Troubling D3 announcement

[pindicator]

I will still buy this as soon as it comes out. The game is still Diablo 3.

I dunno... I said the same thing about civ5

[Lewwyn]

I dunno... I said the same thing about civ5

That was Firaxis, this is Blizzard.

I'm sure there are going to be a few changes, but this is a company that always at the least sends out a complete product. Civ 5 was a joke with how it was pushed out in a terrible, buggy, unbalanced state. None of the above news bothers me that much. Even the money market is something I will embrace. When I played D2 I used to use D2JSP and I would "sell" items on the forum for forum cash and then "buy" items from others. Same concept here only people will be using real money. If I play the game as obsessively as I did D2 I'd probably make enough money for the game to pay for itself. I don't intend to put as much time into D3 as I did D2 for my own sanity's sake, but let me tell you the economic side was a fun game all its own. Having notebooks of inventory in mules and keeping track of people purchasing stuff was a lot of fun.

[ellman]

I dunno... I said the same thing about civ5

I'm worried about the short beta of D3. Its only going to be 1/2 or 1/3rd of Act 1. The the runestone system will not be in the beta too and is still be overhauled. Maybe the increased size of blizzard since D2 means they have been catching a lot of bugs in internal testing? Nah, I bet we'll see a repeat of this.

I like that they're removing skill points. This fits the design goal of having a smaller set of useful and interesting skills, which I think is a good idea. This may make variants less interesting but d1 didn't have skillpoints (or melee/range skills besides auto attack) and people still made hundreds of variants.

I'm sad there isn't going to be a singleplayer. I really liked playing mods in d1/d2 and thats probably not going to be possible. I guess they're removing singleplayer to make the game harder to hack/bot on battlenet? Or maybe its so you can't use offline cheats to get you the best items in the game. Now you have to use battlenet's real money auction house! Battlenet only is probably there to kill piracy completely. Starcraft2 has singleplayer but you have to login to battlenet every few weeks. There's still cracks of Starcraft2 that have got around that. If Diablo3 is like a mmo where the code for attack rating, damage, armor mitigation are stored on the server then even if you could run d3 singleplayer, you would need to fill in the gaps with your own formulas for damage, armor, etc. You would need to "mod" in order to crack the game for singleplayer.

[KingOfPain]

Emotionally, I am saying WTF!?

I am trying to not overthink this, but once it goes down that path, and especially when bliz sees good sales, no telling if (later) decisions for profit will not see changes affecting game play.

I am at least now down grading it from Pre-order ASAP to Wait And See. And if GW2 comes out first, it will be hard for me to find time for 2 games....

[Thecla]

Emotionally, I am saying WTF!?

I agree. After the first shock was over, I could see rationalizing the decision (people are going to do it anyway, better that Bliz provided secure ways to do it, Bliz isn't selling stuff themselves etc. etc.) but in the end I can't reconcile myself to this.

The argument that they put in RMTs because "people want it" rings very hollow. Leaving aside the question of how many people actually want RMTs, we all know, since the first couple of weeks of D1 on b.net, that what most people want is to have their lvl 1 warrior equipped with GPoW/KSoH/ObsZods/RC etc. Plus, Bliz's "butter wouldn't melt in our mouth" claims to the contrary, it's very hard to avoid the cynical POV that the main motivation is really so Bliz can test out the "monetization" waters on b.net; and no doubt there's plenty more to come where that is concerned.

Overall, I'm bitter that, despite their claims to promote legitimate play, Bliz -- in my view -- has gone with the majority of their player base instead. For example, in D2 the DClone and UT could be seen pretty much as rewards for players who used duped/hacked/botted items to make the rest of the game trivial (not that everyone who did UT, say, used dupes, or items that had been acquired by using dupes --- just I'm guessing the vast majority). And then those players get rewarded with further, even more uber, items.

I could see D3 with a RMT AH going the same way, even without dupes, with expansion content accessible to characters with the bestest, most expensivest gear that non-RMT players would be effectively locked out of. But then again why not buy gear if you want, and can afford it (as I certainly will be able to) given that it's an officially sanctioned part of the game? I guess there is no principle any more of non-gameplay monetary factors having no in-game advantage.

Anyway, I'll definitely buy D3 and play it (for how long, we'll see...) But beyond the RMT AH what worries me most about about D3 is the apparently almost total focus of Jay Wilson/Bliz on itemz as the thing that will keep people playing.

[Sareln]

Saw this story wending its way through my usual internet news sources and am happy to find a thread on it at RB .

It's their game, they can do as they please. At the same time, I don't think I'll be playing anything like that with RMT hooked directly into it. I am still keeping an eye on Torchlight 2; it'll probably have a different flair to it, but all I'm really looking for is to punish my mouse

Nerf Now touched on the issue well I think: LINK

[Nicolae Carpathia]

The first Torchlight owned, though it got a bit repetitive later on when the maps got too big.

[Lewwyn]

I thought this comic from Virtual Shackles summed up my feelings on the always online situation:

[Zephirus]

Relax... it´s a matter of time until someone find a way to play it offline and to mod whatever they want... blizzard like it or not...

[CelticHound]

Not if crucial parts of the game (e.g. all the character save/load code) is on the server. Then there's no way to make single player work, without a painful amount of effort.

1. On-line only - I can see that not putting the whole game on the local PC could make it more difficult for hackers to find exploits. Still my gut reaction is "So if I go away for 90 days I lose everything?" That's what switched me over to Titan Quest. (Which I bought on Steam, so I have to be on-line, anyway.)

2. No mods - Certainly Blizzard has the right to do that. I got a 90-day ban for running multiple copies of D2 (with individual legitimately purchased keys). I wasn't thrilled to lose all my characters, but I recognize it was within their rights.

3. Market - Dunno - seems like something I could ignore.

On the whole I'm with Zed and KoP, I'll want to check out a demo first. Torchlight was fun but a touch cartoonish for me. Titan Quest was just my speed, except for a couple issues - one of which I was able to mod away.

-- CH