Cindy Claveau

I want to be fair on this. So I'm going to list both likes and dislikes for me.

Likes:

1. It's Diablo. The music has been updated and some of the voices (like Cain) are the same. In some areas, it feels very much reminiscent of D1 and D2.
2. Graphics are superb. After replaying enough D2 with the grainy pixellation of the old 640x480 days, it's nice to have a Diablo game that works with modern graphics cards.
3. As many problems as I have with playing online, it can also be said that a system crash won't destroy your build. I've had several in which I had to recover my old Diablo games, but still lost a bunch of stuff.
4. The addition of another difficulty level means there are going to be challenges even for the highest level characters.

Dislikes

1. Always-online means there is no pause feature if I need to take a phone call or break for lunch.
2. It also means the game has disconnected me too many times at critical points, including in the middle of a fight. Occasional momentary lag is also noticeable.
3. I'm buying and selling items on the AH, but I have a bad feeling about its future. Once people are buying legendary items for real money, it makes the old hacked Diablos feel more honest. At least then nobody else was harmed by your personal solo offline cheating.
4. Very limited build options - There are certain skills that just work the best for a wizard, for example, as I try to survive. Some look and sound cool but are worthless against a horde of teleporting giant demons.
5. Very linear game - just like the old Diablos, except I used to use IP games to generate random maps. Not sure if D3 generates random maps when you log in but so far I haven't seen any evidence of that.

I'm sure I missed a few but that's the short and sweet of it.

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Lil Hapmouche

I've read a few comments that setting your game to public blocks the pause mode. Could that help?

Cristiano

Cindy,

You can pause the single player game - just hit ESC. It is only when playing with someone else that you can't pause.

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Jackal Ennui

I've had some zones / dungeons randomize, and others not .. not sure what's the deal.

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Cindy Claveau

It looked like it paused when I've done that, but I've also seen some animations continue (like pulsing lights or flames). So I was convinced that it didn't pause. Good to know.

Mad Mouse

Blizzard Denies Widespread Hacking - News - www.GameInformer.com

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Brenda Archer

So I changed my mind and decided to try it after getting some gameplay advice (thank you Loraan!)

I'm not a gamer (in spite of my heavy WoW playing) so I don't have a lot to compare it to.

But it's pretty and atmospheric, and the music and gameplay are good. I find things going sluggish which might be my low-end computer. I have an authenticator, so I'm not worried about my account. It's a welcome change of pace for me.

I'm sort meh about the RMAH. I might try it for giggles but I've never been the sort of person to chase gear more than I have to.

Tess Whitcroft

The AH is really a mess.



In every one of those SQUARE RUBY fails it takes and holds my money until some random time in the future then returns it in the "COMPLETED" window.

Those 2 SQUARE RUBYs it shows I did buy actually got somehow changed from buyout to bid and failed bid at that and it is still holding that money.

To me this is just a small bit of virtual gold but if this was happening with real money well...

Counting up all the successful and failed buyouts I get a success rate just over 46%



Tess

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zaphodzzplural

Hmm.. that doesn't sound good..

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Cindy Claveau

I've also been outbid on items before the deadline, and when I use the window to raise my bid it shows an incorrect amount for the current bid.

"Your bid: 2000; Winning bid 2100"

So I make my bid 2200

"Sorry, amount is insufficent to win"

"Your bid 2200: Winning bid 2300"

Raise my bid to 2400

"Sorry, amount is insufficient"

Raise my bid to 2500

And so forth.

Meanwhile the AH holds that money in some virtual escrow thingie like Tess mentions.

I did, however, win one nice spear yesterday when I spotted an auction with 5 minutes to go and jumped on it. That spear helped me slay Azmodan. It made my runed Magic Missile spell a LOT more powerful.

zaphodzzplural

Maybe ....

In Wow, the bidding thing seems to work fine bacause your only competing with the rest of your realm. In Diablo III, your competing with the every Diablo III player... and the AH is having problems keeping up with latest bids.


Just a thought...

Cindy Claveau

AH's mechanical issues aside, I still think its very existence has undercut one of the original design mechanicsms of the game. That is, training your crafters was supposed to be a way for players to create their own gear. But as it turns out, that process is so expensive that it's just easier and cheaper to find what you want on the AH. You're also guaranteed to get an item with known attributes rather than the expensive crap shoot of crafting.

I imagine if I ever get my wiz to level 60 and have millions of gold, maybe then it'll be interesting to try to craft. But how does that help the other 90% of the game when we're still playing on Normal or Nightmare?

zaphodzzplural

<nods in agreement>

I took a quick look at the whole craftsman thing the other night. It actually seems like a good idea in isolation, although I've no idea the cost. I just keep hearing that it's expensive.

The AH is fine for WoW, but we really don't need it in Diablo.

Cindy Claveau

Consider the auction I just lost. I have about 60k in my stash (I'm level 31 and just starting Act IV).

I found a nice pair of pants to bid on for 5k and entered my bid. Going down to the last 5 minutes, I got into a bidding war with someone, but didn't realize that every time you raise your bid THAT ENTIRE AMOUNT is removed from your stash.

So every incremental bid of 5000, 5100, 5200, etc., reduced my stash by that much. I had time to go to the "Completed" tab and reclaim the money but didn't. Instead, on the last bid with < 1 minute to go, I didn't have sufficient funds to make the winning bid of 8700g.

Tess Whitcroft

I also noticed that if I sort by lowest buyout price all the N/As show up first. Well if I am sorting by buyout price I don't want to even see the items with no buyout price. Did they even test this thing?

Tess

Lil Hapmouche

Perhaps 10 years passed a bit too soon to complete a full test of all the functions ... and elementary game elements ... and stupid extras shoved down the throats... and all.

Now, seriously, looking at the development time perspective, I have yet to find a review that clearly points out why the game needed a total of 10 years in development or why that amount of time would be justified in any way.
Or explain why such errors weren't wiped out during the quite long beta test.

zaphodzzplural

Historically, Blizzard have done some bloody good stuff. I've always thought WoW to be one of the most polished mmorpg's around.

Their crown has slipped a lil me thinks.

Cindy Claveau

Not to wax pedantic, but Diablo 2 was released in 2000. That makes a 12 year lag between 2 and 3. The D2 expansion, Lord of Destruction was released in 2001.

They announced work on D3 in 2008, giving this game an actual lead time of about 4 years. Considering that much of the AI and lore were already in place from D2 and re-used in D3, it's shocking that the Auction House has so many problems.

The explanation I have is that the AH was added as an afterthought. A kludge if you will, unmindful of how it might unbalance the game. The many bugs and non-seamless interface of the AH tend to support my conclusion.

Sonja Aeghin

Yea, but Blizz has had a lot on their plate besides D3. They've had development for D3, Mists of Pandaria, and Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm going on at the same time. And don't forget Blizzard's own DOTA. For Blizzard, that's a lot of projects going simultaneosly. They haven't been this busy since the 90s.

Cindy Claveau

A shop as large as Blizzard uses separate dev teams for each project, though. Their Diablo team wasn't the same bunch that worked on Starcraft for the most part anyway - I haven't looked at the list of devs. This is just the standard development process for most big game companies.

Some companies even buy other, smaller, company efforts or outsource it to a smaller company and do no development work in their own house.

So I'm reluctant to give them the "we were busy" excuse. They weren't too busy to make a better AH and figure out how to add it in such a way that it doesn't gimp crafting.

Sonja Aeghin

Eh, fair enough. But still, my jimmies (if I had any) would be rustled by the fact an RMT version of the AH exists. I still think it's a bad idea that Blizz has allowed a potentially game-impacting RMT shop to exist.

Edav Nomad

Diablo 3 achieves fastest-selling PC game and biggest PC game launch titles | Massively

I wonder if any of those people have since regretted that decision?

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Cindy Claveau

Just finished Normal at level 32 after 23 hours played.

It's been fun, but I might have to give the game a little break before I decide to forge ahead with Nightmare. When I do (not if), I for sure won't be crafting. I have some 60k in my stash and it says I looted over 158k. I spent a little on the AH (and made a little) but most of that lost gold was from thinking I could train up my blacksmith and jeweler and have it mean anything.

Not any more. On Nightmare, no more crafting.

Seyla Warden

Really, WoW wasn't all that special at release. It was better than the competition, but the competition was what, EQ and AC pretty much?

(I don't consider UO to be competition for 'traditional' DIKU-based MMOs)

The reason WoW became as big as it did was the perfect storm of a new MMO that was unpolished and rough but that took all the good ideas of the current MMOs, combined with a setting/backstory/lore that already had a pretty big playerbase and a company that managed to brand itself as the new up and coming star.

And then Blizzard put the majority of the next decade of their work into it.

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Cindy Claveau

For me, it was because WoW did all the things I wanted EQ to do. Limit killstealing, limit ninja-looting, no PKing, and a UI that was so generic I picked it up in 5 minutes.

But at some point, that's just not enough any more.