"Release is going to be awesome"

Unfortunately, GGG has WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY over-hyped their release. So when it actually comes around and they shit the bed, it will be funny to see the fan boys defend thousands of "what the fuck is wrong with this game?" and "I quit" threads.

you stole my sig bro

The rest of the 'end-game' content will be available along with a heap of new stuff when the game launches in a few months time. From what I've seen it's going to be awesome. - Michael_GGG

I dunno they told us a new act was coming, that was a first for a majority of the players (at least the ones I played with) and it turned out to be pretty underwhelming, especially since every single mob was way too strong in a3 at the start of OB, the story left off on a huge cliffhanger and mostly didn't tie in with a1/a2 at all. Basically you are just chasing piety and her boss - everything else is just random filler. Tolman and Clarissa, who the fuck are they to me? I didn't pick up on it. Finding the busts, great quest (carbon copy of every retrieval quest in every RPG and MMO ever) and no story developpement at all. Burning the asshole, interesting allegory but again, it is just thrown in to give you something to do.

Open beta also had mtx, new race formats, a few new mechanics (qs flasks, ZO). Besides that everything was balance changes and a small bit of touch ups of old content. And I heard "this is going to be GREAT" from everyone. The only reason I played pretty religiously at the start of OB was the same reason that I played diablo 2 for 10 years - the "ladder reset". If I have time at the OB release, I will play solely for the next ladder reset.

The policy of complete secrecy is most likely not going to help bring popularity to the game. The expectations are unnaturally high and a lot of people will be dissapointed, when they wouldn't have been if they knew in advance what was coming.

tl;dr: OB is a better game, CB was more enjoyable.
Only things i actually really want back from CB are: Life not sucking (it sucked compared to ES, but it didn't suck compared to mob damage the way it does now), the ability to craft decently (don't care the method of implementation, but preferred would be specially designed recipes), Maelstrom of Chaos or equivelant (Maps do the opposite of what they were supposed to do, MoC does what maps were supposed to do perfectly when item levels stay locked but monster levels don't. This is assuming the use of the +1 to monster level upon entering a new level of MoC).

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

You're probably not going to get what you want from Release, Xendran.

I don't think it's going to be awesome for you at all.

I'm sorry.

You'd be surprised. If they can add new content without making the balance significantly worse worse I'll be happy, because i don't expect anything more. hoping for minor-moderate improvements though. Generally the "fucked up the balance" patches are when big sweeping changes are made to the entire game. If GGG doesn't do one of these giant balance changes, it's more likely to go well, but i have no idea what their plans are for handling A3X area levels, or whether or not they're going to bump up all the levels for cruel and merc to fit A3XN and A3XC in.

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It was at times more fun but not as good, as fulfilling and interesting a game. Nowhere near.

This is also true in terms of overall quality, amount of content, quality of a lot of that content, variety of content and builds (However this is coming from gems and gear. The 4-start passive tree wasn't necessarily better, but it definitely had a better idea regarding freedom.) however a lot was sacrificed in terms of balance in multiple systems to make that happen. And i'm talking outside of technical number to number balance. I'm talking about the ability to craft more freely, more freedom with life builds .While it's true that the Life to CI disparity was absofuckinglutley GIGANTIC back then, life was also better in general, and by extension, regen, meaning it wasnt a "It's hard as fuck to play life builds", but more of an "it's easy as fuck to play CI builds".

CI was still vaaaaaaaaaastly superior to life, but life also didn't suck back then, so it wasn't as much of a life grind to make a viable build with it.

"

We had desync then. We have desync now. It's improved since then in my experience but plenty will claim otherwise.

It's definitely better now than it was during my first 2 CB ladders. The code still could be substantially better, but meh.

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We didn't have Multistrike or Melee Splash.

People complain about balance now but it would be an understatement to say we didn't have our share of balance issues in CB. If you think ES rules now, you should have seen it when Chaos Inoculation did so much more than just inoculate you against chaos.

Closed beta was probably one of the most poorly balanced games i've ever played in terms of numerical balance, yes.

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On a related note, the Skilldrasil went from something mad and explosive and ridiculous (all classes had four starting nodes, for example) to something boring and rigid and out of balance for a while, but then GGG started looking at certain areas long considered dead zones. The improvements made to the Duelist and Ranger starting areas have been incredible. The more even addition of life nodes within every class' starting area made a big difference.

The current version of it is definitely a good improvement over the original 2 node start, and the old chaotic one was also very poorly balanced, however i do think that the tree needs more ways to path through things. Perhaps bumping up the starting positions to 3. I'm not sure that GGG would consider remaking the entire skill tree to be fun like I would though.

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Iron Reflexes, which should be nuked from orbit, got a semi-decent drawback, finally.

You get the coordinates set and I'll go prepare the launch area.

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Acrobatics, which still needs some love, got a semi-decent buff, finally.

Now if only it wasn't so boring. I like the keystone, but "30% chance for shit to not do anything to you" is boring. Sure it goes into the calculation differently so it's not really just 'fake evasion', but still.

As for evasion and acrobatics, they will never truly feel as good as any other playstyle as long as mob damage remains high enough to be at risk of getting instantly killed in a situation where armour or ES could have saved you.

Sure, evasion is effective when used correctly, but there's always a feeling of "This is unsafe/unreliable" that you don't really get with the other two. I mean sure armour is also giving you a feeling of "this is unsafe" when going up against big hits, but your primary source of protection doesn't get TOTALLY negated.

I WOULD say that armour builds also usually have more strength for flat HP because of being on the strength side of the tree, but armour characters are almost always IR so that's not even a valid point.

That WILL be a valid point if IR gets nuked and armour overall gets a buff up to make people in the STR side of the tree as effective or more with natural nodes as they were with IR.

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Lastly, I feel Closed Beta was inferior to Open Beta because...

Just going to use this as a general response to the CB vs OB thing since this is a good phrase to respond to:

OB IS superior to CB. That doesn't mean that it's more enjoyable.
You can make a game better to the point where the additions outweigh things like poor balancing of different systems in regards to it being a better game.

PoEOB is not bad. It is tedious, has excessive gating that serves the exact opposite purpose of what it was meant to (Want a lioneye? Voltaxic? Kaoms? Catacombs & Lunaris. Want EXP? Maps. So much for maps being an item gate and not an EXP gate.), while intentionally not bringing back a fully completed endless dungeon that fufills the exact purpose their map system was claimed to be for, discourages the use of one of its most in depth system, and has jumpy progression.

These aren't enough to drag it down to Bad Game territory yet though.

The things i want to retain from CB are the ability to craft decently being accessible to players (since there is so much emphasis on different types of items and item mods being the cores for different builds, some of which can even use the same skill tree with a proper gear and gem swap).

Life still does need to be buffed a bit (not a lot), and CI needs to be brought down to life's level. CI needs to be nerfed harder than life should be buffed. Nullification, Void Barrier, Unnatural Calm, Arcane Focus, Infused Shield. These are all in really convenient areas, relatively close together (Nullification being the only one that's kinda far, but for a build that likes crit you can grab Assassination which is pretty good.), and those clusters will net you 174% ES + 12% More (effective 194.88% Increased ES)for a minimum of 40 points. That's not counting the 7 points you could spend to get another 30% from the right cluster below witch start. You also go DIRECTLY beside ghost reaver.

Basically, think about it as if 2 points down from resolute technique, there was a life cluster of 5x 6% Life + 8% Evasion, ending with 10% evasion, 10% life, 0.4% regen and 8 allres.

Since life is technically supposed to be lower than ES (even though without kaoms, the base is already usually lower) i guess you could change the 6%'s to 4, and the 10% to 8, but still. That would be a damn good cluster, and it's basically what ES has, except instead of it being for a node that's only useful for non crit builds, it's beside a node that's useful for almost every (if not every) single CI build in the game.

Maelstrom of Chaos should really be put back in, with item levels locked, but mob levels and exp increasing the further you go. You should also be rewarded with more EXP than enemies of the level usually gives once you're past the first level, and it should increase the further you go without leaving. This could be interesting at high levels for people that want to leave their accounts logged in for extreme periods of time to level up in the 90's, because they may have to leave extremely valuable items behind in exchange for not having to restart an extremely long session in MoC to get their EXP bonus back up.

So yeah, that's about all i really want back from CB.
The ability to craft decently, life not sucking (even if ES still ends up op as fuck), Maelstrom of Chaos.

I have much less of a problem with poor balance changes that make things OP than i do with poor balance changes that make something as broad as life UP.



Oh, and Phase Run.

Edit: Yeah, I'm not getting my hopes up for release either.

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Ishiga25 wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Finding more orbs could mean either more crafting, or more trading; by itself, it doesn't really change anything (as proved when GGG increased drop rates and noticed people just hoarded more).

This is the part that really irks me. Why would anyone defend how they handled this "test"? This was never announced to anyone. This wasn't made public knowledge and as a result actually able to be considered by the testers and players while they accrued wealth. Of course people hoarded the orbs, they just thought they were getting unusually lucky in a system that hadn't actually changed when in reality the drop rates were alter and thus they would actually be able to build up a buffer of orbs to actually USE instead of saving for the purchase of the things they want. Without the knowledge that one can actually use what the orbs are for without carving a hole in their hard-earned wealth, no one's going to actually change their behavior.

Spot on. I thought about giving feedback about this, but figured it would be pointless because I don't know all of the details. The way I view it, the test would have needed two things to get accurate feedback:

1. A drop rate that is increased enough to be significant to the individual. Everybody has their own threshold where they'll begin to use orbs on a whim. GGG probably increased drop rates by something like 25%. An increase in the Exalted Orb drop rate of 25% would probably make a big difference on a macro scale, but individually it would probably do very little to make people start using the orbs. As a self-found player, I've found maybe 4 Exalted Orbs, so a 25% drop rate would result in one additional orb. Thinking about it, my threshold is probably around 10. So in order to get me to occasionally use an Exalted Orb on a whim, they'd need to up their drop rate by at least 250%. I doubt they'd ever dare attempt an increase that large because it would have an unpredictable effect on the economy. (It seems like a Self Found League would be the perfect testbed for such a change, however.)

2. They need to make sure everybody knows that the drop rates have been increased, especially if it's a short-term test. They should be able to see what happens when somebody comes to the forums and says "I've found a bunch of X orb recently, has the drop rate increased?" The forum-goers say stupid (but true) things like "RNG is RNG." This is because the odds that some people are just having lucky streaks is much higher than the odds that the drop rates have actually been changed. Nobody believes the drop rate has changed, so they continue hoarding.

I have little faith in the sample size of that test, especially when the people testing are unaware.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

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Hyskoa wrote:

Man, wish I could have played closed beta. Sounds like a lot more fun than open beta.

Wall of text

Enjoyable to read and while I agree that OB is probably a lot more fleshed out and worth recommending, I still would want to play CB due to people saying it's a more enjoyable experience, rather than a grind till burn out.

Hence why I really want to experience it for myself.

It wasn't a more enjoyable experience. The community was just smaller, so less intimidating. The only thing I miss from CB is actually that community, less prone to troll, the official forums were a nicer place back then.