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On July 21 2012 09:48 freetgy wrote:
was all the same in d2, though people don't want to realise this
Bullshit. Remember needing Enigma to beat Hell? Windforce to do manageable damage? SoJ to beat Diablo?
I never found a High Rune. I never found a Windforce. I never made an Enigma. And I never gave a damn, because I could do everything I ever wanted to do without caring about having the best of the best.
The only time I ever had to search high and low for items was when I made a level 9 dueling Assassin, and when I made a pre-1.10 Necro summoner that got 80+ minions. And the only reason I cared about those items was because I wanted to do something completely unconventional.
Diablo 3 is a game that rushes you into Inferno as fast as possible, and then makes you feel bad every time you don't see an ilvl63 with godly stats.
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On July 21 2012 11:08 WolfintheSheep wrote:Show nested quote +On July 21 2012 09:48 freetgy wrote:
was all the same in d2, though people don't want to realise this Bullshit. Remember needing Enigma to beat Hell? Windforce to do manageable damage? SoJ to beat Diablo?
You don't need perfect gear to beat Inferno either.
You did, however, need good gear to do Uber Tristram, which is a better comparison to Inferno anyway.
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On July 21 2012 11:08 WolfintheSheep wrote:Show nested quote +On July 21 2012 09:48 freetgy wrote:
was all the same in d2, though people don't want to realise this Bullshit. Remember needing Enigma to beat Hell? Windforce to do manageable damage? SoJ to beat Diablo?I never found a High Rune. I never found a Windforce. I never made an Enigma. And I never gave a damn, because I could do everything I ever wanted to do without caring about having the best of the best. The only time I ever had to search high and low for items was when I made a level 9 dueling Assassin, and when I made a pre-1.10 Necro summoner that got 80+ minions. And the only reason I cared about those items was because I wanted to do something completely unconventional. Diablo 3 is a game that rushes you into Inferno as fast as possible, and then makes you feel bad every time you don't see an ilvl63 with godly stats.
And now you're just misrepresenting the game. You needed none of that. Maybe you mean ubers. Diablo 3 has too much grinding and too little gratification in the end, the items are also boring and the affixes are as well. They screwed up the items and finding them which were two of the most important parts of the game.
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this game is nothing like d2.. and... 4 max players per game.. are you FUCKING KIDDING ME???
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On July 21 2012 13:24 gosublade wrote:
this game is nothing like d2.. and... 4 max players per game.. are you FUCKING KIDDING ME???
And Starcraft 2 is nothing like Brood War, 5 minerals per trip and 6 workers wtf, look beyond that
but seriously I feel like the game is missing an Uber Trist / Uber Diablo extension for late game content, I feel that having some sort of specialised item for the end game could bring either some more excitment or more depth to Inferno.
I remember in Diablo 2 first discovering what a Torch was and I was blown away and then did everything I could to farm keys and so on then I discovered Annis and uber diablo and it felt like another world. Maybe that was because I didn't understand the concepts I do now but eh wouldn't hurt.
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Sounds good if you want to have shitty gear forever and corpsezerg even harder than those that do use the AH.
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I hate AH as well for the reasons stated in the OP, a lot of people knew this would happen.
But what's the alternative? Black market, which I'm currently thinking might be better. A small percentage of people would just abuse that and the majority would I guess enjoy the game, though that's not how entirely it happend in D2 in the later years.
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On July 21 2012 11:08 WolfintheSheep wrote:Show nested quote +On July 21 2012 09:48 freetgy wrote:
was all the same in d2, though people don't want to realise this Bullshit. Remember needing Enigma to beat Hell? Windforce to do manageable damage? SoJ to beat Diablo? I never found a High Rune. I never found a Windforce. I never made an Enigma. And I never gave a damn, because I could do everything I ever wanted to do without caring about having the best of the best. The only time I ever had to search high and low for items was when I made a level 9 dueling Assassin, and when I made a pre-1.10 Necro summoner that got 80+ minions. And the only reason I cared about those items was because I wanted to do something completely unconventional. Diablo 3 is a game that rushes you into Inferno as fast as possible, and then makes you feel bad every time you don't see an ilvl63 with godly stats.
Well, when it comes to end game in D2, it's the same as D3 AH. If you want to compete in d2 pvp you NEED totally maxed gear, something realistically obtainable by trading (d2jsp). Although for a casual to kill Baal in hell, it's manageable without the assist of trading (I'm playing hardcore with a friend right now, Necro+Barb, lvl 80 act 2 hell atm).
Trading doesn't have to be completely soulless. Ingame trading in d2 and even trading on jsp can be quite fun, joining trade games, browsing items and arguing about prices. The D3 AH removes the social aspect of trading which I don't like.
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Interestingly, I think the feeling that the AH devalues the game might be avoided if people use the AH from the very beginning. The disappointment, at least in the way that the OP describes, is from not knowing the true value of what you find in the first place. Players who spent hours grinding for items without ever using the AH and then seeing it for the first time are obviously going to feel like they wasted a lot of time and feel like they've been cheated.
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A seriously insightful article and a great read. Actually it's inspired me to try a run without AH or any of my current gear and see how it goes. Maybe D3 can be fun again 
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
it's more like the existence of inferno and the huge drop gap makes the rest of the game pointless
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do people even buy from the AH anymore?
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On July 21 2012 06:54 fishjie wrote:
impossible to progress in the game without AH so not an option.
i was struggling in NIGHTMARE difficulty on my barb and was wondering wtf why am i sucking so badly, because i roflstomped NM in d2. then i just started buying AR gear on the auction, and then from that point i was a god. until i hit inferno. at that point if you dont use AH you might as well just uninstall.
Lol?! Nightmare, especially as a barb, is faceroll. I haven't bought items on any of my characters (and didn't have to farm for items pre Inferno Act 1) and have a 60 Barb/Monk/Wizard. The barb and monk just saved Adria on Inferno, neither of which had problems, so finishing Act 2 shouldn't be a problem for them, the wiz is about to start Act 2 Inferno, and I can't see it being a problem either.
The main problem I have with the AH is that it gives every single item, no matter how bad (since gold is sellable), a real money value. Sure, in other games, even D2, you can sell stuff out of game, but it's no where near as secure (dodgy hex editing bid price excluded) or (most importantly for me) convenient, there's no way I'd trust someone to not reverse a PayPal charge on an item I would have otherwise used, or trust the D3 trading window, and selling stuff on D2JSP is just no where near convenient enough for someone as lazy as me to bother doing, considering the amount of low price items that you get that are worth selling, but only because it takes a few seconds on the AH, something that isn't true when you have to make thread/add buyer/wait for them to be online/meet ingame etc for every single item.
This means that when I get an upgrade I find myself checking to see how much it's worth, to see if I'm willing to "lose" or "spend" that much money on the item to use it (obviously I'm not spending my own money directly, but it's money I'd otherwise have if I didn't use the item and sold it on the AH, either directly or by selling for gold and selling the gold). As someone that doesn't think ANY item in a game is worth real money, this either forces me to quit a game that I otherwise enjoy, or put up with it which leads to me enjoying the game less than I would if there was no AH at all  .
I still don't know what I'm going to do if I find an awesome weapon, I have 3 characters that'd all love a 1k DPS 1H'er, but do I really want to "spend" that much RL money for it?
On July 21 2012 06:31 unkkz wrote:Man up and play hardcore, problem solved
I did do this for a bit, got a Barb to level 60 (again, I never bought items on the AH on this character), but I died on Hell Act 4 due to rubberbanding back into Arcane/Poison . If it wasn't for the online aspect of D3 I'd only play Hardcore, but the fact that you can lose a character to lag just ruins the game for me even more than the AH does .
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It's just how the game works kind of I guess. You go to work (gold farming), buy food (potions, repairs) and buy new gear (ah) to do your work even better and also become a little more epic. It only takes so many many hours to really be any good in inferno, so it's not too interestingly quickly for casuals imho.
Pvp could be a good show-off of epicness, which is currently missing imho.
What I liked about d2 and am missing in d3 a bit I think at the moment is that the economy was kind of stabilized in d2. In d3 it still seems quite random to me. Prices are still getting lower and lower and the rare time if have a good roll, there is still no real value to it, just like the OP says, it's all dependent on what the buyer pays for it. In d2 you had measures of [X] High runes or [X] Pgems, which imho kind of gave much more definitite values to items you found.
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Tbh, I don't understand the gripes about AH - you could do everything the AH did in D2 but it was very inefficient - trading forums, etc. The AH simply made everything efficient so that standard players can participate in it.
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On July 21 2012 21:18 Azzur wrote:
Tbh, I don't understand the gripes about AH - you could do everything the AH did in D2 but it was very inefficient - trading forums, etc. The AH simply made everything efficient so that standard players can participate in it.
Yep, trading in D2 was more hassle than it was worth in most cases.
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I would like to preface this by saying that Diablo 3 was the first of the Diablo series of games that I have played so my opinion is devoid of nostalgia and any expectations for the game due to experience with its predecessors.
I strongly disagree with this article. Diablo 3 wasn’t fun because normal through hell seemed like a very long tutorial, inferno wasn’t challenging, and the game interface was terrible.
Firstly, I would like to start with normal through hell. I’ll admit I had fun playing normal difficulty. The story was new to me, and due to the easy gameplay I could quickly progress through the story. Although there were some very questionable parts of the story I still enjoyed it overall. However, this all went downhill for me. In the same way I don’t enjoy watching a movie more than once I didn’t enjoy playing through the story in nightmare and hell. The game wasn’t engaging for me because the difficulty was too low and I could practically say the dialogues for the characters if I wasn’t skipping the dialogues. At this point the game seemed like a very slow and boring tutorial for the challenge I was hoping to face in inferno difficulty.
I was excited when I finally killed Diablo on hell and “earned” my ticket to inferno. However, I was quickly disappointed with inferno. It wasn’t really more difficult than hell. The same overall strategy of “run and gun” still applied. I was still fighting the same monsters I was in the three previous difficulties. What really changed for me in inferno was more that I had to run and gun more seamlessly because if I messed up by standing still for a little bit here or there or messed up in some other subtle way the monsters would close the gap faster because of their increased movespeed. If I got hit I was dead. Yep. That was it. Inferno turned out to be less engaging than normal because the strategy was stale and the overall design of inferno made the random monster packs easier than the bosses.
Another thing that made inferno stale and monotonous was the poor affix design. I felt like Blizzard was trying to make the game both interesting and challenging through the affixes and their possible combinations. Increasing the number of affixes with difficulty was supposed to provide more dynamic monsters and require the player to develop and utilize unique strategies to defeat many of the combinations. Unfortunately Blizzard failed to implement affixes in this way and instead they became boring and sometimes too much to handle regardless of strategy. Many affixes overlapped completely. “Plagued” and “Molten” come to mind. However, the approach to overcoming those two are also very similar to “Mortar”. If you’re standing in one spot too long you will die. The best direction to move is often back towards the beginning of the dungeon because it is clear and in the opposite direction of the monsters. Unfortunately, this also worked for just about all affixes. “Arcane Enchanted” could have been cool, but I never had to deal with it because it dropped too close to the mobs and it was slow to take effect. Basically if I was close enough to get hit by it I would probably already be dead for some other reason. All the increased affix count did was increase the chance for bullshit combinations that I couldn’t beat. Anything with “Extra Health” and “Reflects Damage” were mobs I could not kill regardless of the other two affixes. Because of this I either had to try and sneak around them, move them to a corner, or leave/resume the game to get a new set of monsters.
Lastly, the interface was horrible. Brood War and Warcraft III were big hits in my teen years. Why? Blizzard gave you a good game and let you play it the way in which you wanted to play it. There were chat channels for just about any game type where you could meet new people, and the custom game list added onto this. Didn’t like the standard melee maps? That’s fine, someone else didn’t like them and they made these better melee maps (for the Korean tournaments). There are a whole bunch of people that play them. If you like those maps you can host them too and connect with others. Don’t like those? Neither did some other people. Here’s a community that play Zero Clutter or BGH or Fastest Map Possible, or if that isn’t your thing here is the UMS tab with a whole slew of different game types. This sort of thing provided an environment where you could naturally make friends and experience new content (or make it yourself if you want because everyone has a map editor that comes with the game). I felt like Diablo 3 was missing this. I tried the public game system, but it was atrocious. I was thrown in a game with random people. I couldn’t add filters with a game name, or the title I under which I hosted the game. I couldn’t have a brief chat in the lobby before starting the game to see if I would want to play with them. Nothing. The in game interface also seemed to downplay the social aspects which made me want to play solo even more. The game, much like SC2 (probably shouldn’t mention this), seems to discourage making friends a lot more than Blizzard’s older games.
Without the auction house I wouldn’t have played through and beaten inferno. When I hit level cap I dropped about 800k on a new set of gear. It had about 25k damage per second in the character sheet, and that is what I beat the entire game with including Diablo. Had it not been for the auction house I wouldn’t have subjected myself to the already boring and stale gameplay in hell or act 1 inferno to get gear equal or better than what I bought from the auction house.
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Totally agree with the article. What I don't understand is how they couldn't forsee this like so many fans could. I fucking hate the AH with a passion. If this was a single player game only, I wouldn't care less what others do, but it really does affect the rest of us that don't use it and don't plan to.
They couldn't come up with anything more creative than a loot grind? They changed or omitted so many other features that made Diablo, Diablo... why couldn't they forsee this and make this one less gear dependent? After doing this for more than a decade, I'm a little tired of it lol. Oh well, my problem I guess.
Edit: Oh yeah... Inferno is NOT impossible without the AH. I made it up to Ghom with only gear I found. The reason I stopped playing is that I don't like feeling forced to use specific skills to get past him (Overpower). That's just lame.
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Yeh but better than black market dodgy ripoff scam sites doing it (imo).
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EPT
