Repeating the same mistakes – part 2

This right here is a prime example of how this development team does not grok the whole rewards/effort aspect (which I touched on in my previous wall of text).  To quickly repeat, acquiring all the components for a Hellfire ring takes effort.  I personally have no problems with that aspect.  I also don’t have much gripes with the increased chances of getting those components by playing higher difficulty settings.  In a nutshell though, the reward should be worth the effort (and that is where this team consistently has missed the mark).

The first thing that I do take issue with is how difficulty is implemented (on the quantitative end of the scale rather than actually making difficulty more qualitative in terms of mechanics), where it basically involves the same mistakes they made in vanilla – where it’s all about ones gear.  And on vanilla, MP10 gear is mostly achieved via the auction houses.  Once said gear is obtained, this of course allows ones characters to do MP10 for the 100% drop rate of said components.  Mechanically though, its all the same at MP0 or MP10 (just the numbers get bigger for monster health pools and their damage output – thus the need for better gear such that it can scale for damage and mitigation).

This difficulty tuning remains the same in patch 2.0.1 so the “challenge” is still more about getting gear for each Torment difficulty setting; it’s not about testing actual skill due to increased difficulty due to monster mechanics.  Effort as mentioned in my previous wall of text is defined more by RNG; i.e. drop rate chance.  Again, I have no issues with that.

This leads me to the second thing that I take issue with; which is how this development team thinks about what is rewarding.  Again as mentioned in my previous rant, once you’ve managed to acquire all the keys and then components to do your actual crafting, the results of that crafting will more than likely, be very unrewarding due to the piss poor RNG.  On live, some folks have done thousands of uber runs and have never managed to craft a decent HF ring; which for many, leads to this rather unrewarding experience for all of that effort.  I also never considered ubers as real end game challenge either due to how it’s been implemented.  Furthermore, the HF ring was also something I didn’t consider as a desirable end game item (it was something useful for leveling and/or use on a follower but rarely represented a side/upgrade).

In Reaper of Souls, I admit the ring will be better, but still not an end game item (and will now require 4 components to craft).  So yeah, more RNG upon RNG where the likelihood of a decent reward is going to be nil for all of that effort (no carrot and broken/missing stick mentality of this development team).  It’s generally about artificially extending the grind to give the illusion of long term replayability/depth because they have proven consistently their inability to deliver such a system.  This development team has shown a propensity towards shallowness with most every system they’ve ended up iterating; leading to this entire unrewarding and uninspiring experience that exists once one has hit level cap.  And they are repeating this entire mistake over again in Reaper of Souls.  So I guess they’ve been hard at work the past 1.5 years basically repeating the same mistakes again.

What’s missing again are actual challenges (with vanilla, it was the failure to deliver an actual competitive  PvP system for folks that enjoy that aspect; I don’t but understand quite well how this has a generally positive effect for the entire game).  Brawling does not suffice since there is no system to group/match make and to keep a running score (the premise of the arena PvP demoed, and then ultimately pulled from the release with the intention of rolling out a replacement for patch 1.1; which is of course being conveniently side stepped with this move to patch 2.0.1).  All of that was what Team Deathmatch was about (though some sembelance of balance was achieved by allowing only select runes to be used).  Yet Brawling doesn’t even try to do any balancing, but lacks the rest of the systems which made TDM actually fun for those who tried it at two straight BlizzCon’s.  Notice the operative word; FUN.  This development team has proven they do not understand what makes games in this genre fun, challenging, and rewarding (where all of this is a symbiotic relationship).

With the patch/expansion, it has been their inability to have a working Trials system (with leaderboard score keeping) which once again leaves the game without an actual competitive component to it.  They’ve obviously been spending their time tweaking the loot system (which is turning out to be underwhelming) which took away time/resources on that competitive component.  But they’ve literally only performed one huge bandaid to the entire core itemization system as opposed to addressing the root cause and fixing it.  So we’re stuck with this deficient foundation for the first expansion (and likely the 2nd/final one).  And as mentioned previously, those who thought BoA was going to result in higher quality drops are going to be in for a rude awakening when once they’ve hit the end of the rare upgrades, that finding those game/build changing legendaries is going to take awhile.  Why?  Because the ones that do drop are sort of like the ones on live and in many regards, worse.  Epic loot and wanting legendaries to actually be legendary, my ass!

As the CM mentioned though, ubers and the new HF ring is meant to be end game content.  Whatever…  it’s going to be just like live, where the actual reward is going to mostly suck because of RNG.  Considering how underwhelming Loot 2.0 is actually turning out to be at end game, this team is clearly exhibiting this inability to over deliver on the message they’ve been telegraphing since the expansion was first announced last August (translating into this loss of potential); basically repeating the same mistakes of the past.

I still managed to get 1000 hours out of vanilla (though the majority of those hours was from release through 1.0.3); what helped though was the auction house since the majority of my drops were total crap.  Now we’re going to have this artificially drawn out grind to acquire those pieces of gear to be able to effectively tackle each slider in Torment difficulty.  No monster mechanic challenges; just the same old quantitative inflation of monster health pool.  And most everything will be soul bound meaning a whole lot of grinding the same content (that no matter which way you cut it, will become   boring due to how Adventure mode has been implemented).  Again, that grind effort, is going to be generally unrewarding and uninspiring if the game ships anywhere close to what currently exists in closed beta.

The point is so much lost potential because of the design ethos of this development team.  Unless they prove otherwise, their trademark (at least for me) is always going to be defined by over promising and under delivering mixed with a lot of conflicting/hypocritical design philosophies; basically a whole lot of hype, but actual lack of substance once they’ve hit the implementation stage.  And that is why I cancelled my digital pre-order; as it currently stands, I’m no longer even looking forward to March 25th.  I’ve basically stopped play testing/providing feedback as the fun quality is missing once you hit end game (plus any meaningful feedback at this juncture cannot be easily acted upon given the amount of basic issues that still needs fixing).  So I believe the expansion will ship in a half-assed state (just like release).  And given the sorry excuse that is known as Battle.net 2.0, I’m kind of expecting the same authentication melt down issues on release day.