Actually, I can define you however I like, its not really hard you make it easy and its not that hard to get people to agree with that assessment. Just because something was big once doesn’t mean it can’t come crashing down. You’re watching that but just too dense to see it. Recent estimations think WoW has about 1 mill subs, down from a peak of 12 million…
“Go over my head” lmfao please kid go open your eyes and maybe a book.
Its a good question, as in who is going to make a good game for them. From what i remember they pulled in a ‘fixer’ former head of gearbox to get D4 over the finish line which hasn’t materialized. I don’t expect them to make a good game and any of the ‘good games’ they’ve made in the past either didn’t appeal to me or didn’t have time for them(Overwatch/Hearthstone).
Startcraft is basically done, the team that was on it isn’t working on anything/have left.
Warcraft 4 is almost assured(probably drawing the wrong conclusions from warcraft reforged) to not happen despite them really needing to either make WoW2 or Wc4 just to give themselves space to write/create something that isn’t weighed down with peoples current expectations. That and they seem to be abandoning RTS. Alot of people don’t want a WoW2 made by the current team, so…
Overwatch 2 supposedly exists, but based on how they updated Overwatch in the first place, its not clear why it needed a second game/gameplay style likely has had its time in the sun/blown out by fortnite.
So a lot is riding on D4 and i just don’t see it being anything like the blizzard classics or even as good as starcraft 2.
FYI, D3 made more sales way way more than D2.
I cut and paste this in here for you to know…
The game (Diablo 3) set a new record for “fastest-selling PC game” by selling over 3.5 million copies in the first 24 hours of its release, and became the [best-selling PC game] of 2012 by selling over 12 million copies. As of August 2015, the number of sales had grown to over 30 million.
This record was beaten by WoW… by WoW:Legion and later by WoW:Shadowlands. FYI.
But D3 wont be successful if D2 is not successful. I hope D4 would be a big hit like D2 and D3.
People like Fortnite, and hello kitty island adventure too.
These are the same people that eat tide pods, and think the earth is flat.
If you actually believe d3 is a “good” diablo game, I guess…thats…well…yeah okay. I wish you many hours of casual enjoyment.
How about no?
20char
You can generate wealth by selling a lot of low value items.
Wealth just come over time. Low effort, and low fun due to the predictability of it.
Eh, I doubt that is true. But of course, given the choice, many players prefer to pick the easy path. Maybe dont give them the choice.
Being able to get whatever you want, just by finding any item of value = fairly instant gratification compared to having to hunt for your own items.
If you genuinely think that way, the game could easily allow you to browse through items for inspiration, even without trading.
Even if I dont think we should be able to do it, it will happen. Some third party sites will allow that within days of release, at most.
It isn’t the time spent trading that makes you spend less time on the core gameplay. It is the easy path to gearing up that does it. You just skip most of the game, due to how easy trading makes it.
Heck, at least if trading took more time, there would be a bit of a tradeoff to it.
Which it does. By offering you an easier path to the items you wanted.
If you are making a game, it is your job to worry about the game experience people have.
Trading does affect players gameplay.
Wouldn’t call it weak. RMT is pretty bad. But yeah, RMT is a lesser, secondary concern tbh.
Trading itself is the main issue with trading. Circumventing the loot hunt. Making the game easy, predictable, boring.
Learn from your mistakes. There is no problem in this.
The fun of making and progressing a new character? Another supposed part of the core gameplay.
But of course, making alts is easier, since you already have found some of the gear they might want. Trading is not needed for that.
That is kinda the concept of seasons, so apparently some do.
But just because it is easier to lvl alts, thanks to shared gear, it doesn’t have to be ridiculously easy because of trading.
I hope D4 will be good, but yeah, it seems much more likely other companies will be carrying the A-RPG genre forward these days.
It is exactly what that means.
Circumventing gameplay through trade does not mean you skip 100% of gameplay. Just that you skip a bunch of it.
Yes, because too many people want easy mode. That doesn’t make it good.
Blizzard is just 1/3 (or less really) of ATVI, so there is a limit to how much you can conclude from stock price alone.
Blizzard sure is suffering in recent years, but the rest of ATVI is doing pretty good. If Blizzard had its own stock price, I bet it would be doing quite terribly right now. Not that ATVI isn’t doing bad as well. Going from ~100 to ~67 in half a year is bad all around. With Blizzard being the sole explanation for the downturn.
Lawsuits which are far from over, new cases emerging, and employees leaving, with more potential delays following,
It is pretty likely the stock still has ways to go downward.
That said, it has gotten fairly cheap, and seems like a decent stock to buy right now for the long term. Heck, even if Blizzard implodes, ATVI will go on.
Personally, not touching their stock for now. Despite having hold ATVI for years previously. For the foreseeable future, their road ahead seems paved with bad news.
What. No. It might be Blizzards biggest loss ever. Which is impressive after BFA.
A game can be terrible, and make a lot of sales, at the same time.
The idea that generating wealth over a longer period of time through low value items is a low effort task is ridiculous. At most this capability is a fallback on bad RNG. You can see this in a game like PoE where the capability of hoarding and selling low value items is high, or in MMOs from people who spend hours gathering craft mats to sell. And sure, there are some people that take on this task, because there is always demand for those items. However, since it can be tedious to make so many small trades (PoE) or most people don’t find it fun (MMOs), not many people opt to do this. Players generally don’t put items below a threshold value up for trade because its not worth the time. It requires a lot more effort to make more smaller trades than it does to make 1 big trade. As for the content to get the items, that is all rng based. You can’t say it took less effort to procure a lot of low value items compared to 1 good item. In fact, its more likely that they took the same effort on average.
You shouldn’t even talk about “low fun”. Who are you to decide what people find fun? Even in situations where there are better, more efficient ways to get wealth, some people still choose to do things that you consider “low fun”. How about you let them play the game how they like?
You have no argument so you decide people want to trade just because its “easy”. Sorry, but calling trade an “easy path” is beyond ridiculous. Diablo 3 is the easiest game in the world to get gear on and it has 0 trade. It takes a lot more from the game design to decide whether something is easy. Even if you mean “easy path” relative to only in D2. Ie. SSF vs Trade, it is still a ridiculous statement to make. Trade is the normal path. Choosing to play SSF is the challenge you are personally deciding to take on. Modern ARPGs will have their drop rates designed around having trade or not. So using trade in a game that has trade is equivalent to simply playing SSF in a game that doesn’t have trade.
The idea is that if you designed the exact same game, but one had trade and the other didn’t, you’d want to achieve both games having a similar progression rate. One isn’t easier than the other. They just offer different things. So calling trade the “easy path” isn’t a real argument against trade. It’s just a different path.
What exactly are you trying to argue here? Can you maybe write more than a single sentence? Give some context. Because right now, this isn’t even an argument. First, you’re trying to establish that instant gratification is a bad thing. What? Why? Second, without trade, instant gratification is all there is in the game (so why are you saying it is bad?). Every item you find that is an upgrade is instant gratification. All other items you don’t care about so there is no gratification at all. With trade, there exists that instant gratification as well. It just comes from two sources: direct upgrades and valuable items. However, you also get gratification from gathering wealth to purchase a big upgrade. You will track how close you are from being able to make that big purchase. Every progress gives you satisfaction. This is what you should be saying you are against and why you are against it. Not instant gratification.
What’s the point of giving me a catalog of items I may never find? Trade shows me the items and shows me a path of getting them in case I never drop one. D3 has this catalog (or at least it did when I last played). It kind of works in D3 because you are pretty much guaranteed to get every item you need if you play for a couple days. But I’m not personally interested in a game where every item is easy to get. And no, trade does not make it easy by default. Yeah, if you added trade into D3 right now, everything would be 100 times easier. But it’s important games are designed around trade if it’s going to have it and vice versa.
This idea that trade makes the game easy is just ignorant. I’ve already established this in this post above, but to add onto it: games that don’t have trade are actually easier to level up in and/or do the campaign. Imagine two of the exact same game. The only difference is that one is designed for trade and the other wasn’t. They are designed to have the same progression rate. However, what happens in practice? The majority of people that play the game without trade progress normally as expected. The game offers the expected difficulty. However, the game where people can trade what happens? People don’t trade is what. While leveling, trade is something most people consider a nuisance. They don’t want to trade until they get to certain benchmarks on their path. Therefore people tend to have a more difficult time progressing in a game that has trade. Now obviously this isn’t absolute. If the game is designed to be difficult, it is going to be difficult regardless. It’s just more likely for people to struggle in games that have trade early on.
You have to kill monsters to get items to trade. You can’t get around this. It’s not an easier path. It’s just a different one.
You’re not getting rid of RMT by getting rid of trade. It still exists. RMT is not an argument against trade. It is an argument against games. We shouldn’t have games because people can just spend money to get something they didn’t really work for.
Don’t blame bad game design all on trade. It’s ridiculous to call a game “easy, predictable, and boring” because of trade. If you are going to say it, then explain how. I’ve already explained how trade doesn’t inherently make a game easier. Now explain why you think trade makes a game easy, predictable, and boring.
It doesn’t circumvent anything; you have failed to explain how it does even though you keep saying it. I even have explained to you how it doesn’t circumvent it. You have not offered any explanation to this, but it has pretty much become your slogan for this debate.
It’s not a character restriction. It’s a build restriction. Not saying all Sorcs can only use wands. Just that your build only uses wands. I don’t know why you are arguing about the small details in an example instead of addressing the overarching problem I bring up instead. Sure, some hoarding will exists as always. But more useful and efficient hoarding comes from trading existing.
I really hate to argue semantics with you, but that is not what circumvent means. Circumvent means “find a way around”. When you go around something, you skip it 100%. But even saying “you skip a bunch of it” is wrong. What you skip is iterative progression. For an example, if you have 10 gear slots and each tier has 10 tiers of items. Even though all your gear is tier 5, you could trade for a tier 8 item. This is not skipping any of the core mechanic. The person has already killed monsters, gotten loot many times. Enough times where they can now afford a tier 8 item. What the player bypassed is the small iterative upgrades. It’s even likely that they found tier 6 and 7 items that were good, but because it was missing a specific stat, you couldn’t afford to use it over your current item so you traded it away instead. These jump in progressions come from events like this. In a game with trade they are expected. It is not a con. It is just how the game is. In a game without trade, you would have found 5 times the amount of tier 6 and 7 items and you would most likely have gotten an upgrade. You’d still end up at tier 8 at around the same time.
Trade doesn’t decide progression rate.
That is fairly irrelevant. If Diablo 3 had trading, it would be easier. Trading simply makes things easier.
Indeed. Just not realistically possible to achieve.
That said, if Diablo 4 did end up having trading, it would be interesting to see this attempted. But it would in all likelihood fail.
Trade is the easy path, obviously, compared to not trading.
Which is again why most people do it.
Because it is? Makes progression boring, when it happens fast and with low effort. That is kinda the idea of having a game; working toward “winning”, not showing up and be handed a participation trophy.
Which is what makes it predictable and boring as said before. Everything just turns into a counter. 1% toward X, 2% toward X etc. Instead of the slot machine randomness of finding the item you wanted, that is at the core of A-RPG design.
I dont think there is a point to it. As said, I would consider it a bad idea to show people everything they can get. People should just explore on their own. But you certainly could do it, if you wanted to.
In a game designed around trade, the game is still easier with trade than without.
Much much easier.
And again, predictable and boring. On rails, 1%… 2%… zzz.
RMT is pretty irrelevant. That is not the reason to get rid of trade. Trade itself is the reason.
Getting rid of RMT is just a nice little bonus. But yeah, getting rid of trading does pretty much also get rid of RMT. RMTing accounts is not even remotely the same.
Extremely faster to get the very specific gear you want. Like in PoE, you can basically get mid-tier gear for free. A big chunk of the game just disappears, because trading exists. And despite the game being “designed” with trading in mind.
No A-RPG has ever managed to make a healthy, stable economy. Nor will any ever manage to, because they dont want to take the steps that would require. Which results in the market getting flooded with items, and only a few BiS items keeping any value. Leading back to the aforementioned circumvention of gameplay, when most items are easily gained. You simply skip over most of the game (=circumvent it), jumping directly from the start of endgame into what would have been late game. With everything in between laying in ruins in a crashed market.
Funny enough, this is the exact same issue D3 has, with droprates so absurd that the entire mid-game just disappears in the blink of an eye. With trading it is just unavoidable. While the disaster that was D3 is very avoidable. Just have much lower droprates and no trading.
Predictable and boring comes from the wealth generation. You can set a direct path toward your item goals. Work toward them 1 currency at a time. You might even be able to calculate the exact hours of farming needed. Aka. predictable. Goes directly against the core concept of random drops in A-RPGs.
Which is the bad part. Skipping the mid-game.
Not interested in arguing semantics either, but yes, skipping something is circumventing it. You might circumvent a tree in the forest, doesn’t mean you circumvented the entire forest.
Yes, but without skipping any of it. A smoother, better progression path. And honestly, no, in a 10 tier system, people wont hit tier 8 around the same time, tier 8 would be mid-tier fast, as the market crashes.
If you are a really competent game designer, you might be able to design droprates so people reach tier 10 at the same time with or without trading, by having different droprates for the two groups, but those tiers before BiS? You will always reach those much faster with trading. That is just how the economy will always work in these games. Cant be balanced. Or rather, it can, but not by any means that the devs are willing to use.
I am positive that I spent more time playing D3 than D2. I was there when RMAH was there. I was there when RMAH got abolished. I was there when RMAH went gone and started to complete my sets for my Witch Doctor. I was there when GRifts started. Of course, the game is repetitive so I have to stop somewhere.
Then they made Necromancers to ask me to return to D3. So I returned. If my old Witch Doctor did GRifts 100+, my Necromancers too has to beat it. So I did. An I can return to its future seasons. I am just busy with AoE4 and planning to go back to Shadowlands afterwards.
On D2 on the other hand, I didnt beat Nightmare back in the days becoz I had no resources from the country where I was. But I was glad D2R gave me a chance to redo it today. In 3 weeks, I destroyed Hell… not just destroyed… I facerolled it… no Trade cheats like people did as I am used to D3 with no trades. Got bored afterwards and left. But I did enjoy every moment on D2R within that month.
I can understand D2 came first… so D3 must be better. And it does. There’s no Tank-and-Spank fights there. I was busy dodging on D3. Malthael and Butcher fights, those are the kind of fights I love… very heavy movement… not the Tank-and-Spank somewhat boring fights of every boss on D2.
But D3 wont be great if D2 was not great. If D2 has GR 150+ difficulty, I would still continue to play it. But D2 Hell is just like GR+40… so easy for me. My Rogue merc can solo Tomb Vipers… ROFL. But the progression climb to Hell was good. I really hope there’s more.
But D3 is a better game than D2. It is not terrible. Pay-to-Win games are terrible… terribad. And D2 has this Pay-to-Win mechanics. We dont need Ebay or RMAH or D2jsp or the likes to play Diablo. D2 needs motivation to have players pursue high runes… We need bad azz Bosses that are hard to kill… the one that requires high runes to kill it. D2 Hell Bosses are being facerolled with just low-quality runes. Maybe players has improved a lot since D2. D3 made players better Diablo players.
We’re currently fixing d2R so the need for D4 is not needed! Once we get a legit mapping or rift system along with lower Kurast chest nerfs maybe will earn items instead of using 3rd party web sites ! Balance and new rune words are coming better ask for maps because we all know purist can’t clear the highest Grifts you can only talk crap about them! Earning items !!! Farming scaling rifts that challenge you??? That’s not the purist way simple basic easy mode runs and joining full games after you hand selected items off a web site your so good wow
BOP is better than d2jsp.
Eh, D3 is both worse than D2, and in its current state, fairly terrible. Easily one of the worst major A-RPGs ever created.
D2 doesnt have any P2W. It does have RMT. Which is indeed awful.
Definitely. None of that should be available. And trading should not be available.
Yep.
I’ll laugh at you all asking for no trading playing a dead game.
No trade = d3 = doa d4
no one is buying that crap
Trading does not inherently make things easier.
It’s very possible. Diablo 3 is kind of case and point. It’s the only game I know of that was first designed with trade in mind and then completely redesigned without trade. It was a more difficult game when there was trade. Trade is not the deciding factor on an easy vs difficult game. I feel like most people are trapped in this idea that you want to take a game with trade and then remove it and say “look, the game is more difficult now”. Well yeah, but if the game was truly designed to not have trade, it wouldn’t be difficult. If difficulty is your argument against trade, I personally think you would benefit from a SSF mode. No, this isn’t me saying “just play ssf if you don’t like trade”. It’s about you obviously wanting a more difficult game and like it or not Diablo 4 is going to be designed to appeal to more casual players than other ARPGs. The base game is not going to be difficult. If the game is designed around not having trade, you’re not going to get this difficulty you are talking about. You are only going to get it from a game that was designed for you to trade and then choosing not to participate in it.
Yes, if we are talking about a game where you have the option of trading and not trading, then trading is the easier path. But the game is also designed for you to trade. If it was designed around you not trading, the game would be just as easy.
What confuses me is that instant gratification is the only gratification that exists in a system without trade. All the types of gratification that exists in a system without trade, exists in a system with trade. It is trade that offers other ways of feeling satisfied.
It doesn’t really subtract anything from the game. It’s just alternative. You still have the slot machine randomness of finding the item you want. It is just exciting as finding the item you wanted, if not more so because it’s more rare for you to do so. But I get that you don’t like the alternative personally. I can’t argue against an opinion. I like having the alternative method and makes loot generally more exciting for me.
I’ve already talked about this above but I’ll expand on it a little. Diablo 3 is a game that was more difficult when it had trade. You can say, well the itemization and game design in general was different and that’s why, but that is my exact point. The difficulty of a game isn’t reliant on a game having trade or not.
Now there is a caveat. A game with trade becomes easier as the population grows and as the game age increases. Ladders/Seasons are a way to combat the latter of the two. There are methods for combatting the first one as well but it all comes down to how the game is designed. Difficulty in a game without trade does not scale with either population of players or age of game, but to be honest if this was the reason Blizzard decided to not have trade, I would think them lazy more than anything. If you’re not going to have trade, let it be because of some core philosophy. Not “we didn’t want to do the extra work”.
That’s because they want you to. They have talked about this quite extensively. In ARPG’s and Path of Exile specifically, players have an expectation of what they should be able to achieve. They can’t fall too much outside the expectation or they suffer for it. The game would be the exact same designed without trade. Path of Exile would be horrible as a game designed without trade. People think they hate picking up items now, but the compensation they’d have to implement if they redesigned around not trading, would make things worse. So much clicking…
To be fair, you aren’t going to be skipping over the midgame on a new released ladder. This only happens for people who start a week or two late. That is when the market is saturated with cheap items for the endgame so people can effectively skip it with the currency they obtained from leveling to early late game.
I think D2R has achieved a pretty healthy and stable trading system. The only con that people can say is that it revolves around jsp. This isn’t the topic to get into that argument though. Low and mid items still hold value even now. Whether that’s due to trading not being centralized, a good itemization system, a combination, or something else I don’t know, but it can be achieved. Now, eventually I expect to a lot of items to drop in value in non-ladder. But it has been 3 months and the economy has shown to be stable and healthy. That shows that at least in ladder, the economy won’t be completely saturated in the first week or two like it is in Path of Exile.
Can’t argue against this one. This is a matter of opinion. I like growing in-game wealth. I prefer my wealth of items over saving everything in some currency though. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll trade away things for a currency if I really need to buy something. But if I find a headhunter, I’m not going to trade it away just so I can have a pile of exalts. I prefer the items over the currency. I feel the core of the game should still be about hoarding items. I love the cool mechanics that the currency items bring to Path of Exile, but I’m not interested in trading away every item I find just so I can see a number go up.
Skipping early to mid-game is always going to be possible if you are making an alt whether trade or no trade, so this argument should be focused on the possibility of jumping levels in the first few days of a new ladder, and I don’t see that being a reasonable possibility.
The smoothness is actually what makes the game easier. You are getting a smooth progression of items that match the difficulty of content you are doing. In trade, you are doing tier 7 and 8 content with tier 6 gear. You do this until you either find upgrades or trade up from tier 6 to 8.
I disagree about hitting tier 8 at the same time, but this is in the context of a new ladder starting, and in some sense, trade would actually progress slower because individual drop rates are much lower and it takes time for trade to be viable at the top end. In trade, the people who wait 2 weeks to start will benefit from the cheaper items. However, this isn’t a problem without a solution. I’m actually impressed how well the D2R economy is. It’s amazing what can be achieved when the market isn’t flooded with duped runes. SoJs, and bases. Only someone who had already established some wealth in d2jsp could really bypass the mid game and we are 3 months into the release.
Same was said about no offline mode for d3. Guess what they were wrong.
Emotional statements means nothing. Its possible that d4 will sell less if there is trade. The negative impacts of d2jsp, eBay etc are clear. Research show that competition is one of the main things which makes ppl play online games. Competition takes a hit by outside factors like rmt, p2w. No trade solved alot of those issues.
It even impact bots as ppl cant trade gears to their main or sell gears. If players are forced to bot on their main account it will punish them much harder and they will be totally removed from LB.
D4 will also have target farming, which means if u cant kill a certain boss or mob u will not get some items. Meaning u cant skip parts of the game which keeps the game challenging. U want a ez game where ppl sell torches first day and be done within 1 week? Or d2jsp makes ppl fully geared without farming? With the current design choice where they gonna make a arpg with pvp, battlegrounds, clan wars etc. open trade just doesnt fit in. A restricted one could work, which is something blizzard earlier suggested. Something like pvm gears/mid gears tradeable. Pvp/high end only tradeable between the party members.
They weren’t though. No Diablo game is going to have low sales. The game was considered a massive failure still. I mean, it’s not because there was no offline mode, but really the comparison of having offline mode with having trade is kind of ridiculous.
This does not apply to ARPGs at all. ARPGs are not balanced or designed around the competitive parts of the game. Competition is not a core mechanic of the game. Also, way more people are either neutral or for jsp lol. No one really is publicly for RMT, but RMT exists even when trade isn’t allowed so it isn’t a strong argument.
Just because you can’t RMT items doesn’t mean you can’t RMT services which is just as damaging.
People will just sell carries. It’s not hard. You completely overestimate how difficult they are going to make Diablo 4.
Stop equating trade to “easy”. The people selling torches day 1 are the ones who play the most. They aren’t quitting the first week. Their Torch shops are pretty much up all the time. These are people that have kept their shops up for years in D2. Now you think they are going to quit in a week of ladder in D2R?
It would be a huge mistake to design the game around those things. They are not core mechanics of an ARPG. They are just extra. There is no reason to take them under consideration when deciding to have trade or not.
No , it wouldn’t work. And that is not the restriction they said. The restriction they said is for the Single rarest items in the game would not be tradeable. The item where you are only allowed to have a single of on your whole character. Which means 1 out of like 10 slots isn’t tradeable for your character. All other slots you could trade for BiS items. However, the itemization system has changed since that announcement.
lmao imagine making a role playing monster slayer game and then what keep the game living is trading economic.
Well if a game is designed around trade, that is how it works. The game is more difficult if you don’t trade because trade effects how the rest of the game is designed. It’s the reason that SSF is considered a challenge mode in a game with trade. Games designed around not trading are usually easier to play as single player games. I mean more than trading decides difficulty of a game, but in a loot hunting game if you can’t trade, the game usually provides a better drop rate and smoother progression to compensate.
So a trading economy is pretty important in a game that has trade. The game becomes more difficult without one which usually means less people are willing to play it.
Yea, with your logic soul games are still so easy and if they implement trade then it’s will be truly hardcore, right ?
All you thought and said it’s only how you feel not truth or fact. Do you have any proof that dev said Diablo are design around the trading and market ? Or it’s all you imagine about the really basic social feature they can implement in the game ?