Diablo III

You do realize that their web development team isn't the same group of people as their game development team, right? I see this ridiculous fallacy being committed all the time.

Oh, I understand perfectly. It's just that since this is much more visible than the mechanics behind game updates, it's also easier to comment on.

That a full class is STILL borderline unplayable at higher difficulty levels after three months when they've had over a dozen tweaks to the auction house speaks to their priorities.

You sound like the people on the official forums. I thought we were better than that here. You do realize there's a large balancing patch coming, right?

... It's been three months. If they showed half the dedication to playability as they had to their auction house, I guarantee you this would have been out a long time ago, before like 85% of their player base stopped playing.

Now you aren't even trying. I assume you have official numbers to back up that claim? I'm quite sure that the lack of a viable Inferno Witch Doctor build caused over four fifths of players to Rage Quit.

edited 7th Aug '12 8:53:10 AM by Fighteer

They certainly had no problems rolling out kneejerk nerfs rapidfire to everything from class skills to follower npcs to breakable objects. But buffs? Oh, those are complicated things that take lots of time.... ;)

I would submit that there is a crucial need to 'sandwich' patches in positive-negative-positive-negative format for palatability. Even if nerfs have good reasons behind them, eating too many of them at once is like eating a sandwich made entirely of lemons.

But hey, glad to see web profiles finally out.

edited 7th Aug '12 9:02:52 AM by Karkadinn

Multiple sources recorded a 65% drop in playerbase in early July. http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Diablo-3-Player-Count-Dives-By-65-According-Gametrics-44420.html

Last week, South Korean news sources reported that the game dropped from the third most popular game in the country to the eleventh. In the space of a week.

More anecdotally, every single one of my real life friends who started playing with me has quit, the number of public games on any given server has dropped exponentially, and players have been reporting difficulty getting into active public games.

Sure, 85% was an exaggeration, but the player base is declining, and not exactly slowly.

Don't have the energy to play much these days - if I'm lucky, I can do about one Cydaea / Azmodan run in a night at most.

Here's my main. Currently on farming skill set.

edited 7th Aug '12 10:13:11 AM by Pyrite

Yeah, I stopped playing after getting a couple characters to Nightmare. The game just isn't compelling enough to keep me playing through an entire four difficulty levels.

Indeed, of the five buddies I started out with, only two log in with any regularity anymore, and of those two, the Barbarian player... is technically not even playing his account anymore, and letting a cousin use it instead.

I don't think that has anything to do with the endgame viability of a single class. It has to do with the fact that players are running out of content. This isn't World of Warcraft, something I think both Blizzard and fans forgot.

After beating the game on Nightmare with all five classes (well, I haven't gotten my WD there yet but I'm close) and working on Inferno with my Barbarian, it's just a grind for no real reward. That, if anything, is why people aren't playing.

I don't see how anyone can classify it as "quitting". After I beat Portal 2 for the fifth time in singleplayer, I suppose you could say I "quit" the game. How does that even make sense as a statement?

edited 7th Aug '12 9:55:08 AM by Fighteer

I'm playing The Secret World right now rather then Diablo III. It's not that this game has offended me in any way, I still intend to slog through on alts or get past Act 2 Nightmare. Diablo will be there tomorrow, not playing it today isn't proof of its immense and utter failure.

edited 7th Aug '12 10:03:07 AM by Rotpar

I just cited their lack of class fixing as one example of a problem. There are many other problems, including the lack of content and the unrewarding nature of the late game grind. And rubber banding lag. And constant nerfs. Etc.

If they had spent more time on those issues and less on their real money auction house, we'd have a better game, and maybe fewer people would have quit.

Since launch, I've gotten my Wizard to Act III Nightmare, and my Monk to Act II Normal. That's mostly because I keep running out of steam—and interest. The grind is pretty dire, and often I lack the character (if that's what it is) to power through the dull stretches.

None of that is necessarily Blizzard's fault. And my personal experiences aren't necessarily normative. Still, I doubt I'm the only casual player who's reached that kind of impasse. Between that and the disgruntled high-end players, the current game seems to have a real problem with medium- and long-term gameplay ... and that seems like more of an issue than a mere patch can fix. I'll be interested to see what their expansion strategy holds.

Again, the term "quit" is meaningless to a game like Diablo. You aren't paying a subscription fee. You aren't committed to some kind of long-term plan for character progression (unless you're part of a coop group or something). You can stop playing today and pick it up three months from now and nobody will notice or care.

If the game no longer holds interest for you, then congratulations, you're following precisely the same cycle you did with every other game you played prior to this one, and every game you'll play after. Except for an MMO, which Diablo III is not.

It's like people expected this to be the next incarnation of World of Warcraft or something. Your expectations for the game are factually inaccurate, and therefore your complaints about it are absurd.

Yes, class balance is an issue, but you aren't competing against other players. It's like complaining that a Destruction mage build in Skyrim is brokenly weak at high levels, and then rage quitting the game because of that.

Now, when the PvP update rolls around, I expect there to be a resurgence of interest in the game, followed by a surge of Fan Dumb the likes of which the Blizzard forums have not seen in eons.

edited 7th Aug '12 12:10:04 PM by Fighteer

That's not entirely true. I would argue that large portions of the player base moving on would have some unique effects on Diablo III. It will affect sales on the RMAH, which will effect Blizzard's earnings. It will also effect the player base to a degree - the only effective way to equip your characters is through crowd sourcing and it will make that more difficult as well as finding people to play with.

As just one person, my quitting is fairly negligible to the larger community. Me quitting has almost no meaning to anyone external of me, but it does have meaning to me. It means that this is a game that I am done with. There are games from over ten years ago, as well as more recent ones, that I still revisit and play. I can't tell you how many times I've fired up Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate II, Alpha Centauri, Day of the Tentacle, Dwarf Fortress, Freedom Force, Arcanum, System Shock 2, Starcraft, Half-Life, Master of Magic, Sim City, Rome: Total War, Super Smash Brothers, or freaking Super Mario World YEARS after my original play-throughs. The fact that I'm already done with Diablo III and 99% confident it will never grace my hard drive again does mean something.

It means that, in my opinion, the game wasn't very good.

If you don't like the game, then it is certainly your privilege to stop playing it. I have never intended to imply otherwise.

I wonder what portion of the player base is actively participating in the RMAH. It's certainly an experiment in crowdsourced loot farming, not to mention a way for canny sellers to make a lot of money off of, well, less canny people. I'd also be very curious to see what impact, if any, it's had on gold selling and other forms of unauthorized RMT.

Diablo III is a proof of concept of these techniques, as well as the other stuff like always-online single player DRM. If Blizzard hauls in the cash from it, they'll have demonstrated that it can work, but there is a valid point to be made in questioning how player perceptions of the game's long-term quality impact future sales.

edited 7th Aug '12 12:24:03 PM by Fighteer

But you did say it was meaningless, which is something I resent.

I also resent your statement that that was my pattern with every game, as that is simply not the case. I mean, I get that games that you can revisit frequently and still enjoy tremendously are rare, but they're out there, and it's not unreasonable to hope that a new game would be one of those, especially when the company that put it out is responsible for at least three other such games.

What I don't appreciate is the savage, often visceral anger being directed at Blizzard over their handling of the game. "It went three months without a patch fixing all these problems" may be a valid concern in some respects, but telling Blizzard how they ought to be running their development processes is extremely arrogant.

"If you'd spend time working on fixing the game instead of giving us a web-based character browser," is exactly one of those complaints that makes me grit my teeth because it's so ridiculously ignorant. "Just fix it already, what's so hard about buffing [X]?" is another one. So is the focus on specific things like Witch Doctor viability and calling that evidence of the game being horribly broken.

If you have five classes, and four of them are fully endgame viable, then play those four classes until Blizzard delivers on their promise to fix the fifth one. It's not the end of the world. There are things you can be doing other than foaming at the mouth. You can even take a break and come back after the 1.0.4 patch. This kind of rage directed at any entertainment product is just plain irrational.

edited 7th Aug '12 12:36:48 PM by Fighteer

Well I'm a little angry because the game felt unfinished and not very good, and I did spend $60 on it. That's kind of reasonable right?

Why I focus on Witch Doctor viability - well it was the only class I enjoyed the playstyle of. In fact, it was the class that sold me on buying the game. So when the one class I bought in for wasn't working at all after Normal mode, with both crippling and obvious flaws, I was a little miffed.

I became more miffed when they refused to fix even very obvious and small bugs, like the Fetish cooldown skills not actually taking cooldown away, refused to fix the horrifically boring itemization in an item based game, and dragged their feet on removing impossible elite affixes whilst telling us that the only way to play the game was to bring down multiple elite packs in a row. This annoyance was made worse as I watched them push through patch after patch after patch focusing almost entirely on their RMAH and balancing the economy for it.

They didn't help matters by shipping the game with a terribly written story, that turned villains that I had spent years looking forward to into, well, idiots. Or giving a certain character a very anti-climatic and manipulative feeling death. Or that there was ... well not very much content period.

And then the worst part was that I discovered the item grind was terrible and brutal, even as early as Nightmare. In Diablo II, while you would never find the very best uniques without trading, you could find enough to equip your character to Hell difficulty by yourself in a reasonable amount of time. But it became abundantly clear that I would need to play the auction house if I wanted to continue. Which was something not required in any previous Diablo title, and something the developers said would not happen.

Their terrible response to fan feedback and horrendous lag issues were icing on the cake.

So perhaps you could imagine why the whole experience leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

edited 7th Aug '12 1:00:02 PM by Cthulboohoo

My only real issue with the game is that each progressive difficulty level feels like a much less fun version of a game I've already beaten.

Ffff... I'm at the Crystal Spire in Inferno finally! I think I owe a lot of thanks to the freaking monster of a Barbarian that I was able to party with for the duration of the descent down to Azmodan. While it was annoying that most of the time he just ran towards the end of the boss encounters (Sin Hearts and Cydea specifically... the guy was so fast that he was out of view of my monk in seconds), and cherry-picked the elites he fought, he was VERY useful when we got to those boss encounters. The guy never left Azmodan's side, even after the floor started burning, which meant Azmodan went down VERY quickly. Heh.

Now all I need to do is to fight my way up the Crystal Spire. Hmm. I think I'll do it on a pub again.

Oh, and hilariously, I think I partied with THREE Witch Doctors during my time at the Gardens of Hope. The one that lasted the longest was the one who came with the Tank Daemonhunter (who I might add actually tanked anything except Mallet Lords better than I did).

According to Diablofans, the developer blogs for 1.0.4 are on their way. So we'll get to see what sort of changes are forthcoming very soon.

Well, at least there's some progress. Not holding my breath, but it'll be interesting to see what they've come up with.