As a realist I think it’s a continued push for remaining players to abandon D3 and go play D4, in which they hopefully empty their wallets.
I would think that D3 is a financial liability at this point that blizz would gladly fully abandon (i.e. close the servers), but D2R has a similar “buy the box and play free online” monetization and it actually gets more serious updates.
I’ll also paraphrase a good statement made from “actman” (youtuber guy who does a lot of good critique videos on different RPGs) in one of his D4 videos a few months ago: “every blizzard decision makes sense if you understand that the goal IS to make a bad product while maximizing revenue”.
Well.if you look at the D4 ingame shop in terms of what is offered and how much cash they want… seems that they want to milk players dry. I mean, they offer small sets of mere cosmetics at a price that’s on the level of the Necromancer DLC for D3. When I first saw those prices, it made me laugh because it looked like a joke to me.
Let’s say it bluntly - if they want me to buy cosmetics, they’d better offer them at a reasonable price. I mean if I wanted to buy the cosmetics for one of the classes then I could buy three full price collectors editions for that. That’s just nuts.
We live in the age of credit cards and payment plans. People don’t ask themselves questions like “can I afford this?” anymore. They don’t really feel the pricing of anything because they just swipe a credit card (literally or digitally) and then give a minimum payment (often with ANOTHER credit card, this will end well) instead of paying off the balance.
It all works fine until it doesn’t, and then your life is ruined.
I mostly play POE now and it’s even worse there. Every day there are cosmetic set or individual item deals for something like 250 points, which is equivalent to 25 USD. I look at those offers and I just think “those are for credit card heroes”. It’s equivalent to me going into a local grocery store and seeing some fancy cheese on offer for 20 CAD/kg (I’m Canadian) and I think “that’s for credit card heroes”.
Seems they mostly brought it back for the QOL. If they left it at full power with a strong seasonal theme, we would all be doing 2 min GR150s 4 hours into the season.
Totally agree. Bounties are now obsolete except for the handful of bounty specific legendaries. It would have been better if they nerfed the spawn rate, so that they are actually cool when you find one.
Well, it is the trash class, so they just made sure all the trash classes’ builds were balanced as trash builds.
The 3 “top” builds were still worse than any of the other classes top builds, then they nerfed them anyways. Totally agree with:
It’s pretty simple actually. The goal seems to be to not have builds that are overperforming when you add an extra season theme on top of the nerfed altar.
It seems pretty stupid especially looking at those awful patch notes but taking into account the addition of soul shards, we are already the most powerful we’ve ever been so for the health of the game its better to tune down numbers.
If you look at the excellent thread DMKT made you can see there’s a certain balance that D3 never had before.
Regarding visions, with the paragon cap gone you’d want to go back to GRs at some point for better XP.
thats not realism that’s a conspiracy based on nothing.
Act man didnt even finish the Campaign which is ,imo, the single best thing about D4. He didn’t even get to the real serious problems the game has, Imo he just saw the popular trend of bashing D4 and hoped on the band wagon, ironically for his financial gain.
Welcome to life in the Corporatocracy that is the USA. I am a capitalist through and through and despise how corporations in the US have started to gut our system and replaced it with a system that is starting to resemble feudalism. If you think I’m out there on this think about this… do you own your copy of Diablo 2/3/4? No, you don’t. You have been granted a license to run it on your computer which you also have a license for(OS). Some car manufactures are also toying around with similar ideas. Fewer of us own our homes anymore and the fastest growing segment of buyer of residential real estate these days are corporations. Even your TVs, you know the smart ones, have license agreements. Our technological corporate overlords are taking control of your life bit by bit. Unfortunately for you younger folks, you may see a time where you don’t really own anything anymore. And I am not even talking communism here.
Problem is we have enough well off people that have plenty of spending money to fuel these in game stores. They seem to think it is better to milk the whales then lower the prices and get more overall sales. Not sure what they are teaching in economic classes anymore.
Dont know what the goals were but …
Altar is still strong, free cc immunity and illu boots, some but not crazy dmg buffs and a lot of QoL.
Regarding nerfs/buffs … some want to explode 150s while playing blindfolded others want 150 to be a challenge both want all sets to be reasonably balanced nothing of this was achieved.
That time is already now. Go view “The Great Taking” documentary film (or read the free ebook version) to get an idea of the systems and legislation already in place.
You got me … I thought that the Altar was a S30 feature … and I only saw that on the PC during PTR last month. So, if the altar is available on console then the blizz, er Micro___ folks have let something slip. Because, folks on PC are still wondering when S30 is coming.
