DiabloFans

Quote from Legatus1982

Mercs were never essential even in d2 and they most certainly CAN be balanced. Who are you to tell blizzard what they can and can't do? Have you ever programmed a diablo game?
A good place for you to start in this debate would be saying something that is true.

And I dont really care if mercs or followers can be used in pvp, but again I'd prefer having the option. If they aren't balanced in pvp, don't use them in pvp.

Well, for starters, I'm not telling Blizz to do anything. Their own playtesting and iterations led them to the current conclusion to the follower 'problem,' and I'm simply pointing out the reasoning behind it.

And I'm honestly sick and tired of everyone saying 'I just want the option.' Of course you do. That doesn't mean that Blizzard should sacrifice quality just so that you have more options. We all know that its not a realistic solution to just have it be a checkmark. If it doesn't work or isn't balanced, it shouldn't be in the game. Period. There are plenty of other options in D3, we don't need more that don't meet Blizz's quality standards.

But so what? Its not like that means that the overall experience is a waste. Obviously there are problems with the system, but people still know what schools/programs/etc are challenging and what isn't. Thats not to say that you couldn't find an easy school, go get a 4.0, and end up being very successful, but it still won't get you as far as a lower GPA at a school where the average GPA is significantly lower. Companies can easily see whether or not a high GPA is legitimate, for lack of a better word, by comparing it to the school's average GPA.

I can't claim to know how it works at most schools, but at least at my college the school is constantly up to date on the grades students are getting in the classes throughout the school. If one teacher is giving out significantly more good grades than another, they talk with the teacher about how to make their tests more challenging so that its more reflective of the schools average, because they want to maintain a challenging environment.

And lets not forget that if you get a college degree you're basically guaranteed to get more money than someone who hasn't graduated college, no matter what some YouTube video says. Not to mention that in order for more people to be able to attend college, there has to be lower level colleges to cater to them. That doesn't mean that companies hiring people are just going to fall for some intelligent guy who went to a lower level school and got a 4.0. Its not like its some magical card that gets you any job you want, and even if it was, if you weren't qualified you'd get fired no matter what your GPA was.

Well thats just entirely untrue if you choose challenging courses that have real world connections. I care a lot about my grades, after all they will determine the graduate schools and eventually jobs that are available to me, but that doesn't guarantee me a 4.0. In fact, it doesn't come close to guaranteeing me any kind of good grade. What it does do is allow me to put up with more studying, etc in order to achieve my goals.

Even if you're excellent at repeating (or regurgitating, if you insist) info, that doesn't mean you have a practical understanding of it, and if your professors are good at their job they'll be able to expose that. Being able to fully understand what you're learning allows you to adapt to new situations and combine your skills to solve increasingly complex problems. I'm sure there are places where its easy to get a 4.0, and I'm not trying to offend anyone by saying this, but if grades don't reflect your intelligence, at least to some degree, its because the professors administering the tests aren't doing their job as well as they should.

If (with an emphasis on if) there was a way to actually make it optional across the board, then sure, it should be implemented. But theres just not. So its not in the endgame.

And as for the number of people disappointed, there was an equally large crowd complaining that followers would be essential.

Because you still haven't provided a valid reason that I can see; all I see is you telling everyone else you don't care what they get because you want it your way. And that is pissing me off to be honest.
Consider other people please.

Did you even read my posts? I pointed out multiple different ways that followers would be almost impossible to balance in a way that makes them both useful and non-essential. If you can't see a valid reason in there its your own fault.

Well the floating text is an option, I don't know if its default. And weapons will show their damage range and DPS along with any enchantments/gem effects.

Quote from Daemaro

Blizzard was at E3 last year. They had a hiring station. Activision just might encourage them to step back out into the public. I'm not saying Blizzcon is going to die, Im just saying they would benefit from attending E3 as well.

Oh definitely, but I'm just saying traditionally they don't announce anything big. But I guess a system could make sense, and I would obviously enjoy something like that.

Blizzard doesn't attend E3. They have Blizzcon instead. From now until the beta, we'll be getting systems updates until we know all the systems in the game by the time the beta starts. At least that was the plan last we were told.

Quote from Legatus1982

Look nobody is saying you guys are wrong for not wanting mercs or endgame followers. We're just saying there are lots of us who wanted them, and won't have them. And -I- am saying you have no justification in your argument, since you've always had the option of not using it. And you still have that option now. We, on the other hand, no longer have any option at all. They took it from us.

Which is worse? Having the option or not having the option? That's the question you need to answer here, not "how much do i hate stupid mercs". There are other ways of getting people to go online, clear screen space, and balance the game, without taking away our options.

And? You can actually make that argument for everything ever excluded from anything. That doesn't mean that they should be present.

Quote from sneakywombat

You don't hear anyone complaining about characters being too reliant on gear. What if I want a gear-free build dammit? I don't want it to be even slightly harder for me if I choose to walk out there naked. You see where I'm going with this?

Not a peep about characters being too reliant on their skills. Still waiting to hear about characters being too reliant on the services that artisans can provide. Why?

Because these are systems that are built intimately into the mechanics of the game. And for better of for worse, so is the follower system. To make an entire system (which undoubtedly had months of work poured into it) void itself a third of the way into the game is simply bad problem-solving, and it's just plain silly.

I'm not saying that we should recreate Diablo II's merc system here. Something is dreadfully wrong when you can't win the game without hiring help. I definitely think that needed major revision as well. But not THIS major. The solution I underlined would make it so your follower would be useful, but unnecessary. I think that's a fair compromise to everyone, honestly, because at the end of the day, it SHOULD be harder if you choose to venture out there all by your lonesome than if you had someone watching your back, amirite?

But who says that you should have an NPC by your side in the first place? Especially if theres very few, very complicated ways of making it so you don't rely on them. If part of the Blizzard design mentality for D3 is that you are on a level way above a normal person, which it clearly is, and clearly was even before this announcement, then clearly the followers don't fit in very easily. And lets not forget that, given the problems with the D2 hireling system, it wasn't entirely obvious that it would return for D3. It was always a condition of if Blizzard could find a new way to implement them. And as much as you might theorycraft ideas you think just maybe might work, it hasn't worked in a lot of games for a reason. And it most certainly hasn't worked in a way that makes the player feel personally more power. Even people who have liked hireling systems would have to admit that having to worry about the survival of a weak NPC isn't fun.

So, instead of fine tuning a system that, as I said in my last post, could easily shift in either direction (as in useless or too useful) just based on a person discovering a build, Blizzard made it help the 'newbies' and encourage them to go online. As much as people have argued that choice makes the system useless, and even an insult, those new players are ultimately a large part of the reason Blizzard is able to make the game. After all, they do make up for a lot of the sales. And lets not forget that, if the follower system does end up promoting online play, we would all benefit.

As maka said, hardcore players ultimately make up for most of the hours played in a game, and as such they deserve recognition. For all we know, not allowing the follower system into the endgame is a favor to us. It means that Blizzard won't have to nerf any of your favorite skills because it got attached to some cheap follower build and was declared overpowered. You won't get screwed in the last few seconds of a boss fight because Diablo decided to target your follower and you suddenly don't have a reliable heal (or something of that sort.)

If the follower system was going to inherit any of the problems of the D2 hirelings, I know I sure as hell wouldn't want it there. I think thats something we can mostly agree on. But thats just a really hard thing to do. I'm not saying Blizzard isn't up to the challenge or that its not a possibility for the future. In fact, it would be an obvious target for an expansion or even a content patch (if they are going to do anything like that.) That being said, the fact that they weren't able to devise some incredible system where followers are both not essential and optional isn't an atrocity.

Again, why should there be options for the sake of options? If something is clearly over the top, why should it be allowed? Theres been plenty of complaints on these forums and elsewhere about too much stuff on the screen, and thats not when you're trying to keep track of your character just to survive or play effectively. I agree that we should have plenty of options, but there has to be a point where it cuts off. And in the case of screen clutter, the cut off point is where the game becomes nearly unplayable. If you just keep asking 'Why isn't this or this implemented?' then of course you're going to think that Blizzard is limiting your play. Not to mention that, if we're going to get into the 4 player limit here, its not only about screen chaos. Its also about balance. But I won't get into that.

Edit: And as for the "screen chaos" argument.. try playing WoW with 25 ppl in a raid fighting bad guys that don't even fit in the screen. It's AMAZINGLY fun to be in the middle of pure chaos.. I was main tank in a very active guild, and I had to find a way to keep everything that was happening under control during extremely complex mechanics. You find a way, and it's exhilarating. I agree with those here, that we should have the option.

And the reason it works is, for one, because of the screen angle, and secondly because of balance. WoW's health system allows for harder hitting monsters, because its someone else's responsibility to heal you. Theres no such thing in D3. Your health goes steadily down until you get a globe. If you had eight players monsters would have to hit insanely hard for it to be a challenge for the group as a whole, but that would also mean that whoever is getting attacked is dying way too quickly. For D3's screen angle and graphical effects, 4 players is chaos, but just the right amount of it. But again, thats not the topic we're discussing.

They might be the majority in terms of raw numbers (and even that's debatable), but they certainly aren't in terms of number of hours played. And I think players who show fidelity to a game and a company should be rewarded, not (as someone said above) "given the shaft".

Its really not debatable in terms of raw numbers. D2 has sold what, 4 or 5 million copies? Theres no way the online community, even if you combined every unique player across the game's life, is or was anywhere near that. SC2 has sold over 3, probably closer to 4 million copies, and even during the game's beginning the amount of players online numbered in, at most, the high hundred thousands. Its a common trend across many games that people just play SP/Campaign or whatever the game offers that isn't online.

Obviously your second point, about hours played, still stands, and we should be rewarded for that. But that doesn't have to be through followers or a similar system. Even if you had something like a box to check to include followers, people would still make builds based around them, and thats just pretty lame. Especially considering the emphasis on character power. Why should it be possible for you to make a build where you intentionally exclude normally essential parts just so that the follower can fill in the blanks?

Followers (both as hirelings in D2 and across many other ARPGs that have included similar systems) are notoriously hard to implement well, so Blizz decided against them. That doesn't mean that we won't see their usefulness expanded in the future, and it also doesn't mean that their restricting our current options. Its just something that (for reasons I've delved into countless times in these threads) is incredibly hard to balance correctly. If you get it slightly wrong in either direction, suddenly one side of the argument is outraged again. You saw how many people were pissed off because they thought followers were essential, and you also see how pissed off people are now that they think their useless (for good reason). So its much easier to simply make it a nonissue but still helpful to a large portion of the people who will end up getting the game. That doesn't mean we're getting the shaft.

Lets put it this way. Suppose WW Barbs are a common, fun build to play. Now suppose that a WW Barb benefits greatly from a Follower's AoE slow skill, to the point where it becomes overpowered. So Blizz nerfs the AoE slow, but it still helps the WW Barb too much, and the follower is still essential to the most effective WW build. What you end up with is ridiculously complicated balancing, where you have to take the followers, which a lot of people didn't want in the first place, into account, instead of directly nerfing/buffing character skills. As we all know, a game like Diablo is incredibly hard to balance, and it will only be harder with the amount of builds in D3. Why make it more complicated by allowing people to supplement their build's weaknesses with a follower?

I'm not saying balancing followers isn't a challenge Blizz wouldn't be able to handle, but clearly it would take a lot of time. And thats not even taking into account the fact that no matter how finely you balance it, people could (and with billions of build possibilities, probably will) find a way to still exploit followers to make builds with very few weaknesses, that are also lame because if your follower is down suddenly your significantly less powerful, and because you, the hero of the game, have to rely on some random guy you rescued.

Right, but that still brings up the problem of balancing the extra difficulty with allowing characters to survive a monster's attacks. The more players you have, the harder the monsters have to hit, to the point where in order to keep it challenging you have to make it so that a player in the group dies almost every time, or you can give monsters more hp, but that gets to the point where it just takes forever to kill a monster and it gets boring (unless you're all constantly hitting the same monster.)

Obviously that wouldn't be as substantial with a 5 player cap, but really we have no idea how the game is balanced, so we can only assume that Blizzard would have made it so that you could have one of each character class in a game if they could.

Hey! Don't be dissing liberal arts colleges! Thats where I am <_<

Well you could just do the quest to rescue them, and if thats not the end of the quest they could be a temporary follower for the remainder of the mission before going back to town. That would be my bet at least. And if they don't really participate in the quest, then they could just go back to town once you rescue them, or help them with whatever the specific quest is.

It'll probably be the same thing that happens when you do those quests in multiplayer. You'll probably still rescue the follower, and they'll say their part, but just go back to town afterwards.

Quote from Butcher2011

Hopefully now when you're in a 4 player group you'll have to stick together in order to survive (unless one of the players is above the other guys in levels and gear etc) and he insists in going to lower level areas

Well yea thats the idea. So its not like D2 where it would just be 4 (or in D2's case, 8) people doing their own thing. When the difficulty ramps up with more players, you'll need them to survive. Which also means that if they tried to balance it that well with more people, you'd probably get one shot, especially with the new health system. So not only does 4 players make it not too chaotic, but its also probably the best number in terms of balance, because you have to make it challenging for the whole group without making the monsters so strong that they just kill whoever they attack first.