Out of Pod Experience

Although I played the hell out of D2, I was 13 at the time. A much simpler game for a much simpler mind. I could never play it today, grinding the same 5 levels over and over sounds so mind-numbingly dull. D3 looks/ sounds the same way, so I am pretty shocked to see all the Eve players play such a mindless grind fest.

First of all, well thought out post. Thanks for replying!

I've been having latency issues, at least a few disconnects per day, and the auction house system keeps going on and offline. Additionally, the hardcore servers seem to be lagging a lot more than softcore - I've had a character die because my Battle.net timed me out while I was fightig the boss of A1. Numerous other hardcore players have reported bad lag issues on the forums themselves.



Did you know Battle.net passwords are case insensitive? Try it out yourself. Type your password in all caps and then all lower case. It works either way. Another brilliant design decision by Blizzard.



I think the biggest problem is there is no reason to rebuild any single character. If I get my wizard to level 60, there is no point in making another one. In D2, if I found a specific unique weapon, armor, etc, I could use it to build a new fire sorc, hammerdin, zealdin, etc. The point of item finding was to find new equipment that allows for you to build a new kickass build of a different type. In D3, since my character can already do every skill, there is never a reason to build another wizard. I can just change items anytime and I'm good. Replayability suffers A LOT because of this, not to mention unique items in this game suck and are usually worse than regular magic items on attributes that matter (Vit, Int\str\dex). I agree that everyone just did cookiecutter builds, but I would rather have the option of making a few different characters that are cookiecutters than to only have one character with no point of making another one. At least it gave you a reason to keep playing



He's right about replayability. The auction house really kills the game because there's no point in item finding. Items are already mostly bad, and after spending 4 hours grinding looking for something you want, you have amassed enough gold to just go buy something better on the auction house. It's pretty lame. The story-telling is atrocious and the story is very predictable. You'll see what I mean as you play more. Additionally, the whole atmosphere made by D2 is gone. It's no longer a dark, gothic atmosphere - it really is more like WoW now, especially since all of the NPCs dont ever stop talking. Wait until A3 when the act boss keeps spamming you with messages. Really.

I can understand Blizzard having technical setbacks on release; that's expected. However, their customer support has been absent. They don't address any concerns raised at large by the community, and some of their community managers openly mock players on the forums (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149151633?page=1).

All in all, I feel like if you played D2 and expect D3 to be a good sequel, it's not. It's pretty much an entirely different game. Not to mention it has ridiculous bugs, such as being able to block monsters by dropping a certain type of armor on the ground: http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=62624076&f=68&o=0+for+reference

It's obvious Blizzard released a piece of turd with minimal effort to milk customers for $

Hey dumdum, i dont support blizzard I dont have d3.

Non working local
UI opening after every jump
Server reboots

All with 45k people?

d2 has 6 million MILLION copies sold in 24H

O wow the servers had issues... big ******* deal.

oh and for the exploits lol

What we all new here? How many were in eve... still are... what about all the people who exploting standing gains long ago...

NEEDS MOAR FANBOIS.

d3, 2 days out
eve 9 years

Ya........

Honestly you just resort to some personal attacks and really weak arguments. Go rage elsewhere dude, this conversation is for people who can atriculate themselves without resorting to being childish

Oh FFS, Blizzard certainly isn't winning any awards for their server performance, but let's not forget that:

1) EVE's servers run well, because EVE is an old game. It took CCP years of poor server performance to discover all the potential problems and get to this point, so it's not really fair to compare EVE's server stability to Blizzard's first real test of the Diablo 3 servers. Unless Blizzard fails to fix the problems in the long run, all we're seeing here is proof that there's no substitute for real world testing and experience.

2) Diablo 3 is bigger than EVE. Like it or not, there's just a bigger load to handle. Imagine if EVE on release day had as many subscribers as Diablo 3. Do you really think that the EVE servers would have been flawlessly stable?

3) Diablo 3 has actually been working pretty well. Granted, I didn't have the game until the day after release day, but so far I've only been unable to play ONCE, and it was around 5am local time. This is hardly the kind of life-ruining experience that people are claiming.



Ah yes, the last resort of someone who knows they've lost the argument: whine and cry that their critics aren't being nice enough.

This is exactly what I think of the matter. Blizzard have been changing since, I guess, Wrath of the Lich King to a "I don't f***ing care what you think because we know what's better for you" thing. They're doing it really wrong, and they should be ashamed of what a lot of the CM do answering in bad manners to people who actually want to make the games better.

That "fanfest videos" you mention are one of the most awesome things I've seen from a developer, really. They try to actually participate with the userbase and show them they're doing stuff, and how they're doing it (special mention to the CCP with afro guy that talked about servers and stuff, really awesome). Just compare to content director from Blizzard in BlizzCon. No way.

I think all people can complain of anything, because it's free, but really: CCP is doing a great work and I, that played Blizzard games for many time, can and will appreciate it.

Regards.

Edit: Oh yeah, and Diablo 3 is awful.

Just one small point to make here, but Blizzard have been running servers of this size and larger for as long as CCP have been running theirs. So the fact that they couldn't keep things running for more than 60 seconds is crap, and there are no excuses. Their 8 years of experience running WoW is more than enough to show that the D3 release was not down to the fact that they are somehow "new" to this, but that they just plain suck.

It doesn't matter if they have years of experience with WoW, because they have zero experience with the Diablo 3 code running on the Diablo 3 servers. Sure, having general experience is good (and WoW is probably a part of why Diablo 3 works just fine most of the time), but there's no substitute for a real-world stress test of your exact software and hardware combination. Just look at all the mass testing CCP has had to do just to collect enough data to even attempt to fix their stability problems. Expecting Blizzard to magically have the same kind of data before Diablo 3 is even released is just plain stupid.

Now, if the server problems persist and Blizzard makes no attempt to fix them, you'll be justified in whining, but we've seen nothing so far that suggests that this is any more than the same old new-game problems that seem almost universal among online games.

wait, did a blizzard QA just posted that?

Blizzard's World Of Warcraft was doomed to fail when they expanded beyond The Burning Crusade, they started sacking people over after failling to listen to them that the game was taking a wrong turn which the customers would know and hate. But Blizzard decided no cant be bothered, we want more money goodbye HF youre fired. and that was just to save face and their celeb hosts are deep in pockets to shut up about it you can basicly see it on their facial expression everytime during blizzcon's and pulling in Activision (aka clone EA) they failed to make a good game crew which resulted in multiple idea changes for mists and now they came up with the lame idea.. hey lets use the diablo 3 talent system for wow it will be fun and unique.... errr yea unigue for an idiot who copies it over from D3 good stuff there, and thats not even the worst part of it they put in a slack set of talents fixed so you wouldnt get different ones if you choose dps, tank, healer. Nope they all get the same crap skills for all class specs. I wanna go tank wee... ooh noes whats this its a healing talent.. i quit wow a long time ago, but i do follow up on the stuff that happens to them just to laugh my ass off.