After making some lunch and taking a few minutes to think about it, maybe my "make the game easier" wasn't the intuitive way to say it. I think a better way to say it is that Blizzard is forced to create the reward loop and it seems like as of right now they are creating that reward loop by nerfing parts of the game, increasing drop rates, and whatever else they are going to do in 1.0.4. In other words, they have no frikken clue, and like I said in my first post today, none of this patch would be an issue if they just got it right in the beginning.

I think the best alternative is to be able to farm for your own gear. However, as it is, the AH is always going to play a part in this game, because it's not going anywhere. So now we have to come up with a way to create the reward loop with the AH there.

The AH should be supplemental, not primary. I should be able to farm my own gear OR go to the AH.

I think I might like an idea of a barter and trade system and Blizzard should have done something to facilitate that. It keeps people in the game because they have to be online to find those deals.

If you have something I want, and I have something you want, we make a trade and we're both happy. It keeps people in the game and creates a social environment. Trading creates equilibrium while currency creates inflation.

I could go on for awhile and I think the more imagination I use the less I start to make sense, but D3 in its current state is flawed in so many ways.

And the thing is PoE is going to be free and I really believe that once people start playing that game they are going start wanting D3 to be just like it. D3's fluidity is superior, but PoE's execution is so much more solid.

Quick and easy change to invulnerable minions:

change to 'Ethereal' or 'Ghostly' minions - boss has reduced HP from a normal boss and remains the same as it is currently, but minions are slower moving / have no collision and are invulnerable. Similar to current situation but without pathing / drawing attention from minions & followers and absorbing your attacks (speed penalty for minions is optional but helps with cases where the main boss lags behind as he casts Waller or Desecrate or etc).

solsek - I don't think the 61/62 weapon changes will lead to a HUGE influx of top end weapons, as they'll still be restricted by their weapon level modifiers, but it basically means that things will be a little more like D2 - where all elite weapons are somewhat equivilant except for weapon speeds for reaching 8/9/10 fps, and are just mostly cosmetic. Theres also going to be a significant damage roll range for level 61 & 62 items to overcome.

Using a 'Saif' level 61 sword as an example the base range is (78-81) to (181-187). whereas with the new patch it'll roll a damage range of (78-107) to (187-242).

I think it just means that 800-950 dps weapons with good mods will become more accessible to the majority of the player base, but 1150 crit / socket weapons will still be very rare and only accessible to the top elite players.

If they didn't nerf the difficulty in the next patch and only adjusted the item quality & drop rates from white mobs, would you really be able to just MF grind A3 for another year? PVP adding on a significant amount of playtime I could see, but another year of just farming the same content (assuming you mean like 6+ hours a day) just seems brutal. There are so few BIS / end-game items on either AH right now that I don't even think that there are even items out there that you can grind / buy. As an example a search for 5+ crit, 160+ int, and AR (any amount) yields only 7 results - the best being a 168 INT / 80 VIT / 54 all res / 5.5 crit chance for 600 mil - basically a pretty solid item but very far from the maximum possible rolls.

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As a possible challenge, would anyone be interested in rolling a group of 3-4 from scratch (sharing drops as necessary), no AH usage? Basically it would be similar to playing at release and would probably be pretty fun.

You might be right about the weapons. I haven't really done the math to know whether or not 1150 DPS weapons will be affected, but from just reading the patch notes it seemed like ilvl 62 weapons could basically roll a little bit worse than a top ilvl 63. What's a top ilvl 63 w/ socket anyway? 1300? So 1150 wouldn't be too hard for a ilvl 62 to roll. I haven't looked at the ranges but I might be a little off.

I probably wouldn't farm more than 2 hours a day but if they went back to the difficulty of pre-1.0.3 then I could probably do it given it was rewarding enough. Would I do it with the current drop rates? Probably not, but if they made the game difficult again but implemented these increase drop rates, then yes, it would probably be enough for me to play at least 1 more year.

I've been lurking this forum since I basically stopped playing a month or so ago, but IFX basically hit the nail on the head. I love the Diablo series but I just get no satisfaction out of D3 anymore. There is no real reward, just the marginal hope that I'll find a rare I can sell to marginally improve my gear so I can progress slightly further in the game.

Maybe I am totally alone on this but does every game that involves gear NEED to have a massive economy? If I wanted to sit around all day waiting for something useful to go up for auction in a price range I can manage I would have made an account on eBay. I swear it feels like Blizzard developed most of D3 and then decided to let Zynga design the end game. I just want to play the game and naturally acquire loot with the legitimate hope that when I ID something, it will actually be useful to me. I'm still supporter of separating the game into AH and non-AH servers, the latter having much higher drop rates.

I got roughly the same rush out of playing my 60 monk in inferno as I would sitting at 7/11 scratching off lotto tickets. I general I knew I wasn't going to get anything good and when I did get something marginally profitable it wasn't a sense of excitement, just a sense of 'finally, it is about ****ing time I found something'. I think once the discussion after every single patch is "how will this affect the AH?" as opposed to "will this make the game more fun?" they have already lost.

This was part of the reason why D2 was so good. You could:

go on these scratch off runs on certain super uniques
OR
go for crazy mass quantity kills of cows
OR
you could go for bulk "decent" stuff runs from meph
OR
you could do a slightly more mixed run of rare vs decent but have higher tier loot by doing baal runs and to a lesser extent chaos sanctuary

There were many other runs (countess, nihlathak, council, etc.) depending on what you wanted or what you mood was too.

You basically had a ton of choices and while the game may not have had a ton of content it had good itemization to keep you occupied, plus it had a more in depth item system (charms, jewels, etc.) and also an extremely high level cap so you always got something (exp) even if you got crappy drops.

I think we're at least a year+ away where D3 is even remotely fun, it will probably cost another $60 too.

When Diablo 2 came out it was like way more garbage worse terrible than 1.0.3 Diablo 3. It took them several years to fix most of the worst bad horrible things. So we remember the final good Diablo 2 when in fact it was steaming poop originally

We've been down this path many times.

They had over a decade to see what exactly worked for D2 and all the time in the world to develop the game. D2 had a legit excuse to be bad when it shipped because they didn't have 10+ years of wisdom to base decisions on.

There's no excuse for D3 to be worse than D2:LoD in terms of content/re-playability/itemization but it is.

I hate to bring up another game but look at this torchlight II chart:



This to me seems like a win in every category. They just added more stuff to the game because it's stupid not to ride the success rainbow of the original (or in D2's case, the sequel). If D3 were to be compared to D2 in a chart it would read much different.

It would be more like, less interesting socketing, no runewords, no charms, no jewels, no xyz and everything else that was cut or purposely excluded. Then the final cost would be double what D2+D2:LoD costs.

Well torchlight felt super boring to me for some reason though.

It was a small game. I'm not going to try and pitch TL2 in the D3 forum. I just remember seeing this chart the other week and it really fit into what I was trying to write.

Yeah I tried Path to Exile as well and it seems like their system is way better than Diablo 3. But then it looks and plays like a pile of poops.

Might sound cliche but Blizzard has sold out. They don't make games for gamers anymore, they make games for the masses now.

They are McDonalds and WalMart now, mass generic crap designed to maximize revenue.

It doesn't surprise me smaller game companies making games like TL2 or Path of Exile have much more sophisticated and deep game systems than D3.

What Blizzard has though is way more resources to polish their games, which is why D3 looks and plays very well and games like TL2 and PoE don't look as impressive.

From what I've heard TL2 feels like a true successor to the Diablo franchise and even though I'm put off by it's somewhat retarded graphics at $20 I'll give it a shot.

Sounds like everything will be easier but imo there are some good changes for the long run

SPSTW is a great criticism of the videogame industry imo. So is Progress Quest. They each took big trends in the videogame industry, and made games that were hyper-exaggerations of those two trends. And I don't think a year has passed where videogame fare hasn't inched closer to those two titles, and I really hate that.

But maybe it's a good thing? Maybe we should just outgrow this stuff and move on?

D2 was pretty easy.... much easier than inferno. Sadly, I don't think adding pvp to a broken game will fix things.

I liked SPSTW
I'd already played progress quest, I felt it was a bit grindy though