Our Experiences at GDC 2013

Great Story. First time making a general post to you guys. My brother and I grew up playing D2 and were beyond disappointed with D3 after waiting so long for it... We are absolutely loving your model and your hardcore approach to this game. Keep it up, don't sell out, and this game will continue to be a huge success among serious gamers.

Great stuff GGG and I am pleased to call myself a fan.

Cheers,

People act is if the Rmah was the only dowfall of D3... But it's not.

First problem is having 4 difficulty levels. Most games of that type have three for a reason, cause the first play is fun cause you're geting your skills, the second is you improving and gearing up to prepare for the third play , which is the real challenge. In D3, you play a totally easy difficuly where you facepalm everything , a slightly harder difficulty that feels kinda the same , a somewhat harder difficulty that only stretches out the leveling curve while adding minor challenge, and finally you get to the so called inferno, which imho started way too hard but nowadays is pretty useless as choosing your MP level defeats any sort of challenge in clearing it.

Another huge problem was the fact there were no real reason to play Normal , Nightmare and Hell in terms of gear aquisition or item acquisition... Since all the stuff is below item level 60 and is pretty much unusable in endgame. A game like POE has currency items, skill gems, low level whites with great sockets, etc... You still have a reason to gather stuff in POE... Whereas in D3, you pretty much just sell everything for gold , more gold , more gold.

Another very stupid thing about D3 is the nephalem valor buff. It also renders playing below level 60 useless, since you know you're only getting a few rares every now and then unless you're max level . It's also very tedious to be forced to kill 5 elite monsters pack to even start getting good drops, especially when you factor in the fact you can't change acts or quests... Basically, if you want to max out your Neph valor, your best bet is doign a full playtrough of the game... Which sucks.Basically, Blizzards tells you "the real Diablo 3 starts in endgame", gives you Nephalem Bonuses and makes it so the great gear requires lvl 60 to be equipped... Only thing , once you get to the so called endgame, you realise there's no "endgame" asides from farming content you already completed 4 times over and over and that tedious as hell uber key and organ farming for a crappy random ring side quest... And ponies, yeah , ponies.

You're basically burned out of the content by the time you finish inferno with one character... Having spent 80% of your game time playing easy as pie content that gave you no reward for doing so. And since unlike most games in that genre , you can't have someone give you waypoints, can't skip quests, can't be underleveled in Inferno, they basically force you to repeat the the full game 4 more times for each new class you want to try out... No more rusing and doing Baal runs to catch up, you gotta do the whole game from point A to point Z 4 times... Per Character. That's 20 full play of each act... Not counting farming sessions.

It doesn't help either that the game is 90% linear ,with non-random maps with only minor alterations and a story that's always interrupting you and making it feel even more scripted and repetitive... It doesn't help either that AC2 has a fetch quest that has you gathering body parts and flipping seals in repetitive areas for most of the act, while act 3 has a repetitive tower/lava section that takes half the act... And act 4 has you destroying two rift oculus and repeating very similar sections too... Overall, even on my first playtrough , I found the level design and quests repetitives, so you can imagine how I felt when I noticed they were not randomised in subsequent playtrough and just as booring on my 2nd play.

The of course there's the terrible itemisation, where items are defined by their + to primary stat and vitality, along with three or four desirable other parameters like attacks speed, crit chance and Life on Hit... Overall, the gear feel all the same... It's not even self found, so who cares... Just get as much +Primary, as much HP and maybe some resists and armor and facetalk everything. No build needed either , as every lvl 60 is identical asides from gear, and even then , there's best in slot gear for pretty much every character slot nowadays.

It doesn't help that the AH and RMAH makes it so that you can gear up strictly using it and get stuff a thousand times better that what you find/craft on your own... In POE, 95% of the gear my lvl 75 uses is self-found or self crafted... Whereas in Diablo 3, I'm not even sure any of my 5 lvl 60s have any piece of gear that I found myself... I just buy the cheapest overpowered piece of gear on the AH and be done with it... Why even farm where you can just buy what you need.

At first , Legendaries were terrible, and gear was expensive on the Rmah, but since everyone has now left D3 and there's only bots left, I believe gold now costs less that 25 cents for a million, meaning you can pretty much gear up 5 characters in newly improved legendaries for less that 10 bucks in real life if you play the market and settle for "not absolutely perfect" Legendaries.

That's what D3's endgame has devolved into... An auction house stock market simulation. I went back to D3, could hardly bring myself to play the content cause it's still the same old booring stuff, yet I spend the couple of days I played buying cheap legendaries to gear up my characters and as a result, characters that used to be stuck running ACT 1 inferno before the nerf now can run MP5+ inferno for less than a happy meal worth of investment into the Rmah... When I quit 8 months ago, an upgrade sold for 250 Bucks on the Rmah... That's what I call global market saturation and massive player exodus.

It's especially stupid that by making legendaries and set better , they basically rendered magic, rares and every single old legendaries and sets almost worthless. Now all your hard earned gear before the legendary patch are garbage since you have set piece and legendaries with cool bonuses for having numerous pieces, attack speed and crit on items where those won't spawn... The odds of having a great rare with a great combination of stuff that's better than a legendary is pretty thin...

Finally , there's all the nerf Blizzard keeps doing... Killing builds, buffing and debuffing stuff and treating customers like their plaything. Now, they are talking about an itemisation patch, which probably means 90% of existing content will be rendered useless due to the new upgrades to items... And you're often payign real cash for said items... Then they are made to suck and you got ripped off, basically...

Ovearall, it's a spectacular failure... And I haven't even talked about the terrible story, the cartoony vibe, the lack of atmosphere and the terrible boss battles and the so called classes where only a couple skills and runes are worth using anyway ... But alas, nobody is going to read that whole wall of text anyway...

I really hope nothing is going on the background about actibli$$ acquiring GGG by any means.
That would totally destroy this PoEs grand fame immediately doom its future.

Chris;

Great feedback from yourself, well written and perfectly explained and shared with the community.

Its good to see various developers getting together, hopefully for the better good of the ARPG PC gaming Genre.

I play PoE because in my opinion its a great game and the effort from GGG and yourself is what has been missing in many games. Passion, a demonstrated skill and willingness to make PoE the best game that it can be, open and honest interaction with the PoE community, and so I can continue with a much longer list.

Other gaming companies can learn from you guys!

"

Mortiferius wrote:

People act is if the Rmah was the only dowfall of D3... But it's not.

Spoiler

First problem is having 4 difficulty levels. Most games of that type have three for a reason, cause the first play is fun cause you're geting your skills, the second is you improving and gearing up to prepare for the third play , which is the real challenge. In D3, you play a totally easy difficuly where you facepalm everything , a slightly harder difficulty that feels kinda the same , a somewhat harder difficulty that only stretches out the leveling curve while adding minor challenge, and finally you get to the so called inferno, which imho started way too hard but nowadays is pretty useless as choosing your MP level defeats any sort of challenge in clearing it.

Another huge problem was the fact there were no real reason to play Normal , Nightmare and Hell in terms of gear aquisition or item acquisition... Since all the stuff is below item level 60 and is pretty much unusable in endgame. A game like POE has currency items, skill gems, low level whites with great sockets, etc... You still have a reason to gather stuff in POE... Whereas in D3, you pretty much just sell everything for gold , more gold , more gold.

Another very stupid thing about D3 is the nephalem valor buff. It also renders playing below level 60 useless, since you know you're only getting a few rares every now and then unless you're max level . It's also very tedious to be forced to kill 5 elite monsters pack to even start getting good drops, especially when you factor in the fact you can't change acts or quests... Basically, if you want to max out your Neph valor, your best bet is doign a full playtrough of the game... Which sucks.Basically, Blizzards tells you "the real Diablo 3 starts in endgame", gives you Nephalem Bonuses and makes it so the great gear requires lvl 60 to be equipped... Only thing , once you get to the so called endgame, you realise there's no "endgame" asides from farming content you already completed 4 times over and over and that tedious as hell uber key and organ farming for a crappy random ring side quest... And ponies, yeah , ponies.

You're basically burned out of the content by the time you finish inferno with one character... Having spent 80% of your game time playing easy as pie content that gave you no reward for doing so. And since unlike most games in that genre , you can't have someone give you waypoints, can't skip quests, can't be underleveled in Inferno, they basically force you to repeat the the full game 4 more times for each new class you want to try out... No more rusing and doing Baal runs to catch up, you gotta do the whole game from point A to point Z 4 times... Per Character. That's 20 full play of each act... Not counting farming sessions.

It doesn't help either that the game is 90% linear ,with non-random maps with only minor alterations and a story that's always interrupting you and making it feel even more scripted and repetitive... It doesn't help either that AC2 has a fetch quest that has you gathering body parts and flipping seals in repetitive areas for most of the act, while act 3 has a repetitive tower/lava section that takes half the act... And act 4 has you destroying two rift oculus and repeating very similar sections too... Overall, even on my first playtrough , I found the level design and quests repetitives, so you can imagine how I felt when I noticed they were not randomised in subsequent playtrough and just as booring on my 2nd play.

The of course there's the terrible itemisation, where items are defined by their + to primary stat and vitality, along with three or four desirable other parameters like attacks speed, crit chance and Life on Hit... Overall, the gear feel all the same... It's not even self found, so who cares... Just get as much +Primary, as much HP and maybe some resists and armor and facetalk everything. No build needed either , as every lvl 60 is identical asides from gear, and even then , there's best in slot gear for pretty much every character slot nowadays.

It doesn't help that the AH and RMAH makes it so that you can gear up strictly using it and get stuff a thousand times better that what you find/craft on your own... In POE, 95% of the gear my lvl 75 uses is self-found or self crafted... Whereas in Diablo 3, I'm not even sure any of my 5 lvl 60s have any piece of gear that I found myself... I just buy the cheapest overpowered piece of gear on the AH and be done with it... Why even farm where you can just buy what you need.

At first , Legendaries were terrible, and gear was expensive on the Rmah, but since everyone has now left D3 and there's only bots left, I believe gold now costs less that 25 cents for a million, meaning you can pretty much gear up 5 characters in newly improved legendaries for less that 10 bucks in real life if you play the market and settle for "not absolutely perfect" Legendaries.

That's what D3's endgame has devolved into... An auction house stock market simulation. I went back to D3, could hardly bring myself to play the content cause it's still the same old booring stuff, yet I spend the couple of days I played buying cheap legendaries to gear up my characters and as a result, characters that used to be stuck running ACT 1 inferno before the nerf now can run MP5+ inferno for less than a happy meal worth of investment into the Rmah...
Pay to win, basically... Why even farm anymore where you can get 40 millions for less that one hour of minimum wage work... Makes no sense.

It's especially stupid that by making legendaries and set better , they basically rendered magic, rares and every single old legendaries and sets almost worthless. Now all your hard earned gear before the legendary patch are garbage since you have set piece and legendaries with cool bonuses for having numerous pieces, attack speed and crit on items where those won't spawn... The odds of having a great rare with a great combination of stuff that's better than a legendary is pretty thing...

Finally , there's all the nerf Blizzard keeps doing... Killing builds, buffing and debuffing stuff and treating customers like their plaything. Now, they are talking about an itemisation patch, which probably means 90% of existing content will be rendered useless due to the new upgrades to items...

Ovearall, it's a spectacular failure... And I haven't even talked about the terrible story, the cartoony vibe, the lack of atmosphere and the terrible boss battles... But alas, nobody is going to read that whole wall of text anyway...

meh, i like walls of text, here's a little one

i agree, but imho the whole AH is still the weakest point; a game can be sucky or ugly as much as the developers want it to be, that is a matter of taste, the gameplay too; taste can't be judged since it's unique, singular, affected by personal persceptions, it's subjective. The AH is a nasty way to gain profits, it makes the whole game a pay2win, where the rich wins and the poor farms act III 12 hours a day and get banned for inappropriate behavior. The presence IN GAME of an auction house it's like saying "come to me botters, you are welcome, we can do profit togheter".
Sadly i belive that it's impossible to remove bot from these games (or at least i can't immagine how, without using captcha in game) since the whole game type (arpg) is based on "acting like a bot", repeating the same actions over and over, getting more skills doing it, the more you play (if not a complete dumb as i am) the more you're strong.
BUT at least, without AH surely you don't help botters whom as to relay on third party websites making it harder to get profit.
SO for this reason, i've lost my love for Blizzard's Diablo franchise, and embraced GGG's Path of Exile.

<3

"

Imverykind wrote:

its time to come to the Gamescom 2013 in Cologne/Germany.

not worth the journey to europe as cologne is a ugly, cold, rich and expensive city which in 2008 basically copied the existing successful games comvention in leipzig, convinced the BIU (german games organisation) somehow (probably the cologne way) to withdraw support for the old location.
don't like it, wouldn't go there.

Hi,just wanted to say : fix the desync and the lag,just bring the servers down for a day or so and try fixing these issues.Overall it is a good game,but the lag and desync makes it a decent one.
Sorry for posting here.Peace!(hope that 10.6 patch would bring a small impact on what i wrote above)

These photos say it all

Photo 1 (Chris and Jay) : Chris clearly bigger than Jay.

Photo 2 (GGG with the Schaefers) : GGG roughly the same size albeit somewhat smaller on average.

"

Tagek wrote:

You are pretty damn stupid if you actually think it was jay's idea to put in an RMAH.

Activision has nearly full control over what they do. If they tell blizzard to implement a RMAH, they can only comply.

I'd say the guys were thinking about doing an auction house, and activision told them they should also put in an RMAH while they were at it.


That said, the RMAH wasn't that big a deal. The gold AH hurt the game way more.

another reason why i quit all blizz games , kids were all over the place
no way on earth you can have civilized conversation with any of them just like you mate .
now you're blaming Activsion for RMAH and the half-assed game with childish graphics .
majority of Diablo fans agreed that D3 is piece of shit, and its why you're here playing PoE .
now you BlizzFanBoys blaming Activision for WoW, SC2, D3 failure, its like when everyone blamed EA for the failure of DA2, ME3.
poor developers they had nothing to do with it, the Evil corporation were behind it .

Agreed on the critiques about the failures of D3. In the end it was all attached to concept of the AH (not really the RMAH, which was an appendix) and the supply/demand curves derived of a highly productive and efficient market. That's why 'item hunting' and farming was so bad individually, and why a 'single player' version of the game would have been way way more rewarding and engaging in the end.

Add to that the dynamic of gold and ever inflationary supply (this one of the best things of PoE, how the economy works and interacts with the whole gameplay). In HC the lower item devaluation was made easier thanks to attrition, but the constant nerfs to game difficulty (which in the end was all the game had going for it) post-release finished the game replayability and entertainment value (add to that the bad design of systems like NV or paragon levels) even in HC mode.

But one of the biggest mistakes of D3, usually forgotten, was totally ripping the game of RPG elements, only an ARPG by name. There is no actual build-up and uniqueness for each character, and simplified systems make itemization terrible. And let's be realistic here, ARPG's do not shine for their smoothness of combat or actual combat gameplay, which is most times accessory and only adds temporal value to the game (even if it can be exploited in certain ways, ie. the races in PoE), specially when you reach 'end game' status and faceroll almost everything with a single button. It is the 'rpg' elements and character development which make the games durable.

That's why D3 was a fine game if you planned to play it for few hours/days/weeks (depending on how you play it, like only self-found), but a disappointment as an actual ARPG.

"

Nekrothique wrote:

Hi,just wanted to say : fix the desync and the lag,just bring the servers down for a day or so and try fixing these issues.Overall it is a good game,but the lag and desync makes it a decent one.
Sorry for posting here.Peace!(hope that 10.6 patch would bring a small impact on what i wrote above)

It's not that easy, it's not a matter of turning off the servers and fixing it in a day. they much change how the engine works at it's root, and the problem has been a while here. They know this exists and I hope is a first priority, because game will die eventually if this not fixed. But I'm sure they know about it lol.

I just hope the devs would take some time to update us about this and what are their plans to fix it; as it's one of the worst issues with the game now. But I also prefer them to be actually working in the game if they don't have time to do so.