Diablo III

[Skane]

Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant

~~ The Beta would be fun to watch; let's see how Blizzard tries to run a dual currency economy properly, when most real world nations have no idea how it could be done.

This. It's going to be entertaining to see the implosion.

The Greed of Mankind.

[NervZero]

Diablo was one of the best games i ever played back in the day.. I remember playing with a friend of mine on the PlayStation version and then graduating to the online world... Diablo 2 was also a good game, tons of fun... But the problems with Diablo III are going to be the same as Star Craft II.. Which were:

1) Rushed release (even though they have been working on it forever... It will still be super buggy.... and SUPER imbalanced...) Time to milk the cash cow MOOO!

2) Smaller party sizes.. Although smaller parties were cool with the PlayStation version having only 3 or 4 people in a game at one time might kind of suck... What made the online play so much fun was running around with a ton of my clan mates..

3) NO OFFLINE.. although this is news to me it will cut down on the fun for the people who just want to play through the story.... Although we all know why they are doing it stupid hackers!!!

4) Activision... need i say more?

5) hmm.... BlizzVision....

[Xacual]

Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant

It seems to be as everything else in the game is region locked. And also, you can only have a maximum of 10 characters per account. Which is just silly as then you can't even have one character for every gender and class.

I just had to comment on this, there's only 5 classes and 2 genders = 10 characters.

[Vallen Chaos Valiant]

Originally Posted by Xacual

I just had to comment on this, there's only 5 classes and 2 genders = 10 characters.

Ah, my mistake.

Though one wonders why the restriction even exists. Is it because they are keeping everything on the server now instead of having the characters kept on the player PC?

[felix]

Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant

Ah, my mistake.

Though one wonders why the restriction even exists. Is it because they are keeping everything on the server now instead of having the characters kept on the player PC?

Oh please, we're not in the 80' anymore glaring in wonder over a kilobyte. You character information isn't that big of a deal, and hardisk space is nothing. I know everyone likes to jump on the "but the server will get overloaded" bandwagon each time database resources come into discussion, but the truth is the servers only get overloaded from complex queries that hit a lot of records; getting your character information isn't anything special—particularly on modern servers with modern database systems. I'm sure there will be some hicups, but they will probably be mostly hardware/netcode related, not database related.

tl;dr the limit is completely arbitrary

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

This is how my thought process went:

YAY DIABLO 3!

... online only, have to be connected to b.net, real-money trading auction house, no modifications...



YAY TORCHLIGHT 2!

Aye, Torchlight 2 is on my "getto" list. The first Torchlight was a refreshing bit of fun.

[Kyero Fox]

We have bad econemy and they decide to do the real money thing? Tell me how and why they even thought of this...

[Kafriel]

^ Because they gotta make money from somewhere! Do wonder how much Blizzard net annually just from SC2 and WoW...and how much they spend on everything.

[felix]

I think I heard about how SC2 didn't do so well as they hoped; might explain the recent F2P move they are going with it.

[Demongod86]

Well of course it didn't do as well as they had hoped. They ripped LAN out. Do you know how frustrating it is to play Smashcraft with lag?! I suppose as we speak, certain people out there are trying to put together a LAN version of SC2. So far, it covers 1v1 and 2v2, but has no "add map" functionality yet. Augh.

IMO blizz is pulling an epic blunder here. From what I can tell, the gameplay is slowing down, they're trying to run a two-currency economy (signs of success? Doubtful.), they're shamelessly milking the cash cow because they know that there's no other company that can match up to them.

It's sickening really.

Honestly, if not for the fact that SC2 will be a mainstay favorite of mine for however long because of the modding community, I'd be playing indie games full time. (IE Kongregate games, such as RPG shooter: Starwish, Bullet Heaven, etc...)

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by Demongod86

Well of course it didn't do as well as they had hoped. They ripped LAN out. Do you know how frustrating it is to play Smashcraft with lag?! I suppose as we speak, certain people out there are trying to put together a LAN version of SC2. So far, it covers 1v1 and 2v2, but has no "add map" functionality yet. Augh.

IMO blizz is pulling an epic blunder here. From what I can tell, the gameplay is slowing down, they're trying to run a two-currency economy (signs of success? Doubtful.), they're shamelessly milking the cash cow because they know that there's no other company that can match up to them.

It's sickening really.

Honestly, if not for the fact that SC2 will be a mainstay favorite of mine for however long because of the modding community, I'd be playing indie games full time. (IE Kongregate games, such as RPG shooter: Starwish, Bullet Heaven, etc...)

Agree completely on the LAN-less fail (goes for many games).

Though I'm questioning the "they know that there's no other company that can match up to them." part... more like they've made a calculation that may backfire.

Most of the gamers I know like to gather TOGETHER and play. We haul our consoles and computers around and eat, talk, and play. We don't need a bleeping internet connection for this and forcing everyone to hook to the "mothership" means saturation of the party home's connection in many cases. So what are we doing? We're using the old standby LAN games and more recently, the spate of Indie games that actually have co-op and lan play.

[felix]

^ not to mention god forbid you have limited bandwidth

Originally Posted by Demongod86

Honestly, if not for the fact that SC2 will be a mainstay favorite of mine for however long because of the modding community, I'd be playing indie games full time. (IE Kongregate games, such as RPG shooter: Starwish, Bullet Heaven, etc...)

There are actually quite a lot of really really good non-browser free indie games out there; but sadly nobody seems to hear about free singleplayer indie games. Super crate box, Wagic, Vanguard Princess, just to name a few games of the top of my head.

[Flying Dagger]

Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant

What is the reason Blizzard say they won't sell items themselves? Well, they say it to pretend they are not being greedy. In order to stop people revolting. But that's all it is; words. There is no reason for Blizzard to actually follow their own promises as long as it isn't in the User Agreement. There is no "contract".

They will likely run into all sorts of trouble. Getting caught by smart users/1 single whistleblower and the company will have to go through an audit - that will sink their stockprices. Handling the legal issues and all sorts of other stuff will cost blizzard a lot more than what they can earn. While there is no written contract, they have claimed they will not be selling items to the press: so essentially that will become false advertisement, and a scam to RMAH users.

Originally Posted by Ithekro

Some of the forthcoming beta testers are "excited" to test out the new AH system...just to see what it takes to break it, and/or the market. They want to see if there is a viable way to make a nitch market, like say "Staff of Jordan" or whatever and try to corner the market of that item or whatever it is that is desired but common enough to get some of if a group takes down an area repeatedly.

There is no RMAH in beta. One thing to note though: the WoW economy varies a lot server to server depending on population. D3 will not have similar protections to keep the the prices up if the horde of chinese item farmers invade the game.

Originally Posted by felix

Just great. All that's left now is for the game to be extremely short.

This will definitely kill the game. But this is different from WoW (endgame is about arenas and raids+a lot of social aspect) or SC2 (its all about matches). I HOPE they are not dumb enough to skimp on the length.

Originally Posted by felix

I think I heard about how SC2 didn't do so well as they hoped; might explain the recent F2P move they are going with it.

if you watched any of the sc2 tournaments, sc2 is only doing better and better as its competitive scene continue to explode. While sc2 may not be the most financially successful product in the company (very hard to beat WoW), it is likely the most successful of its genre in recent years.

Originally Posted by Vexx

Agree completely on the LAN-less fail (goes for many games).

Though I'm questioning the "they know that there's no other company that can match up to them." part... more like they've made a calculation that may backfire.

Most of the gamers I know like to gather TOGETHER and play. We haul our consoles and computers around and eat, talk, and play. We don't need a bleeping internet connection for this and forcing everyone to hook to the "mothership" means saturation of the party home's connection in many cases. So what are we doing? We're using the old standby LAN games and more recently, the spate of Indie games that actually have co-op and lan play.

Many years ago (~10?) when I go to lan parties we played D2 over bnet because we all wanted to use our bnet toons. LAN is a lot more important in a much more competitive game such as SC2 where latency means life and death. (there is still reason to expect no lag for a single player toon played via lan - at the end of the day those are relatively "worthless" and you can just load game/create a new one via editor).

Originally Posted by felix

^ not to mention god forbid you have limited bandwidth

a game like sc2/d3 actually streams doesn't take that much bandwidth. 10-15MB per hour shouldn't hurt that much...

[Belial13]

Oh damn you blizzard, damn you to hell, i hope D3 flops and Blizzard suffers for it....

This Real Money AH is the worst thing to happen to any game, don't know if i will buy the game now.

Don't care for no offline SP, i mean it's for anti piracy, and everybody complaining about it clearly has an internet connection...

but this shit ? witch encourages chinese gold farmers ? this if you can't stop them, profit from them philosophy ? WTH is with that... the next thing they are going to sell us Map Hack and Bots and Dupe methods in the AH because they sure as hell can't stop those either, it doesn't mean it should be available to the general public... greedy bastards

if this does not screw up the economy withing 2 months max nothing will ><

I guess the only games to look foward to now are Guild Wars 2 and Dota 2 ><

[felix]

Originally Posted by Flying Dagger

if you watched any of the sc2 tournaments, sc2 is only doing better and better as its competitive scene continue to explode. While sc2 may not be the most financially successful product in the company (very hard to beat WoW), it is likely the most successful of its genre in recent years.

I agree wholeharteadly with it being on top of the RTS scene at the moment, but that has nothing to do with my point. Regarding the the e-sport aspect, I kind of feel it's boring to watch (followed it closely in the past); which is strange since I would still watch a good broodwar pro game, but sadly the scene is dieing out and those are hard to come by. Most likely it's the broodwar mechanics.

[Duo Maxwell]

Originally Posted by Belial13

Oh damn you blizzard, damn you to hell, i hope D3 flops and Blizzard suffers for it....

This Real Money AH is the worst thing to happen to any game, don't know if i will buy the game now.

Don't care for no offline SP, i mean it's for anti piracy, and everybody complaining about it clearly has an internet connection...

but this shit ? witch encourages chinese gold farmers ? this if you can't stop them, profit from them philosophy ? WTH is with that... the next thing they are going to sell us Map Hack and Bots and Dupe methods in the AH because they sure as hell can't stop those either, it doesn't mean it should be available to the general public... greedy bastards

if this does not screw up the economy withing 2 months max nothing will ><

I guess the only games to look foward to now are Guild Wars 2 and Dota 2 ><

You make it sounds like it's a new thing. It's been around since the Diablo 2 period. I don't see how it affect you in anyway if you don't intend to use it, honestly.

[felix]

Originally Posted by Belial13

I guess the only games to look foward to now are Guild Wars 2 and Dota 2 ><

And Torchlight 2, and skyrim, and that's just looking at the RPG titles.

[Flying Dagger]

Torchlight 2 I consider as a D3 "alternative".
dota2, GW2, skyrim are considered RPGs but are VERY different games in my eyes.
Try not to rule out a game just because you do not like the "evilness" behind the developer's parent company.

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.

Piracy is an ugly issue which we must respect. Given D3's online only nature I suspect it will be DRM free (yay?). Even in the real world we have to sacrifice privacy and pay taxes to keep ourselves secured. Blizzard's lesson from WoW is that if you have a game that can only be played online you are going to be breaking sales records.

[Duo Maxwell]

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.

That's the problem. I don't really see the investment worth all the trouble I'm going to meet.

Well, I probably will buy it anyway, if the "must be staying connected all the time" doesn't affect my gameplay process (as in, no lagging), then I don't have any problem. I don't use AH, but I know other people who don't have as much time as I do will want to use it.

Not sure about how much an improvement Torchlight 2 is, but the first one bored me to death after a while.

[felix]

Originally Posted by Duo Maxwell

That's the problem. I don't really see the investment worth all the trouble I'm going to meet.

Well, I probably will buy it anyway, if the "must be staying connected all the time" doesn't affect my gameplay process (as in, no lagging), then I don't have any problem. I don't use AH, but I know other people who don't have as much time as I do will want to use it.

Not sure about how much an improvement Torchlight 2 is, but the first one bored me to death after a while.

They took all the old characters out and put in new ones. Frankly the art style looks like Alpha War3, somewhat.