Diablo III – Final post about the stash tab seasonal unlock

I didn’t really want to make this following post but what the heck since it presents a perfect opportunity for me to explain why I feel the devs decision is one that has ulterior and contrived motives (I didn’t qualify the details in my earlier post).

I wouldn’t say it’s discriminating against us filthy casuals (or at least I don’t).  The reason IMHO to gate it in this particular manner is to artificially drag out the player engagement for the next year with minimal effort on their part.  By not tying legendary items as seasonal exclusive, that frees them up from having to meet these tight 3-month constraints with getting those items ready each season.  They also have to release the patches to Microsoft and Sony for the console versions earlier which actually means they would have to push up those timelines.

If one thinks about this from the designer perspective, making a desirable thing like additional stash tabs the new objective of Seasons seems brilliant at face value.  It does not require any time constrained design and balancing considerations as it is with new items every few months.  And from that perspective, it will bring up concurency numbers at the start of every season for at least the next year.  So now, they can settle on 3-month seasons and work on items at a more leisurely pace, tweaking sets as they always do, as well as focus on the actual expansion content (though I believe some of new zones, monsters, and even the cube, were things that were previously meant for it).

That zeal however is missing their entire original intent of Seasons as an optional mode with the incentives being the fresh start aspect and some cosmetic rewards tied to your progress.  But like everything, this design team ends up with a funnel vision and ends up forsaking everything else to cater to the flavor that they are putting their effort into.  And that current flavor is the seasonal game mode.

Their base core foundation is so flawed that even they have made the decision to completely ignore the campaign in this mode because everyone knows there is no value pre-level cap except to act as a complete time sink.  For this exact same reason, they completely tried to trivialize low level play through (they won’t remove it completely because then it would be yet another implicit signal that shows how very little this game is actually a proper ARPG to begin with – a huge failure for both the lead content designer and lead technical game designer; both who have been there from the start.

Seasonal exclusive items (especially when they enhanced builds) was the beginning of crossing over the line with incentives that gated content into an optional game mode (this would be like giving only act specific crafting materials for the cube to hardcore mode players for the entirety of patch 2.3; you want those materials now, you need to play hardcore regardless if you like playing that game mode or not; else you need to wait for the next patch for them to begin finally dropping outside of hardcore).

With stash tabs 7-10, a player is forced to play this optional game mode as there is no way to earn them outside of seasons.  So lets toss this into the other optional game mode; lets force everyone to play hardcore mode to unlock stash tabs 7-10.  That is what gating a Quality of Life feature behind an optional game mode is.  And as if it weren’t even more obvious (like they think the player base is that stupid to not put 2+2 together), they are further sticking it to the end of that seasonal journey.

If a game mode needs to constantly rely on incentives beyond the original premise of Seasons, then its an implicit admission by Team 3 that the seasonal game mode cannot stand alone on its own merits.  How in the world can the game director approve of and even sign off on this decision by the lead content designer?

I need to reiterate that I play all the game modes (softcore, hardcore, seasonal) so I don’t have this mutually exclusive agenda.  S1 was part season on both softcore and hardcore, part non-season.  S2 – hardcore seasonal all the way until season end. S3 – softcore seasonal only to get the cosmetics and then I stopped playing D3 completely.  This season, softcore only again for the cosmetics and just playing one single class in non-seasonal softcore that I hadn’t played much past level cap in both classic and RoS (barbarian).  Stopped a few weeks ago since I’ve been playing the Devilian closed beta.

I don’t believe any quality of life feature should be gated behind an optional game mode period.  Even if it is at the beginning.  The definition of optional is pretty damn clear.  Players should not be in any way shape or form feel forced to play an optional game mode they may not care about.  If you want to implement something like that, it should be attainable in ANY game mode and be achievable the exact same way in each.  If we’re going to have proponents making an exception, then I want them to go all the way; Seasonal Hardcore (two optional game modes) and actually completing all Seasonal Journey’s (meaning not stopping at Conqueror and moving it to Guardian).  Because according to some un-filthy non-casuals, it’s easily done.

As mentioned, I came to the conclusion awhile ago that this game was not designed to be a proper ARPG and I’ll qualify why I feel this way (this tangent is being made because its to make a point regarding the above). There is no value in continually grinding in this game from that perspective because there is virtually little actual character building and development that is of your own personal decision making.  The game is designed to spoon feed that to players (set items) in terms of end game.  It’s been this “on rails design” since the start.

IMHO, it’s more of an action combat arcade game and there is nothing wrong with that.  Arcade meaning you play it for a short while for fun but then move on once you’ve achieved your personal objectives.  More power to those who actually have the intestinal fortitude to actually grind an arcade game to get the high score. Players used to do that at amusement arcades spending hours feeding coins into the arcade machines and playing to accomplish that.  Some of us choose to stop well ahead of that and move on until something new arrives.

D3 in that respect works well.  To go along with its excellent graphics, aesthetics, and physics, the game undeniably has fast and fun combat with equally visceral attack animations, mechanics and effects.  At level cap, you can quickly swap out skills outside of Greater Rifts (the game client just lacks a skill and gear load out preset system).  Objectives are immediately conveyed directly to the player so that you can jump straight to the action.  Patch 2.4 adds some QoL in this area with immediate directional arrows.  In many other games, I would consider that level of handholding over the top.  But D3 isn’t even close to being an actual ARPG and this kind of handholding works well for its core design.

But this design means there is no sense of actual discovery and exploration because the rewards are made in such a way as to direct players to those objectives (and ignore everything else) as well as specific gating mechanisms.  Basically, the design of many systems in D3 are contrived where it lacks that organic feel inherent in many ARPG’s as you journey from the start.

Stopping to take your time to full clear a zone offers no better rewards and no discovery of anything new so it is pointless in this game to do that unless you don’t mind just wasting time slaying monsters outside of the objectives just for the hell of it.  You can’t get blood shards, cube materials, or greater rift keys from just exploring the game world and slaying hordes of monsters outside of bounties/rifts.  Bounties need to done to acquire the act specific materials for the cube.  Thankfully, all those places you need to go and the objectives you need to complete are spoon fed to us.

While the gating mechanism of requiring key fragments for regular rifts were removed, the most rewarding place to acquire Death Breaths are going to be in regular rifts (and has also been more rewarding in terms of increased legendary drop chances) which also holds the gating mechanism for Greater Rifts; Greater Rift keys.  The point I am getting at with this tangent is that the game designers created these systems, and they want to force everyone to play in them.

All of those systems are also just a means to an end to funnel players into Greater Rifts (legendary gems and leveling them) where at a certain point, your characters power ends up exceeding the games base difficulty at its highest setting and where the rewards (XP, gold, blood shards) ends up blowing away what you can get elsewhere.  Now that your character can just face roll Torment X, the only end game challenge left is running Greater Rifts over and over again because it has no ceiling.

New legendary gems/items, sets, monsters, and zones are new content per their respective categories.  But they are too are just a means to an end because at end game, you still end up doing the exact same thing with those; Greater Rifts over and over again.  Just one more tier to push on what is a hamster wheel to nowhere just like an arcade game to get the next highest score.

All of this is their design as to how they perceive the games longevity should be implemented because these designers don’t have a clue as to what makes an action role playing game tick at its core.  And that’s why this team can come up with such a grand idea of gating a quality of life feature behind an optional game mode.  You seriously cannot make this stuff up but if there is one thing for certain, Blizzard’s Team 3 knows how to always deliver in this area.