5261

I think you can make it private.

5262

Blizzard’s in-game voice chat has always been terrible (I think D3 might even have it, SC2 and WoW both have it). I just use skype.

5263

The last thing Blizzard’s servers need right now is the extra performance and bandwidth hit caused by voice chat

5264

Checked out the Inferno streamers again. The tank dodges through all of the map until they get to the boss, or they ‘corpse banner chain’ through a hard area. Nobody looks at rare mobs except farming. And Blizzard was right: you will die a lot in Inferno. But you can die 100 times during the same boss right and it doesn’t matter.

While nobody HAS to play this way I wonder if there’s a way to align player incentives in and make the non-bosses essential and exciting and make death a bit more meaningful in boss fights too. Even playing solo it’s like, “oh I died again? guess I’ll have to walk for 30 seconds…”

My ideal mode would be something like a mediumcore setting:

  1. You can only transition out of an newly discovered area (doors OR portals) until after most of the enemies are dead. 90% of regulars and 100% of trait mobs.

  2. The time it takes one player to rez another is increased and that player is immobile while doing the rez and can’t cancel the process. If your ally can’t get to your corpse you can still rez to checkpoint but you are out of the fight until they clear the area.

  3. Every area resets back to 100% if there are no players alive there at any time just like the boss fights.

  4. Bosses and their minions get predefined random traits, different in each difficulty level, so the same pattern doesn’t work on every difficulty. Named minibosses as well.

5265

And you’ll get a whole 2,000 gold for it on Auction House amidst the thousands of other legendary items for sale :/

5266

Yeah, but they don’t HAVE to be that bad. LotRO’s built in voice is surprisingly solid. It’s not as good as a standalone service, but it gets the job done.

Basically, I want to be able to jump into a group with random friends and have voice just work, without handing around login info and trying to get everyone to install the same voice software and so on. It’s a very different use case than, say, a guild in an MMO. A good portion of my friends aren’t going to dick around with anything outside the game just to get voice chat. The rest of the grouping experience has a really slick, convenient interface to lower the barrier enough that typically non-grouping friends are willing to give it a try.

5267

Really, even legendaries?

I’m going to ignore the AH for now and just use items I get myself or from my friends. I don’t think they planned properly for the effects of a trading system that is incredibly, super efficient and open to everyone. What held back item inflation in D2 is that trading was so cumbersome that most people didn’t do it, and also not everyone played online.

Should have made rares and legendaries BoE.

5268

The good stuff isn’t 2000 gold. Even among low-level yellows, the really good pieces go for 100-200,000.

5269

No, not legendaries. Those are still somewhat expensive. (But not for long, for the low-level ones.)

5270

I don’t understand Blizzard’s thinking here. The non-hardcore game has an endless stream of new items being generated through normal gameplay, and no way to permanently remove items from the game. Isn’t this obviously going to lead to complete valuelessness for everything? Eventually there will be an infinite amount of every item in the game, making every item in the game worthless.

Maybe that’s awesome because I’ll be able to buy a full suit of legendaries for 10GP! But that’s not what Blizzard wants if they want to actually get revenue from the RMAH, right? Yet what other outcome could there possibly be?

I suppose item salvage is one way to get items out of the game, but that really just is a way to recycle worthless items into infinitesimally less worthless items – it just sets a bottom price floor, and causes more powerful items to become more common (because more people are crafting them), which drops the value of those more powerful items, which makes those more powerful items into salvage fodder for even more powerful items…

Am I missing something here? Because an economy without scarcity is barely an economy at all, and I’m not seeing any scarcity.

I didn’t think anything did hold back item inflation in D2, especially with all the duping. I heard lots about Stone of Jordan (or whatever it was) spam everywhere.

5271

One way they do it (in D2 at least) is Ladder Reset. So they could add a ladder mode, and move all characters from the previous season to non-ladder mode. They’ve said they haven’t decided if they will do that, but I hope they do.

Also, D2 did it through astronomically low drop rates. D3 will have a hell of a lot more players generating items online, but it will also have no dupes, so it might balance out that way.

Oh it was definitely inflated due to duping, but it was inflated from a very, very low base (not as many people online, trading is very cumbersome, and the drop rates on high runes were like lower than winning the mega millions lottery).

Also the ladder reset mentioned above.

5272

Diablo 3 is a brilliant rendition of a post-scarcity economy. All prices fall forever and everyone can afford all the items they need for immortality.

5273

But like the Fed with the dollar, Blizzard controls the supply via their obfuscated item generation randomization tables. If they decide that X foozle or Y elzoof needs to be rare as shit, they can set the drop percentage to something absurd like 1-in-a-million and ensure that over the course of the next 5 years of gameplay, only 20 will come into existence (or, hell, put a hard cap on them server-wide and only let new ones drop when an old one gets salvaged or deleted w/ an account).

Moreover, they can introduce new items as they tweak difficulty and balance.

Now, this might mean that everything except for the absolute top 0.01% of items is worth shit by next year. . . but Blizz can still count on that 0.01% to generate some cash-flow.

Or they’re fuckheaded idiots who let anything and everything drop semi-regularly and will let supply overwhelm demand and destroy their chances of long-tail profits. I’m not being sarcastic with this, either; they aren’t showing a lot in the brains department this week as it is.

5274

And lookee here, here’s an entire site talking about how to game the DIII economy. Latest post is on doing short-term arbitrage in Subtle Essence. Only a matter of time before someone automates that particular strategy…

Good points about how Blizzard controls the scarcity knobs. I wonder what correlation there will be between scarcity and power, if any. The Stone of Jordan wasn’t bad in its way.

Still, this all thoroughly drives home why Blizzard needed DIII to be fully online: they needed everyone to be able to play in a single economy with enforceable scarcity, and opening up offline mode would have complicated their lives enormously for minimal benefit to them. (I’m taking Blizzard’s perspective here.)

5275

Er, what? The vast majority of items are either vendored (for a small amount of gold) or salvaged, both of which removes them from the game. It takes dozens of salvaged items to make up enough materials to make new items…and since itemization is random, most of the new items won’t be suitable and will either be vendored or salvaged.

As with most things in this game, people are blowing the problems way out of proportion.

5276

There is a cow level, it seems.

5277

Jezz at least give me an hour to feel good before you rain on my parade :-)

I have also just finished in normal. My demon hunter has ended up I think at level 34 and I have about 70k in gold.

5278

A quiver of awesomeness or something. Gee the credits are lasting for a LONG time. They have a lot of staff at Blizz by the looks of it.

5279

While, yes, I do agree strongly with the general idea, I think what it presents is also a really compelling argument for it. If Blizzard strikes gold with their model, what’s to prevent a company with even less of our best interests at heart from coopting the model and saying “But Diablo did it and you loved that!” when fans bitch?

That said, the author’s central tenet is pointless. Countless SC2 fans have been begging, pleading, and shouting for an offline LAN mode since beta two years ago and it’s never come, nor will it. It’s ruined multiple tournaments (and some tournies have prizepools in the $100,000 range), destroyed modding and innovation, and of course made the game unplayable for thousands (small compared to the millions that bought it, but worth mentioning). Hell, thousands of people literally chanted for it while Mike Morhaime and Dustin Browder of Blizzard sat there in the midst of them and squirmed like the spineless snakes that they are at IPL 4’s GSTL finals. The casters even goaded them about it live on stream to tens of thousands more. Still no LAN.

Blizzard has decided and fuck all else. Given their ludicrous success, I can’t even see it going badly for them even if the next five games they release suffer from crippling flaws due to their always-on strategem.

5280

Blizzard’s games are as good as they are because they have the money to make them that way. They have the money to make them that way because they build their games as unpirateable services.

If you don’t like it, DON’T BUY THE MOTHERFUCKING GAMES. Vote with your wallet. That’s the only effective protest. Giving Blizzard your money and then bitching is pretty much beyond pointless.

I continue to unreservedly support Blizzard going the game-as-service route, and I think more and more companies will do so, because it is the best way to ensure that your customers pay you for the value you provide for them. Even with all the admitted inconveniences, it is still the best existing solution.

Don’t like it? Play Torchlight 2. That’s what competition is all about: choice in the marketplace.

Personally, I’m really enjoying the fuck out of Diablo III, and I know that most of that is because Blizzard had the money to make it as amazing as it is. Always online is the reason they have that money. They deserve it. And you calling them “spineless snakes” is exactly fucking backwards.