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

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DirkAustin wrote:

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D_nasty wrote:

It's funny how stupid a company can be. They had the most perfect ARPG ever in D2 then they come to us 10 years later with some ridiculous creation that's worse in every way and to make things worse they butcher it even more by doing a 180 and eliminating trading.

D3 was the biggest disappointment in gaming of the last decade for me. That's what happens when you let incompetent people try to design a game, they should have kept Blizzard North to make D3, everyone will forget but Jay Wilson absolutely killed the diablo franchise.

I take D3s self found over POEs noticeboard spam, trade chat spam and 3rd party sites any day.

To each their own.

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D_nasty wrote:

That's why you're a casual. Games shouldn't be catered to people like you, especially games with so many loyal hardcore followers like the Diablo franchise had.

No one's forcing you to trade if you don't want to, but when you DO force everyone to play self-found that's the laziest path to game design you can take.

brb balancing game too hard
brb just make it self-found

The only thing I'm thankful for to D3 is that I made like $3k on the RMAH, never touched the game since they removed trading.

Some games should absolutely cater to the casual; and different breeds of casual at that. If we can remove the legacy of Diablo from the equation, D3 does hit a niche of casuals that control a large part of the market and they certainly deserve to enjoy gaming as well. Blizzard is certainly more interested in market share than catering to a niche (more recently), so let them.

Hell, Farmville was a game that was made for casuals and it should have been made...it brought tons of fun to people who otherwise don't game.

The real issue is the assumption that one approach is better than the other because it is "more fun". If people want self found hard coded: go find a game that does it. If people want to trade, do the same. POE offers trading and GGG has never stated anything otherwise, so that is the players that they are targeting and the types that enjoy the game to its fullest. There is nothing in POE that prohibits self-found. D3 on the other hand does prohibit trading (and the driving factor in my personal departure).

I think that is one thing people overlook. D3 has literally written off a section of players that will never return. POE on the other hand has taken an open stance that does not exclude either type of player -- self found just takes longer (not impossible).

Those who only take part in a subset of the games functions should at least concede that they are intentionally limiting their experience and in turn, not make balance suggestions based upon that limited point of view.

To say that no game should cater to casuals, I think that is just as short sighted though.

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Nubatron wrote:

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D_nasty wrote:

That's why you're a casual. Games shouldn't be catered to people like you, especially games with so many loyal hardcore followers like the Diablo franchise had.

No one's forcing you to trade if you don't want to, but when you DO force everyone to play self-found that's the laziest path to game design you can take.

brb balancing game too hard
brb just make it self-found

The only thing I'm thankful for to D3 is that I made like $3k on the RMAH, never touched the game since they removed trading.

Some games should absolutely cater to the casual; and different breeds of casual at that. If we can remove the legacy of Diablo from the equation, D3 does hit a niche of casuals that control a large part of the market and they certainly deserve to enjoy gaming as well. Blizzard is certainly more interested in market share than catering to a niche (more recently), so let them.

Hell, Farmville was a game that was made for casuals and it should have been made...it brought tons of fun to people who otherwise don't game.

The real issue is the assumption that one approach is better than the other because it is "more fun". If people want self found hard coded: go find a game that does it. If people want to trade, do the same. POE offers trading and GGG has never stated anything otherwise, so that is the players that they are targeting and the types that enjoy the game to its fullest. There is nothing in POE that prohibits self-found. D3 on the other hand does prohibit trading (and the driving factor in my personal departure).

I think that is one thing people overlook. D3 has literally written off a section of players that will never return. POE on the other hand has taken an open stance that does not exclude either type of player -- self found just takes longer (not impossible).

Those who only take part in a subset of the games functions should at least concede that they are intentionally limiting their experience and in turn, not make balance suggestions based upon that limited point of view.

To say that no game should cater to casuals, I think that is just as short sighted though.

I'm saying a hardcore ARPG shouldn't be catered to casuals. There was nothing casual about D2, it was pretty much the opposite of that. If you want to play farmville go ahead, but don't try and ruin games with a lineage of having complex mechanics and immersive gameplay just because you, as a casual player, want to play them. You can either adapt or play another game, having the game adapt to you is just absurd.

If they wanted to make D3 a casual game they should have announced it beforehand and I wouldn't have bought it. Instead they forced everyone to play casual-mode halfway through the game, it just doesn't make sense to me.

As for D3 excluding everyone who wanted to play a game with trading, that's pretty much what I said in my post so we agree there.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

the supermodel isn't entirely number-useless.

34-24-34?

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Nubatron wrote:

The real issue is the assumption that one approach is better than the other because it is "more fun". If people want self found hard coded: go find a game that does it. If people want to trade, do the same. POE offers trading and GGG has never stated anything otherwise, so that is the players that they are targeting and the types that enjoy the game to its fullest. There is nothing in POE that prohibits self-found. D3 on the other hand does prohibit trading (and the driving factor in my personal departure).

I think that is one thing people overlook. D3 has literally written off a section of players that will never return. POE on the other hand has taken an open stance that does not exclude either type of player -- self found just takes longer (not impossible).

Exactly. There were a couple of other good quotable sections in this thread, but this one captures the gist just as good.

Watching the interviews and presentations of D3 devs at various points made it pretty clear to me that they - people who mostly didn't even play or like the arpg genre to begin with - want to hammer players in to their own percieved "fun" mold.
They say stuff like "trading removes the reward loop and thus kills fun" or "seeing how far you can get in a rift is fun" or "the players need training wheels and less options in order to have more fun" etc. and while those statements do hold truth for a certain percentage of players, it's frankly very ignorant to force everyone in to the same mold.

I just hope that GGG will continue to be a balanced counterweight to Actiblizzard's take on the ARPG genre so that those who prefer other ways of having fun can also have fun.

ya, I agree. tbh I feel those statements come from a company that is honestly trying to give people what they say they want, they listen to feedback and react to it rather than having a vision of what actually makes for a good game in a lot of cases. They see 100s of people crying for more legendary drops, make x y and z easier, I dont understand this part of the game etc. For blizzard its more about giving the masses what they want, if people on mass call for a bad game they are more than happy to give them a bad game.

Often the problem is they give people exactly what they asked for, not what they really wanted I feel. People said the AH ruined the arpg experience, and a lot of that wasnt as simple as that sounds, it was to do with a game designed to make money from the rmah, complex problems spawning from the business model that soaked through the entire experience. But blizzard want to sell you the expansion, people simply said no AH, so they removed it and said hey, AH is gone. They didnt want to fix the real reason people were unhappy, they wanted the dramatic simple statement that would sell copies.

People were annoyed by finding shoddy items, they wanted to find more useful loot. Now a lot of this stems from the AH, it comes from them having bought better gear than they will realistically find, its a complex problem, it also comes from people who dont understand that if you find 1000 items per day they cant all be good. But again, "players wanted better items so we buffed legendary drops". Sounds good, sells tickets to the show, theyre fixing things... But by buffing legendaries the way they did they ruined rare items, made them pointless. now rather than finding 1000s of rare items that are potentially good and inevitably rubbish, you find 40 legendaires that are inevitably rubbish. People now have less chance of finding amazing loot, are finding less potentially amazing loot, the AH side of the problem was already removed... but they dont care about fixing the underlying problems, the real reason their game is bad, they want to say "youll find more legendary items", its simple, its giving people what they think they wanted. Even if the actual reverse is true and the game is worse as a result they dont care because the catch phrases and buzzhype quotes sell copies, make people who have not played it happy and thats the target, the people who are potentially buyers, not the people who have already paid for the game and are playing it who are finding out the hard way that an 8 hour grind still = probably not a single item worth talking about found.

So then people playing it are saying "well items are still crap" so they 'add' ancient legendaries. Now these were a thing before and they removed them, back in the day you could find Nats set boots with like 80-100 dex, but there was a more rare variant of Nats boots that rolled something like 160-200 dex. They took that out in order to say "now the loot you find has more of a chance to be bis rolled loot" hotsales buzztalk, now they add it back and say "now you can get ancient legendaries that are more powerful" hotsales buzztalk... theyre just flip flopping, add it, take it away, add it again, just rebrand it and make it sound like the game is getting better every time. Theres no one at blizzard sitting down and saying "as a seasoned arpg veteran and a highly experienced, talented game designer I believe this is the best way to make a loot system", its all about examining feedback and working out what changes will be marketable when it comes to milking the next buck from the crowd.

I say it always, a finite difficulty is a blessing in disguise. Only people that don't really care about power creep or variety will say otherwise. Even if Uber Atziri is not for every build, it's an optional, non farmeable boss, and probably the first of many that will complement themselves when it comes to diversity.

About the happy medium between selffound and trading, the only thing that will do is recipes that are far more expensive than your average market price for uniques and reducing the difference between perfect rares and the ones you find after many hours of grinding.

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NeroNoah wrote:

I say it always, a finite difficulty is a blessing in disguise. Only people that don't really care about power creep or variety will say otherwise. Even if Uber Atziri is not for every build, it's an optional, non farmeable boss, and probably the first of many that will complement themselves when it comes to diversity.

Playing lv75+ maps is "optional", playing atziri is "optional", even whole merciless is "optional". You can reach lv100 without ever entering merciless.

What makes Uber Atziri far more "optional" than entering "Merciless"?

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mazul wrote:

You can reach lv100 without ever entering merciless.

Good luck.

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FadeXF wrote:

You guys can obviously have differing opinions to my own and that's totally fine... that being said I absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt at all, get more of a charge - a massive sense of FUN - when I FIND my own stuff as opposed to trading around to get that item.

D3 gives you the items, and takes roughly 2-3 weeks of heavy play to deck your toon with all items you want.

POE is the extreme opposite to that.

Would it be such a bad thing to have a balance - a happy marriage between the two?

Yes it would. Their loot system is wacked now. The item may have dropped for you, but it wasn't earned. It was handed on a silver platter to you.

Hope you enjoy the game. I'd be in a glass house throwing a stone to shit on you for playing it. Keep the influence of that game away from PoE though.