When D3 first came out, it took me 1000 hours to reach P100. Then it changed to Seasons. When they first started I did not even manage to finish all the season achievements. It was challenging.
Nowadays, only part time players and dedicated players keep playing all season long. I am usually finished the achievements within the first two weeks but still plod along.
There is no challenge anymore.
The dedicated and top of the ladder players find out which build is best and within a week the top ten all have the same build.
Realistically, I don’t care as long as a new season comes out every three months, however, if you were to monitor players online, you would find that the majority leave within the month.
Within the first 2 weeks you mean. But D3 was never about being hard, or stuggle to gear up quickly. Hell no Diablo game ever was hard. Findig good items was leghty, specialy in D2. But being hard? Nah, none of them were, ever.
I want a tick box on character creation. One that moves all the grind time to 1-70. So rather than 10 minutes (or 1.5 hours solo) to 70, make it 50 hours to lvl 70, and then I get 49 hours of grind XP, gem levels, and shard increases over 3 hours, so that, I can catch up to everyone else. Also 1-70 has like 2-3 times more magic find. In order to keep it a challenging journey, I don’t want to be able to open the challenge rift cache until lvl 70, and I don’t want to get mass XP from joining lvl 70 character games. Let me play T6 with lvl 70 players but as if I’m solo.
Point being, constantly using unique builds with best in slot gear. Constantly getting new legs and upgrades for a week straight. 2 if I’m casual. Looking forward to a level up to unlock my next skill. And then avoiding a week of grinding paragon and gem levels. Then I can spend 3-4 days grinding and I’ll have been playing a week and a half instead of 3 or 4 days.
Psychology states that if you are just given stuff, you don’t enjoy it as much as struggling for it and finally getting it. If you get 30 levels in 30 seconds, then you don’t even have time to look forward to unlocking them. If you get a great legendary item, you don’t really care because in 5 minutes, it will be obsolete. So you don’t care about things. It’s the reality of how the brain works.
Imagine if there was a “Skip to full primal 150 augment gear with 4000 paragon” button. You click it, and what do you have to look forward to then? Just the leader board times and the perfect rift. And for some people, that’s all they want. They would click it and grind for the perfect rift for 3 months.
Dude, don’t even. I played D1 in 1997 here in Australia, D2 when it first came out in 2000,
and the stupid Auction House when D3 came out in 2012. It took me 1000 hours in HC.
Well not exactly on launch, but in the same year. I played through all difficulties exploireing every map, going into every dungeon on my way, doing all the side quests, in every difficulty. I might have died twice to Diablo, and to Belial might be more than twice, on Inferno. But that’s it.
I know this is going to sound rude but it’s not meant to.
Games should never be designed to cater to people who play all day long. It then becomes impractical for any casual gamer to reach any sort of tangible goal. The way Diablo 3 is designed, those who play all day will always be the higher level paragons and reach the higher GR faster
As a very long time gamer, people who do this are not really “top of the ladder”. Copycat players are just bandwagon players. It’s like people who play MTG or other CCGs and rather than figure out what decks are good, copy what others have done. Plagiarism does not equate to skill.
There is a steep decrease in player soon after the start of the season because this game is repetitive, not because this game is easy. Believe it or not most people aren’t engaged by the “do GR90 in 90 seconds for five trillion times” core gameplay.
50 hours? You are really underplaying how much farming you need to do in this game lol. To have a build that’s push-ready(which I’d define as having about 2.5k paragon + full augments + every gear at least has the right stats)is easily 100+ hours per build. And that’s if you only starting counting the time AFTER you get your basic farming build set up.
That’s the confusion that I feel many people have when it comes to games like Diablo, and the leaderboard.
Take the first person to find the necromancer issue, or the wizard bug that currently plagues the PTR leaderboards. That’s skill. Because those players were thinking outside the box. But they probably started getting high on the leaderboard, and then came the copycats. But an issue with the leaderboards is, you can out grind players. And when it comes to the live game, not the PTR where you gain tons of paragon, players with new and better builds can often become lost and forgotten, just because they’re not the top grinders.
Yep, this is correct and why I never took “I’m a top player” seriously back in Diablo 2 days just because someone was high on the ladder. All those people who botted… and that’s something else that grinds my gears. There is another game I played not long ago where a few players bot their success and are viewed as “top tier players”.
I played these games when they launched too. D3 was, by far, the most difficult. The loot was terrible and there was no paragon. You would know that if you had played it at launch.