While players may want the sort of staying power that Diablo II – Lord of Destruction ended up providing quite by accident (since the overall design pretty much provided different ways for players to create their own meta end games), the current curators of the franchise have their own philosophies regarding that aspect which they believe will be fun for a larger majority. Unfortunately, not everyone is going to be satisfied.
What I mean is they (the developers) want the game to last long, but not in the context of players continuously playing the game for years on end. As for when content is no longer developed, they’ll probably already have ladders and maybe some form of PvMvP in the game by that point. They’ve already gone on record (several CM postings in the forums) that they never designed Diablo III to be continuously updated with content. The underlying design they went with further exasperated the lack of longevity that some players see.
It’s more on the lines of play and maybe take a break, then come back after awhile when they’ve actually made an update. And since there is no ongoing subscription to play, continually having players engaged with the game, isn’t a very high priority when it comes to those designs that can make that aspect compelling.
With the development team taking this rather firm line with soul binding certain items (basically the best items the game will drop), it’s basically an implicit admission that the underlying core design which led to the itemization that currently exists, being flawed (and because they made the decision to stick with it so as to not break current items, means utilizing this soul binding mechanic so that it will allow them to increase/narrow the stat range, ease up on the RNG aspect of rolls to increase the quality level of those items in terms of both stats and class specific targeting).
This does have a negative impact for those who enjoy trading (a meta game in itself) everything including the most BiS items. It’s something they (the developers) seem willing to sacrifice though because their current message is pretty much, “finding your epic loot by killing monsters”. So they are relegating the trading of such items to a very narrow window while leaving trading open for everything below that. And they realize this isn’t going to please everyone. Myself, I have mixed feelings regarding any form of binding on every legendary/set item that can drop since I can see both sides of the argument. But I’m reserving judgement until they PTR the system level changes, and players are able to try it for themselves.
