The True Successor to Diablo 3

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Kenthros wrote:

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Labanski wrote:

and of course the AH which completely ruined the way the game is played.

Hate to say it but the AH was not even close to what ruined D3. People that were going to buy items were going to 3rd party sites and if you didnt you werent going to compete with them, there AH give us equal grounds. How about the abuse of bots, lack of help from blizzard, piss poor itemization, skills, maps. Limitation to follow story crap instead of making a game and just killing monsters. How about the horseshit BNet 2.0. AH did nothing to d3s downfall.

Well, the major part of what killed D3 in my opinion was as you said the poor itemization and character customisation, but I as many believe that the auction house was really responsible for that too.

Blizzard had a very ambitious business plan: make a game about items about which will keep everyone playing, and at the same time, coerce everyone into using an auction house where they will trade the items using real money, and Blizzard will take a cut of that money.

In order to maximise the extent to which the game was really about gear, they removed all other real forms of character customisation from the game. It's hard to imagine buying skill points in an auction house, after all. Any two characters with the same class and level in D3 are essentially identical if you strip the gear off them, and everyone who plays the game through to the end will hit the level cap pretty quickly.

Now, this perhaps wouldn't have been too terrible if the itemisation was really great, and you could feel like you were making continuous progress and had lots of good options to choose from in the direction and choices for the type of gear you put on your character. But if everyone had a constant feeling that they were making good progress playing the game, what would be the point of using the auction house? Only a few people would find any cause to use it. Especially so for the RMAH where they'd pay real money for gear. Why pay money for gear if you're having lots of fun finding the upgrades yourself?

So they had to really squeeze players hard by making the item lottery a somewhat ridiculous proposition to win. There are a few stats on gear which just have to be there for an item to be usable, and many stats in the pool of things which can show up are comparatively useless. Couple that with the need to actually obtain a decent roll on each of these affixes (rather than just getting some good rolls from a bunch of selections of almost-equally-useful affixes), and you have a recipe for making upgrades hard to find.

Things are tuned in D3 so upgrades rapidly become few and far between, and even though some people will find epic items from time to time, the sense of real progress quickly vanishes for almost everyone. Because of this, if you find an upgrade in terms of core stats, you generally put it on because you're not going to find another one soon. The freedom to be picky about everything else and develop any sense of attachment to the uniqueness of your character is greatly reduced.

Moreover, the players who actually buy items in the AH (which does give them a bit of ability to customise things) only make things worse for themselves by making the good feeling of finding an upgrade yet harder to achieve in-game. Even the gold auction house on its own would have had the capacity to spoil the game somewhat from this direction, at least for the players who opted to use it. However, an auction house like that wouldn't have given Blizzard the incentive to ruin the rest of the game like they did.

Without the good feeling of finding upgrades for your character (or at least for an alt), and without the freedom to build really unique characters which actually functioned differently from those of other players, there was really no reason for most people to continue playing the game past a single play-through (or if you're really pushing it, a play-through using each class).

Anyway, that's the lesson that D3 painfully taught the world about incentives in ARPG game design. Hopefully we don't have to see another mistake like that any time soon.