Time Capsule from PoE Closed Beta -- a classic PoE vs D3 thread circa 2012

All yours, fellas. Thanks.

@Whiteboy: Ouch, but I understand.

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I'd say that would be more around 1/50th, or more.

Last I heard, the stress test for D3 had 129k online simultaneously, and I think I remember PoE having 7.5k or so? That would mean that it's on the level of... 1:17-ish? Slight overestimation on your part.

let's not dismiss company size and assets, however. D3/Blizzard knew full well that there'd be a rush when the stress test began, and their servers didn't hold up very well. The dialog between company and player is pretty bad as well (but not as bad as WoW when they had issues with their servers -- sometimes you'd have to wait several hours for an update as to why the server was down/get an ETA). Compare with PoE, who probably had an idea on how many players were interested. And sure, the PoE servers had some issues, but the communication was excellent. As far as that goes, they've outperformed Blizzard by a lot.

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azaz wrote:

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I'd say that would be more around 1/50th, or more.

Last I heard, the stress test for D3 had 129k online simultaneously, and I think I remember PoE having 7.5k or so? That would mean that it's on the level of... 1:17-ish? Slight overestimation on your part.

let's not dismiss company size and assets, however. D3/Blizzard knew full well that there'd be a rush when the stress test began, and their servers didn't hold up very well. The dialog between company and player is pretty bad as well (but not as bad as WoW when they had issues with their servers -- sometimes you'd have to wait several hours for an update as to why the server was down/get an ETA). Compare with PoE, who probably had an idea on how many players were interested. And sure, the PoE servers had some issues, but the communication was excellent. As far as that goes, they've outperformed Blizzard by a lot.

And where did you learn that information? Seriously, where.
Blizzard hasn't made any announcements regarding the login count. You can read on bashiok's twitter that there were at least 187.000 people in public games in the beta, and that's when they're still not even allowing everyone to access it.

About the communication, I agree they could have sent out a message sooner, but It's not like you have to be a genius to understand what you're up to when a message saying 'The servers are currently busy' pops up.



Anyway, I've just played for about 2 hours.
The game is frikkin amazing.
I was still wondering whether I should take monk or barbarian, because I thought barbarian might be cooler.
I was wrong. This is some of the most fun I've had in ages, I cannot wait for this game to come out. ^^

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Tagek wrote:

And where did you learn that information? Seriously, where.
Blizzard hasn't made any announcements regarding the login count. You can read on bashiok's twitter that there were at least 187.000 people in public games in the beta, and that's when they're still not even allowing everyone to access it.

Sheesh, calm down dude, I don't know where I got it from, and your number's even higher. I'm not bashing them for having servers down with -- counting low -- 100k people try and log on at the same time. I'm saying that compared to GGG, blizzard has a lot more assets and they should have been able to foresee it better than they did. We're talking about an AAA company here. Blizzard dropped the ball, as usual, on this, and you'd think after all the problems they've had with huge rushes before (SC2 beta also had issues at the beginning) they should learn. Also, as I said before -- the communication sucked. Yes, it's obvious that they have issues, but that's not the point. The point is that they should talk to the users, which they more often than not don't. GGG were very quick to respond with why or if the server crashed, Blizzard are not. It shouldn't be more than a "hey guys, the login servers are getting trampled, should I put up a note on it for players starting D3?" if even that.

As for the game itself, I'm not very impressed. My bow sounds like a shotgun and it's getting on my nerves. Combat is unresponsive, the skill tree is linear and pretty boring, the drops are underwhelming and not very exciting, and I'm not a big fan of the art direction. I'll play the released game for the story, but I won't stick around after that unless the game gets a whole lot better after the beta content (which I'm guessing it won't). But whatever, subjectivity abound. It's Blizzard, they'll make a couple of hundred millions -- easily -- on this and call it a success.

For what it's worth, with your number we're looking at roughly (I run the numbers in my head, so take them with a grain of salt or run them yourself) 1:25 instead of 1:17. Still a long way to go before we hit 1:50. :P

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azaz wrote:

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Tagek wrote:

And where did you learn that information? Seriously, where.
Blizzard hasn't made any announcements regarding the login count. You can read on bashiok's twitter that there were at least 187.000 people in public games in the beta, and that's when they're still not even allowing everyone to access it.

Sheesh, calm down dude, I don't know where I got it from, and your number's even higher. I'm not bashing them for having servers down with -- counting low -- 100k people try and log on at the same time. I'm saying that compared to GGG, blizzard has a lot more assets and they should have been able to foresee it better than they did. We're talking about an AAA company here. Blizzard dropped the ball, as usual, on this, and you'd think after all the problems they've had with huge rushes before (SC2 beta also had issues at the beginning) they should learn. Also, as I said before -- the communication sucked. Yes, it's obvious that they have issues, but that's not the point. The point is that they should talk to the users, which they more often than not don't. GGG were very quick to respond with why or if the server crashed, Blizzard are not. It shouldn't be more than a "hey guys, the login servers are getting trampled, should I put up a note on it for players starting D3?" if even that.

As for the game itself, I'm not very impressed. My bow sounds like a shotgun and it's getting on my nerves. Combat is unresponsive, the skill tree is linear and pretty boring, the drops are underwhelming and not very exciting, and I'm not a big fan of the art direction. I'll play the released game for the story, but I won't stick around after that unless the game gets a whole lot better after the beta content (which I'm guessing it won't). But whatever, subjectivity abound. It's Blizzard, they'll make a couple of hundred millions -- easily -- on this and call it a success.

For what it's worth, with your number we're looking at roughly (I run the numbers in my head, so take them with a grain of salt or run them yourself) 1:25 instead of 1:17. Still a long way to go before we hit 1:50. :P

I played the open beta for about an hour just now...

In my opinion Diablo III has more fluid combat and animations, they really tweaked that to perfection. It reminds me a lot of how character control and skill-use feels like in Diablo II. Path of Exile is still lacking in that regard.

The environment in D3 is also surprisingly ok, I was expecting much worse from the screenshots/vids I watched before. The lighting engine is pretty darn good and you get a good sense of multiple sources of lighting on your character and environment objects.

I !@#$ing hate that it has more or less no customization other than items though, turned me off so much I just got terribly bored at one point and exited the game. It's amazing how much damage "steamlining" can do to a game being developed.

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azaz wrote:

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Tagek wrote:

And where did you learn that information? Seriously, where.
Blizzard hasn't made any announcements regarding the login count. You can read on bashiok's twitter that there were at least 187.000 people in public games in the beta, and that's when they're still not even allowing everyone to access it.

Sheesh, calm down dude, I don't know where I got it from, and your number's even higher. I'm not bashing them for having servers down with -- counting low -- 100k people try and log on at the same time. I'm saying that compared to GGG, blizzard has a lot more assets and they should have been able to foresee it better than they did. We're talking about an AAA company here. Blizzard dropped the ball, as usual, on this, and you'd think after all the problems they've had with huge rushes before (SC2 beta also had issues at the beginning) they should learn. Also, as I said before -- the communication sucked. Yes, it's obvious that they have issues, but that's not the point. The point is that they should talk to the users, which they more often than not don't. GGG were very quick to respond with why or if the server crashed, Blizzard are not. It shouldn't be more than a "hey guys, the login servers are getting trampled, should I put up a note on it for players starting D3?" if even that.

As for the game itself, I'm not very impressed. My bow sounds like a shotgun and it's getting on my nerves. Combat is unresponsive, the skill tree is linear and pretty boring, the drops are underwhelming and not very exciting, and I'm not a big fan of the art direction. I'll play the released game for the story, but I won't stick around after that unless the game gets a whole lot better after the beta content (which I'm guessing it won't). But whatever, subjectivity abound. It's Blizzard, they'll make a couple of hundred millions -- easily -- on this and call it a success.

For what it's worth, with your number we're looking at roughly (I run the numbers in my head, so take them with a grain of salt or run them yourself) 1:25 instead of 1:17. Still a long way to go before we hit 1:50. :P

Sorry if I came off as mad, I wasn't. I just actually wanted to know where you got your information from. :P


And you think the combat is unresponsive.....?
Like.. ok.. but I'm not sure what you think about POE's combat then. I believe even charan agrees that D3's combat is very fluid. Did you play like only one class or something? (and if so, which one)


Also, maybe, but they still had a cap on the servers, making a lot of people unable to enter.

Truth be told by lvl 9 you get 7 useful skills to play with, which is about 5 more then PoE (notice useful in sentence), and 4-5 more then D2. So no complaint there.

The real question is how this will look at high levels.

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Torin wrote:

Truth be told by lvl 9 you get 7 useful skills to play with, which is about 5 more then PoE (notice useful in sentence), and 4-5 more then D2. So no complaint there.

The real question is how this will look at high levels.

You get 7 useful skills, but you can only use 4 of them. What's with the cooldown on skill change? The new Blizzard Experience(tm) is that they decide everything for you, and I have no doubt that they'll do so for D3 as well. An amusing footnote is to look at the detailed stats and hover over each one -- you get a popup with EXACTLY THE SAME INFORMATION. I'll accept that this is more of a tutorial than anything else, but that was just... what? Why would they do that? You can read a simple list of things yourself, can't you? Do they really think I'm that stupid that I can't see that the line "Magic find" (or whatever it said) ends in the number "10%", they have to tell me that when I hover over it? It feels a bit insulting, to be honest.

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Tagek wrote:

Sorry if I came off as mad, I wasn't. I just actually wanted to know where you got your information from. :P

Someone in PoE mentioned it, I guess they got it from where I got my later numbers, from the number of public games players (this was maybe after two hours since the beta had opened). For what it's worth, later on in the evening it was 150k players; I haven't checked today, but maybe we'll reach the 1:50 yet. However, my initial point was mainly that the math was incorrect.

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And you think the combat is unresponsive.....? [...] Did you play like only one class or something? (and if so, which one)

I played Demon Hunter -- I'll try another class today, not because I want to play the game, but because I'm curious if it'll change my opinion. (The sound of the Demon Hunter's bow was horrible, bows (nor crossbows) doesn't sound like shotguns, ever.) And yes, at times the combat is unresponsive -- that's probably due to server load though; I have a feeling that Blizzard verifies every single click. They pretty much have to, since Real Money is involved via the auction house.

The animations are very nice though, I'll give them that. The voice-acting was overall good (a few weird choices that I personally wouldn't have made), and I have no doubts that the story will be good. It won't be a game where you get to say much in regards of the actual story, obviously, but we all knew that. I just wish you could turn off the achievements (fuck the xbox for making them a staple; they add nothing to most games and are at most just a feeble attempt to get players to play the game longer, in effect making the game 'longer' for completionists. I'm obviously not one of those.) announcements and the massacre notices, they ruin the immersion pretty badly.

What's the hotkey for healing pots? I heard someone say that you use those automatically, which is another weird thing that I don't like. Also, hover over the health orb for a great joke/insult against your intelligence. Yes, thank you very much, I can figure out that on 0 health I'll die. There's no need to be disrespectful of your players' intelligence, Blizzard.

Well I just played the demon-hunter. I thought he felt very good and responsive, but he pales in comparison to the barbarian, and even more so, the monk.

Also, the hotkey for potions is Q. I don't know who said that it was automatic, but he got his information wrong.

Also, you are seriously offended by the health orb thing?
I thought it was hilarious.
'If you lose it all, you die.'
Honestly, if I was new to this type of game I really wouldn't know what my health bar is.
Maybe you are offended by tutorials in general, but this is nothing to cry about.

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azaz wrote:

An amusing footnote is to look at the detailed stats and hover over each one -- you get a popup with EXACTLY THE SAME INFORMATION. I'll accept that this is more of a tutorial than anything else, but that was just... what? Why would they do that? You can read a simple list of things yourself, can't you? Do they really think I'm that stupid that I can't see that the line "Magic find" (or whatever it said) ends in the number "10%", they have to tell me that when I hover over it? It feels a bit insulting, to be honest.

Firstly, you're misrepresenting this - many of the tooltips are not "exactly the same" at all, and even the ones that are identical (like Magic Find) at least have the tiny function of highlighting the information in a box with a different text colour, possibly making it easier to read. Ignoring that though...you found a tiny UI oddity in a beta. Might be slight bit of overreaction going on here, especially to feel insulted about it.

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azaz wrote:

And yes, at times the combat is unresponsive -- that's probably due to server load though; I have a feeling that Blizzard verifies every single click. They pretty much have to, since Real Money is involved via the auction house.

Mno, they have to because if you start ignoring client commands, the game goes out of sync. Unless you mean clicks that don't do anything, like left clicking random bits of the UI background. In which case I'd suggest you could probably make the combat more responsive by clicking on the monsters instead.

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azaz wrote:

Yes, thank you very much, I can figure out that on 0 health I'll die. There's no need to be disrespectful of your players' intelligence, Blizzard.

What exactly do you think tooltips are for? You complain when they explain things and you complain when they don't explain things. If you already know what the red orb does, then feel free to quit hovering your mouse over it and get back to the game.