Never played Diablo 3 , Please explain why it sucks WITHOUT PoE in mind

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1453R wrote:

I can see what you're saying but it's an odd sort of distinction to make. Quality isn't normally used as a demarcation of a game's inherent Gudness, the way you're positing it here. Normally, quality and polish are seen as roughly synonymous with each other, both being used as a means of describing how much of the rough edges have been filed off, how much the kinks have been worked out, and how generally smooth-and-creamy the product is. Diablo 3 is a quality product by most people's standards.

I think it's fair to say that a story is high quality or low quality, or to make similar statements regarding voice acting, artwork, music, gameplay intuitiveness, and even things like itemization or overall fun factor. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that "That is a quality game!" means that it is, in fact, a good game, not an extremely well-polished turd. If I were to nitpick, I would say that they are not different categories but rather that one is subsumed by the other: "Quality" includes many things, of which "polish" is just one.

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It's also, however, a deeply flawed one in the design stage. I'm not sure there's an easy word for a bad design which is executed very well, that's a phenomenon almost unique to entertainment media.

I'm pretty sure there is. ;)

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....Also let's face it, reviewers gave D3 exceptional marks not because they confused polish with quality with Gudness, but because D3 is a Blizzard game and when a big-name reviewer writes a review for a game from a company like Blizzard, that review says damn well exactly what Blizzard told the reviewer to say. Glowing praise, with just enough "they could've done this a little better and it may wrinkle your brow a little, so watch for that while you're enjoying your purchase" to give the illusion of that reviewer having independently arrived at whatever conclusion he's espousing and no more.

Perhaps I am naive, but I don't really think this is the case for more than a few review sites and publications, and only the largest at that, where advertising bucks really do rule the roost.

Rather, I think that Blizzard did a genuinely good job at creating a game that leaves a good first impression (if you can ignore the horribly written story) but is obviously not designed with longevity in mind. (Some postulate that this was deliberate, as they wanted people to go back to playing and paying for WoW, but I neither know nor care.)

In short, professional reviewers and ARPG fans have an utterly different frame of reference, and that's why there was such a large disconnect between critical opinion and fan opinion. This seems much more likely to me than some conspiracy to force reviewers to give a qualified-but-glowing review.

To address the title question:

There is a certain group of players who enjoy playing games in their head when they're not actually playing games. Some kind of puzzle you can extract from the game and carry around with you to obsess about when you could have your mind on work or whatever, then test your hypotheses when you actually returned to the game proper. The technical term for such a game-outside-the-game is a metagame*.

Diablo 2 had a strong, vibrant metagame. Diablo 3 cut it to near non-existence, in an attempt to reduce the learning curve for an action gaming audience that never expressed interest in the Diablo franchise previously. Many returning Diablo 2 players thus felt betrayed, as the franchise owners had sacrificed something the base craved in an attempt to capture new audiences.

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* It's a little sad to see so many misuse the term "metagame" to refer not to the puzzle of choices made outside of a technical play session, but instead to the distilled community-consensus answer to said puzzle. For instance, the Hearthstone metagame isn't the set of proven decklists TempoStorm or whomever post to their website, but instead the process of experimentation and empirical data collection that "proved" those decklists. When players are quick to jump straight to such resources and copy the winningest results, the implication is that the metagame is unenjoyable enough that it's best to cheat-sheet the answers to sidestep it.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

To address the title question:

There is a certain group of players who enjoy playing games in their head when they're not actually playing games.

Progress Quest is for them.

Am I allowed to have Diablo 2 in mind? Cause I hated Diablo 3, with Diablo 2 in mind, before I ever heard of POE

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de99ial wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

To address the title question:

There is a certain group of players who enjoy playing games in their head when they're not actually playing games.

Progress Quest is for them.

That is exactly the opposite of what PQ is for.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

* It's a little sad to see so many misuse the term "metagame" to refer not to the puzzle of choices made outside of a technical play session, but instead to the distilled community-consensus answer to said puzzle. For instance, the Hearthstone metagame isn't the set of proven decklists TempoStorm or whomever post to their website, but instead the process of experimentation and empirical data collection that "proved" those decklists. When players are quick to jump straight to such resources and copy the winningest results, the implication is that the metagame is unenjoyable enough that it's best to cheat-sheet the answers to sidestep it.

That is still a metagame; the distinction is PvE vs PvP and how many players are engaged with it. PvE games leave plenty of room for the more casual brewer to engage with the metagame and establish their own expectations. Success is more subjective (individual), and they provide more of a meta-sandbox than PvP games do. In PvP focused games, the meta-competition isn’t versus other players, it is versus the expectations established by the best (few) metagame analysts. Expectations are collectively established, not individually.

When people refer to the metagame of Hearthstone or M:tG, they’re using appropriate terminology; there’s just little room left for them to engage with said metagame and succeed.

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CanHasPants wrote:

the distinction is PvE vs PvP and how many players are engaged with it. PvE games leave plenty of room for the more casual brewer to engage with the metagame and establish their own expectations. Success is more subjective (individual), and they provide more of a meta-sandbox than PvP games do. In PvP focused games, the meta-competition isn’t versus other players, it is versus the expectations established by the best (few) metagame analysts. Expectations are collectively established, not individually.

When people refer to the metagame of Hearthstone or M:tG, they’re using appropriate terminology; there’s just little room left for them to engage with said metagame and succeed.

While theoretically any PvE performance can become PvP by comparing results to other players (even subconsciously, ex: viewing streamers), I'll agree that the potential exists for subjective standards in PvE performance. However, what I was trying to draw attention to is how, in the context of interpersonal competition, people would rather be told what works and skip the metagame than science out the metagame themselves.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

However, what I was trying to draw attention to is how, in the context of interpersonal competition, people would rather be told what works and avoid experimentation than science out the metagame themselves.

I believe this is demonstrably false, to a point. M:tG standard recently went through a few bannings, which weakened the top decks, while a new set was simultaneously being released. In the absence of established solutions, or in the face of uncertainty, a larger population of players began to experiment with new strategies.

Once enough of a metagame has been solved, more people will err towards investing in established solutions over finding the remaining untested solutions, but that is just a value proposition. There is a natural scarcity in viability, and searching for new viable solutions has a cost. As the amount of viable solutions increases, so to does the risk in allocating your resources towards discovery. Conformity, then, becomes increasingly popular.

I’d call that a quirk of a game’s design, rather than a failing (of either the game or its players).

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CanHasPants wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

However, what I was trying to draw attention to is how, in the context of interpersonal competition, people would rather be told what works and avoid experimentation than science out the metagame themselves.

I believe this is demonstrably false, to a point. M:tG standard recently went through a few bannings, which weakened the top decks, while a new set was simultaneously being released. In the absence of established solutions, or in the face of uncertainty, a larger population of players began to experiment with new strategies.

Once enough of a metagame has been solved, more people will err towards investing in established solutions over finding the remaining untested solutions, but that is just a value proposition. There is a natural scarcity in viability, and searching for new viable solutions has a cost. As the amount of viable solutions increases, so to does the risk in allocating your resources towards discovery. Conformity, then, becomes increasingly popular.

I’d call that a quirk of a game’s design, rather than a failing (of either the game or its players).

The other thing to remember in Magic, especially upper-end Magic, is that you have a limited number of chances to locate success. There's only so many regional tournaments, only so many chances to earn a slot in Nationals or the like. There is a timer on success and you do not get an indefinite number of swings. In an environment like that, there is a very real price for metagaming unsuccessfully, and a great deal of incentive to spend your dollars and just as importantly your chances on something you have a reasonable guarantee of being able to perform.

Now admittedly, the best players are the ones who exploit this tendency and manage to successfully counterplay the popular mainstream decks, or tweak their own decks such that the threats their opponents are prepared to face aren't the ones they're bringing. There's value in unpredictability and nonconformity, and dark horse deck configs are actually often a lot more potent and dangerous than people looking in from the outside would think. I don't play competitive Magic, but I used to run competitive card games of other sorts all the time, and my brother did play competitive Magic. Playing a time-tested, proven strategy was a way to get yourself into the upper brackets more reliably. You wouldn't win more often, but you'd do consistently better than people who played nothing but dark horse decks.

Dark horse decks are really sink or swim. Either they do great for you or they flame out and die and you go home in disgrace. The netdecks will at least let you make a fight of it after you tweakl them up for your own environment and tendencies.

It's playing a straight-up netdeck, 100% cloned from meta lists, and doing so without an understanding of why that deck is good, what it can do, what it can't do, what it does in game 2 and 3 after sideboarding, and all those other things you only really learn when you extensively playtest a deck and make it yours before an event, that gets you punted from your event with a 2/10 record.