Blog Archives
D3-Day
As you slaughter more skeletons and zombies than should technically exist based on historical human population levels, remember this:
Bam!
I never ended up pulling the trigger on the Annual Pass, and the RMAH fees Blizzard settled on are completely ridiculous, but hey. Give it the old college try, and let’s see what happens.
On the Other (Cloven) Hand
First, a correction. I have been informed in the comments of my previous post that one can turn on Elective Mode in the option menu to turn Diablo 3’s talent system into what I had envisioned previously. Namely, pooling all your abilities together and picking out any combination of 6 at your discretion.
If accurate, that is the system I can (and want to) get behind.
I saw in the Witch Doctor the ability to recreate my nostalgic Necromancer of twelve years ago – spiders from jars and zombie dogs replacing skeletons and golems – but felt stymied by my apparent inability to drop skills I never intended to use with any regularity for the ones I would. It seemed as though I had to choose between maximizing my voodoo army and being able to actually destroy barrels on demand; the bottled arachnids cared not for my entropic war with all material things, and I’d be damned if I could find a way to actually use whatever random weapon I happened to be carrying around at the time.
It is thus possible that my entire original impression was colored by my ignorance of the Elective Mode feature¹. I might suggest it is partially Blizzard’s fault for hiding the light under a bushel in the first place, but nevermind.
What I wanted to mention today that I did not before, is Diablo 3’s Auction House and the effects on the game proper. Simply put, I think Blizzard is riding the very cusp between brilliance and disaster.
It took me a while to even find the Auction House interface at all, and as a result I did not use it until my second playthrough – it requires you to be logged out of any individual character, which I suppose saves Blizzard the bandwidth of people idling in-game. Between vendors who sell random magic items for ~1500g, the normal sort of loot hauls from furious clicking, and the Artisans (e.g. Blacksmith) allowing you to break down magic items to craft new ones, I cannot say that I felt especially deficient in my solo gearing. I suppose that is not especially praiseworthy, seeing as how screwing that up would defeat the entire purpose of this sub-genre, but there it is.
Once you taste the AH though, there is no going back. Unfortunately.
Oh my.
There are a couple things going on in that picture worth noting. The weapon on the right was the one that my Barbarian killed the Skeleton King with after ~2 hours of play. The one on the left is so ludicrously overpowered in contrast, it is difficult to put into words. What really stands out though is the +6 Health per kill bonus. As Sullus experienced, that singular stat bonus completely erases all semblance of difficulty from the beta by itself; surprisingly, you end up killing quite a few monsters in Diablo 3, such that a bonus like that amounts to probably six times its value in passive HP regeneration.
The problem is just beginning, though. This rare weapon, which I would have been flipping out about had it dropped for me, can be equipped at level 4. You thought mobs were already discorporating blazingly fast? You haven’t seen anything yet. But wait… there’s more! If you call within the next 30 minutes Since magic items are not Bind on Equip, this clearly ridiculous weapon is something you will be able to use on all of your starting alts moving forward. If you run out of alts, you can simply resell it on the AH or give it to a friend or whatever.
All of this is somewhat Old News, of course. But here is the thing.
I feel a stirring in my gilded loins.
I bought the rare sword on the AH for 1000g. In contrast, the vendors will typically try and hawk a +2 Mace of Sucking for nearly twice that amount. Sometimes you can luck out and get some nice items from said vendors, Sullas’s “+HP on kill” rings being a notable example, and sometimes you will find good shit right off the ground. However, even if I concede that this rare weapon was underpriced or a lucky find, my concern is that I am no longer dependent on RNG monster drops. And that puts me right back into Torchlight territory wherein I went 20+ hours without upgrading my weapon. Without the food pellet, or one worth munching on, I have little interest in continuing pressing the lever.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed having the AH because I enjoy doing AH things in any game. But I can also clearly see a possible future in which the AH amounts to “cheat codes” that bypasses all the fun limitations of the game proper. And, unfortunately, I do not possess the personality that is capable of handicapping myself when a more efficient strategy is discovered. If I can get all my upgrades from the AH, I will get them all from the AH. Perhaps it won’t matter in the aggregate as long as I am experiencing some kind of gear progression (which Torchlight lacked). I dunno.
So… we will see how this shakes out on the 15th and the weeks following.
¹ Of course, the “baby WoW” criticism is still both applicable and concerning.
Diablo Annual Pass Challenge
Tobold forced my hand a bit, so without further ado… I formally present:
The Diablo Annual Pass Challenge
For the the visually impaired, the four difficulties are as follows:
- Inferno – Earn $155.88 within 12 months.
- Hell – Earn $95.89 within 12 months.
- Nightmare – Earn $59.99 within 12 months.
- Normal – Earn $38.97 before you quit.
Completing Inferno will mean you financed both Diablo 3 and a year of WoW (with associated perks) entirely through Diablo 3’s real-money Auction House. The step below that, Hell, means you financed an entire year of WoW through the purchase of a $59.99 game. Meanwhile, Nightmare demonstrates that you got Diablo 3 for free after paying for a year of reduced-price WoW time. Finally, completing the Diablo Annual Pass Challenge on Normal difficulty means you managed to pay for 3 of the 12 required months via Diablo 3 gameplay.
A Hardcore mode can apply to any of the above difficulties, and requires two things: 1) no seed money, e.g. putting $20 on your account to get started, and 2) net profit only counts when cashed out via Paypal.
Death is (unfortunately) permanent in all difficulties and modes. We are working on a hot fix.
For the purpose of this Challenge, “earnings” refers to net profit from the sale of items in Diablo 3’s AH. If you spent $50 and made $160 flipping items, you have only actually achieved Hell difficulty, not Inferno. “Items” refer to anything sellable on the RMAH, whether it is gear, gold, gems, characters, etc. Any money spent in the satisfaction of your Annual Pass obligation, i.e. buying game time, will still “count” as long as it came as a result of AH profit. In other words, you don’t have to just sit on the money until you reach your desired difficulty.
For those Challenge participants not using USD, simply use the relevant cost of two 6-month WoW time cards (Inferno), two 6-month WoW time cards minus the cost of Diablo 3 (Hell), the cost of Diablo 3 (Nightmare), and the cost of three months of the reduced-priced WoW Annual Pass subscription in whatever your local currency happens to be (Normal).
Good luck everyone, and don’t you dare undercut my shit.
The Underplayed Piece of D3 News
You can buy and sell characters.
The screenshots (from MMO Champ) are fairly low resolution, but it does clearly show Featured Heroes results, the drop-down box for the class, narrowing your search to level ranges and, of course, three listings of level-capped toons for sale. Apparently the market price for a level-capped Witch Doctor is 10,000g. I would recommend buying out all three and relisting for $20 apiece.
…things are going to get fun, aren’t they?
One quick item of note (that may be old news to some):
- Personal loot. I was planning on making a post about how the whole RMT value of gear would make grouping and co-op loot rolling bizarre, but hey, this appears to have been settled over three years ago. In effect, each player gets loot from bosses/kills individually. In WoW terms, imagine killing 10m Magmaw or whatever and each person getting a (random) piece of gear instead of two pieces of random gear that has to be divvied up between 10 people. The funny thing is that this works in Diablo because loot is truly randomly generated, but absolutely doesn’t work in WoW judging by most peoples’ reactions to the random-stat loot in Throne of the 4 Winds, etc.
- Of course, grouping can still get weird assuming you are playing with friends. If a cool Barbarian axe drops that you can’t use on your Wizard, do you give it to your Barbarian friend… or sell for $5?
- Making things worse, few (if any) items in the game are BoP. This means you can swap with your friends (passing down a good item), but also that if you agree to mix-n-match loot in co-op, your friend can sell that Barbarian axe you gave him for cash later and you would never know (especially if he replaced it with a legit upgrade). Might sound petty or too goblin’ish right now, but believe me, this is a Diablo game; eventually there will be some 0.001% chance item drop that could easily sell for $100+ on eBay without even considering a Blizzard-sanctioned RMT system.
I would say that this will be the last post about Diablo 3, but honestly Diablo 3 is the most interesting thing that has happened in weeks. Other than Limbo being released on Steam.
Talk About Free Publicity (Diablo 3)
Diablo 3 will let you sell pixels for dollars, in-game, and vice versa.
My first thought, along similar lines to Alto, was: can you imagine the number of gold guides for Diablo 3? WoW alone supported one costing $47 for the majority of the game’s lifespan, and that is discounting the other, cheaper ones of the last few years. And you couldn’t even really cash your gold out! In a game where you could presumably spend $47 and make $100 in-game using the tips, it might be foolish to not do so. Unless you could get those same tips from anyone with a blog, of course.
My second thought was self-reflection on why I instinctually despised this news. If you never use a cash shop, and if you don’t care that other people do… then why hate it? There are two reasons why.
- Number 1: It removes, or diminishes the value of time.
When you drill it down, by “value” I really mean “advantage.” If I can play five hours a day and you can only play two, all other things being equal, I will have an advantage over you in an MMO. Especially in MMOs, where the design is to throttle content to ensure monthly subscriptions. I will reach the level-cap sooner, I will level more alts, I will have access to more professions, I will have more attempts on raid bosses, I will be geared to the teeth while you are still struggling for your two-piece bonus. Skill can overcome Time in many areas (Arenas, raiding, etc) and obviously a complete moron would be incapable of any number of activities no matter how much time they spent playing.
Most people, grudgingly, can accept when their Time was beaten by an opponent’s Skill. In RPGs, people are more forgiving of when Time beat Skill – the premise being that Time is something that acquires value in only one specific way (“earning” it) that is available to anyone*. Cash Shops, RMT, and so on radically change the calculus. Time, which hitherto was “priceless” in-game, now has a price. If we are equally skilled, I can win by either Time or Cash whereas you may be limited (literally or philosophically) to Time alone. If the game makes Time capable of beating Skill, and Cash = Time, then Cash > Skill becomes possible. This is where the whole “Pay-To-Win” (Golden Ammo, etc) pejorative comes from. As a gamer, you have to start asking yourself why you would “invest” in Time in a game where anyone with more Cash could stomp you at any moment. If Time is all you have, there are other games without Cash Shops which would give you a better return.
Blizzard has thus far avoided the Pay-To-Win scenario in WoW by keeping the Cash Shop limited to cosmetic items and preventing gold from being (legitimately) purchased. Meanwhile, Diablo 3 is balls-deep in Pay-To-Win by every available measure. From their FAQ:
Will players be at a disadvantage in the game if they do not purchase items in the auction house?
All of the items available in the auction house can be obtained in the game. The auction house system is designed to facilitate the exchange of items (items can also be exchanged through character-to-character trades). Diablo III is primarily a cooperative game; while the game will offer some highly entertaining player-vs.-player options, we don’t intend to balance items for player-vs.-player gameplay. We feel that a robust and powerful item-trading system will make the co-op experience more enjoyable.
The question after that is equally hilarious.
Can I just buy the most powerful items and breeze through the game?
Items will be level-restricted, meaning your character won’t be able to use an item until he or she is at the appropriate level for that item.
Read: you can purchase the most powerful items for your level to breeze through the game with, until you hit the level cap of 60 where uber-gear** will likely make or break your character just like in WoW. For the low, low player price of $100 per slot, if we are lucky. And we may actually see sales that high or higher, given that it would be “affordable” after the sale of a bunch of $5 auctions. Keep in mind that while Blizzard is providing a “cash out” advanced feature, it is actually pretty misleading:
How do I cash out from the currency-based auction house?
As an advanced feature, players will have the option of attaching an account with an approved third-party payment service to their Battle.net account. Once this has been completed, proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house can be deposited into their third-party payment service account. “Cashing out” would then be handled through the third-party payment service. Note that this process will be subject to applicable fees charged by Blizzard and the third-party payment service. Also, any proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house that have been deposited into the Battle.net account will not be transferrable to the third-party payment service account. Not all regions will support this advanced feature at launch. Region-specific details, as well as details regarding which third-party payment services will be supported and the fee that Blizzard will charge for the cash-out process, will all be provided at a later date.
In other words, any dollars that actually reach your Battle.net account essentially become carnival tickets – non-refundable currency that performs as pseudo-cash, buying you the big fuzzy bear, Disco Lion, or 30 days of WoW. The “cashing-out” only occurs if you tweak your Battle.net settings so that AH proceeds never actually touch your Battle.net account, but get directly deposited into your Paypal account or whatever. Considering you can’t actually buy anything with dollars until said dollars are loaded into your Battle.net account (thereby making them non-refundable), I have little doubt there will be quite a few surprised AH goblins out there who find that their $1000 nest egg will, at best, keep them subscribed to Titan or whatever for the next half-decade.
- Number 2: It threatens design integrity.
This is decidedly a gray area, especially in a post where I already said “[…] the design [of MMOs] is to throttle content to ensure monthly subscriptions.” What design integrity means to me is asking yourself whether what you are about to do is going to make for a better game (story, simulation, etc). I intentionally did not say “makes your game better” because typically gaining more subscriptions or selling more boxes makes a game with a multiplayer component better. Instead, design integrity is about making the game in of itself better at what it is. If a game can only be better if it had more people playing it, that is a job for the marketing department, not game designers.
One of the clearest, most easily recognizable breaches of design integrity to me would be the Firelands daily quests. There is nothing about this series of quests that gets better for them having been spread out over 30+ days. Nothing. Even if your argument is that the number of days serves to simulate the long struggle of a dangerous military campaign, I would counter that the same feeling could be accomplished by doubling the number of actual quests, and allowing a choice few to be repeatable once complete. An example could be, I dunno… the entire Hyjal zone itself?
Obviously the Firelands dailies were not the first incident of intentional content throttling (there were reputation grinds, etc, from Day 1), but it is particularly galling to me insofar as the way it was hyped and presented. Seriously, they came out and said…
Rather than these stages only becoming available after a certain period of time or at the end of a long quest series, players will instead get to use a new alternate currency called Marks of the World Tree to unlock them at their own pace.
…as if stages were not available until after a certain period of time (weeks) or at the end of a long (daily) quest series. Again, the Argent Tournament et tal did this years ago, but in that particular preview they merely state exactly what was going on: new dailies.
How this relates to Diablo 3 is simple. Does a currency-based AH make Diablo 3 a better game? I do not think it does. What it seems to be aimed at is what Blizzard mentions in the FAQ, along the lines of “since you guys are going to do crack anyway, we may as well supply it.” If getting the perfect item or set is the motivator for playing the game (after finishing the story), does the inclusion of an AH at all make Diablo 3 better than, say, some profession/item/etc that could randomly turn items into a different version of itself? Such a thing would perhaps be distracting from the Skinner Box lever that is grinding bosses for loot (e.g. spend more time randomizing one item than simply killing things for a random shot at another), but it is a question worth asking anyway.
The fear here is Cash Shops and RMT lead to F2P-esque games that sacrifice the fun of the game for monetization of the game. Tobold has talked about the World of Tanks model many times, but it is most succinctly described in the opening paragraphs of his Payslope post:
Even Free2Play games need to make money to be sustainable. Many have some sort of paywall, reserving certain content for people who pay. World of Tanks doesn’t have such a wall, everybody has access to all the maps and tech tree tanks in the game. Instead WoT has something I’d rather describe as a payslope: The high-level game becomes very tedious if you don’t pay.
The effect is first noticeable around level 7 (out of 10): Starting from this level regular tanks on regular accounts tend to spend more credits on ammo and repair than they get as credit reward at the end of the battle. There are some variables there, winning earns you more than losing, and dealing a lot of damage also earns you more. But with level 8+ tanks costing millions of credits, money definitely is getting tight at the higher levels.
I am not opposed to game designers being paid for their quality products. I am, however, opposed to intentionally hobbling the player’s game experience to “trick” them into paying to continue playing a game they found fun. If World of Tanks did not have a Cash Shop or RMT, do you think they would still have a point in the leveling curve where it became extremely tedious to play? Maybe. You would rightly call that bad game design however. Same deal with MMOs and systems designed to take weeks of repeated content to complete.
Blizzard stated that Diablo 3’s loot system was developed before they decided to add an AH with RMT options. I have no choice but to accept that statement on face value. But given the carnival ticket structure of money in Battle.net accounts, it is abundantly clear Blizzard stands to make an absolute killing by implementing RMT even without considering the Blizzard cut on both listing and successful auctions. Even if you are a pro AH goblin and amass $10,000 without yourself ever paying anything into the system, that is $10,000 (+X% of whatever Blizzard cut) sitting in a Blizzard escrow account earning interest, all of which would have been “left on the table” otherwise. They repeatedly said they will not be selling anything or setting prices, but it would be incredibly naive to believe that future Diablo 3 balance decisions (drop rate, etc) will not directly affect Blizzard RMT profits, and/or Blizzard would not ever make changes with such things in mind.
Bottom line: you can only really trust someone who makes you pay everything up front. Provided they actually deliver the product you bought, you will know that they had no incentive make an inconsistent experience. And inconsistent experiences make for the worst videogames.
*In reality, Time as an advantage is just as “unfair” as Cash could ever be. Just ask anyone who has typed the phrase “no-lifers” or “you just live in your mom’s basement.”
**Even more interesting to ponder is whether Blizzard intends to limit the gear from Nightmare and Hell difficulties to only being wearable by players of those difficulties. I mean, I can only assume gear dropped from Hell difficulty would be better than Normal mob drops. It is possible they intend the level cap of 60 to only be achievable on Hell difficulty, although I imagine it would be almost as tough a sell as the opposite – not everyone can/wants to play on that level, but do you simply not give the average player access to the coolest spells? Or are the gaming veterans stuck with merely upgraded spell stats instead of abilities?
In An Age 
Post-Interview, and Diablo 3
Feb 23
Posted by Azuriel
The interview went… more or less okay.
For the curious, my interview in Chicago was for the JET Program; basically applying to teach English in Japan for a year (or more). I spent a semester in Japan during college, I want to go back, and we will all have to wait to see how it shakes out because results aren’t announced until April. If selected, I’d be in Japan by August. If not, it will be business as usual. In fact, considering this blog (and commenting on other blogs) is my only outlet for gaming discussion, it’d be business as usual anyway.
…okay, maybe business as usual. Let’s jump off that bridge when we come to it.
In other news, in catching up on Diablo 3 blue posts, I wanted to highlight two things:
In the near future, we’ll be implementing several changes to the posting limits and fees related to the beta version of the Diablo III auction house. Here’s a quick summary of what’s in store:
With the removal of the listing fee, players will no longer need to worry about whether they’re going to run out of free listings for the week. In addition, introducing a limit on the number of active auctions means players won’t feel as though they should be trying to sell everything they find, potentially flooding the auction house with unwanted items. Under this new system, players will only pay an auction house fee if and when an item actually sells. This has the main advantage of allowing players to try to sell their items risk-free. In addition, because the transaction fee is already baked into the price when an item is listed (as part of the minimum listing price), it’s no longer possible to be in a situation where you don’t have enough Battle.net Balance to list an item, forcing you to have to charge up your Balance just to attempt a sale. We think this will be a much cleaner process for selling items and will ultimately lead to a better experience when using the currency-based auction house. (source)
What I am finding curious is A) such fairly radical RMAH changes are being iterated on so late in development, and B) how there is now an effective floor price of (presumably) $1.50 for any given item, and C) holy shit, an 83% Blizzard cut of the profits on said floor prices. Even if you sell things at $5 or $10 a pop, that’s still 25% and 12.5% respectively.
I am beginning to wonder if these margins won’t start creating a space for the gray markets to move in – if you broker a “10 items for $10” outside the game, the customer saves $5 and the seller gets $7.50 more than they would have. Perhaps Blizzard doesn’t feel like people would bother with small sales? Easy typically trumps cheap, so who knows.
The other bit was this… unfortunate analogy by
CashiokBashiok:Now, there is certainly a tongue-in-cheek context to the quote and the thread it was responding to. Is Blizzard seriously trying to lower expectations as they scramble with radical 11th hour changes? I guess we will know for sure when it releases.
What is unfortunate is that I use Sixth Sense as a go-to example of why developer/director/artist worship is a bad idea. You see, Sixth Sense was a brilliant, brilliant film. It was also, based on the movies that proceeded it, a complete fluke. There simply is no reason to believe that a beloved whatever will continue creating quality content. I read bloggers casually throwing out “We will have to wait on Titan to move the genre forward” and arch an eyebrow. What makes you think Blizzard even knows why WoW was so popular? There isn’t some secret formula for quality gaming, and even if there were, what worked in 2004 doesn’t work the same in 2012.
Just ask Nintendo and the company that sold me Chess on my flip-phone for $5.99 how mobile gaming is treating them these days. Oh how things change.
Posted in Commentary, Diablo
15 Comments
Tags: Diablo 3, Interview, RMAH, Sixth Sense