Why not let the people decide?

Why not just have a poll across multiple outlets (The Official forums, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit); average the results…and let the people decide on free trade vs restricted trade (along with other matters)?

Once upon a time Blizzard cared about what the people wanted and this was actually a thing…back in the Bnet 1.0 days.

Who remembers Bashiok?

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because of people making money and cluttering up the trade system, causing value of items to drop to the point that everyone has them. And also the amount of bots involved to do so. They do however read what people think and i guess make certain decisions to iterate SOME ideas in some kind of way. They even name characters in their games after people.

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I do. ^^ But only from the D3 development era, where he seemed to be there just to defend every choice made by the developers, not listen anything the community had to say.

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That’s true but at least he frequently engaged with the community. That barely happens anymore.

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Game design should never be a democracy. That will only lead to mediocre games, at best.
Nor would polls on the forum/fb/twitter/reddit be representative in any way.

Blizzard should listen to ideas and feedback of course, but in the end, they are the ones who need to make the decisions.

I do agree Blizzard should engage more on the forum though.

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And that get him fired, I think because he made a statement that people doesn’t like it?

Also, considering how Internet works together, it is better for developers or community managers not to engage a personal conversations with fans because it is so easy for fans to twist the words to their favors.

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Look how that turned out for D3… game population died hard and it didn’t take long.

I hope you don’t have the same attitude for government.

This idea has been brought up a few times by the community, including me. Had this idea where blizz/D3 could create a poll with 3 different season theme option and lets the community vote on what we would like to see for the upcoming season. For some reason ideas like these goes straight into blizz’s trash or something cause it hasnt happened yet, not sure if it ever will. LET THE COMMUNITY DECIDE! Stop realeasing random ideas hoping people will like it!

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Game design and government have very little in common.

But no, direct democracy would also be catastrophic. There is a reason very few, if any, nations really try that (Switzerland probably being the one that gets closest).

Anyway, D3 turned out badly because Blizzard made an endless stream of bad decisions.
That certainly doesnt mean the game would have turned out great if people had voted on everything

Games need to be coherent, having some kind of single vision behind them. That is basically the opposite of what you get if people voted on it. Nobody ever blamed governments for being coherent.

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Indeed, democracy is a ideal that doesn’t get practiced.

Anyways, making a game that is based off of poles would be… something based off numbers that may or may not represent the majority of the player base.

Take the forums here. It is a fraction, very small one at that, of the player base playing D3. I didn’t even join this forum until long after I played diablo and even then, shied away due to people not answering a question I had but rather telling me I’m a newb/idiot/don’t belong/ or just not answering.

Reddit, google, forums, Facebook… gather all those up and you would still be missing the answers from a mass amount of players.

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Back in August 2011 when RMAH was announced, the reaction on the old forums (the ones you could access with WC3 / D2 key) was overwhelmingly negative. If Blizzard truly cared, they wouldn’t have pushed it though anyways.

I do… and? What about him?

First, if any survey should be done, it shouldn’t be on lame and cancerous social media platforms. People have e-mail addresses associated with their battle net accounts. Any and all surveys should be done there.

Second, I don’t want a situation, where it falls on the players to make the game instead of the devs. I want the devs to be competent, to be familiar with the franchise and make the best decision on their own. I can throw suggestions and criticize, but it’s not my job to make the game instead of them.
Video games are… to some extend an art. I wanna play their art. When I buy a painting, I don’t want to have to paint over it in order to fix it.

Third, another reason I don’t want the players making the game, is because we already have examples as to how that’s a bad thing. It’s called Word of WarCraft… a game, which was systematically destroyed throughout the years, because Blizzard didn’t listen to reasonable people, but instead listened to crying noobs, who wanted an MMO to be a Single Player game.

In relation to Diablo, I’ve heard and read so many myths and nonsense from other players, that I would have to wonder whether or not they come from a parallel universe, where the game was completely different. The nonsense they spill is just abysmal. I don’t want players like that to have a say on the game.

Especially when it comes to trading in Diablo, I’ve heard utter nonsense. There are some legitimate concerns about trading, but interestingly enough I’ve never seen them brought up from other players. They merely regurgitate talking points, that have been long countered and debunked by actual Diablo players.

Fourth, I don’t want the game to be flipped on it’s head all the time… from hand to hand trading (D2) to full blown AH (D3 Vanilla), to then severely restricted trading only within party members (RoS).
If the D4 team have been developing it with the following in mind: some items being tradable, some tradable with limitations, some untradable… then let them release it like this and we see what happens.
Ultimately, David Brevik, one of the creators of the Diablo franchise also thinks the same. Also, that’s how his game MH worked, and it was OK.

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Activision cares about my money.

Nowadays, people define themselves by their economic potential and related accomplishments. So what is the matter if Activision sees money instead of people?

And who is Bashiok?

At the end of the day there’s a thread/threads on this forum for suggestions and they said they will read them. It would be nice for them to actually comment back and say if they will implement any of their player bases ideas, whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. Even if they say they won’t be at least the players know where they stand. But i guess that part would never happen xD. Either way D4 looks like it’s going to be good. If taking peoples money for in game things is the way to keep a game alive then so be it. This franchise can certainly have some of mine. I have played Diablo games since i was a kid.

Bashiok was the forum name of Micah Whipple, a long time Blizzard community manager. Bashiok was first known as Drysc, from 2003-2008 when he was a CM for World of Warcraft. When Diablo 3 was announced in 2008 he moved to the Diablo 3 team, working as the sole community manager for that game for several years, and remaining on the Diablo 3 team after others joined, through 2012. In early 2013 he moved back to working on World of Warcraft, though he kept the Bashiok name. Micah Whipple left Blizzard Entertainment in July 2015, posting a lengthy farewell letter in the Battle.net WoW forums.

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People can’t even agree if they want trades or not… its a waste of time. Design a good game, get some feedback, change a few things, but ignore the most of it…

People don’t always know what’s fun, because everyone has a different opinion.

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This statement falls in what I talked about, which is basically regurgitated myths and legends.

Diablo 2 over battle net has a pretty solid and stable economy (and I am talking about in-game currency like gems and runes, not real money). Prices are the same nowadays, just like they were in 2017, 2014, 2011, 2007 and so on…
Meaning, the whole “causing value to drop” is nonsensical. Good items retained their value. I imagine someone laughed at you, because you tried to sell some crap item, that doesn’t sell anyways, if you even played at all…

Also, I can gear in BiS on Single Player within 6 months. The same cannot be said for D3, where you can grind for 6 months, and even if you are full ancient, most of your rolls will most likely be terribad.

The bots in D2 had little to no effect on that of other players. They spam, you can filter the chat. You don’t want a bot to enter, put a password and add it to the description, so that a regular player can trype it in, while the bot cannot.
But whether I do a Baal run with bots or with real people is more or less irrelevant…

This cannot be compared to D3, where bots grant massive advantages to players, who compete for a spot on the Leader Board.

I really couldn’t care less if some crazy person wastes his money on pixels.
But I can give you a more dramatic example of how some players can get massive advantage of the open trade, and they wont have to spend a single dollar.
It’s called content creators with sycophantic audience, which will donate them stuff for free.

And all of that is not much of a problem with trading in itself, it’s a problem with the game being too simplistic and gear being too important. The solution would be for characters to have inherent strength though the skill system… and to some extend in D4 they will…
And also to have a bit more complex gameplay, so that even if you’re granted godly gear, you still have to play correctly.

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wow steady on now. I’m only saying why they won’t change their minds on having every item trade-able. I wasn’t on about the bots in D2 even though that could fall under the same category, no i was on about bots in general. Also ‘making money’ well… The reason D3 hasn’t had extra content other than repeating the same stuff is because it doesn’t make enough money to i guess. If they have people spending real money on the game then they can keep the game alive for longer and keep DLC etc coming. Cosmetics and stuff is always a great start. I never came up with the idea here anyway… Blizzard did. As for me selling rubbish items in D2, yea i probably did i was a lil kid and not very good at these types of games back then. Can’t of done too bad i managed to get some good items like enigma and other stuff. (can’t remember names other than enigma and BOTD)

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It’s not worth the backlash “why pick THAT option over THIS option!”

The bike shedding would be legion.

Outside of something super tangible like “I wish I could double click in the Enchanter window to select the option I just rerolled”, most suggestion are vague one liners, suitable perhaps for discussion, but not implementation. They’re also almost always without context on how such suggestion may have a rippling impact affect.

How many suggestions would they implement that could end up being “exactly what I asked for, and not what I wanted”.

I would have like for them to remove the ability for players to pop back to town and go hostile in public games, then pop box and PK strangers. Why was it impossible to open up a public game and not have a checkbox that said “no pvp – eva!”?

But, apparently, it was (maybe this has changed since, D2 is a long time ago). They never added that option. Was it vision? Was it technical? Was it “gee this is a lot harder than we thought” or were they simply philosophically opposed give a player who created the game this kind of power to deny PvP to complete strangers at the hosts peril.

Who knows.

I do not dare tap in to the complexities of a code base such as D3. We’ve always seen weird bug show up in, say, WoW, and marvel “how was it even possible for this to slip in here”.

So, yea, I think they do listen but they have have internal constraints and goals that we are not party to, and won’t be party too, that affect design, and if they can sneak in a request from the peanut gallery? So be it.

what exactly are you on about here? i don’t have any problems with people choosing to pvp if that’s what you are trying to get at. Ganking people and smashing them over and over to demoralise however i disagree with especially when you are way way way over geared than that person.

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Believe he’s talking about the concept of your “want” with “what would really happen” if they gave people what they “wanted”.

I’m a proud person and can argue until my face turns blue about something I’m wrong about…but I also know and come to terms with what I’m wrong about. This is the same with “what I want”. I know for darn sure that there is and has been many things I wanted but unknown to me…I actually didn’t want it lol and wished they would have not done what I wanted.