i don’t even care about gaming that much in general these days, it’s an ultimately unimportant past time. that’s why games like PoE and D4 are nice because they’re “seasonal”. i love to go fast on a fresh start. it’s really fun to optimize progression and play 8+ hours a day for a few days or a week, despite not spending time on games consistently day after day, week after week.
that being said, it likewise only takes a few minutes to make a post to just speak about my experience regarding a game that i do keep coming back to, and also spent a lot of time playing its predecessor, thoroughly enjoying d3 even though it was unpopular and had no development team after RoS release.
also, my post may be moreso addressed to blizzard, but is honestly more in regards to what other people are posting than what blizz is doing. i accept the company is a corporate shill lol. ive been embracing that reality as a long-term WoW player (since 2005) the moment that they sold out to Activision.
you also can’t stop people from being people and despite that, i think it’s good to have a few voices in the wilderness to promote actually using reason and objective thinking.
obviously for example, people are screaming about this rhykker tree of whispers, and all this other crap that will literally not improve the game whatsoever and doesn’t even begin to address anything regarding the fundamental nature of ARPG and the missing fundamental elements. any of these ideas which add something to the game, but not the end game (currently: horde/pit/boss spam) only artificially extends the progression to end game (its the exact same rewards just makes it take longer lmao), does nothing for end game itself, which is the real problem with d4, according to what’s “normal” rather than what’s “common”.
or just simply the reality that blizzard literally says they want to achieve certain things (make bosses/hordes more rewarding and less of a timesink), they fail at it, and literally 99.9% of people are completely unaware regarding this whole chain of events and act like none of these things were ever said. there’s almost 0 useful feedback whatsoever.
they just keep screaming about uber uniques, their builds sucking, and the difficulty of torment levels, despite there being like at least 5-10+ builds in the game (which is a milestone for d4 because all previous 7 seasons have had only 1 good build) which can all speed run pit 90-100, which is effectively the equivalent of torment 6-7 lmao. people (the majority of players) are screaming about nerfs but theyre actually needed for the game OBJECTIVELY, because literally anyone with iq 90+ can 1 shot everything in the game all the way up to “torment 7”.
people screaming about how the game takes too long, when in reality its not hard and it doesn’t take a long time. they said they wanted it to no longer be a weekend game, but it’s still a weekend game, and so these further nerfs are to make it even less of a weekend game. obviously no one has any clue whats actually going on lol, because they only scream and don’t listen, incapable of even questioning let alone understanding, at the very least, WHY blizzard is doing more nerfs, and because of the innate egotistical and narcissistic nature of mankind, are literally UNABLE to accept their own lack of skill (and simply accept playing on a lower difficulty) and realize blizzard has to also appeal to “normal” people as well, despite them being a minority, and so the masses just continue to scream about their feelings as humans have always done rather than being empathetic to normal people and caring about the big picture.
to get to my more specific answer now that i’ve addressed the blizzard/playerbase issue, another reason for my post is because the game is actually almost good. ill preface by saying i play on SC usually cuz the game generally isn’t worth the time, but this season was good so after about para 220 on SC i rerolled to HC. its not a HUGE difference in the initial experience of the game because until you really get to end game (if you’re not a leecher), you’re just gonna be playing SSF most of the time cuz its simply most efficient and least cumbersome.
but just as a side note (just another thing 99.9% of players are clueless about), on HC theres no duped mats, 50b gold items, 10 trillion leeches in group finder, etc. if you’re even just okay at the game you can easily play this game on HC with 0 deaths and play a stable version of the game, with stable economy, and you can interact with “normal” players, which obviously all these things significantly improves the experience overall. it’s great compared to sc and its almost entirely because of the people you’re playing with.
that being said, s8 in general was actually fun aside from bossing. and until the “end game”, being an efficient player, in order to optimally improve/max out all the character progression systems simultaneously in the least amount of time, for me there was a decent and very healthy amount of bouncing around between activities which kept me engaged and feeling refreshed. loot being more rare and taking more time was generally a vastly different experience from previous seasons where i’d have 2ga+ everything in 3-4 days and just quit (which unfortunately may become the case again in s9).
even on HC with S8 nerfs, i still managed to get virtually perfect MW’s and 2-4 GA in pretty much every slot within a short period of time. i was around para 240-250 by the time i had nothing left to do but grind pit for xp.
also, unfortunately in s8 both NMD and helltide are obviously obsolete and really only used to complete season journey and do some whispers, legions are so obsolete i actually forgot to mention them because i forgot they existed lmao, but even despite all that it all felt “okay”. like a step in the right direction that just needs to be pushed a bit further. similar to what they’ve said about hordes and bosses.
so its not just what i observe in the game, its my own (educated) experience in contrast with previous titles in the series, and also in contrast with other ARPG’s, and most importantly, in contrast with blizzards own vision, repeatedly saying things like “we want horde’s to be less common”, and “we want you to spend less time on bossing” and they make these tiny changes towards that goal, but ultimately does nothing to address the problem. and they receive no real feedback on anything important.
obviously as well, there must be so many hurdles and levels of authority for someone to push even a single idea and get it approved, but its clear that somewhere in the deep vaults of one or a few developers mind(s) working in the catacombs of the D4 section of Blizzard there is an understanding of the glaringly obvious fundamental problem(s) to some extent. i just wanna provide a little bit of real feedback for a game that i enjoy and have seen moving (very slowly) in the right direction, and would like to see it further improved.
so yea, man. hope that sufficiently answers your question as to my motivations for posting.