http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/
Thoughts?
I’ll be celebrate by actually getting a toon to max level and doing the rainbow happy fun time level. Glad to see Blizzard is taking feedback. Hope to see this decision take an effect how they design their other games.
Best decision they could have ever made. Blizzard has had a very long and storied history of coming clean on bad decisions, stepping up to the plate when they’ve admitted to making a wrong turn. This one right here is a big one. Really big. It means they actually aren’t trying to cater to the shareholders with some half-baked business strategy to continue to keep suits’ pockets lined. That they actually may, in fact, still truly care about making an excellent gaming experience.
…now, if they can admit they were wrong about the whole 10/25 merge/LFR shit, then they will be back to being 100% in my books. And in all honesty, they still have a chance at doing this, esp. now that Rob Pardo is back involved in the design of the next expansion.
…or they aren’t seeing a return or as much player longevity as they expected and are hoping that these changes are what keeps D3 going as long as possible.
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They dipped their toe and tried it Kotick’s way and it was an embarrassing failure. To save face? Sure. They can put whatever spin on it that they want.
…but they’re doing it. And that’s the first step. I’ve grown tired of the constant denial. It’s refreshing to see them come around – like they used to.
As someone who was never into Diablo 2 and casually tried part 3, this is great news. The worst part of that game was that there was rarely anything exciting to pick up from clearing levels. You’d get some crap, sell it for gold, and buy what you really need. I lost interest so quickly.
I might give Reaper of Souls a shot considering this.
I was reading the thread they had in Games on Reddit and the posters there brought up a few points that I agreed with, it isn’t just the issue with the loot. Diablo 3 has other problems that make me not want to play it:
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Not enough randomization in the level design.
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Having to go through the story elements on each play-through on multiple characters on various difficulties (ie: if I have to hear Diablo explain his plan one more time…).
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Inferno cannot be solo’ed. Granted I have not played in a while so I don’t know if they made difficulty tweaks in the meantime but I tried everything on my Monk as far as gear builds to try and get through just Act 3 soloing and the first named or elite in the ramparts would bend me over. There are times when I’m playing that my friends just aren’t online and I don’t want to have to spend time trying to find people who play at my speed or have the same goals; fuck me for wanting to clear the map or do achievements, right? This brings me to the last two issues.
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Please stop making me farm the bosses over and over and over and over. Hopefully they are folding this into the changes already but if killing Warden/Butcher, Kulle, Cydaea/Azmodan and Diablo are the only things I’m going to be doing then seriously why is there anything else even in end-game? Just make an arena where the bosses spawn one after the other so I can realize how much of a RNG loot collection game D3 really is. /s
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This may go along with the difficulty issues but there were some combinations of champions and elites that you simply could not defeat. I can remember playing with Turtleman in some cave in Act 2 and getting gibbed by fast, molten, arcane enchanted, illusionist Broodlings. It was funny maybe the first 3 deaths but after that when I could not get back to my body because there was physically not enough room to get around 20 mobs in a cramped area, I wanted to stab a baby.
Some of this list may be addressed in the expansion but then you’re left with 1/5th of the game you want to play and you still have to pay more money to play that part of it. The only game I have played recently that justified the purchase is Skyrim and most of the reason there is because I can mod it or otherwise alter something I don’t enjoy to my liking.
I believe they’re addressing this in Reaper of Souls, making the various sub-components that comprise a level or dungeon far more interchangeable and dynamic.
Concur. Doesn’t bother me, but I completely empathize with players not giving a shit about this.
This is still the case, even now, with all of the changes? If so, yeah…that’s awkward.
This is a side-effect of the game’s natural design. I mean…it doesn’t really have an endgame. The ex-Diablo II design team handled this creatively in Torchlight II: when you finish their game, it opens up this alternate dimension where you choose among a list of randomly spawned “zones”, none of which are a part of the main game. They are made up of a mixture of all kinds of randomized mobs and bosses, each with their own feel, and challenges – and of course, loot.
Imagine it like a sort of miniature Act, beyond Act IV, almost like a bonus stage. Bonus Act! With the level of randomization involved, it would be quite a while before you’d see them all, and plenty of opportunity to level further and hike up your gear.
Concur. Something that was always a stupid design. Wilson was completely out-to-lunch on stuff like that.
AND THEN WE DOUBLED IT.
That was my other glaring issue as a non-veteran Diablo player. The progression was pretty repetitive as you climbed in difficulty but the loot system made it unbearable at that point. It could be good!
IIRC, someone who has played more recently correct me, but with the paragon level patch or around that time they made inferno much easier to solo. Diablo may not be reasonably solo’able, but most everything else isn’t too terribly harsh.
I think the thing that pisses me off the most is that you can’t hardly powerlevel anyone. Since they removed repeated quest experience, you are forced to level each toon yourself. Since you can’t get rushed to inferno at a low level, grinding mobs is just slow and painful way to get leveled.
Also, i think ROS is putting in an infinite dungeon? I thought i read somewhere about it, may help with the lack of end game a bit.
I played D3 for 2 days straight when I picked up my new rig. It got old that fast and I switched back to WoW. In retrospect the only thing I ever really liked about D2 was farming bosses with my frozen orb sorc and banking the good stuff on my various alts. Doesn’t really seem like that’s a thing anymore. I realize none of what I said here is terribly relevant but it’s 6:50am and I’m lonely.
Unless you have an obsessive compulsive disorder to collect things, I can see why it’s hard to find a game like that interesting when solo. A group of people definitely cranks things up a notch.
On this note, what do you think it would take for DoD to return to its former glory? Obviously the 10/25 split would be the key. I don’t think LFR is going anywhere…there are just too many people who like/need it to feel engaged in the game.
Or is it possible that too many people are gone and the damage is too great to ever get over?
It’s possible but highly unlikely. I can’t speak to the more famous historical figureheads of the guild, but I myself would not subject friends/guild-mates to the ordeals of raiding again unless change were made to LFR, 10 and 25, to bring their reward mechanisms more inline with what we experienced during Wrath.
I gave you my shpeel over Google chat, but here’s what needs to happen in order for me to give it any further effort:
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Blizzard acknowledges 10 / 25 are not one-and-the-same, difficulty wise, stops trying to kid the public and each other, and embarks on a new design agenda:
– 25 = hard
– 10 = easy
– LFR = the unmentionables. -
Blizzard re-itemizes 10 and 25 separately, and not with palette swapped gear. Sorry, no more corning cutting is allowed here. They should have learned their lesson in TBC with PvP and PvE gear sharing the same models, but apparently not. As long as palette-swapped gear exists, so too, will the backdoor out of a guild trying to make real progress in raids.
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LFR needs to stagger token drops out of the gate. The more desperate, spiteful measure would be to hold LFR back an entire tier (eg. 10s and 25s run Siege of Orgrimmar, but LFR only goes up to the end of ToT) but this would more than likely alienate too much of the casual base. So, the compromise: LFR doesn’t drop tier tokens at patch launch…and then, adds them to the loot table in the sub-patch…the same technique used by the PvP system to allow folks to catch up mid-season.
The bottom line is that exclusivity is gone. There is no great reward in running 25-Man raids. It’s brutal, actually (it was in Cata, which was my last taste of it) and returning to Orgrimmar to see mouth-breathers fully decked out in gear after standing in the fire for half the raid makes me want to never log in again. Gets some personal accountability back on track. No, not everyone can adhere to a schedule, but you know what? Even with Flex now, it could still be made to work (and work well)…which brings up one final suggestion, a sort of “bonus”, if you will…
Bonus: Let flex scaling go in the other direction – 25…32…37…39…40-Man.
Then, there would be no argument as to what is the most difficult, real raiding experience in the game.
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This is the best thing ever. Please send these ideas to Blizzard immediately. Tell them I agree with you. It might help. Maybe you should start a petition to un-fuck the game. I’d sign it.
Oh trust me. He has posted these suggestions in many places only to be lost in the shuffle.
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Pretty much any topic anywhere with the subject of ENTITLEMENT, WOW, BALANCE, BLIZZARD, EPICS, ITEMIZATION, RAID, Shawn has made a response indicating his extreme passion for wanting Blizzard to @Kelden “un-fuck” WoW with his suggestions.
Feel free to add more subject headings/keywords to find a Hanzo post on WoW’s ever devolving gameplay.
Haha, I spoke with Shawn yesterday and it is my opinion that as 8YIA grows in popularity, Shawn’s voice will grow too. Eventually someone in Dev at Blizz will read the blog and who knows what will happen there.
On another note, I saw this in the “Blue posts” part of MMO-Champion:
Flex Raiding
First 2 wings of Flex down and must say rivals BT for epic so far. Boss fights are mad fun and seem to reflect player feedback
Oustanding. (Source)
How many teeth are missing from the average Flex audience member? Are they shirtless? Have they been on “COPS”?
Our hope is that they are pretty normal players who put a premium on playing with friends and family over progression. (Source)
A traditional raiding guild might boot a nice player with low DPS. The intended flex audience would never dream of it. (Source)
i will not use on principle its an attempt to kill lfr.
It is not an attempt to kill LFR. It’s an attempt to provide a more casual alternative to N for social groups who don’t enjoy LFR. (Source)
Flex just is not needed. There’s already that… it’s called 10-man. If guild can’t form then they have bigger issues.
We disagree. 10-player ToT is harder than 10-player ICC. The players who enjoyed the ICC level of difficulty are shut out. (Source)
What was the rationale for the step-up in difficulty since Wrath? Did 10-man ICC feel too easy to devs?
A series of steps. 1) Didn’t want 10s to feel like 2nd class citizens, so we gave them the same ilevel. (Source)
2) Didn’t want same ilevel for easier difficulty, so we brought 10s up to the 25 level (overall - there is variety per boss). (Source)
You can argue that those were both missteps, but that’s how we arrived where we are today. Flex is trying to recapture ICC 10. (Source)
I can’t help but like that last part. The recognize their missteps and are trying to revert back. Maybe this will come in a way we don’t expect, but hopefully it will have a positive outcome, regardless.
In addition:
Hey Greg, any thoughts on gating LFR wings more heavily in future expansions? Influence people to try organized raiding(?).
What we have found historically is the LFR players just don’t raid, or even don’t play if there isn’t enough content. (Source)
We’d love to encourage more players to try organized raiding, but I think we have to lure them in, not beat them in. (Source)
Your purposely trying to push aside people that use LFR as there only means to see content. Way to stick people in a box.
I’m confused. That’s not what we’re trying to do. (Source)
We would like someone who has run many LFRs to consider Flex for better loot now that they know the fights pretty well. (Source)
Why? If i am happy in lfr why do you want to push me out of it?
Because it provides you more content. Compare: Run LFR until finished vs. Run LFR until finished, THEN run Flex. (Source)
I don’t understand the argument of the pure LFR players. They feel like they’re being pushed to step out of LFR because Flex has higher rated gear? Well sure…but so has 10/25 man. LFR never felt pushed to organize a 10 man, then a 25 man, did they? And if so, why not the complaint then? Why is it happening now. Would they be complaining if Blizz instead added a 20 man difficulty?
And this is why it will never be fixed. Look. It’s right there as the very first “issue” he was trying to address, fixing a problem that did not exist.
GC is all about fixing problems that don’t exist.