D3 Dev's Lessons Learned - How Relevant to PoE?

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

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mrpetrov wrote:

"Competition is good." Chris Wilson said this re d3, and of course he's spot on. Despite us enjoying a golden age of arpgs, I happen to think there are some relevant observations for poe in the comments in the OP.

...*eyeroll*

Sure, competition is good, but let's not pretend that D3's massive failure to be the true successor to Diablo 2 had nothing to do with PoE's initial burst of Open Beta success.

Hell, if Blizzard had stuck to their original skill rune idea, I'd be $24k richer right now.

Couldn't agree more. I hope I'm not stretching the analogy to suggest that PoE were the Virgin Blue-esque beneficiary from the Ansett-style collapse that was D3 Vanilla.

P.

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vector292 wrote:

The biggest issue is that time means next to nothing for d3, you can grind 100s of hours and never get the one legendary you need

Let's explore that idea. Let's say you are aiming for the "Sunwuko's Shines" Amulet as a Monk. That has 6.98% drop rate given that a legendary amulet is dropped and is Monk-smart loot.

85% chance to become Monk-smart loot.

Kadala requires 100 shards per amulet try. Each amulet try has 10% chance to be legendary.

A torment VI regular rift run yields about 100 shards and we'll assume it takes 10 minutes to do.


So in 100 hours, we'll have obtained on average: 100*100*60/10/100*0.1*0.85*0.0698 = 3.5598 "Sunwuko's Shines" amulets

In other words, the risk of not getting any Sunwuko's Shines in 100 hours spent that way would be:

(1-0.10*0.85*0.0698)^(100*100*60/10/100) = 0.02814 = 2.814%

2.814% risk is very low


Edit:
Conclusion is that it is extremely likely that you'll obtain that specific legendary amulet you were chasing by grinding for 100 hours.

I can't believe there is still stigma towards Diablo 3. Honestly I liked it then and I like it now. Flaws be damned, it had something that I like. Granted I have 10xs more play time in PoE than D3, I enjoy all the classes in D3 and the loot gets better and better. They add new legendaries, and legendarie powers, and just added a new tier of items called ancients. It's a grind and that's what it's supposed to be. They switch up skills, and abilities here and there, buff and nerf, and have a great servers.


You can like both.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

I think the biggest lesson that Bliz learned from D3 was that you should make a game... not a business model.

Agreed with this. There's no doubt that D3 vanilla was earning crazy money for Blizzard - RMT was so profitable that bot ban waves were only a minor inconvenience for those companies, meanwhile Blizzard would see significant upticks in game sales after every wave.

I'm sure the 180 they took was due to someone in a board meeting saying "You know, it's making lots of money but we're basically killing the brand..."


Anyway, back on-topic, I think the whole "pillars" thing is really relevant to PoE. Especially since GGG doesn't have a whole lot of manpower, so running into a design snag can be very costly for them. Example:

GGG used to have this rule that mobs should either be fast but hit lightly, or slow but hit hard. It's been the backbone to most mob design all the way up until 1.0 release. Then we started seeing a few mobs here and there that both are difficult to avoid and hit hard (devourers and frogs mainly). Each wave of new mob types they add tend to include one more of these "mould-breaker" types. Now they have a real spike damage problem, as players can and often do get killed out of nowhere despite being able to handle 99% of the content with zero problem.

Addressing this issue is going to take some comprehensive balance passes. Probably quite a lot of work, especially for all 2 or 3 GGG team members who's job it is to do this (among other things as well, most likely).

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Shagsbeard wrote:

I think the biggest lesson that Bliz learned from D3 was that you should make a game... not a business model.

This is one of the rare occasions I'll agree with Shags.

I usually put it as... let the devs make the game not the board.

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Nubatron wrote:

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Shagsbeard wrote:

"With help from Blizzard North".

Nonsense. Blizzard North quit working on D3 because the company wanted a business model, not a game. What we have today is NOTHING like the D3 that was being made by Blizzard North. And "Ten years of development" includes about 4 where they built a game and had to scrap it because the team walked out rather than bow to the demands of the company.

"History is written by the victors." - Winston Churchill

History/Science/Everything is rewritten by academia/popular opinion and force fed to the masses. Stop thinking, start towing the line or face the consequences of the mindless hordes.

#wearebecomingbiologicalrobots

the 6 piece sets are so bad though, its an item game and theyre locking down 6 bits of your gear completely that can never be anything other than the 6 set bits or 5 + the rorg. Then theres the items that go along with them that make your build function... in the end you are basically left with something like 1 ring, 1 amulet and 1 bracer that can actually be changed and upgraded with something other than exactly the same item but with 20 more strength and 3% more crit damage etc. Theyve completely taken rares out of the game pretty much.

Its literally the worst item system I have ever seen in an arpg, its actually far worse than when the game first released, when rare items could be truly amazing. Its a much better game now, because it actually has endgame, it has crafting, theres something to do. But theres still literally a couple of viable, competitive builds for each class, they destroyed the item system in an arpg which is an item game and didn't manage to fix the problem of there being virtually no build diversity at all so far, and their answer is to destroy the item game even more to try and fix that.

Right now for cursader theres 1 build that can really push properly high rifts, condemn, and that requires you to have an ancient legendary blade of prophecy in order to do high rifts with it.. so if you play that class you basically have to wait for 1 particular ancient legendary weapon to drop for your class to really be viable and competitive in grifts, otherwise you are playing the other build that class has which is the lmp Pony thrower while waiting for the condemn weapon to allow you to push higher. Can you imagine in this game if there was 1 build for the Ranger that could do lvl75+ maps and it required you to find a soul taker in order to actually do those maps? That is the state of Diablo 3s builds and items 3 years after release. You cant even trade for the soul taker, you literally just have to grind 66-72 maps all day every day until this particular item drop that allows your class to actually push the higher content. How many actual different builds and items can take on higher maps in this game with a Ranger? More than anyone could sit here and list off. I could clear 75-78 maps self found on a ranger with probably 10x as many builds as Diablo 3 has across all classes that can take on its higher grifts, and it would take less item rng to gear them. I understand that they are trying to 'fix' this with item changes on the ptr right now, but this game is 3 years old and theyre still struggling to work out how to have basic functionality of builds etc, and by fix we mean maybe now there will be 3 or 4 builds for a crusader than can take on a solo lvl46 rift hopefully, how many ranger builds can take on 75-78 maps again? 30? Probably more.

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gilrad wrote:

I'm sure the 180 they took was due to someone in a board meeting saying "You know, it's making lots of money but we're basically killing the brand..."

true. Well, honestly i think it was "we MADE a lot of money but now the game is dead and so is the brand, so if we want to make more money from our expansion ideas we have already worked on and sell diablo 4 at some point in the future we have to change."

If it was still viable and had life and money in it they would have just kept on going, it was a business decision imo and not one based on not wanting to destroy the brand because of feelings of integrity as developers. The game really is better now, its more fun as an arcade blaster style game. Im still not sure if blizzard actually understand what an arpg is or if they just dont care and feel like they can make more money with far less effort just sticking with a little fantasy shoot em up.

D3 has that arcade-like feeling to it. Good game if don't want to mess with min/maxing your guy.

Snorkle, you're right in many areas, except I don't agree with you that D3 "end game" as you define it (ie the part of the game which, as you correctly point out, narrows to a couple of major builds per class - with some minor tweaks around those builds).

Running 45+GR Solo is what I'd say is end-game solo in D3 right now. For GR45+ solo, I agree that D3 has relatively little build variety per class. However, that is not, in my view, the equivalent of running 75+ maps.

If you want to farm T6, then there are many, many, more viable builds in D3 that those couple of "end game" builds. One of the key differences is that D3 has an endless dungeon - while PoE...doesn't. It has Uber Atziri. How many really materially different builds can take down Uber Atziri (I don't know the answer, I've never even taken down Atziri, let alone UA)?

I suspect that if you had an endlessly scaling end-game in PoE, you'd see a not totally dissimilar narrowing of viable builds here too.