Prepare for an uber post:
Dewskie Fixes Diablo 3Don’t get me wrong, I love Diablo 3. So far I’ve maxed out (levelwise) a barb and a wizard and feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp on not only the game itself but the Gold/Real Money Auction House (from hereafter referred to as the GAH or RMAH). There are a ton, a TON of people who are incredibly disgruntled with the game as it presently stands along with the numerous patches that have come out subsequently to adjust to the trends.
These are just basic suggestions that are going to sound fairly rudimentary since I’m not a developer, game designer or well-versed in financial terminology. Let’s start with the stuff that’s actually in the game:
STORYLINEPROBLEM: The story is what it is - some like it, some love it, some hate it. D3’s team stands by it staunchly and is quite proud of how it turned out, but I’m not alone when I say I felt like it was not only mediocre but
quite boring. The lore that surrounds D3 is pretty substantial and has potential to be seriously twisted, dark, but more to the point - entertaining and engaging. Clearly the devs wanted this initial D3 release to be something of a celebration of the franchise, but I think they underestimated how fresh Diablo II/LoD was in people’s minds. The intense lack of originality and new environments felt like a massive step backward, but after a decade of absence from the gaming community I could see where the creative team would feel like playing it safe with sort of a “reminder” saga. Unfortunately for them I think it left the vast fandom of people that stayed loyal to D2/Blizzard over the years feeling cheated.
SOLUTION: In the followup expansion(s)
branch out and escape the formula. You’ve reminded the audience of the franchise staples and (seemingly) killed off two of the game’s keystone characters in Diablo & Cain. Start fresh! Enough with the Angels/Hell Lords. Provide shades of grey to these entities, let the stereotypes of fantasy and the series predecessors dissolve, and for the love of god get some better voice actors/writers. My theory is to conceptualize a group of (for lack of a better name) Titans. The Titans are huge (as in so tall that their upper halves are frozen from the atmosphere ) that are unleashed by a rebel angel to break mankind. Obviously the nephalem will be the only ones able to destroy these enormous and incredibly powerful entities. I also suggest a level that takes you inside of a Titan or in some kind of moving vessel. Get creative, for fuck’s sake. I came up with that shit half-asleep.
GEARPROBLEM: The best part of D3 is the new skill bar and simplified gamestyle. It’s streamlined, simple, and yet still allows for innumerable complexities based on how you like to play. However that doesn’t compensate for the fact that
gear IS the game. There’s no bones about it, Diablo 3 is item porn for item porn addicts, but it’s losing it’s grip on sense. Gear is simply too powerful and your player has virtually no effect - whether you’re a barb or a witch doctor, take off your gear and you’re dead within seconds; normal or inferno. I’m like everybody else in that I love getting the gear and the endless hunt for it, but there’s no flexibility to how to play - you will get good gear or you will be left behind. By revoking skill point assignment you put the build of your character entirely in the gear. It works to a point, but the fact that it’s blatantly 1-dimensional kind of taints the experience.
SOLUTION: Allow players to assign skill points upon leveling again, and nerf ALL gear across the board drastically. I’ll elaborate
more on this below since it kinda ties in with other gripes.
PATCHESPROBLEM: The D3
team seems unsure of how to compromise or adapt player demands with the patches. The major issue is class balance. The first wall they ran into was Demon Hunter attack speed which exponentially magnified damage to unheard of levels. The blizz response was to nerf IAS (increase attack speed) buffs on all existing and forthcoming gear. This doesn’t sound that bad, but you have to pull back to see the real problem - the gamers are playing the game and pursuing every possible exploit. BlizzNorth in turn waits for these exploits to rise to the surface and as players dredge for countless hours for their gear to take advantage of the exploitation, the latest patch comes in and nullifies all their work and effort. What ends up happening is people either rage quit/get pissed off/find a new exploit/all of the above, and before long the cycle repeats itself. On and on and on.
SOLUTION: There is
no solution, since it’s a catch 22. They would’ve done better just to have their shit together before the game’s release, but there’s only so much you can test. Basically the best way to handle this going forward is to at least confess that they fucked up and apologize each time they trot out a new set of scales, but that’s not going to happen.
AUCTION HOUSEPROBLEM 1: Short-sighted UI/system. My friend Nick addressed basically this in a post on the official forums, which I’m pretty much going to steal. Item searches are limited to 3 affixes when rare items tend to have 5+ properties. Why not expand that completely? Pretty stupid if you ask me. The AH sorting is horrid. You are not allowed to sort by time remaining, which is apparently to deter “sniping” (ala eBay) or perhaps had something to do with their servers. Also because you’re sorting through millions of items, there’s no sense of user organization. In order to track an item they’re interested in, players have to bid or else remember the item’s name/page it was on. Fucking retarded - let me tag the item. Common sense, Blizzard.
SOLUTION: …fix the interface. Make it a fancy spreadsheet for all I care - if you want this thing to resemble a real life marketplace (oh yeah, it is one), then don’t half ass it. Handcuffing players to use the AH under such limitations not only keeps a TON of items from selling, it keeps the market cluttered as well as pissing off the gamers to no end. More on this later.
PROBLEM 2: The RMAH is doing exactly what I thought it would, and that’s
devaluing gold and holding the best items hostage. I get it, I really do. A game this popular always was going to have the potential for a black market - that’s just how gaming works. WoW accounts were sold on eBay or other websites on the quiet, thus cutting Blizzard out of oodles of $$$$. A built in system to cut out the middlemen is a great idea to supersede the potential submarkets, however it’s thrown a wrench into things. The GAH was (and to a point still is) a fantastic application. For a long time gold had real value again and made farming incredibly lucrative for players of any level, but now two things have happened that are making the GAH more corrupt day by day: A) Bots farm gold by the billions, B) The RMAH sells gold…cheap. The bots were always going to happen because cheaters exist to cheat - it’s inevitable and requires cleverness on the devs to get around, but the RMAH is their own creation, and the price of gold is their choice. For just over two dollars you can buy $1,000,000 gold. The fact that items are already selling for the maximum allotment of $250 is ridiculous enough, but it shows that there are trust fund kids and gamers with copious amounts of extra income to fully invest thousands of dollars into maxing out their characters. A person that is willing to spend $250 on a video game item is more than willing to spend $10 and get what takes most players days or weeks to farm. Kripparian has
a fantastic video that details what he calls The Gold Problem, and in a nutshell he summarizes that gold is going to endlessly inflate to the point where it’ll be pennies on the million and ultimately worthless. The only things sold in the GAH will be the dregs or C-level gear since players, now realizing they can actually turn a dollar, take their precious tier-1/2 gear and open their wallets. Ultimately there’s going to be a polarizing effect similar to any economy where there is simply no middle class - Gold Auction House has shit gear, Money Auction House has the good gear. Since you can only advance so far with mediocre gear, players will have no choice but to turn to spending MORE money just keep playing the fucking game they already paid for, as blizzard sits content in the knowledge that they’re making money either way - thus no solution is required.
SOLUTION: 1. Don’t Sell Gold in the RMAH, 2. Raise entry prices for items in the RMAH. Here’s my thinking - By not selling gold you immediately restore it’s value. It’s incredibly irresponsible that Blizzard allows gold to be a commodity for sale anyway, but Greed > Integrity. My second point is that you’ve got to alienate the number of people participating in the RMAH. It must be done. However because Blizzard views the RMAH as a legitimate cash cow, you can’t just outright blow it up, you’ve got step up the bar to a point where the average person wouldn’t be able to afford to participate. Raise the initial entry item price without exception to $50-100. This will scare away people who maybe could’ve afforded to participate before, but raise the stakes of the ones who can. Raise the max price cap to something like $10,000 and let these dumb rich fucks throw their money away. Blizzard makes 1% on all these items, so why the hell dick with these nickel-and-dime price tags? In my mind this cures most of the AH problems - gold regains value, and elite items are no longer restricted to the RMAH.
The following are simply things I'd like for blizzard to change in the future.
-Auto-skip. After the first playthrough with a new char, sure, but after that? Get real, blizzard. Everybody and their mom spams esc/enter, never once giving the slightest shit. I shouldn't have to wait for 90 seconds while some NPC rants about shit I've had to listen to 1000 times.
-The auction house data I'm sure is available internally at BlizzNorth. I want access. I want to see trends, what's selling, for how much, what items, what stats command the highest dollar, etc. The data exists and is sortable - allow user access. I'm tired of questioning whether an item is going to sell or not, or if what I currently have is actually dogshit.
-Speaking of which, allow me to cancel sales if there's no bids. I'm sick and fucking tired of having to wait 24+ hours for items that CLEARLY aren't going to sell just to get them back into my stash. If it's not going to sell...it's NOT going to sell. Stop making me wait if clearly there's no interest, god dammit.
-Remote/offline trades and full (view only) access to my heroes, stats, gear, auction house sales, acheivements, etc. Blizzard's homepage is a fucking joke. I shouldn't have to be logged into the game's UI to see this info which is clearly accessible otherwise.
-Sortable friends list and password encrypted groups/clans as well as a community chest.
Let me know what you guys think who play. I know this was a TL;DR glut of shit for sure, but I’d appreciate feedback.
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