Yeah because there ate 0 copied builds in D2, nor were there ever any early on. I’m telling you that guy doesn’t know half of what hes talking about and refuses to learn.
It does not.
I do not forget how to add numbers just because I learned the definition of a few other words. I carry the spirit of that logic over to my games.
I can understand people not liking the D3 style where everyone who hits level 30 knows the same skills immediately. I am 100% for changing how we learn and empower skills. I will just not advocate taking effort away from the player like wiping skills or throwing in decay. Otherwise, you should know by now I’m for a system where someone could eventually learn and master everything for their class. It doesn’t mean they can set everything at once due to skill loadout limitations, or change all willy nilly for reasons I covered in earlier posts. It just means they liked the character and put that time in. That’s it. Throw in avatar customization for a greater personal touch? Even better.
I’ll take that as a no 
Surely, if you dont do something for a while, you get out of practice.
Not that I could care the slightest about whether something in a game fits with reality. Should we also need to eat and sleep in the game to keep our skills working?
is this still going lol
they have made their decision based on the apparently more vocal part of the community
it’s a compromise nonetheless
you wont get any further discount
We also thought Angelic and Demonic Powers were a thing, but that changed. Such is game development. The presumption this process is set in stone should not be made. Internal testing can eventually draw the conclusion I’ve been making that too much time is spent farming for the cost, while simultaneously realizing if you make it too cheap there’s no point in having it at all.
Check again after launch if anyone wants to gloat. Even then, that’s not a promise of permanence.
thats not an unexplored game mechanic that they invented to show us for feedback
the community wants meaning and consequences and they get it
Cant claim to have that much faith.
I think the cost end up being meaningless. Like some gold cost or whatever.
Of course, saying the right words in a blog post is better than saying the opposite
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Perhaps I went too D2-centric in that regard but the idea behind is the following:
If when you do stuff X that allows to you fight mobs in close combat relatively safely/er, then you’ll stick to your build even though it may not be otherwise effective enough as some other (and vice versa, if you can’t “stand” getting hit and have to almost always disengage or use a potion or something, then you’ll re-spec in hope that mobs won’t even “come close” in the first place, at least much less often)
That being said IF, IF they make it somehow that some “bad” abilities can increase defensive capabilities in some ways, and “good” abilities do not, then they can afford to reduce the number or re-speccing in general
Not sure how/which/why exactly but perhaps there could be things like:
- CC resistance bar (the higher keep the lower CC durations from CC suffered)
- Elemental damage absorption (how much elemental damage you can “eat” without taking any damage)
- Shard system (a spendable defensive socket that does X for X times, like reduce a damage from projectile by X% before resistances count, things like that, so maybe you could have a skill which says suffering an elemental projectile damage has chances to recharge your shard for X charges or maybe disperse and drop a free shard on the ground)
THAT WAY the game can also afford to be a relatively high-damage output at times without being too “linear” at builds, extra stuff that increase your defense/s at times can afford the game be harder and present risk for being “too greedy” on offensive efficiency in a way
Just a thought… 
stop it
dont summon the demons of casuality
You can claim that some want respecs to have a high cost at end game, but certainly there are many who do not share that viewpoint as illustrated by this thread. The unresolved question is how many in the community want a high respec cost versus free?
Since I and others are part of the community, it is clear that the community as a whole does not want high respec costs at end game? Are we the vast majority, the majority, the minority, or the few?
If you look at video games broadly, the players of the vast majority (in games where it is relevant) do NOT favor high respec costs.
Unless Blizzard makes a poll to properly gauge it’s community interest on the matter (and even then I wouldn’t say that would be accurate), I doubt anyone knows how many people want a high respec cost vs those who want a non-cost respec.
Every choice a develeoper make, “alienate” some part of the potential playerbase. Online/offline, respec, trade, game difficulty, depth etc. So it is not like Blizzard got a choice here, that leads to nobody being alienated.
And it would be a horrible idea for them to try that. Making a game that tries to please everyone, leads to a trash game.
Also, no, free respecs do not make all choices meaningless. But it does make a huge part of the game meaningless. All build choices are gone, except the choice of class (which some people want to see gone as well).
Definitely yeah.
Though people will of course disagree on what that is. But it definitely should not be “the majority decides”. That is the same as trying to please everyone, but pleasing none. A game needs a coherent vision.
Huh. Got any data supporting such a claim?
Indeed.
To be honest, even an accurate poll would not tell the whole story, because context matters. What respec cost, in which kind of game.
People would pretty much need to play the game for a while, with and without a significant respec cost, to fully answer the question.
I would assume most people want meaningful choices and consequences in their games (at least in any game with RPG elements). Since, otherwise, why play them at all. But the kind of consequences can be discussed endlessly.
We already went through this - trying builds should be free at anytime.
Then you won’t use a token to respec in it.
If you however tested a build, found it fun, respeced to it and after an hour you regret this and want to respec again, but you don’t have a token now, well… That’s life. You’ll have to play with the build for awhile. Maybe in the meantime you’ll find a way to make it better, or you’ll use your loadout for multi and play with some friends instead while waiting for a token to drop, or get such token from a pvp battle if that’s possible.
Playing with not so fun build for awhile is not the end of the world.
Free respecs shorten the time people experiment with builds, which ultimately leads to more “ripping off” than the case with properly done respecs.
If you make Seasons with no respec option and one character available to be made what you’ll end up is many players starting after 2-3 weeks in Season after the meta has settled down and they know exactly what build to copy-paste.
Free respecing as the other extreme gives you the option to copy-paste at any time and this is what many will end up doing - “Oh, there’s a new build B here that’s better for activity A and it needs item X. Oh, I have X. Let me respec now.”
The middle ground is what would create most character identity on average. If we apply the B-A-X example from above sentence, we’ll see two interesting cases where the player eventually decides not to respec to B:
1] The player might not have a respec token thus he’ll continue to play more with his current build and he might improve it himself to the point where it’s pretty close to B, so he’ll save the token when he finds it.
2] The player tests B, but he realizes it lacks something he needs for activity A' and he doesn’t use a respec token.
With the free respec case it doesn’t matter whether the activity you do is A, A’, A’'. You can be optimal for ANY activity if you have the right items. That’s what makes free respecing the less skillful mechanic. Yes, it’s more convenient since you save time from not switching characters (and items when needed), but ultimately this convenience doesn’t make it the better option.
Free respecs is like having a race which includes driving through a formula 1 track, Nascar track and rally track in the end, in which race you can change cars between tracks.
Limited respecs is going through the same competition with 1 car - you choose what it should be and how to tune it, but you’ll experience its upsides and suffer its downsides.
If you get a f1 car you’ll go through that Nascar track if you are skillful enough, but you’ll crash on the rally track. If you get a Nascar or a rally car you’ll manage to finish the race, but you won’t be among the top drivers. You need a custom made and tuned car if you want to be optimal for such race - one that performs good on each of the tracks and one you can handle good yourself on the worst track of your liking. That’s where the car/character identity emerges.
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Sounds good enough for me… In that case you should be able to respec easier the longer you have played…
this is why we are here
to speak up for your opinion
we are voting and they are reading blogs, forums, reddit and watching youtubers amd streamers and apparently they came to the conclusion that the best way to make most people happy is to give us infinite respecs with reasonable costs
What is your evidence that “best way to make most people happy is to give us infinite respecs with reasonable costs”? In particular, you claim “most”.
Do you have insight into representative statistical sampling that has been done by Blizzard to guage their playerbase?
And things can and will change. This is why threads like this have potential to change the developer’s mind. We have already seen this happen.
Of course, each decision can alienate certain segments of their potential customers/playerbase. The question is what percent?
Not proof, but a good summary of issues that have been encountered.
Do a google search with “respec costs” and you will see the widespread concern of having this in a multitude of video games.
If respecs are not free, many people will just wait for the math folks/committed players to define the top build and just copy/paste. The will NEVER experiment with any build but just follow other’s lead. If you have free respecs, it is easy to experiment with the knowledge that failed attempts have not led to a significant time investment.
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i just believe that blizz is not blind
if they claim to have read all our feedback and came to a conclusion, they might have been leaning to the “most” feedback
what is this? just some whiny dude asking for another D3?
because its an “article” it has any kind of relevance? XD
most arpg streamers out there are totally fine with respec costs and they might be reflecting a major part of the community
Streamers are cults of personality, just as any subreddit is reflective of their mods’ whimsies. Fanboys also tend to be the worst to garner feedback from because “the bad” of a game is very frequently a blind spot to them (Alternate take: People who dislike games with steep respec costs aren’t streaming them, and therefore can’t build a base around that mentality by default). However, be it a blog or article somewhere you’ve never heard or care about suddenly doesn’t mean the opinion doesn’t count. Game devs have also been known to go against player wishes because those in charge of the purse strings tell them to or they happen to want to stubbornly cling to a particular vision.
What is inescapable is that the dissent exists. None of the people for steep costs here has made a compelling argument that they’re for the better, and occasionally don’t seem to realize they’re being paradoxical (Hint: You don’t give people choice by saying, “NO!”). What can’t be ignored is people disliked the time when D2 didn’t have respecs at all. Not everyone was satisfied with the eventual iteration that came to be. PoE, as it is frequently touted as “the true successor of D2”, has also met a similar scrutiny with the limitation of their orb system. “Just do XYZ because this other game in the genre did it!” is not justification on its own. That seems to be where we’re at in the current line of dev rationale. Myself and others have said that how D3 handled things wasn’t perfect, either. We’re just saying character growth can be better without clinging to archaic principles that tend to be psychologically destructive. Resources spent on making this cost system a thing (because I doubt they’ll actually have testers farming 2+ hours per individual full respec to a fully grasp on the soulless mundanity of it all and just run drop simulators) could otherwise be diverted to making crafting better, a cool boss, or whatever.
Not necessarily a bad thing. Heck, as much as I want Blizzard to form Diablo 4 based on my wishes (like everyone else here), uncritically listening to what the “majority” of your players claim they want, is rarely a great idea.
Game devs should find a coherent vision for their game and try to stick with it.
We are of course all free to critize that vision.
Just like people didnt like it when D3 had free respecs.
At minimum we should be able to agree that people are not one entity here.
And as much as I dislike streamers and their fanboys (and yeah, definitely do not blindly listen to them as if they speak for others than themselves), a random streamer and random laptop magazine writer holds about the same value when it comes to opinions (they hold just about 1 persons value each).
A good respec system seems endlessly more important for the quality of the game than crafting, a cool boss, or whatever.
Heck, most things are probably more useful than trying to make crafting better.