The primary driving force behind my decision is always being gold starved. I run countless NM dungeons and do all the efficient things to gain gold and the return on investment – let’s just say that the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. It might be that I’m frustrated and not thinking clearly but I swear that in pre-season I gained much more gold somehow.
Another thing is the new season’s vendor buff powered by smoldering ashes doesn’t even work. According to a few clan mates, it’s bugged and actually TAKES AWAY GOLD; let me explain. There was (is?) a bug that if you put points into the vendor buff – your rolls for enchanting gear multiplicatively COSTS MORE GOLD – I was already always running lean; thus another nudge to me towards stepping away from D4. Not sure if this is fact but was said in my guild chat, however, another friend of mine said he was experiencing this bug even without the vendor buff. Regardless of the technical mechanics of how enchant costs work, I can say that I jumped into the ‘millions’ cost on my 3rd roll – so there definitely is something stupid going on. Lastly, about the vendor “buff”, I tested selling the same item with and without the vendor buff – got the same amount both ways – when I was supposed to get more??. This is annoying, feels like a meme, and feels punishing of my time – for what??
Lastly about gold is the indirect push for players to use 3rd party platforms to vendor wares. The way we are gold starved now forced me to go on discord servers and forums to merch my rare items. Essentially, a 3rd party auction house. I don’t enjoy games where I have to go outside of my immersive experience to augment it. And I really shouldn’t even say augment – it’s more like maintain it. To do those things is a process. You gotta 1. stop playing the game. 2. Snip a pic of your item. 3. open up discord or a browser and post your item on the platform. 4. manage the auction at which the item is being sold at. I JUST WANT TO PLAY THE GAME! And before anyone starts freaking out about 3rd party vendoring – it’s not Real Money Trade; it’s rares for gold and even PezRadar is in one of the discords XD (lol).
A secondary gripe is that Season 1 feels like a fraud to me. Pre-Season is where my expectations (Let’s call this Player Expectations) were set. Right before Season 1, they nerf stuff but then give it back for Season 1 launch in other ways – but still less in the original sense and more temporarily for the specific season (YUCK). Doing business practices in this manner makes me feel like I’m at a ‘net zero’ level of fulfillment. It’s like our baseline (we will call it Pre-Season) gets TAXED and thus we start at a net negative, but then the seasonal potential is designed with the possibility to be maxed to mirror the Pre-Season potential (with a twist/variation per season). However, in order to recoup the income (damage potential) you made before the season, you MUST claim your TAX CREDITS (in the form of Malignant Hearts) in order to get that tax refund and that is the seasonal content! “Blizzard Giveth, and Blizzard Taketh”. I wouldn’t have felt this way if they announced this back-end practice/meta of “giving a lot> taking away> giving back again but on certain conditions to be met” if they just were upfront about this strategy. They should have done a better job at setting up Player Expectations, since they are ultimately in control of the game system.
In sum total, it wasn’t really about the long-winded rant in the paragraph above but more the gold mechanics that made me want to stop playing – but Season 1 certainly felt bad. As if I am a forever renter of power, nonetheless. Gold, as of right now, is the ONLY thing that is so damn hard to get enough of and I DO NOT enjoy going outside of the game to get more of it. I’m done with D4 for now.
I may give D4 a second look during season 4 or 5 but for now, I’m tired of being an iterative lab rat (are we still beta testers??).
