Am I actually enjoying D3???

ExileDude, that's what RPG's is all about. You start a game and decide which kind of character you wanna be, and then you play like it. That choice in the beginning defines your character. In D3 it's more like changing after what suits the situation best - only slightly more advanced than choosing a sniper over a AK47 in Counter Strike. Would you play D&D / Elder Scrolls etc if you could change your character all the time? I'm sure some people would like it, but it has nothing to do with RPG, and therefore makes Diablo 3 an action game without the RPG-element.

RMAH in Diablo 3 is only a problem because of the itemization. The best weapons mostly works for every character and every build, so that makes it pretty easy to pay 2 win.

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ExileDude wrote:

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anubite wrote:

They should just get rid of the mechanic all together then. Why give players the illusion of choice?

How the heck did you go from "We can stop at every station you want to, and you can even go back" to "We only have an illusion of choice"? Are you just trolling? Let me explain it one more time, this time in more detail:

Diablo 2: We make a choice what kind of character we want to make, then we pursue that choice until we hit level 99. If we want to make a new choice along the way, we need to start over again from scratch with a new character.

Diablo 3: All skills are unlocked along the way, so we make our choices along the way. Played twenty levels with a certain skill and got bored? Change the skill and continue. Can't figh the boss with your current skill? Change the skill and try again.

No matter how you put it, we have far more choice with the Diablo 3 solution than the Diablo 2 solution.

You have less choice actually. There is always an optimal build. Always. Even when developers are soo good at balancing there game, there is always an optimal choice. An optimal build. Discovering that optimal build is hard, it's what makes the game a game, instead of just a passive thing you just watch unfold. Discovering the solution, the optimal solution, to a game, when you do that - the game is no more. The magic's gone. You celebrate because you've won, but you eventually move on, because you've exhausted the game.

When you allow players to arbitrarily change their specialization, finding the optimal build is only a spreadsheet away and then the game is utterly broken. You have no game.

Build diversity comes about from restriction. It comes about from mechanics that make you pick choices. We play RPGs like computers do. We sit down, and if we want to win the game, we say to ourselves, "What is the strongest class?" You pick the strongest class, after much deliberation. "What is the best race?" You pick the best racial bonuses. "What is the best alignment?" You pick the alignment that lets you play the game the way you think is optimal - helping others or hurting them. "What is the best way to specialize my class?" You deliberate, you pick and choose passive/active skills you think are the strongest. And then you try to beat the game.

That's what RPGs are about, tactical, strategic number games. Finding the optimal path through a huge tree of possibilities. Diablo obviously doesn't have all the trappings of an RPG, but it does have enough elements that you can say a decent amount of its game comes from this idea of specialization, class picking, decision making, et cetera

When we remove strategic thought, when we say to the player, "You can pick any choice at any time and can undo your previous choices." Then you are free to evaluate your character at any point in the game and decide the most optimal solution to any encounter. This might work for some games, but it doesn't really work in an RPG, because RPGs are generally balanced around classes filling different roles, and if you can change your role on the fly, then the game is broken - you aren't making choices, you aren't making compromises. You aren't playing a role. You have the optimal solution at your fingertips. The game has beaten itself for you.

More freedom is not necessarily a good thing. Lots of people desire easy respecs for POE, but that is a natural desire to have. It's because we know that is a powerful tool. But it's way too powerful. It utterly ruins the game.

If you don't like further developing your character after having set out on a character idea, then you probably don't like RPGs... or the game is flawed. D2 is flawed I think in the sense that you do play a similar character from level 1 to 99 - they could have made passive/active skills and itemization more varied/impactful, so it's possible to really develop your character into something new every 25~ levels or so, but the first time you play D2, I don't think you get the impression that you're "just developing the character the same way every level" - you're evaluating what you think is best for your character all the time, if you're playing the game blind for the first time. Once you get better at D2, you begin to understand the game and find perhaps some of its character building monotonous, but that's why POE is a successor to D2, once you beat Merciless with one character, you get a feeling for what you'd like to try next and you see more opportunity, instead of less (hopefully anyway).

I'm doing only self found and it's been a blast so far

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anubite wrote:

You have less choice actually. There is always an optimal build. Always. Even when developers are soo good at balancing there game, there is always an optimal choice. An optimal build. Discovering that optimal build is hard, it's what makes the game a game, instead of just a passive thing you just watch unfold. Discovering the solution, the optimal solution, to a game, when you do that - the game is no more. The magic's gone. You celebrate because you've won, but you eventually move on, because you've exhausted the game.

It's definitely not "less choice" than D2. Even the most optimal builds do have some fine tuning available to them. It's usually X skill works better on X monster type or monster affix while Y skill works better on another. Since it's impossible to predict the exact number of monsters or their affixes you do have some choice.

Your second point however points out a fundamental flaw in PoE. D3 still has it's combat engine. TL2 has mods. PoE, however, offers nothing once you've found the best build. The game needs something more to hold player's interest.

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anubite wrote:

When you allow players to arbitrarily change their specialization, finding the optimal build is only a spreadsheet away and then the game is utterly broken. You have no game.

The game would be broken if math-crunching was the only thing the game had (which is unfortunately true for PoE).

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anubite wrote:

Build diversity comes about from restriction. It comes about from mechanics that make you pick choices. We play RPGs like computers do. We sit down, and if we want to win the game, we say to ourselves, "What is the strongest class?" You pick the strongest class, after much deliberation. "What is the best race?" You pick the best racial bonuses. "What is the best alignment?" You pick the alignment that lets you play the game the way you think is optimal - helping others or hurting them. "What is the best way to specialize my class?" You deliberate, you pick and choose passive/active skills you think are the strongest. And then you try to beat the game.

That's what RPGs are about, tactical, strategic number games. Finding the optimal path through a huge tree of possibilities. Diablo obviously doesn't have all the trappings of an RPG, but it does have enough elements that you can say a decent amount of its game comes from this idea of specialization, class picking, decision making, et cetera

See, what you described isn't an RPG. What you described was a game with a failed customization system. The entire idea behind having customization in the first place is being able to individualize your self from other players. Most games, including D3 and PoE, don't do this very well. It sounds to me like you've dealt with so many unbalanced games that you've accepted this as the way games are supposed to be.

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anubite wrote:

When we remove strategic thought, when we say to the player, "You can pick any choice at any time and can undo your previous choices." Then you are free to evaluate your character at any point in the game and decide the most optimal solution to any encounter. This might work for some games, but it doesn't really work in an RPG, because RPGs are generally balanced around classes filling different roles, and if you can change your role on the fly, then the game is broken - you aren't making choices, you aren't making compromises. You aren't playing a role. You have the optimal solution at your fingertips. The game has beaten itself for you.

You cannot change your skills mid-run. What your saying only applies to games that give you access to every skill at the same time. You are still filling a different role, you just aren't locked in if you want to try something else. Your build still has strengths and weaknesses. The only difference between D3 and PoE is that the latter has a 30 hour grind to change your passives. That's it.

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anubite wrote:

More freedom is not necessarily a good thing. Lots of people desire easy respecs for POE, but that is a natural desire to have. It's because we know that is a powerful tool. But it's way too powerful. It utterly ruins the game.

I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of time it will take the community to come up with an optimal build. PoE isn't that complicated, and more importantly it doesn't require you to reroll if all you want to do is some number-crunching. When a serious player rolls their first character, its purpose isn't to evaluate how optimal its build is, its to gather data about game mechanics like damage progression for various skills, monster mechanics, how affixes work with each other, ect. They know their first build won't be optimal, but they wont care because they weren't trying to build one in the first place.

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anubite wrote:

When we remove strategic thought, when we say to the player, "You can pick any choice at any time and can undo your previous choices." Then you are free to evaluate your character at any point in the game and decide the most optimal solution to any encounter. This might work for some games, but it doesn't really work in an RPG, because RPGs are generally balanced around classes filling different roles, and if you can change your role on the fly, then the game is broken - you aren't making choices, you aren't making compromises. You aren't playing a role. You have the optimal solution at your fingertips. The game has beaten itself for you.

That doesn't make any sense or follow logic at all.

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Sickness wrote:

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anubite wrote:

When we remove strategic thought, when we say to the player, "You can pick any choice at any time and can undo your previous choices." Then you are free to evaluate your character at any point in the game and decide the most optimal solution to any encounter. This might work for some games, but it doesn't really work in an RPG, because RPGs are generally balanced around classes filling different roles, and if you can change your role on the fly, then the game is broken - you aren't making choices, you aren't making compromises. You aren't playing a role. You have the optimal solution at your fingertips. The game has beaten itself for you.

That doesn't make any sense or follow logic at all.

I don't agree that it doesn't make any sense, but I do agree it's slightly myopic.

The reason for that is that it's potentially the case that the designers INTENDED you to figure out the puzzle by choosing the optimal strategy. If you have 10 choices, and 1 situation and each choice is then ranked from worst to best... it's perfectly fine if the intention is for you to pick what you think is the best option.

It's not fine when that is not the intention. If the intention is not to solve combat optimization puzzles by choosing the optimal strategy, then I agree with anubite. If you have all the combinations available all the time, and you can always choose the best one, and that is not the primary intention (which I'd argue it's not in an RPG,) and couple that with loss of build failure, loss of replayability, loss of role play... such a system falls flat.

This is one of many reasons why D3's gameplay systems choices by their dev team were a significant flop overall. We all know you will disagree, probably vehemently, but from a design perspective many of these choices look good on paper, they sound appealing to the greedy or min/max type player, but they are detrimental overall.

The odds of divining out the 'best builds' even at this point, is nonsense given the amount of build possibilities and future uniques that will support a vast array of varied build possibilities. There is a high chance that there is always a build that you didn't imagine that is vastly superior, perhaps in particular situations, than any build you've tried yet.

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Sickness wrote:

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anubite wrote:

When we remove strategic thought, when we say to the player, "You can pick any choice at any time and can undo your previous choices." Then you are free to evaluate your character at any point in the game and decide the most optimal solution to any encounter. This might work for some games, but it doesn't really work in an RPG, because RPGs are generally balanced around classes filling different roles, and if you can change your role on the fly, then the game is broken - you aren't making choices, you aren't making compromises. You aren't playing a role. You have the optimal solution at your fingertips. The game has beaten itself for you.

That doesn't make any sense or follow logic at all.

I would love to hear why my logic is asinine but if all you can make is a single sentence in reply it's kind of worthless for me to care what you've to think...? Please, don't just say someone's opinion doesn't follow logic, then provide no logic to contradict mine at all.

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Your second point however points out a fundamental flaw in PoE. D3 still has it's combat engine. TL2 has mods. PoE, however, offers nothing once you've found the best build. The game needs something more to hold player's interest.

I completely disagree with this statement? And I'm confused because I don't see what D3 has that PoE doesn't. Its combat engine is only slightly more robust than POE's with animation cancelling and such, that's... I mean they're basically the same base game with vastly different direction.

I am still playing POE even though I've beaten Merciless Vaal how many times now?

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The game would be broken if math-crunching was the only thing the game had (which is unfortunately true for PoE).

Could you please elaborate on this? Where is D3 not about math crunching? Name a mechanic. Because if you watch Kripp's stream (you know, the guy who beat D3 HC first), you'll notice he always has excel open and it's probably why he won in the first place.

The real truth is that if your game is on a computer, it's definitely mathematical in nature. You can't have a game not be about math if it's on a computer. There's nothing a game is that can't be explained with math - that's all computers understand. Beating a game competitively comes down to number crunching, that's the absolute truth. D3 isn't competitive because everybody has the optimal build. They only need to be informed of what it is and execute it. And since it's so easy to spread information, it's not long before everyone has the "i win" button and everybody's build is the same. Everybody's strategy is the same.

Diablo 3 is not Command and Conquer. It's not Starcraft. But Diablo was still a strategic game, just in a different way from RTS/TBS games. When you remove strategy, all you've left is a person's skill in clicking and their tenacity to keep clicking. The worst thing is that, your passive mechanics influence itemization and active skills too, so a bad passive system, like D3's, squanders may otherwise potentially fun builds. The presence of an optimal build within easy reach completely exhausts a game of any magic or fun. At least for the kind of person who is serious about games. Someone who is casual and only plays games like they might skim a book, may not notice any of this, but that doesn't make what I'm saying any less true.

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See, what you described isn't an RPG. What you described was a game with a failed customization system. The entire idea behind having customization in the first place is being able to individualize your self from other players. Most games, including D3 and PoE, don't do this very well. It sounds to me like you've dealt with so many unbalanced games that you've accepted this as the way games are supposed to be.

It seems to me you're spouting nonsense. PoE is the most customizable game I have ever played. Ever! Ever!

Baldur's Gate 2 has 11 classes, 7 races, 9 alignments and 2 genders for your starting character. I did calculations this morning for a video I'm making on this very topic and Baldur's Gate 2, before active/passive skill choice, at level 1, you have 2958 possible starting character combinations.

Baldur's Gate is considered a fairly complex RPG. One of the most complex probably, when you consider how little customization games like WoW and Dragon Age are offering these days.

Path of Exile has 1350 nodes of which you can pick more than 100 of.

(1350)!/(1350-100)! = 10^345 is the upperbound of theoretical passive node arrangements.
If at every level up, you can only pick between two nodes, then there are 2^100 possible passive skill combinations. And there are always more than two to pick, after level 2. Oh and multiply all these numbers by six when you're ready because these calculations are only for one class starting point out of six.

You're telling me Path of Exile is a "failed" system? I'd love to here your thoughts on a successful one -- wait. You're claiming D3 is that one. If you are, I would like to hear why, because I think I've demonstrated that D3's 'respec all the time' design is contradictory and self-defeating to the game and its genre.

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I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of time it will take the community to come up with an optimal build. PoE isn't that complicated

I've shown it is the most complex commercial game ever created. Chess has only 10^80 possible chess boards. PoE is 4.3 times more complex than Chess, at least in theory. Go has 10^170 legal go boards, so PoE is 2 times more complex than Go - and Go is considered probably one of the hardest games in the world. Probably never going to be fully mapped by a computer in the history of man kind. At least in terms of mathematical possibility, PoE is leagues beyond D3. Humans can of course notice patterns and discern optimal builds, but finding THE optimal build because of the time invested, is NOT easy.

Look at Kripp, the guy who appeared during the great surge of Ground Slam Marauder. He claimed he would never do another kind of build than GS. And on his stream the other day? He was playing with a Ethereal Knives duelist, his eyes bugging out at the possibilities. I think you have "underthought" how complex this game really is, and how much more complex it will be in the future.