One of the most “amusing” things is the “I quit” type of postings when it comes to <insert game name>. I temporarily removed the access filter to the Battle.net forums just to see if they fixed the performance issues (which unsurprisingly, they have not), and saw a number of “I quit” threads on the Diablo forums. That is nothing new since it has been happening since launch. And I do realize I’ve taken to expressing my own disappointment on the official forums and via this blog (including this particular time wasting post). Part of this is to keep me grounded as I engage in the design aspects myself (so as to not to make those same mistakes).
I looked at the lifetime/elite kills on the profiles of some of these players (I no longer consider Paragon level a good indicator of time played due to the multiplicative experience granted in multiplayer Greater Rifts) and concluded that some of these players played the game way too much.
Seriously, there is something called addiction and games like Diablo require personal discipline to occasionally step away from. For every hack and slash ARPG with the exception of the first Wizardry, I’ve always done that. I noted Wizardry because at the time, I didn’t realize I had an addiction problem with the amount of time I played it. I was in college and it got to the point where I was putting more time into the game, than actually studying. My GPA took a hit as a result from a 3.4 to 2.9 (to lose .5 points should give an indication of how bad my grades were over several semesters).
I eventually stopped playing cold turkey (I was also into RTS games like Broderbund’s Ancient Art of War and put that aside as well). After that, I tended to keep my game playing in check (it also helps that I’m not heavily into gaming where only a limited number of genres and specific titles interest me). While I played D1 and D2 a lot, I also never let it consume a large bulk of my free time. And most of my D3 playing came in the first 3 months of the game (before the original Paragon was implemented) but even that was far less than the amount of time I put early on in D2 classic and LoD. To date, I have just under 1800 total hours in D3 since launch (there are 8766 hours in an year) which over the past 3 years, isn’t much time. In contrast, there were some players that easily had over 5000 hours in the game before Reaper of Souls launched. That is a serious addiction problem for just ONE game. And some of these players ended up quitting the game once Seasons were implemented.
There was one D3 player who I recall mentioning how much he loved the game (being a huge fan of the previous two games) where he had over 5k hours racked up in vanilla by the time RoS went into closed beta. He was also in the closed beta and racked up a lot of play hours in that, and when RoS went live, continued putting several thousand more hours into the game. That all changed with the implementation of Seasons and Greater Rifts though. The grinding associated with trial keys took its toll and this player, eventually came to find how un-fun D3 had become for him to where he just had to put the game down a few months ago.
And it isn’t surprising that a person would feel burnt out when that much time is put into just ONE game to where they hit their limits and quit out of this frustration. And it is worse when the game has a design that doesn’t tickle ones dopamine often (of course, everyone is different in this area but for me, D3 just does not have a very good effort/reward balance which makes it really easy for me to stop playing for long periods of time). For Blizzard, this might be a good thing since that is one less person consuming server and network resources.
From a game designer perspective, hooking players this way is sort of like a holy grail where even when your game design systems are terrible, un-fun, and frustration inducing, players cannot seem to stop playing it until the whole thing reaches a tipping point. The situation is much more complex with Diablo though because the franchise was started by a completely different development and design team than the one that has taken it over. Diablo 3 is just that, just a name applied to a game designed by a team that does not have any deep roots in the franchise (nor have a good understanding of the entire hack and slash ARPG genre when it comes to character development/progression), and have put their own stamp on it.
But this does have a longer term impact where some players are just so deeply turned off that Blizzard has essentially burnt through whatever goodwill there is. Myself, I am not even burnt out from the game. What I am is turned off by is poorly designed game systems by a AAA game developer that takes this for granted because their deeply seated thinking is “they’ll be back”. I’ve already stated before that I’ve played D3 enough that I might as well see the series through.
That is only true though if they stick to their original trilogy where the 2nd expansion does wrap up the story line for the game in this particular time frame in Sanctuary. If they change that and decide to continue to extend the game (since it is cheaper and less resource intensive to actually design and develop a new engine), then I am out because D3 cannot be properly fixed without a re-design of the underlying core systems when it comes to class skills and itemization. And so long as the same game designers work on the franchise, I see zero reasons to be subjected to same B.S. that will happen in a D4.
Blizzard tries to leverage their other franchises to keep some stickiness with their players. It’s not working for me since #1, I don’t even play WoW (never been a subscriber and never will). #2, I stopped playing Hearthstone awhile ago (before the first expansion even went into beta). #3, I rarely play StarCraft II anymore and while I will likely get Legacy of the Void (to wrap up the trilogy and see it through), I am no longer really interested in the franchise. I’m in the closed beta but only launched and played it all of 2 times. #4, I was in the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha before it moved to closed beta status and only logged in once, played part of the tutorial, and never logged in again until it just a month-and-a-half prior to its recent launch (and again, I just continued the tutorial where I last left off, browsed some of the skins, and logged off again). #5, Overwatch doesn’t interest me at all since I am not into first-person shooters.
My point is that Blizzard has burnt through whatever goodwill existed where I am no longer an automatic customer. And that is for someone who hasn’t quote-and-quote, quit the game. There literally is no reason for me to quit because I already paid for the base game and the expansion. And I already have developed this extremely lowered level of expectation for the Diablo franchise to know that I will get some level of entertainment from it for the price, but nothing that keeps me constantly engaged in the game play (like with many other players that end up with serious addiction problems and find that they cannot easily stop).
Sure, some of the above titles are free to play, but the underlying aspect is to get you to spend money via DLC microtransactions (MTX). Cosmetic MTX will be coming to D3 eventually for existing regions as well (I still haven’t reposted some of the things I posted on the official forums awhile ago regarding MTX). Something like will most likely be tied to the next expansion announcement (a surefire early 2016 release) since they will need to generate all kinds of hype. And it would not surprise me if that shop premiers before the actual expansion because that would serve as a kind of glue to get players who purchase cosmetics, to continue to stick around.
What remains to be seen if any of the marketing hype will get the “I Quit” players to actually return (like how RoS did when you search the forum for earlier such threads, and find players that said they stopped playing and would never buy RoS, still playing even now).
