@Murasama, stay persistent and dont give up just yet. You can always make a thread for us to unite for a cause and this cause is for us to be able to recieve some choices in our Diablo 3 Blizzard.com Avatars because seems like when it comes to uniq avatars we have been left out compared to SC2 and WoW…
Thanks NeLLy, but like the quote from October I included in my original post in this thread, there’s a point where I don’t like to rehash the same thing where it turns into beating a dead horse even more. With that said though, I’m just going to add a bit to what I’ve previously posted as to why I take the carefully worded PR laced statements by Blizzard officials with a huge block of salt.
It’s apparent many of us were previous players of the first two games in the franchise and expected a game that would build upon that previous foundation. When you dig through the archived postings during the timeframe the game was in development (http://blues.incgamers.com/Topics/1/1/4/diablo-iii), it is clear that much of what a portion of the player base is complaining about or suggesting features for, were pretty much disregarded/shot down by the developers because they felt they had something really better. When you have players asking questions back in 2010 if D3 would stand the test of time, that itself is telling:
http://blues.incgamers.com/Posts/1/1/4/10/8596/can-diablo-3-stand-the-test-of-time
It really is to the point where they would have to completely redesign, recode, and rebalance the underlying game engine in order to accomplish what many of us would like to see (in other words, a whole “new” game). Which leads me to the response Bashiok provided in response to Blizzard’s design philosophy with regards to iteration:
http://blues.incgamers.com/Posts/1/1/4/10/69193/the-inefficiency-of-diablo3s-development
I specifically refer to the post numbered 80 where he says “Game systems are much easier. Game systems are numbers and math in a spreadsheet for the most part. Numbers and math are easy to change, and easy to change right up to the launch of the game.”
That is only a half truth though. One of the main complaints is the uninspiring itemization system. The math and numbers part of the equation may be “easy to change”, but what about redesigning every item and the way it interacts with active and passive skill sets? If the numbers and math are so easy to change, then this shouldn’t be an issue to address now. Yet, we still have to wait for them to really address the root issues with both the monk and wizard classes where this whole “simple numbers tuning” with the math is no longer viable (which I asked them about in the Q&A -> http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/7710222398?page=8#142). And that particular aspect likely also impacts why PvP arena has been delayed because you cannot even begin to perform the balancing needed there before both the underlying design of the monk and wizard have been fixed to where the skills synergy in those classes meet their (and the players) satisfaction.
Finally, this regarding their end game philosophy regarding Inferno:
http://blues.incgamers.com/Posts/1/1/4/10/110647/bash-end-game-philosophy
Inferno was a stop gap implementation of an end game solution. What ended up shipping turned out to be the exact opposite of this original philosophy. It’s overall design and QA process was flawed IMHO because no one outside of Blizzard was able to test that content and the resulting itemization of drops in terms of their viability for progressing through that end game content (remember, closed public beta was limited to level 13 in normal difficulty). Once the game went live, early exploits and clever use of in game mechanics marred that end game when some players were permafreezing Diablo Inferno just a few days after release or invincibly farming A3 content (gaining an advantage over everyone else just playing the game).
Prior to 1.0.3, the quality of the drops were extremely terrible. Just getting to 50k damage was considered godly. This is what my wizard looked like at the start of Act 2 which had a steep difficulty curve over Act 1 (again, far from the the flat curve originally envisioned).
Since 1.0.3, they’ve been continually tuning Inferno to the point where it is no longer that initial end game content where even 100k damage now is all too common. There’s a link to a slide in one of the posts he quoted which stated that D3’s end game has room for options and growth. My question at this juncture is where is it? True, we got keywardens and Ubers with 1.0.5 but the reality is that both are recycled content and mechanics.
From my perspective, it’s like watching a train wreck happening in slow motion. The impression that all of the above provides, leads me to believe that the overall cohesive vision was lacking from the get go which is why many see this game in such a (sorry but I need to straight up blunt) half-assed state. I can understand the snarkiness from the development side of things and what some players took as arrogance from Jay Wilson and company pre-release. They had a vision and executed it to what they thought would be something good. What they underestimated though was not building on LoD. By that, I’m not implying to copy verbatim either because LoD was far from perfect even in the later patches. What they did have was a template to build off from in seeing how LoD fixed and made vanilla D2 better. Instead of completely ditching LoD’s itemization system, that was an area they should have built upon, fixing the stuff which didn’t work well and improving on the whole concept (instead of throwing it all away).
As I mentioned, the graphics, combat fluidity, animation effects, and physics of D3 are bar none top notched. The graphics design team should be highly commended for their work in this area. I go back and play D2:LoD and it reminds me how great D3 is in this area. The uninspiring itemization in D3 is just that though, forgettable and unrewarding.
Jay Wilson said the following in his post: “For example, we agreed that Diablo III’s itemization at launch was not good enough, so the team made numerous changes, including changing drop rates, re-tuning legendaries, and adding scores of new items to the game. We also agreed that the end game needed more depth, so the team added new events, and new systems like Monster Power and Paragon levels.” While they are positive steps, they amount to bandaid fixes. The one important philosophy in all the years I spent in network engineering/operations is that a bandaid approach always ends up resulting in a much bigger failure in the future if you do not perform root cause analysis and placing priority in fixing that underlying issue. A solid and stable foundation is paramount and this is no different in software engineering. If you have a crappy kernel which leaks memory and causes the hardware to crash, what good is every layer that is built above it (no matter how excellent the frameworks and apps are)? In a game like this, it is only good as its underlying gaming systems.
This reality is a tough pill to swallow when talking about an expansion if you are in Blizzard’s shoes because they’ve all but admitted (based on the quote I posted) that itemization and end game are lacking. They may have underestimated the early community feedback they received and chalked maybe too much of it up to nostalgia. Communicating online has some fine nuances. You don’t take feedback and suggestions verbatim. The key is to pickup on the commonality of issues that are being brought up. They knew they had a captive market prior to the release of D3 and its sales reflects that. But as we come up upon the one year mark, it is also apparent that a portion of this once captive audience is no longer a guaranteed sell (they’ll still sell a lot, but just not to the pent up level of D3) because it did not live up to many of our expectations from an overall game play experience.
The next D3 game director will have their plate full because of this frayed relationship between the customer base for this game. As Chris Metzen said in interviews, Diablo III isn’t the end of Diablo. It is just the end of a trilogy in terms of the storyline that has been playing out:
“I see this as the ending of a specific storyline. It’s not at all the end of Diablo, the end of a particular age or era, but it is the end of a series of machinations that have been playing out on Sanctuary for the last couple centuries. If Diablo ever really had a plan to mess people up, to bring about doom and destruction, this game really illustrates how grand that design has always been. Before, we didn’t have all the information. This game shows just how smart and cunning he’s been over the arc of time and why he’s the series’ unique villain. In the first couple games there wasn’t a whole lot more detail to that character other than that he was a big red dude who kicked the s— out of people. So why is the series named after him and not Baal or Mephisto? Is Diablo stronger? I would argue that he’s just really clever, he thinks laterally in a way that his brothers do not. He’s not just one of the seven big Evils. He’s Doctor Doom. And Diablo III is the culmination of his machinations, even if it’s not the end to potential stories we could tell in that universe.”
In other words, the expansions are supposed to basically complete the story up until this particular timeline of the Diablo universe. It’s not the end however from his overall vision of what Diablo is doing in some other space and time. Thus there is a vested interest on the part of Blizzard to repair the damage that has occurred because if they don’t, then there will truly no longer be a need to keep the franchise alive with a Diablo IV.
