BobTD

Many players played the new Diablo for a while and then stopped. They where not having as much fun as they thought they could be having so they played something else. This is a valid reason to stop playing and there are two big reasons for this I'm going to highlight. But I also want to really get into legitimate failings of this game, despite my love for it.


Two common complaints:


It was to slow: holding your full set of skills and giving them to you slowly up to lvl 60 really made it so that all the customization was at the end of the game. So I understand why some people felt this way. This is because the game was built mostly with focus on smooth difficulty in the beginning that let you focus on the story, and very difficult end game that let you focus on gear hunting. The idea was that it would appeal to hardcore players. (and did)


It was to fast: It is only 4 Acts long right now, and each act can be completed in about an hour (if you really go for it, there is an under 1 hour achievement). But first time around each act might have taken you 2 or more hours. Still, many players completed the game and thought "this is it?".


Hardcore diablo 2 fans were not surprised because they understood the game had 3 more difficulties to complete. But if you where playing multiple characters this put the end game pretty far off. But the idea of rushing to the end game did not offput a lot of players, who raced there and began enjoying the end game content, hidden boss fights, full skill access, the race to find and sell legendary items, and a nearly impossibly difficult inferno mode. The idea was that this would appeal to hardcore players. (and did)


The thing is that this was a game made with a cash auction house in mind, an incredible event in gaming and even from a world economic standpoint. So to counter potential disaster of managing this they took precautions,some better than others: There was a limited max transaction of $250 (didnt stop the black market though) they focused on making it very gradually paced up to the point where the real money was being spent, and very gradually lowered the difficulty to a point where it was accessible to less obsessed players.


I fall under the crazy obsessed category. I have sold and bought items on the auction house for ridiculous prices. And there was a dark side to this as well.


(if anyone is interested this is my character list: bobtd/diabloprogress, and if you like the xbox version I have a barb that can pull 800k legit damage)


Back when this came out we had a lot of fun buying and selling on the Real Money Auction House (rmah). But I am, and I don't doubt many other fans, going to be glad to see it taken down to make way for improvements to the game March 18th. Besides the hunt for epic loot, to sell for hundreds of dollars (and I have, and we did) we had a lot of fun finding the builds that where able to break the game. I played one of the first Critical mass builds and me and a group of friends defeated the 3 Uber boss sets on monster power 10 the first week they where out without a single player death. So we had a blast developing overpowered characters.


The fundamental problem in this is that the true fanatics, who could be said to be hardcore, are outnumbered by the regular players just looking for a fun game. Don't get me wrong the game was a lot of fun, it was just a lot harder to be included in. Reaching that end content was how you found the real meat of the game.


But this is when the dark side of the hardcore game, for my group, began. Some of my friends made, literally, thousands of dollars on rare drops. Someone even sold a lucani prowler drop and went out and got a brand new BMW. But that person had gotten that drop off a bot he was running. pretty soon almost everyone in my group was obsessed with cheating there way through the game to make money. The way this for the most part happened was with a program called Demon Buddy, a virtually undetectable bot that could be loaded with behaviors that made them vary everything from how fast they picked up loot on the ground to path choosing. I wont get to much into the program itself, but I will say the official version was (or maybe still it) a pay to use program. They sold it to you for $1 a day.


But not even that was enough, that program was hacked so that (some) bot users could run it without paying for it. (I did get invited to use it, but I dont bot for fear of loosing my account, i wont even open it on my computer, not worth the chance of loosing my characters). Not only did the bot make it possible to grind to paragon 100 in mere weeks (8 hour sessions, most people only ran it this long to avoid suspicion)but it could look at a dropped item and determine Its ilevel (1-63) without identifying it. So it only picked up ilvl 63 items, identifies them and then saved, sold or broke down those items according to its setting.


This program was virtually invisible as well. My guess is that blizzard had to observe and ban on a case by case basis because they could not simply detect it in action. And this actually really sucked for the hardcore players like myself as well as the community at large. On one hand the auction house became flooded, and all those people I used to play with now ran bots, and had them set to farm in a way that was more efficient than playing legitimately.


So now a game that had alienated the less hardcore players had also alienated many of its hardcore players. And for a while I pretty much stopped playing as well. This is actually pretty depressing.


But I have high hopes for this series after the next expansion. They are removing the auction house, and adding another game mode (to help with players who dont want to repeat the story, they now have an adventure mode) as well as drastically improving the legendary item drop rate. Loot 2.0 was the reason I picked up the game on xbox, and in about 3 weeks I have found roughly 300 legendary drops. I know it sounds like a lot, but it seems pretty well balanced where it it. Is feels more like playing the original diablo in terms of drop rate.


Actually you can watch the beta and see the new loot system in action on live streams:


Twitch Tv - reaper of Souls


So those are the reasons, despite a very high quality production a lot of people didnt seem to enjoy the game. Despite these flaws this game has, for me, been one of the most entertaining games. I have had a blast playing it and I hope I will in the future.