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On October 02 2022 17:10 KobraKay wrote:
just by that thumbnail alone the red flags are there.
Not even RSL is brave enough to sell headstarts and that one is a gacha game expert in selling stuff to the players without them noticing much. Plarium will be blushing if they never thought of this one xD
I found an ironic thread on that topic but regarding D3 back in 2012. It popped up when I googled preorder for D3 because I couldn't remember if they had any boni.
https://www.diabloii.net/forums/threads/pre-order-bonuses.819679/
"Blizzard doesn't do this." lol
At that time, information about the RMAH was already out iirc.
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Did you know RedDeadRedemption2 had a gold bonus for the online game given to players who preordered? I didn't like that, even sent email to say it. Didn't buy the game lol but I think it looks like a good game I would play the solo.. No idea if the multiplayer ever resets.
Other games like for example Escape From Tarkov or The Cycle : Frontier give you bonuses at start of each season if you purchased a more expansive pack. I don't like that either but I think they both look like good games, didn't buy yet.. (Tarkov still on beta)
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RMAH sounded like it could have been okay and then i think everyone quickly found out it was terrible because :
• the entire itemization of the game including the stat system was designed so your gear got obsolete super quickly so you need to replace your items with upgrades constantly to be able to progress (contradicting first stated design goals and coming as a modification of the first presented systems, some people called it bait & switch)
• bots ran rampant with blizzard doing nothing about it almost like it was on purpose, some areas even having gold pots to farm with no monsters around as if to make it easier for these bots to pick up all of this resulting in bots owning a huge proportion of the total gold pool
• this results in botters being able to make most of the trades on the gold auction house and increasing the gold cost of everything leading to gold being super devalued and reselling some of these items on RMAH instead : now if you wanted to buy items without paying real money for it, you'd have to farm a stupid amount of time for gold which isn't even worth it as you're more likely to find a item by then although that would also take quite a while and be necessary to progress each step into inferno (contradicting the stated design goals of inferno having flat difficulty accross acts etc).
• this results in making constant transactions off RMAH optimal, maximizing the profit that blizzard could make by taking cuts. It's hard to phrase how ridiculous and hypocritical that was in the context of "fighting off third party shops" that hurt the past games or w/e they justified adding RMAH to D3 for.
They just had to quickly scrap this because everyone knew about it I guess. Bot farmers were just notorious for example, running maybe dozens of bots off multiple computers from the get go. Simultaneously Blizzard got the biggest reputation hit we never see them take before. I personally asked for refund a few weeks after game was out, got refused and I never played it again, and man was I looking forward to it. I played a lot more D2 after though.
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You must now regret asking the question.
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On October 02 2022 22:24 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
Did you know RedDeadRedemption2 had a gold bonus for the online game given to players who preordered? I didn't like that, even sent email to say it. Didn't buy the game lol but I think it looks like a good game I would play the solo.. No idea if the multiplayer ever resets.
Other games like for example Escape From Tarkov or The Cycle : Frontier give you bonuses at start of each season if you purchased a more expansive pack. I don't like that either but I think they both look like good games, didn't buy yet.. (Tarkov still on beta)
Tarkov is loads of fun if you have friends to play with. The gun customisation is absolutely second to none, and some of the ideas are amazing, but you need at least 100 hours just to get used to it and learn all the maps and everything. Its absolutely brutal solo.
I've played 500 hours or so and i'm still terrible compared to most of the players.
It does have a cheating problem though.
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Tarkov has some great ideas but it has huge problems with cheaters and optimization. I would recommend Hunt: Showdown until Tarkov gets sorted out.
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On October 02 2022 23:07 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
RMAH sounded like it could have been okay and then i think everyone quickly found out it was terrible because :
• the entire itemization of the game including the stat system was designed so your gear got obsolete super quickly so you need to replace your items with upgrades constantly to be able to progress (contradicting first stated design goals and coming as a modification of the first presented systems, some people called it bait & switch)
• bots ran rampant with blizzard doing nothing about it almost like it was on purpose, some areas even having gold pots to farm with no monsters around as if to make it easier for these bots to pick up all of this resulting in bots owning a huge proportion of the total gold pool
• this results in botters being able to make most of the trades on the gold auction house and increasing the gold cost of everything leading to gold being super devalued and reselling some of these items on RMAH instead : now if you wanted to buy items without paying real money for it, you'd have to farm a stupid amount of time for gold which isn't even worth it as you're more likely to find a item by then although that would also take quite a while and be necessary to progress each step into inferno (contradicting the stated design goals of inferno having flat difficulty accross acts etc).
• this results in making constant transactions off RMAH optimal, maximizing the profit that blizzard could make by taking cuts. It's hard to phrase how ridiculous and hypocritical that was in the context of "fighting off third party shops" that hurt the past games or w/e they justified adding RMAH to D3 for.
They just had to quickly scrap this because everyone knew about it I guess. Bot farmers were just notorious for example, running maybe dozens of bots off multiple computers from the get go. Simultaneously Blizzard got the biggest reputation hit we never see them take before. I personally asked for refund a few weeks after game was out, got refused and I never played it again, and man was I looking forward to it. I played a lot more D2 after though.
This contradicts my experience. I played D3 heavily for the first 2-3 months of it. It was actually difficult to sell, not buy, anything on the gold AH because the rare (I think that's what the yellow ones were called) items kept getting better so they kept going down in price. Just wait a week and that really good rare item that used to cost 5 million gold would become 500k. Those of us who played early and were diligent in selling all our unwanted gear were able to sell them for much higher prices than what they would fetch a few weeks later. Then we can use the extra money to buy really, really cheap stuff for our new chars. Sometime after the first month, you could clear inferno act 1 with rares bought off the gold AH for 20-50k. 1M in gold could buy an entire outfit that could get you deep into inferno (the hardest at the time) depending on your build.
For the players who were a bit behind, it skewed the reward system. The gold they found became way more rewarding than drops because the players ahead of them were dumping their older gear on the gold AH. It was more efficient for newer players to look for and buy underpriced gear on the AH, flip them, and buy upgrades with the difference. Gold AH farming was more rewarding than actually fighting mobs.
There were people paying good money for legendaries on the RMAH but they sucked compared to the top rares during that time. Somebody paid $100 for some shitty Natalya's armor that I got long before Blizz actually buffed those things. Unfortunately, I didn't get any other drops like that before they shut the thing down.
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I was playing on the HC side which might have been different since some gear vanishes on death but anyway I wasn't gonna stay on this game. To be specific I dont necessarily think something like RMAH has to be inherently bad but it's a super risky take in terms of how the game systems aren't going to be "perverted" by it + you absolutely need to fight off cheating completely etc. It's also rather unnecessary, the dev probably shouldn't take cuts, it probably doesn't belong on the game interface etc. The uniques being crap at that time btw definitely was because the items had to become obsolete quick. The bulk of your damage comes from skills damage and a attack stat directly increases your skill damage by a %, higher level rares have a higher chance to have a higher stat bonus to this etc.
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Items became obsolete quick because they went with a WoW style itemization. In D2, higher level mobs expanded the item and affix pool, which was actually bad in the early stages of D2 because some of the best affixes weren't that high of a level. It ended up diluting the affix pool. In D3, higher level mobs dropped higher ilvl items, which had higher base stats. And because non-vitality stats are no longer mostly useless like in D2, the higher base stats of higher ilvl items often trump a lower ilvl item with better affixes.
RMAH is an inevitability on any game where trading can net you the best items. The only question is if the RMAH would be official or unofficial. All the official RMAH did was make it easier for everyone to participate instead of limiting it to the people who are willing to jump through hoops to register on fansites or ebay. It exposed that being able to trade for the best and rarest items is inherently bad for the game.
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I don't mind being able to trade for the rarest/best or some of them interesting topic I'd say but well looks like D4 don't have that. I think in wow vanilla items don't go obsolete quick at all but that's yet another topic.
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On October 05 2022 02:27 andrewlt wrote:
RMAH is an inevitability on any game where trading can net you the best items. The only question is if the RMAH would be official or unofficial. All the official RMAH did was make it easier for everyone to participate instead of limiting it to the people who are willing to jump through hoops to register on fansites or ebay. It exposed that being able to trade for the best and rarest items is inherently bad for the game.
This has always been a weird argument to me. It's like saying you should legalise any crime because you can never fully prevent it from happening. Same logic. I think real money trading is inherently bad and should be deincentivised. If they actually issue bans, a lot less people will risk it and it will stay out of the mainstream, which is healthier for the game.
Do you speak about D3 when you say being able to trade the best and rarest items is bad for the game or for games in general?
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not that i have any better ideas off-hand, but i generally thought that D3 scaling was pretty bad.
IIRC, everything scaled hard off base weapon damage, then different multipliers, one of which was main-stat.
multiplicative increases in skill damage and etc.
this way of doing things is nothing new at all and is extensively studied in PoE for less casual players to get every edge they can. i just feel that for D3's sale there's less diversity and there's really only a handful of choices when it comes to builds.
D3 up until a handful of seasons ago had the same builds running the same items on ladder, every single time.
just the same players playing the same builds for every season.
when the game had first come out, a magical (blue) item with one proper affix was better than most uniques of any type.
that was just bonkers to me. that a freshly dropped The Grandfather was unusable.
the more i think about it, the more absurd the entire experience had been. it makes me sad that so many people took the game so seriously and still take it seriously because of its namesake.
on one hand i'm almost certain that D4 is doomed in the same way. people are just operating on too much hindsight, taking the game too seriously where any little set of exploits are near impossible to mitigate on a constant basis.
so many people pursue the endgame at blazing and unhealthy speeds which necessitates having the game centered around procedurally generated content.
i just really don't have any good vibes about what would be the actual nature of the finished product beyond the initial journey of reaching endgame. sadly, i'm done with blizzard if it is anything short of a masterpiece.
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On October 05 2022 06:07 Miragee wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2022 02:27 andrewlt wrote:
RMAH is an inevitability on any game where trading can net you the best items. The only question is if the RMAH would be official or unofficial. All the official RMAH did was make it easier for everyone to participate instead of limiting it to the people who are willing to jump through hoops to register on fansites or ebay. It exposed that being able to trade for the best and rarest items is inherently bad for the game. This has always been a weird argument to me. It's like saying you should legalise any crime because you can never fully prevent it from happening. Same logic. I think real money trading is inherently bad and should be deincentivised. If they actually issue bans, a lot less people will risk it and it will stay out of the mainstream, which is healthier for the game.
I always assumed that that was a bullshit argument. The people at Blizzard making it didn't actually believe it, but they needed something to justify the RMAH. Everyone hated the idea of that thing, but it was supposed to make them a lot of money, so they tried to figure out spins for the thing.
It is hard to say "Yeah we put this is because it makes us money, even if it makes the game worse, that is worth it to us".
The only thing RMAH did for me was show me that i was in fact grinding for € 0.50 an hour. Which made any grind incredibly unfun. There is a huge difference on how it feels to be grinding for 10 hours and getting something cool, and grinding for 10 hours to get a few items i can sell for a few cents each to buy one item that is useful to me. RMAH basically pushed your face into this all the time.
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one more thing i want to put out there if it wasn't obvious:
besides how game developers at blizzard want to uphold the namesake quality of entries into their games series, a lot of the people behind the games we held dear in the late 90's and early 2000's are no longer involved with any of these new blizzard titles. they've long since moved on or do not hold power in truly changing the state of things.
honestly speaking, blizzard ent. is an entirely different beast and the games that they make--although at high production values in almost every regard--are entirely different also. they're there to make a profit first and foremost and that warrants a lot of apprehension IMO.
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EPT
