took a week off work and sent my wife out of state... and she was pregnant at the time! I played Diablo II with my dad during one of the most difficult times of his life, and the experience brought me closer to him, and I hope helped him through it. I joined the Diablo team because the idea of a world without more Diablo seemed like a pretty crappy world to me. I wasn't sure if I'd be good enough. I'm still not sure. But I felt I had to try.

Regardless of how I've done, my team has been more than good enough, and I'm proud of the game we made together. We believe it's a great game. But Diablo III has flaws. It is not perfect. Sales mean nothing if the game doesn’t live on in all of our hearts, and standing by our games is what Blizzard does. Patch 1.0.4 is a step in the right direction, but we have no illusions that our work is done.

Playing Diablo III needs to be a rewarding experience. The new legendaries are a big step in the right direction, as are tweaks to item drop rates. But I'm not convinced that we've gone far enough. If you don't have that great feeling of a good drop being right around the corner -- and the burst of excitement when it finally arrives -- then we haven't done our jobs right. Out of our concern to make sure that Diablo III would have longevity, we were overly cautious about how we handled item drops and affixes. If 1.0.4 hasn’t fixed that, you can be sure we'll continue to address it.

Part of the problem, however, is not just item drops, but the variety of things to do within the game. Many of you have stated that there needs to be more to the game than just the item hunt, and we agree completely. The Paragon system is a step in the right direction, giving meta-progress for your time in the game, but it does little to address the variety of activities you can do while playing. I don't think there’s a silver-bullet solution to this problem, but I do think we can make this aspect of the game better, and as such we're planning more than just PvP for the next major patch. Not trying to be coy, but we're still firming things up and will talk about this as soon as we can.

Difficulty has been a constant source of division when discussing the game. Some players believe Diablo has never been about crushing challenges, but more about efficiency and farming. Some players want a game that tests them to their limits. Neither player is wrong. As it stands, Diablo III simply does not provide the tools to allow players to scale the game challenge to something appropriate for them. We set Inferno as the high watermark and took a one-size-fits-all approach to game challenge. Later in the development of Diablo II, the 'players 8' command -- which let people set monster difficulty -- was added to address this issue, and we're considering something similar for the next major Diablo III patch to allow players to make up their own minds about how hard or how easy is right for them.

The Auction House has also proven to be a big challenge. It adds a lot of power for players to trade and acquire items. Getting a great Monk drop that you can trade for better gear for your Wizard is obviously a great benefit, but it does come with a downside. The Auction House can short circuit the natural pace of item drops, making the game feel less rewarding for some players. This is a problem we recognize. At this point we're not sure of the exact way to fix it, but we’re discussing it constantly, and we believe it's a problem we can overcome.

While these are some of the major issues with Diablo III, they aren't the only things we're looking at. On a daily basis we ask ourselves if the classes are satisfying to play, if rares and champions are fun to fight, if they’re tuned well relative to normal monsters. Can we make further improvements to social elements of the game? How can items be even better?

We made Diablo III because we believe in the Diablo games. We think the gameplay is awesome, the world is compelling, and it's the game we all wanted to play. Because we believe in it, we'll continue to stand by it and make it better. We are committed to making Diablo III the best Diablo game to date, and we hope you'll continue to help us do just that.

Saying that, I'd like to apologize to all of you, the players in our community. You deserve better than my reaction to Dave's comments. You deserve more honest communication about the game and what we're doing to make it a more awesome experience for us all. We care about Diablo very much, and appreciate your passion for it. Without you, we wouldn't be able to do this, and for that I can't thank you enough

Alright, I can accept that.

Fair enough then. But I think he needs to follow the producer that fucked up Civ V out the door.

Not enough of a Mea Culpa for me. I mean, making a game that doesn't grab me like their title from over a decade ago when I was still in fucking high school isn't their fault. I'm a manchild now instead of a child and despite how mad it makes me I'm just not the same person I was then. Nothing will give that same feeling that having a lan party with like a half-dozen friends for a solid week did with D2. I'd have been sold on a D3 that was basically not-quite-as-good-as-D2-but-still-great.

But we just got this honestly soulless, joyless endeavor that kinda tricks you into this feeling that you're getting into something awesome...then it never gets awesome. I haven't logged in for probably 2-3 months?

You didn't just not make the game that Dave would've made, you fucked it up. You can snicker about his shitty track record but you made a game that actually made people wonder how Dave would have done it.

Quote from: Fabricated on August 22, 2012, 07:31:54 PM

You didn't just not make the game that Dave would've made, you fucked it up. You can snicker about his shitty track record but you made a game that actually made people wonder how Dave would have done it.

Ell no, he didn't make the game Dave made. Dave made Hellgate:London. Diablo 3 has been a big disappointment, but it isn't even close to that pile of absolute crap.

Quote from: Lorekeep on August 22, 2012, 04:40:02 PM

Alright, I can accept that.

I don't. He made the game all about the AH and denied the basic principal. Now he's been caught out being an arrogant dick and he's all "it's about the drop".

It took him longer than almost everyone else in the community to realise the basic premise behind a successful ARPG - fuck me, even Titan Quest got it right first time!

Yeah, I'm sorry, but that's a whole load of bullshit paragraphs amounting to nothing.

You didn't just reveal your utter contempt of what you do and who you do it with, you revealed exactly who you are as a person and you can't really apologise for that with mealy mouthed, 'Oh, no, wait, I really love Dave'. You also make it clear that you STILL don't understand what you made and what you did wrong. Seriously. There's nothing in there that's personal at all. Bullshit PR Statement is Bullshit.

What a retard.

"But I worked really really really hard on it, it MUST be good! Let me talk about all the 'great people' who worked on this thing and how 'awesome' they all were!" - like everyone in games/movies ever when asked to talk about a project people consider a failure

I'm pretty sure that at least 50% of the cast/crew who made "House Party 3" worked pretty hard on it and believed in their project in some way. They still made House Party 3. Sadly, we don't live in the world where quality is directly proportionate to effort put into something. Your crew can be AAA talent, love the property, put in 80-hour workweeks for a half decade, and still churn out a pile of mediocrity. Maybe you didn't get the memo about the world not being fair.

Server down, Aussie prime time once-a-fucking-gain!

So Patch tuesday - Aussie Prime - used to only being able to play a Blizzard game 6 days a week

Drop-outs/de-synchs wednesday when I retract my "I'm over it" stiff-necked attitude

Thursday "unscheduled scheduled maintenance" Aussie prime time

He can take his crap and shove it - this game should have been offline/online aka Diablo 2.

The one thing that has stopped me buying MoP? Diablo 3 - I have no faith in Blizzard at all anymore.

Yeah. I like Pandas and I like Zerg, but this Activision Company is just .. Wow, they're bad.

Quote from: Setanta on August 23, 2012, 12:51:43 AM

Quote from: Lorekeep on August 22, 2012, 04:40:02 PM

Alright, I can accept that.

FATE didn't. It was pretty successful.

Quote from: Ironwood on August 23, 2012, 02:30:16 AM

Each week that I spend on these forums finds me agreeing with you about, well everything, more and more Ironwood.

When your "apology" contains 5 paragraphs of self-congratulatory wank then it's not really a fucking apology is it.

Ironwood speaks the truth succinctly.

I wish I'd gotten a similar apology out of WoW. I think yall are hammering him because you hate his guts and the game. The actual message seems to address the points about the problems of the game pretty well. It also admits in places that they aren't sure how to fix things, but they are going to work at doing it.

I really had little to no idea who his guts were before all this. I really, really do dislike the game, but I think it falls down on two fundamental pegs that are utterly Unfixible and he knows it.

1 - AH. It shouldn't be there. At all.
2 - Online Always. That was retarded from the start.

The other minor problems are Loot, which is utterly shittastic and skills, which are also BAD.

I'm not surprised he has no idea how to fix it. It's clear that these two 'design' decisions came down from on high to be all about the moolah and they implented them in, well, an awful way. I can't really think of any GOOD ways, though, so what do I know.

For me, it's like a house with really, really shitty foundations. I have this image of him talking about 'his first castle that he built on the swamp. They told him not to, but he did it anyway. It sunk into the swamp.'

In short, Fuck that Loser.

I guess that's always where we're going to disagree. There are people that hate the AH, and there are people that enjoy it. If you hate it, it's never going to be right for you.

The online decision simply stems from the AH implementation.

Quote

The Auction House has also proven to be a big challenge. It adds a lot of power for players to trade and acquire items. Getting a great Monk drop that you can trade for better gear for your Wizard is obviously a great benefit, but it does come with a downside. The Auction House can short circuit the natural pace of item drops, making the game feel less rewarding for some players. This is a problem we recognize. At this point we're not sure of the exact way to fix it, but we’re discussing it constantly, and we believe it's a problem we can overcome.

I'm almost surprised they even admitted this. Anything useful they implement will be seen from above as negatively impacting the RMH. I thought they'd just quietly ignore it forever.

Quote from: Paelos on August 23, 2012, 07:00:10 AM

The guy sent his pregnant wife out of town because a game he wanted to play was coming out, and admits to it in order to show his love and devotion for the game that he completely fucked up and still STILL doesn't understand what's wrong with it.

He's sorry, all right. Sorry he got caught. He's a a sorry excuse for a human being.

Nevermind, forgot this was the hate thread. Back to my patch thread.

So it's a basic apology and then multiple paragraphs about how the game is fucked up at places to try and bring people's attention away from the facebook posts and back onto the game. Yeah, he's just sorry he got caught, and now we know he's either an ass who sends his wife away while pregnant to play a game or willing to look like an ass if it means people will believe he's devoted to a game.

If the game absolutely have the auction house because Jesus Christ decreed that there must be one, then there must be a functional economy. You can't just drop in an auction house in a game and expect a good economy to spring up around it. Auction House facilitates economy by making markets more efficient. They really need to put on their big boy pants and put some serious gold and equipment sinks in the game.

As well as gold and equipment sinks, they need to find an iron clad way of detecting asshole botters.

Quote from: Ironwood on August 23, 2012, 07:37:47 AM

You need to bundle inferno in with the AH bullet point as w/o the one the other is impossible.

I like the patch changes for the most part. I am mildly enjoying playing some, I am just pretending that the AH does not exist at all, in either form. So basically I plan on playing occasionally instead of not at all ever. I certainly will never spend a dime on the AH, and I definitely will not buy any additional future content for this game.

Edit: Instead of grinding gold for gear i turn everything into raw mats, and have had some mild success turning out gear for my lower level characters using the crafting system, Ive even made a couple of useful pieces for my wizard in inferno.

P.S. I am hopelessly addicted to PoE. I cannot believe how much fun I am having with it and it's not even finished.

The bits of the letter apologizing for the state of the game are fine. I like mea culpas. He's still an arse for losing it on Facebook over comments that just weren't that harsh. Something this letter should have been entirely devoted to, and no more.

Not that I really care as I have no investment in D3, but I think that's why it rubs people the wrong way.

Quote from: Lantyssa on August 23, 2012, 08:53:45 AM

Agree. I've already written off the game because it has problems on a fundamental level that they are now saying in hindsight is a bad thing -- reminds me of Mass Effect 3. I wanted to see a letter that should have been about him and only him rather than an additional commentary on the game, but his identity is uncontrollably linked with Diablo III and Blizzard's name and reputation, which was what led to such an uproar in the first place.

I agree with the more direct assessments of that apology letter, like how sending his wife away to play a game somehow shows greater devotion and love. That's rationalization I expect from an addict and somehow I don't expect any gamer to question because they love their games more than anything else in the world. Passion's a funny thing.

I can't stay angry -- only cautious and more mature when the inevitable next incident occurs. I'm quicker to forgive than most, considering my own struggles with emotional control and the realizations I have afterwards.

Wait, are we seriously taking the wife thing at face value?

Knowing the passion of game developers, I believe it. I'm sure the wife isn't happy about it, especially if she didn't know.

I mean, if he was lying about that, then that'd throw me back into Fuck That Loser camp forever and ever.

OK the options are not only 'he really sent his pregnant wife away' and 'he's lying!'

There is also the extremely likely option of 'it's a joke'. One she's probably in on.