since we are ragin,g i think the biggest dissappointment with the game that makes it kinda boring is the fact, rare drops are pretty worthless.. I think when a yellow should drop. it should be worth wearing/weilding at that level. So many blue items I have are better than the yellows, and there is just so much of it that has junk stats, that you get so drowned out you think the AH is your answer and becomes that cheap fix.. So far, i have not bought anything on the AH, as I feel thats cheap... but i do see how others complain its needed.... The loot is just too much junk, make it less drop yellow but when it does make it useful.. not sure why rare items are salvaged just as much as blue in nightmare etc..

Great post descender, touches on many of the games problems. I sold all of my stuff on the weekend and hung up the spurs until they flesh out the game and make it fun to play after Hell. It's super boring only having 2 real builds that work with each class. I wasn't really having fun farming any of the items themselves either and they keep making farming itself tedious (How is running packs any different from running bosses or chests?) so meh.

After how much the expansion added to D2 I am hopeful that they can salvage this in terms of gameplay longevity though.

So, D3 SE is basically like that open beta!

There were far more reasons to keep playing D2 though, like... you could go to level 99 and upgrade the skills you actually used along the way. There were multiple viable builds for each class of the game because you could improve the skills you needed to. What is my incentive to keep playing in Inferno (or play it at all, really) once I reach level 60 in Hell? To get my head beat in by mobs that are not even meant to be killed using skills that will considerably diminish in effectiveness as you progress through the acts? Skills that have been mostly crap since I got them and have higher level skill runes that are worse and less useful than the lower level runes?

I'm just getting to the end of hell now with my WD (act 3), regular visits to the AH every few levels have become a necessity to survive in Hell. I already know that there are no more runes I'm intersted in unlocking. I might try one or two but... the "leveling up" part of the game is essentially over for me already. I've re-done a ton of areas playing with other friends and it's taken me almost 50 hours to get to level 57 where I am now. This class is either broken or broken, I'm not sure which. I really tried hard to play as long as I could without touching the AH, because it seems to cheese out like... the entire reason to play the game.... WD seems to rely heavily on landing Soul Harvest to do any significant damage and now I seem to have little ability to significantly heal myself during long fights with elite+ mobs. Single target fights like boss mobs? Forget it, this class is a joke for them.

My Monk just finished Act 2 of Hell. He has half of the play time of my WD to the same area of the game. Half. He does not seem to die, ever... because he can just spam skills and indirectly heal himself. He has a summon that is probably twice as useful (if not infinitely as useful considering what I know is coming in Inferno) as anything I have on my WD.

The first thing everyone jumps at is "oh, obviously you are under geared". Well... I had considered that, but consider this.

The Monk is also 4 levels, 7k HP and 3k DPS behind where my WD was at the same part of the game... and he literally just walks right through everything still. Never dies. For boss fights like Belial it took my WD 30 minutes to kill him in Hell, and almost that in Nightmare... along with numerous restarts because if I got hit with a pool of poison and a fist, that was it I was dead. My Monk stood there and straight boxed Belial to death. I only moved once because I mis-clicked.

I only fear what is to come on the other 3 classes in terms of balance. I can only hope that the WD was the most broken, weakest, most squishy of all of them because... god damn... and I told myself I'd play them all through Normal at least.

I used to yearn for Diablo 2. Now I long for something more like Dungeon Seige 2. Or 1 for that matter. Those games were tons more fun to play than this... Heck, I had more fun playing Hellgate London... and that obviously says alot :/

The more I play this game, the more I feel like they had no idea why people actually played D2 for hours upon end. Handing out skills and runes like this every level is about the worst thing they could have possibly come up with. Obviously the level cap will be increased, and it will cost you somewhere between $15 and $45 each time they increase it (sorry, release DLC *cough*) to be allowed to level up another 10 levels and get more runes you don't want.

It's just an incredibly depressing end-game.

The only thing that is not depressing is that I have made $8 so far in the RMAH. Recouping the costs of playing the game are certainly an attractive prospect... but I'm not sure how much motivation I will have beyond that to "farm for money".

Dev wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 22:24:

HorrorScope wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 20:15:
Your pets can go to town and sell your junk and comeback. Brilliant! That was the k-rap with Arpg's too much going back and forth.

I loved this part of TL. All blizzard needs to do is sell DLC with a premium town pet seller and they'd make a bunch more money. I'd even be tempted.

oh I am sure they have ALL SORTS of plans to take our money!

HorrorScope wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 20:15:
Your pets can go to town and sell your junk and comeback. Brilliant! That was the k-rap with Arpg's too much going back and forth.

I loved this part of TL. All blizzard needs to do is sell DLC with a premium town pet seller and they'd make a bunch more money. I'd even be tempted.

eunichron wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 12:52:

Jivaro wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 11:56:
Torchlight 2 cannot come soon enough. It may have its own problems, but somehow I think those issues will be largely fixable. Diablo 3's issues have more to do with Blizzard as a company and very little to do with the actual game. My ARPG itch can handle being ignored a while longer.

I think I will go spend the money I was holding for Diablo 3 on a bunch of indie games instead. You know, give the money to companies and people that don't make their own self-created problems the customer's problem.

While I'm not going to jump on the Torchlight 2 bandwagon, Diablo 3's flaws as a game don't become apparent until you reach Inferno.

I disagree some.

I can choose SP/Internet or Lan from the start of TL.

I can choose which difficulty I want to start at, not you have to start here in D3, and it's stupid simple.

The players movement is faster and it goes better with an Arpg.

Better performance and will start up if your pc starts up.

Mods.

Your pets can go to town and sell your junk and comeback. Brilliant! That was the k-rap with Arpg's too much going back and forth.

eunichron wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 12:52:
Diablo 3's flaws as a game don't become apparent until you reach Inferno. Luckily for the player population about 98% of them will never bother to step foot in Inferno. Though I would say that up to Inferno, you are correct, Diablo 3 is a great game, and its only faults are the ridiculous measures Blizzard is taking to combat exploiters, hackers, cheaters, and farmers (bots or otherwise).

I disagree. You even pointed out in your post all sorts of things that happen before inferno.
Diablo 3's rubber banding issues screwed me over long before inferno. And those 600% higher repair costs start before inferno. Visits to the AH become almost required before inferno.

etc etc

Ray Ban wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 11:01:
Diablo 3 was supposed to carry on the legacy of Diablo 2.

Hopefully Torchlight 2, Grim Dawn and Path of Exile will succeed where Blizzard failed ...

Gawd, I hope not... I think D3 was a great update to the series... It's just crap that they shoveled in so many 'features' (and keep doing so) that are undesirable.

-Alamar

Tumbler wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 10:58:
This is Diablo 3: Auction House! The auction house is the game, the part where you are clicking and stuff dies, that is just a mini game to let you get resources to play the auction house!

Seriously, after wasting a ridiculous amount of gaming sessions trying to trade stuff at d2jsp, I'd take the auction house ANYTIME.

Honestly sometimes I think they would have been better off just upping the Hell difficulty a bit and never making Inferno. Then just let people farm what they want, people loved the shit out of Diablo 2 despite running the same 3 bosses for eternity. Nightmare was too easy by far, they could have made a better difficulty curve and never needed Inferno.

Jivaro wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 11:56:
Torchlight 2 cannot come soon enough. It may have its own problems, but somehow I think those issues will be largely fixable. Diablo 3's issues have more to do with Blizzard as a company and very little to do with the actual game. My ARPG itch can handle being ignored a while longer.

I think I will go spend the money I was holding for Diablo 3 on a bunch of indie games instead. You know, give the money to companies and people that don't make their own self-created problems the customer's problem.

While I'm not going to jump on the Torchlight 2 bandwagon, Diablo 3's flaws as a game don't become apparent until you reach Inferno. Luckily for the player population about 98% of them will never bother to step foot in Inferno. Though I would say that up to Inferno, you are correct, Diablo 3 is a great game, and its only faults are the ridiculous measures Blizzard is taking to combat exploiters, hackers, cheaters, and farmers (bots or otherwise).

deqer wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 09:09:

PropheT wrote on Jun 21, 2012, 21:31:
Instead of listening to people's complaints

companies don't listen.

they pretend to listen, and feed you with little crumbs of positive-sounding dribble; but big picture is that aren't going to listen to you.

Just wait they throw in a new pet and a new avatar and all is good haha As someone said : Close the Hellgate diAHblo is done

Torchlight 2 cannot come soon enough. It may have its own problems, but somehow I think those issues will be largely fixable. Diablo 3's issues have more to do with Blizzard as a company and very little to do with the actual game. My ARPG itch can handle being ignored a while longer.

I think I will go spend the money I was holding for Diablo 3 on a bunch of indie games instead. You know, give the money to companies and people that don't make their own self-created problems the customer's problem.

briktal wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 11:24:
They deal with it in WoW by doing the exact same thing, except it removes the level restriction. Other services can get away with it more because those issues aren't as common or as big of a deal. There's no flood of fraudulent HL2 or ME3 purchases from botters who will use the account for a day or two then make another. Maybe you'd get some people doing that to hack in an online FPS/RTS or something. But even then, that's just one game that gets a little hurt, but everything else is fine. For Blizzard, Diablo 3 is one of their three current games.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying and fair enough but I don't agree. There's a significant amount of fraud on Steam for example, it might be a different kind of fraud but they are able to combat it through better controls and prevention. In a way the advent of the RMAH almost legitimizes that sort of behavior whereas in the past they had to deal with these issues but much of it was contained on third party sites (such as D2JSP). They also dealt with it in WoW for many years before the Starter Edition was even available and to this day gold spam is still a problem regardless.

This is also yet another poor decision in a series of ones where they are making the classic DRM mistake - negatively affecting consumers in an attempt to fight a third party. Thankfully it looks like they will at least remove the level restriction but I doubt it would have happened without the widespread condemnation across many news sites. This guy said it better than I am:

That's an intelligent question! When you consider that they have created a system whereby players can make money just by playing, they have created a system that rewards the unscrupulous (put in a false CC#, loot and sell in the AH/RMAH, then transfer your loot to another character before the account gets banned).

The humor is that every attempt to weed out the unscrupulous has resulted in more injury to the honest player. It is the logical extreme of any DRM, treating the honest player like a criminal.

This comment was edited on Jun 22, 2012, 11:59.

Verno wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 11:11:
Yeah I feel like the whole fraud defense isn't really much of one. Steam, Origin and other services have to deal with this sort of criminal activity on a daily basis. Blizzard themselves had to deal with it in WoW pretty much from the start.

They deal with it in WoW by doing the exact same thing, except it removes the level restriction. Other services can get away with it more because those issues aren't as common or as big of a deal. There's no flood of fraudulent HL2 or ME3 purchases from botters who will use the account for a day or two then make another. Maybe you'd get some people doing that to hack in an online FPS/RTS or something. But even then, that's just one game that gets a little hurt, but everything else is fine. For Blizzard, Diablo 3 is one of their three current games.

Hahahahahahaha. That's fantastic. So now you spend good money on a game, and they tell you to go fuck yourself for three days.

Keep defending Blizzard, guys. This is all just for the customer's benefit, after all.

Creston

Verno wrote on Jun 22, 2012, 11:11:
Yeah I feel like the whole fraud defense isn't really much of one. Steam, Origin and other services have to deal with this sort of criminal activity on a daily basis. Blizzard themselves had to deal with it in WoW pretty much from the start.

The only logical thing I can think of is that there are very few games where you can profit in real cash like this one (at the moment.)

This makes me think the order of magnitude must be much much higher than those other services, which caused Blizzard to take such a draconian measure.

I think it's terrible, though, and feel they should just not sell it digitally until this is figured out.

Another interesting angle -- a game which requires a persistent on-line connection restricts on-line purchase of the game, but not the off-line purchase. Ahh, the irony..

Yeah I feel like the whole fraud defense isn't really much of one. Steam, Origin and other services have to deal with this sort of criminal activity on a daily basis. Blizzard themselves had to deal with it in WoW pretty much from the start.

Besides, it's not even so much this single announcement as it is a series of very poor decisions that keep screwing the players/customers instead of the people directly responsible. There are dozens of unbanned third party programs that are constantly being used to allow things like gold botting and so on to proceed - get banning already.