every “new” season has little to no incentive to play. 1 new character in 20 seasons? nice triple A company
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Well i think Forgotten Archieves is a really cool name and for me that is incentive enough. Also i have to say that i love pushing for conquests.
The fact that Activision / Blizzard is still supporting this game as well as they are - despite the lack of those corporate coveted microtransactions - is truly appreciated by the player base.
My fear is that sometime after Diablo IV launches, they close the D3 servers and we will loose access to this game entirely. It’s not a big revenue stream at this point and is kind of here for brand and franchise recognition. It’s currently running on a maintenance team - rather than a true dev team. So play and enjoy while you can. =)
Diablo IV is coming with it’s microtransactions - and you’ll wish you had this oldie but goodie to fall back on.
I for one am looking forward to seeing what’s possible with lesser builds with the “Unlocked” cube.
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Name another major game that get the support D3 gets after 8 years without a live service monetary model.
It’s Good will ( so you Buy their next games) that they keep giving us updates, not profit.
You can be sure the D4 Will have a live service model and have more regular and beefy updates.
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D2 Servers haven’t even close. I think your fear is uncalled for.
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The D2 servers have super small overhead. It’s p2p networking linking through a single hub. The game runs on the player machines (including RNG and the like). So the computational overhead is minimal when compared to D3. The fact that your Battle.net characters are stored locally on your hard drive as opposed to “On The Server” is kinda proof of that. Its why hacking your “Online” character with gear and stuff is soooo easy in D2.
But you make a good point - perhaps they will keep it open indefinitely. Just take the ability to purchase it (and thus get new players) off the main page and bury it like they did D2.
I think they will keep to a minimum server needed.
If D4 is the equivalent of the second coming of back street boys, then most people won’t be worry about D3 anyway and the server I reload will be minimal.
What does Blizz have to keep making new classes for all eternity to keep you happy. You do realize that D3 is in the hands of the classic team right. So the resources are not gonna be allocated to handle such a huge task.
If that were the case then D2 would’ve been shutdown as soon as D3 launched. D2 is still going like the ever ready bunny. I don’t see them shutting down D3 for a long time to come. The only what that might happen is if D4 by some miracle becomes the WoW of Diablo games as far as success goes. No, I am not talking about how it is designed but I am talking about the sheer number of people playing it. If D4 somehow manages to get around 12 million people playing it for as long as WoW did when it had 12 million active subscribers then you might see that happen. But I highly doubt that would happen. In order to get those kind of numbers D4 would have to sell around 36-45 million copies. I just don’t see that many people worldwide buying D4.
I think you are mistaken. Diablo 2 has a few different ways to play.
- Offline single player on your PC
- LAN locally in your home
- Open Battlenet - this lets you use your own chars saved on your PC and does operate as you stated.
- CLOSED Battlenet - the real online mode where characters and everything are on the Blizzard servers.
It is option 4 that people are saying Blizzard has continued to support for 20 years now, despite not making money off Diablo 2 anymore.
Given they still support Diablo 2, it seems likely they will continue to support Diablo 3.
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Did you even try when posting this?
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WoW had 12M subscribers for like less than a year. Albeit they had 11, and 11.5 for the previous year. But then I don’t Thinknyou even have 12M copies sold of all 3 games combined.
I don’t think D3 will be switched off once D3 goes live. However that will depend on how many people are playing it. While D2 is significantly less expensive to support, as long as a certain threshold is playing both games will still receive support online that is.