Why can't we be more thankful?

[sifuedition]

"I'm curious how the new set of patches won't OP player characters"

No character should be stronger after the patch than it was before. They are taking the unused skills, which were unused because they were too badly designed, and tryin to fix them so they are optional to use as intended.

[Valeli]

Hope that's how it works out. I know i used to use 7 sided strike on my monk though, and wasn't /too/ unhappy with it. So if all of a sudden they're making it "incredibly" powerful, or whatever adjective they used, I'm slightly curious. But yeah, I see a lot of skills in there that simply weren't given the light of day because skill X was much better. So hopefully it does balance it well/somewhat.

I guess I'm just inherently pessimistic with the way modern games work on a constant feedback loop (where skills are always being buffed/nerfed/buffed/ modified/ removed/etc... because of constant feedback from the online community). Don't get me wrong - I totally see the benefits of listening to people's feedback. But at the same time I guess I like the idea of having X as my available set of skills, and being fairly sure that it won't get buffeted around much from month to month because people are happy/unhappy/jealous/whatever.

[mr punk]

i'm thankful OP. i'm thankful to blizz for putting on one of the greatest displays of game development ineptitude and design blunders of any company not named Capcom. the lulz have been awesome.

No character should be stronger after the patch than it was before. They are taking the unused skills, which were unused because they were too badly designed, and tryin to fix them so they are optional to use as intended.

pretty much. allegedly, this site gather data from hundreds of thousands of D3 character profiles. if these numbers are similar to what blizz is seeing. you can see the problem skills/passives. TLDR : so much for "zillions of builds". there's a lot more beta testing to be done.

it also begs the question of why a 4th difficulty was needed.

a combination of a feedback loop and blizz's hubris in thinking they could pull it off.

[SteveG]

Thankful?

Thankful for my favorite game developer taking me for a fool, and trying pass off a shameless, pay-to-win, POS as the second sequel to my all time favorite game? Sorry, not thankful at all.

They're getting legendaries ready for PvP, then the cash will really start rolling in.

I'm not fooled by 1.04. What looks like badly needed depth and item buffs is merely better looking bait to get us all to reach into our pockets and fork over even more money to Blizzard.

I'm not saying that godly items should be available to people who do not put in the time, I'm saying that the system should be interesting for all types of gamers. I log about 2-3 hours a week, not much. I have pretty close to zero chance of finding a legendary, but I know some people have found some with less effort, but the fact remains, legendaries are INCREDIBLY rare, as they should be. It's just sad that the items stay on this really awful, linear path until you get to legendaries. So now Blizzard has given me the choice, I can either farm for hundreds of hours to be part of the party OR I can whip out my wallet. The "choice" is mine!

[Locohead]

Because the main flaw in D3 isn't going to be patched away -- low drop rates from an item system shackled to auction houses. The only plausible suggestion to eliminate it - creating an AH-free ladder - probably will never happen because the new Actiblizz only cares about money; not the game and not the players.

[jonw]

I'm good with it. I've already got over 250 hours of play time, and I'm not paying any more for the changes in the 1.0.4 patch, so not much to gripe about. From reading Blizzard's posts it sounds like the developers listened to pretty much any criticism people made, took them seriously and are implementing changes to address those. As others have posted, the Internet is like a giant complaint amplifier that didn't exist when D2 was launched.

I don't see any problems in D3 that can't be patched, and some of those problems were carried over from D2 where they were never fixed.

No biggie. I guess I'm so busy with work that I can't pull allnighters in D3 anyway.

[Prak]

I remember the Diablo 2 launch. The servers went from very laggy to unplayable because of the influx of players logging onto BNet. What kept me busy during that time? I could still play the Single player until they fixed the servers. Its too bad a game made more than a decade after has FEWER features than its previous version.

I think that's the main gripe people have about D3, and why people are not more thankful. I want to still play this game, but I don't enjoy the game at the moment and am on hiatus. I still check these forums because I still have faith that things will be better down the road.

[Simfish]

The fact of the matter is, we live in an era where the bar for video games has risen to such incredible heights that people expect more from developers. The penetration of social media has even made it easier for people to share their views on video games, and when you see companies like Riot release significant content and balance patches once every couple of weeks, you expect Blizzard to be able to do the same regardless of whether or not frequent patches make sense with the gaming software underlying its products. The older Diablo games did not receive the same level of critical exposure within the first few months, and they couldn't really because the Internet social structures weren't in place at the time to rapidly disseminate information on broken features and other sources of frustration. Such critical exposure would have upset a lot of people, but it was easier back then to keep to yourself and just simply deal with the difficulties.

Moreover, the comments on Amazon indicate that a great number of people are not happy with the sequel. The constant feeling that the rewards are not commensurate with the amount of effort in actually playing the game, especially in the context of modern games, makes it easy for people to believe that Blizzard has completely misaligned the incentives structure that made Diablo 2 so addicting. I have always been a huge fan of Blizzard. I have many fond memories playing StarCraft 1 with friends in a LAN setting nearing the end of my high school years, and watching commentated, bad quality YouTube videos of the Korean StarCraft players in 2006 back long before eSports even became a notion.

Today, the more time you spend with a game like League of Legends, the more you are rewarded. For all of the criticisms surrounding World of Warcraft, I can say the same thing about that game. That is not the case with Diablo 3. In Diablo 3, the criticism is that people are rewarded for exhibiting the same character traits and abilities that made the investment bankers in our society so rich despite being poised to lead our country to financial ruin. When those similarities between seemingly different personalities resonate, it is no wonder that people despise the path to progression being laid out in the game. People expect the most talented players or those who put in the most time to rise to the top, not those who don't even play the game and shamelessly arbitrage when they should just go and play the stock market instead.

I think 1.04 will appeal, until people realize that the game is fundamentally the same, with the same incentives structure in place. It is one thing to keep triggering people's extrinsic motivations with extra carrots in gear upgrades and such, but it is quite another to motivate people internally to keep up with the product. And when people see others succeed through sleazy means, that defeats the perception of hard work being rewarded justly, as it is in many areas of life. A company like Zynga only cares about those external carrots, whereas game developers like Shigeru Miyamoto ONLY care about the game experience itself and not continuously releasing digital content in order to drain the pockets of customers. A company like Riot has mastered both aspects in that the biweekly champion releases are quite enticing, but even without spending a dime on the game, the game is still quite good. What kind of company will Blizzard evolve into? Only time will tell.

[sacridoc]

It's true, the bar for video games is really high these days, but it kind of goes both ways.

I'd say it's a combination of high expectations and too many companies developing disposable games that you throw away after 20 hours.

I guess it's because there are too many games competing for people's time. It's too easy for people to play a game for a little while and then move on to another game, so developers are aware of this and don't bother making really deep games because the risk isn't worth it.

[Benbos]

Diablo 3 was the most hate trolled game in history ... AFTER the COD series who got a nice 2.2 on Metacritic... the latest COD sold 26 million copies (over 5 different platforms), while Diablo 3 is on its way to its 11 million copies on just ONE platform.

Above is the reason why people can't be thankful: everything that is successful is hated.

be that Microsoft, Apple, COD, WOW and so now Diablo 3.

People are a selfish, rude, dumb mass of species which happen to exterminate themselves every few generations.

The more mass, the higher the root to the extension.

Some day some lunatic WILL push that button.

I am so happy I will no longer be part of it by then.