Mysteries of the Mighty Barbarians.

[GRT]

I'm saying it has literally no effect on the player, you are saying it does have an effect on the industry. We are at an impasse because we are not arguing the same point.

Well, according to Blizzard it won't have an effect on the player, but to me it seems like down the road the inflation will be uncontrollable and renders the gold-based AH worthless. But we don't know all the factors yet (such as the fee structure) to build a model and make projections, so I guess it's too early to rage about it on this point.

(although I'll probably try to build a biased model anyway and post it all over Bnet if I find out this is making me lose sleep. god damn it)

[Katlan]

Wait, what... They plan on allowing the buying/selling of entire characters on the AH? I guess I missed that?

looks that way to me, you can buy characters and in game currency for real life money

[Eanae]

Wait, what... They plan on allowing the buying/selling of entire characters on the AH? I guess I missed that?

Eventually, not at release.

[elison]

I could care less about the removal of stat points, there was always an optimal allocation (ALL VIT LOLOLOL) and if you did it wrong, you were worse or planned poorly. And unlike differing skill builds, there was no confusion or debate about what was better or more fun to play, there was just either correct, or incorrect and it was at best a testament to your planning and max-min'ing skills.

Saying the optimal stat path in D2 was always vita is pretty ignorant. I could list a large list of different stat variations that held their own and some that even dominated PvP that didn't include a single point into vita.

It's the simple fact that they removed one of the biggest customization features that I truly enjoyed about D2, making your character distinct and to your personal liking. Taking a step back from such a successful formula nearly 11 years after D2 introduced it's features and mechanics is just a big what the fuck in my eyes.

[geno]

Buying characters doesn't particularly surprise or bother me, but I still don't understand why people bother lol. The vast majority of the fun in a game like this comes from actually leveling up the character and watching it progress. What the hell would you even do when you just buy the end result?

[geno]

Saying the optimal stat path in D2 was always vita is pretty ignorant. I could list a large list of different stat variations that held their own and some that even dominated PvP that didn't include a single point into vita.

It's the simple fact that they removed one of the biggest customization features that I truly enjoyed about D2, making your character distinct and to your personal liking. Taking a step back from such a successful formula nearly 11 years after D2 introduced it's features and mechanics is just a big what the fuck in my eyes.

Bullshit stat allocation was successful. You may be right in PvP, and there may have been some variance with dex for blocking, but I refuse to believe that STAT ALLOCATION was a widely loved area of customization. That shit was just tedium for me trying to keep track of how much of what I needed to wear whatever gear and then being pissed off when I realized I put too much STR in because I forgot to account for some other piece of gear. VIT was just too damn good in PvE.

As for PvP, I do feel bad for those that enjoyed it, but Diablo3 is not going to be a PvP game and I never imagined it would be. Anyone who did was fooling themselves. They aren't going to balance for it and certainly aren't going to actively support competitions. People of course still will, but they aren't designing the game around PvP, and I actually am a supporter of that notion.

[Zzsark]

From Bashiok

"I realize there’s a lot of information spread around, I’m hoping to bring some of it to a single post and hopefully get our point across and reassure you that the changes we’re making are for the betterment of character customization options, and ultimately your long-term enjoyment of the game.

So, why did we get rid of skill points?
(Note: this is a supplementary min/max explanation. There are lots of other reasons which have been touched on in the past such as how players approach our game, supporting the idea of builds, observing how players behaved in internal testing, etc. This is just further explanation that I think will resonate with some of you.)

In Diablo III, we really want to improve the combat depth. Part of having combat depth involves having skills that are useful in different situations. In Diablo II players often used a single skill to deal with almost all situations: Blessed Hammer, Frozen Orb and Bone Spirit to name a few. Players invest 20 points into a single skill and use it as much as possible. The only reason a player would swap away from their primary spam skill is due to monster resistances/immunities. If a monster was immune to your primary spam skill, you’d either skip the encounter completely or fall back on a second skill. Neither of these answers provides the player with much combat depth.

To support combat depth, skills need to have different roles. Here is a very simple example:

Magic Missile deals 15 damage to a single enemy
Arcane Orb deals area of effect damage for 10 damage each


With these two skills we’re beginning to develop some combat depth for the player. Use Magic Missile when you’re facing one enemy, use Arcane Orb when you’re facing multiple enemies. But you may also want to use Magic Missile if one enemy is a “high priority target” in a group, and you want it to die quickly. In this simplified example players can still defeat a horde of enemies by casting Magic Missile multiple times, or they could defeat a single large enemy by casting Arcane Orb multiple times, but that wouldn’t be as efficient as a player who uses the right skill for the right situation.

Ok so that basic layout of combat depth out of the way!

With skill point spending your skills get better as you invest points into them. The problem is that this destroys combat depth. If after pumping a bunch of points into Magic Missile it now deals 70 damage to a single enemy, assuming my enemies have any reasonable health, then Magic Missile becomes a better choice than Arcane Orb even in group situations. If after pumping a bunch of points into Arcane Orb it now deals 45 damage, then it deals more damage than Magic Missile to single targets. Now rather than using the right skill for the right situation, I’m using the skill I’ve put all my points into. Skill point spending has eroded away combat depth.

Why did we go from 7 skill choices to 6?
(Note: again, this is a supplementary explanation. We’ve gone over some of the other reasons elsewhere, but this is specifically targeted at those of you here who feel strongly that 7 means there would be more build diversity than 6)

Diablo III emphasizes build customization. We feel that 6 skill choices actually creates more build diversity than 7.

Why? Well for any given set of options, the greatest number of combinations exists when the number of choices you can make is close to half the number of options you have. Some of you may remember a high school math problem like this: There are 12 differently colored marbles in a bag. How many different color combinations can you get by choosing X marbles? Well as it turns out the solution for various values of X are:

1 marble: 12 different color combinations
2 marbles: 66
3 marbles: 220
4 marbles: 495
5 marbles: 792
6 marbles: 924
7 marbles: 792
8 marbles: 495
9 marbles: 220
10 marbles: 66
11 marbles: 12
12 marbles: 1 (there’s only 1 way to choose 12 marbles from the 12 in the bag)


The greatest number of possible combinations happens when you are choosing 6 from a possible 12.

You may be asking what 12 has to do with anything as classes all have over 20 skills available to them...

This is true in theory, but in practice players tend to (and really should) pick up skills to fill different roles so they can be effective. Categories such as single target, area of effect, auto-targeting, debuff, defensive, group buff, escape, crowd control, 2-minute ubers, pet skills, etc. etc. Players generally take at most two (and often one) skill to fill any particular role. For example, the Wizard has Ice Armor, Storm Armor and Energy Armor, but I don’t think anyone is going to take all three (though maybe somebody will take that as a challenge and prove me wrong), most players will choose one Wizard Armor spell (note that this can change dramatically with some rune effects). If we look at each class, depending on how you count, you get anywhere from 8-12 different types of skills. So we err on the high side in our category estimate (12) and that means 6 is a pretty good number to maximize build variety.

It's important to note that we’re not just talking about you and your friend having Wizards with slightly different skills, we’re talking about you and your friend having 6 skills that are different in functionally significant ways.

Closing remark! When we pull math out like this I’m sure somebody will point out that if our only objective was to maximize build combinations we’d have allowed people to also choose 6, 7 or 8 passives rather than just 3. So I’ll counter by saying maximizing build combinations is not our only objective. We also want our system to have aesthetic flavor, to be simple to understand, and to have the passives in particular feel impactful. We have many different goals that we take into account when making any design decision. In the case of active skills, we felt the increase in variety was one of many good reasons to go from 7 to 6.

So how many skill combinations are there now?

Well taking into account 6 active skills, all the rune combinations, and 3 passives we currently expect each class to have roughly 2,285,814,795,264 different build combinations. That’s not taking into account skill types for ‘ideal’ builds, but that’s always been a big part of the fun of experimenting (and longevity for Diablo II) - finding a build that shouldn’t work, and making it."

Now if they can only keep runes as they are at the moment and just add the randomized prefix/affix idea into that systems I think I'll have no complaints. (lulz at all the AH/RMAH stuff that is everywhere.... I'd fucking lose it if they came out and said "APRIL FOOLS! Trolled you good.")

[plue]

Exacly. I do hope you and your friends will be able to stay within your circle. I just cringe thinking about how finding a really good drop from a boss drop and the conversation goes something like "holy fuck! imagine how much money i can get for this!!! IMMA BE RICH LOLOLOL!!!!" instead of the "holy fuck! imagine how pimp this will make my ww barb!!! IMMA KICK ALL YO SORRY ASSES LOLOLOL!!!"

This is my biggest gripe with this whole AH deal. When I'm playing a game, it's just to chill out and play the game. I don't want to be thinking about money, and the cost potential of every single thing I digitally own. With this system they're just turning the whole Diablo world into a big digital treasure hunt, where all people see is dollar signs. If they needed money so bad, they should of just had the ability for people to buy gold from their store or something.

[miokomioko]

It's pretty low of them to do this to Diablo. They know everyone has been waiting for this with bated breath for fucking years and cherish the franchise. Blizzard doesn't have a worry in the world that it won't sell a billion fucking copies on day-1. They are taking such obvious advantage of their customers right here. I wish everyone would all see it and lose enough respect for them to not pump money into their money machine.

They aren't out to stop RMT or unfair playing, or even any playing field. They are out to get a piece of that fucking pie.

[djzombie]

They aren't out to stop RMT or unfair playing, or even any playing field. They are out to get a piece of that fucking pie.

I completely agree with you. Will it stop me from buying the game? No. I will however avoid all RMT aspects of the game, to me it just cheapens the game experience. Diablo was about exploring dungeons and killing everything in sight until the shit you've been after finally dropped, or finding something of equal value you could trade for it and then the obvious hunt to find someone who had what you wanted and wanted what you had. I appreciate they've made finding things easier with the gold auction house, but I don't see much point in playing the game if you can just whip out your credit card and buy everything you wanted. To me that would make PLAYING diablo utterly pointless.

I am going to enjoy this game regardless of what tactics blizzard uses to siphon every last penny from their user base.

[LinktheDeme]

Shit's gonna happen anyway Blizzard might as well take a cut. I can't wait for this to be mainstreamed and the next few generations down the line be like "Hey there was a point in time where this shit wasn't sanctioned and people payed an arm and a leg?" Obviously it is going to affect the economy, but every individual game is instanced it isn't like people can cockblock you from anything. Not to mention in Diablo 2 the unit of currency was either trading or Stones of Jordan. The value of traded items aren't going to go down at all only Gold is going to go down. And the last time I checked gold was worth nothing in Diablo at all, now it just has value. This auction house is nothing more or nothing less.

[djzombie]

Has anyone seen anything on how loot is going to be distributed? Is it going to be loot is dropped like D2 and everyone just fucking races to pick up whatever they can get their hands on the fastest? Or is there going to be some sort of need/greed distribution/rolling system like there is in WoW?

http://diablo3blog.blogspot.com/2008...-diablo-3.html

Just answered my own question.

As stated by the Blizzard developers, the new drop system in Diablo 3 will make monsters drop several items specific to each person in the game. That means no more ninja looting of items at the moment that you see them. This is a huge change from the Diablo 2's quick "loot or lose out" system we are all so used to.

[miokomioko]

I'll probably end up playing it, but I'll only be playing single-player. This whole debacle will keep me far far away from battle.net.

Shit's gonna happen anyway Blizzard might as well take a cut.

The problem is that when it's not sanctioned, it's not readily available for people and most people don't partake at all because of risks and expense. Now it's in everyone's hands and it will run rampant and completely dull the gaming experience in an online setting.

[Gokulo]

The problem is that when it's not sanctioned, it's not readily available for people and most people don't partake at all because of risks and expense.

Afaik the history of D2 and other games disagrees with that.

[GRT]

I can't wait for this to be mainstreamed

...really?

yeah, it's time to get out of gaming

[GRT]

what's funny is that if Blizz would get its way, there will absolutely be a point in the future where kids are like "huh? games used to have fake money people used to trade with? lolz"

[djzombie]

http://www.d3sanc.com/diablo-3/diabl...ved-much-more/

Compilation of information that has hit the interwebs since the NDA was lifted. Some of it most here have probably already seen, still a good read. Also this site here as a d3 blue post tracker.

http://www.d3sanc.com/blue-tracker/

here are some videos about runes, and how they modify different abilities, that i hadn't seen yet.

http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/world...runestones.xml

[Lucavi]

They aren't out to stop RMT or unfair playing, or even any playing field. They are out to get a piece of that fucking pie.

I said it before twice in the thread. No matter what question someone could ask, the answer remains the same: "because money."

They realize that they can't figure out a better way to "solve" the "problem" of RMT, so instead of enacting a prohibition clause on it (like they did with D2) and trying to think of a million new systems to try to restrict it, they've instead legalized and regulated it - the same thing some people cry for the American government to do with Marijuana and other drugs. They figure that if they can control at least 75% of the "flow" of RMT traveling throughout and around the game, they'll make so much profit over an inevitable occurrence that they'll have no problems allowing the remaining 25% to be fought over like scraps tossed outside a mansion after supper.

Its all about money. You have to remember: Activision had no part in the making of Diablo and Diablo II. Activision now, however, has spread their influence throughout Blizzard, and we're seeing the result of the merger. Its like watching an old friend with a dark boyfriend/girlfriend. You can see the corruption spread, but there's little you can do about it. Do you walk away and wipe your hands of the situation, or do you continue to support them and hope for the best in the future?

[Meko]

While I agree with most of what you said Lucavi, I don't think this kind of thing is completely terrible. It could certainly be a possible start of a bad precedent, though.

[Agito]

The real money auction is the best possible way that 3rd party RMT can be neutralized in Diablo 3, i know this because not a single person can think of a better alternative. Everyone will be able to use the real money auction house to sell really rare items that they don't want (without having to pay a single dime of real life money) then they will be able to use that money from the sold item to buy items that they do want. It's a win-win situation for everyone really, there is absolutely no cons to the real money auction house, only benefits.