Diablo III

[Lendial]

blizzard knows how to milk gamers.

[Xion Valkyrie]

Originally Posted by Flying Dagger

Alas this is a world ruled by money. Your investors "invest" in you because they trust you can net them a profit, not because they want to be "good samaritans" and contribute to the gaming culture.

And the correct way to tell them that they made an incorrect investment by pissing off players it to not buy the game.

Unfortunately they have their fans by the balls, so it seems like they can do whatever they want and still get their millions of sales.

[Flying Dagger]

Originally Posted by Xion Valkyrie

And the correct way to tell them that they made an incorrect investment by pissing off players it to not buy the game.

Unfortunately they have their fans by the balls, so it seems like they can do whatever they want and still get their millions of sales.

Every major game experience a boycott threat. A lot of people DEMANDED lan and chat rooms in sc2 "or else they wouldn't buy the game".

A good majority of them bought the game anyway. Unfortunately it is worthy to sacrifice 2% of potential buyers at lunch time to gain +20% extra sales (due to anti-piracy model). Eventually as the game scores high in various reviews, and through peer recommendation, 75% of that 2% may end up buying the game anyway, while the reviews attract even more consumers.

//

In a way, what exactly is pissing people off this early when there is still very limited information about the game? Is the plot shitty (but you wouldn't know unless you play it through)? Is the combat system broken? Are there too many bugs in the game to play? The overall theme/genre not appealing? You do not like the art?

"I refuse to buy goods from China because it is a communist country"

A lot of people who detest the RMAH seem to not realize how big of a role d2jsp has on the game. Every single MMO I have played, everquest, runescape, ff11, WoW has a very large (yet "healthy") black market.

There have been countless cases of scam via the usage of third party trading systems. Severe enough that emotional teenagers have committed suicide over the loss of virtual items. RMAH is one method to offer a layer of protection.

Once again, don't like it? Don't use it. Whether RMAH exist officially or not, there WILL be a lot of people who buy items and gold which you spent HOURS to farm up. But what did previous experiences teach us in other mmo's? A majority of those who buy their equipment/characters have next to no skill at the game (PvE/PvP), and over time, people like my friends and I have learned to benefit off the existence of such players to trade in game currency for game time.

Microtransactions is the next evolution to sustaining a profitable model to the gaming industry. Good game requires many years of development which cannot simply be supported by the old business models while still being appealing to shareholders.

I reminiscent the days where a lot of added features came for free, such as new map packs for your favorite RTS. However the development costs and expectations for such added values back then was rather low. Just compare the art from the late-90s to the art of today's games - you will see a significant gap. It is up to the business' judgement to find the right balance: while (hoepfully) shipping out high quality products, games that entertain its players for countless of hours and leave behind everlasting memories.

There is one thing which I have always wanted to see happen in D3 (and even WoW). It is the support to user created content. UMS have been very successful in Blizzard's RTS franchise and I would like to see them implement such a system to their RPGs. Just put a limit in such a way that it is impossible for people to actually "gain" anything from playing those maps (maybe you clone your character over to play a specific dungeon).

[Vallen Chaos Valiant]

See, this is what I don't get...

I am saying the real money auction house is a bad idea not because of ideological debates about greed. Yes, it is greedy to do it, but that isn't the actual elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room is that the DIII trading economy would destroy itself.

Back then with DII, Blizzard has absolute control over the official trading mechanisms. They can manipulate drop rates, and erase things from the world at will if they feel they need to.

But now the DIII system has been chained to the Foreign exchange mechanism. They have effectively floated the Diablo Gold as an official currency, by introducing real life money in the game world.

The result? An inferior game overall when the multiplayer trading scene collapses completely.

There are no winners here. Blizzard is going to get paid only as long as people want to play DIII. But the economy implosion timebomb would ensure it wouldn't last long.

We can argue all you want, but proof is in the pudding. We can have a revisit to this issue when the beta comes out. And if the trading house survive beta, we would see if it survive 3 months after official release.

[Kunagisa]

There seem to be some misinformation here.

Blizzard don't get a cut per auction from RMAH unlike the WoW AH, they only charge a flat fee for putting up auction ONLY if you put up a crapton of auctions (aka farmers), the first xx auctions are free of charge for each week/month (I forgot which period). For the average joes like us, this doesn't effect anything.

Crafting will be the designated gold sink for the gold economy. If you play WoW, all the money you earn from the RMAH can be used as credit for the blizzard store (aka game time etc.). Really as a gamer, I don't see how any of this is greedy; my friend argued this is immoral only because the fee it charges on the farmers (profiting, no matter how minuscule, from people who have terrible working conditions).

I support RMAH, I won't use it, but it's needed against d2jsp. D2jsp is a huge community and it exists because there is a demand for it. Most of you won't buy gear, but you guys are in a separate community. I honestly don't see how there's a better alternative to combat third party real money trading that already exist. If you've played recently, you would know that d2 economy went to shit because of duping, botting, and bugged HR rushes that flooded the market with super high level items. You know it' s stupid when a 4-soc-AP is worth a HR. None of which can happen anymore. If you have no confidence in them stopping these hacks, then that's a totally different can of worm.

Also keep in mind, even manual farming will be harder now that BEST OF THE BEST items drop from the equivalent of 103 level monsters (max level was 99 in d2, which I bet most players never hit, with max monster level of 85). Now you can farm stuff anywhere (at least that's the goal), and not do like millions of Pindle, Act End Boss runs. For your REAL hardcores, you can't even use RMAH as that's only for softcore.

tl;dr: No I'm not "blizz fanboi", no RMAH isn't the most elegant solution but is needed, and D3 is fine (given the current information) and hope to see you guys there when it launches.

[Duo Maxwell]

Originally Posted by stuopidget

tl;dr: No I'm not "blizz fanboi", no RMAH isn't the most elegant solution but is needed, and D3 is fine (given the current information) and hope to see you guys there when it launches.

We will meet after I try it out with my friend to see if the constant connection affect me badly or not.

[synaesthetic]

None of this matters in the face that the game has no mods at all. No mods on a PC game in 2011 is complete epic fail and a gigantic step backwards.

[Keroko]

Originally Posted by stuopidget

Crafting will be the designated gold sink for the gold economy. If you play WoW, all the money you earn from the RMAH can be used as credit for the blizzard store (aka game time etc.). Really as a gamer, I don't see how any of this is greedy; my friend argued this is immoral only because the fee it charges on the farmers (profiting, no matter how minuscule, from people who have terrible working conditions).

Hold on, roll back here. WoW has a RMAH? Since when?

[Xacual]

Originally Posted by Keroko

Hold on, roll back here. WoW has a RMAH? Since when?

I think he means you can use the money earned on the RMAH to pay for your WoW time.

[Waven]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

None of this matters in the face that the game has no mods at all. No mods on a PC game in 2011 is complete epic fail and a gigantic step backwards.

If it's gameplay/content/fullconversion mods then no, these pretty much don't matter that much these days. I remember the number of great mods the Q3 and UT engine spit out but it seems nowadays modders are more or less a dying race.

If what you mean is interface mods/addons like WoW is flooded with then I'll welcome it. These range from tools for lazy people to just plain cheats, I don't think neither are either necessary nor desirable. It just ends in a state where everyone has to use a certain set of addons and players start to become dependant on them.


As for the D3 RMAH: All Blizz has to do is integrate one or more ingame money sinks (something more meaningful and desirable than D2 gamble) as well as introducing new money sinks as time goes by to keep the ingame currency inflation rate as low as possible at all times. This way ingame gold won't lose its value and will keep playing a role in the auction house.

[synaesthetic]

I mean mods like you find on ModDB or The Nexus. Look, devs never get everything right, there's always bugs left over. Leaving the hood unlocked to let the players tinker means a lot of things get fixed, smoothed out--plus you get gameplay/content/TC mods, and yes, they still exist. Just hit up ModDB if you don't believe me.

"Cut content" mods are a good example. Lots of games get rushed out the door by the publisher to meet some important sales period, leaving a lot of half-finished, unimplemented content sitting in the game's data files. Modders can resurrect that content and make the game significantly better--case in point, The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod and killap's Fallout 2 Cut Content Patch.

Then you have full-blown expansions or TCs--notable examples being The Dark Mod (TC for Doom 3), The Nameless Mod and Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age. One of my personal favorites, a HL1 mod, Afraid of Monsters: Director's Cut... there are loads of mods, and not just the silly WoW-style UI mods, either.

[Waven]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

I mean mods like you find on ModDB or The Nexus. Look, devs never get everything right, there's always bugs left over. Leaving the hood unlocked to let the players tinker means a lot of things get fixed, smoothed out--plus you get gameplay/content/TC mods, and yes, they still exist. Just hit up ModDB if you don't believe me.

"Cut content" mods are a good example. Lots of games get rushed out the door by the publisher to meet some important sales period, leaving a lot of half-finished, unimplemented content sitting in the game's data files. Modders can resurrect that content and make the game significantly better--case in point, The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod and killap's Fallout 2 Cut Content Patch.

Then you have full-blown expansions or TCs--notable examples being The Dark Mod (TC for Doom 3), The Nameless Mod and Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age. One of my personal favorites, a HL1 mod, Afraid of Monsters: Director's Cut... there are loads of mods, and not just the silly WoW-style UI mods, either.

All of the examples you present are running on really old engines or are based on old games, the most recent being from 2004 (!) , which was actually my point to begin with that mods are becoming less and less important and more rare on top of that.

I don't know if its the devs not providing the code or even releasing an SDK or if it's the the industry as a whole that is flooding the market with more games than in the past so players don't have "the time" to develop an interest in modded games or even the arrival of the booming f2p games but I see the modding scene that builds on commercial games declining more and more.

You say D3 individually fails for making a step backwards by making the game unmoddable, I say the industry as a whole has made this step long time ago.

[Ithekro]

Starcraft II is modded a lot, and was intended to be modded from the start.

[Waven]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

Starcraft II is modded a lot, and was intended to be modded from the start.

An editor, even as extensive as the sc2 one, is not an SDK. With it people make maps, not mods.

[-Sho-]

Really ?, mod are less important & more rare....

Fallout 3 , The Witcher 2 , Dragon Age 2 , Minecraft , Empire Total War.....

[cors8]

Let's just take into consideration the D3 is intended to be played online. As far as Blizzard is concerned, they don't care about mods for single player since they want people to be logging in and playing on BNET.

As for as UI modding is concerned, I'll wait to see how the interface is myself before criticizing it.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Waven

You say D3 individually fails for making a step backwards by making the game unmoddable, I say the industry as a whole has made this step long time ago.

Console gaming != PC gaming. Plus, big mods take a long time to make, and that's why most of the big mods are for older games. A small handful of guys can't crank out a full-blown TC without a few years to do it.

Also, go search for "fallout 3 mods" or "fallout new vegas mods." Or how about "oblivion mods?" When Skyrim is released, watch how fast The Nexus adds a section for it.

PC gaming's primary strength over console gaming is mods. That, and stupidly high resolutions for those with the hardware to handle it. Blizzard has never been a typical PC game developer, and most Blizzard fans are not PC gamers, but rather Blizzard gamers.

I've known three separate people who have a PC for no other reason than to play WoW and/or SC2. Blizzard is not a PC gaming company. They are a subscription service provider with a pseudo-Apple cult-like following.

[yezhanquan]

I can understand the cult-like behaviour. These are the people who not only play the games, but read information from the expanded universe.

Amng Blizzard games, Diablo's expanded universe is the weakest by far. But, it is still there.

[DonQuigleone]

Regarding Mods, I love mods, I play them all the time (Paradox games get a lot of their product life due to player made mods and tweaks). However in some games they're not as appropriate. In particular large scale multiplayer games like Diablo 2 and 3. In a game like Diablo 2 it's important for all the players to be playing by the same "rules" otherwise it would be unfair if some players had modded copies.

What Blizzard are intending is to integrate the online and offline portions of Diablo 3, and I think this is actually a good way to go. Single player Diablo 3 will be richer for being able to trade your loot. I think the offline/online integration of SC2 also worked quite well.

As an RPG, Diablo, I think, works best as a pseudo MMO. And that's how I think it should be arranged.

If you really want a modded diabloesque game I'm sure there's other engines you can look at. It's getting easier and easier for independent games to get made outside of mods.

As for RMAH, I look forward to selling my excess equipment to fools who are willing to pay real money for it. The real meat of trading has always been barter, and that's not going to change. Though being able to auction for gold and then use the gold immediately might be useful.

Blizzard can keep the value of gold in D3 relatively consistent if it's tied to some usefull service ingame (EG trading gold for experience or something). That way if the value of gold gets too low people will switch to buying the other stuff taking gold out of the system until it's more valuable again.

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

Reason for no mods in D3 is quite simple. With the way they are setting the game up letting people use mods that alter the game world or the character directly would be directly contrary to the level playing field required for what it essentially is an F2P pseudo-MMO. There is really no way around it or a point to argue about it - I won't be the slightest bit surprised if Warden is included in the game. Warden, for those that don't know, is Blizzards anti-cheat software.

Also, lol @ 'mods not being a important part of gaming'. Console gamers lose out on so much because they generally cannot use mods. Some of the best ways to keep an ageing game alive is with mods, ie. the myriad of player made campaigns developed for FreeSpace 2.

Originally Posted by Waven

An editor, even as extensive as the sc2 one, is not an SDK. With it people make maps, not mods.

Starcraft Universe would like to have a word with you about what can be done with a 'map editor'.