DiabloFans

Fun? Only for those who wanted to screw it up for everyone else. If that's all the fun left in a game you might as well go do something productive.

Is that anything like a Chia pet?

Kicking and whining?

We know D3 isn't going change. I guess we all should have just fell in line; no independent thinking here.

Hey Cletus! We got us a free thinker here, get the cattle prod, we need to coral this one back into the bovine pen! YEEEE HAA!

Boy if that wasn't inspired by Jackson's LOTR Minas Tirith I don't what is.

Still nicely done.

Never got into the books, maybe it's my age or because it's hard to read anything that begins to compare to Tolkien's work. Still kind of cool to see them in a Borders, it reminds you Diablo is still out their somewhere. I'm certain he has possessed our government now, at least I'm waking up in the middle of night these days screaming something about "the east", it would be great to see mythic hero's march on Washington and restore order. LMAO!

The barbarians Whirlwind would be especially righteous in Congress, I really don’t care what side of the isle he starts on.

(Sorry for the double post, lost track of where I was at)

Creepsville agreed, my wife taught me years ago making demands is futile. Like I've said, I know there will be few if any changes to D3, all I can do is sit back, rant occasionally, OK frequently, and hope they do good a good job.

Synthaza exactly right, Fluffing up big numbers is always great when trying to go IPO, it’s also great when merging. That is exactly what Blizzard did I stand corrected they are public. Their merger was consummated just last month Symbol ATVI having just lost the D on the end of the ticker, and that would explain why Blizzard is pumping its numbers.

http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/activision-faq.html

Look clearly there are many, many out there not happy with the look and feel we can debate numbers until we are all blue in the face. You can’t deny though there has been backlash and to suggest it’s just a few people whining is no more verifiable than proving there were double entries on the petition. There is no right or wrong here, just peoples views and we’re entitled to them.

All I can tell you is I haven’t plunked down money on most of the dungeon themed games because IMO they look like my description above. Granted the flaming hammer and charged axes are better then the foo foo fluff magic of many games but its one step towards being less realistic. To me what makes fantasy games fun is they walk that fine line between realism and fantasy.

By itself the barbarian looks cool with the flaming hammer but when you go online and there are a thousand characters all magically glowing from some part of their body its looks utterly ridiculous. Hey look everyone has rare glowing items and freakish floating things revolving around them, ooh aah. In that setting it you might as well have Dee Dee dance across the screen singing with her pet unicorn.

Again I’ll say the game isn’t changing regardless of the director so I’m not sure what there is to defend or debate here. I think everyone trying to discredit my numbers here are mostly just those who don’t want that argument to gain any traction. Don’t worry it won’t, Blizzard made its bed and said so.

Its funny people are ready to believe Blizzards PR released 10 million online paying customers but question 53,000 signatures. It’s a private company and they don’t have to report anything, they can say anything they want. I helped start a .com in the 90’s and take it public. We embellished our subscriber numbers as much as possible (and yet be technically honest) so we could get investor money, it got us $40 million in investment dollars. Blizzard is trying to create excitement with their number, hey look we got 10 million, maybe that will make another 10 million join, that’s the point of that number.

Even if the petition numbers were flubbed I’ll bet you can find 100,000 real people to sign if one tried without any trouble. I know some here think the art is stylized and looks great, to me I see it falling (thankfully to a lesser degree) in the same direction of the overly polished polygon 3D characters that are on a load of games that made me put their boxes down and not buy them. DSII, WOW, NWN, EQ, and on and on. I made the mistake of getting DSII, I hated it, what a boring game.

The big problem with most of these games is the characters look too polished and frequently too sexy for the medieval setting they are in. OK, here I am in a dark medieval place, evil is covering the land peasants are getting racked in some dungeon by vile creatures and along comes the shiny 21st century sex kitten hero. Hey I’ll save your land, oh and check out my rack. Be amazed at my bubbly cotton candy magic I’ll thrash them with. FLMAO! Give me a break!

I prefer the necromancer myself but as long as the witch doctor has some cool stuff I can live with him. I still think there isn't anything quite as wicked as having an army of undead come to your command. I wish they would have toned down the flamboyant purple feather look. When I saw that I thought dear God that is artist formerly known as prince after he gets really really old. I'm sure though they will have other get ups for him.

I also didn't really care for the witch doctors critters, at least I didn't identify with them. If he's a witch doctor then he should be raising an army of zombies (and not just a wall of them as an attack) that follow you around all over and do your bidding, now that would be cool.

synthaza I think were talking about a bare minimum of 53,000 that signed the petition, that would be a good niche market. Hey if Blizzard wants to direct all 53,000 towards my company because they don't need it anymore I'll be most happy to service that business.

Would any of you snub 53,000 sales a year? I wouldn't. Let's see 53,000 x $25.00 (guestimating wholesale price) is a paltry $1,325,000. Yeah who needs that chump change.

I suck at convincing people, I'll go take a class or something.

Creepsville I'm not complaining about people who are happy with the game, I'm glad you like it. I do however see a number of the happy with D3 people who don’t seem like they can deal with those who are not. I just happened to be looking forward to one game for several years and was disappointed with what I seen so far and pointing out what I don’t like. In the end it's just a game and this board is just a way for me to pull my head out of code for a few minutes each day and wind down when I’m done.

Yes there is nothing quite like having your own army of darkness, bring on the death

Creepsville no that is called marketing 101, and Blizzard forgot it. I am more than qualified to make that statement but I’m not going to wave my flag here about that. You would be hard pressed to find a savvy entrepreneur who would disagree with the point I made. I expect Diablo will sell very well, too many have waited too long for it to come out and there are a load of WOW fans who will identify with the more cartoony characters; no doubt Blizzard won’t change much if anything at all for those like me, so you have nothing to worry about with D3.

What I do expect is if Diablo has too much of the 100 acre wood look and feel through out the game; boards will be buzzing with complaints for years to come. A void will be left for a darker game to emerge, I hope I’m wrong about D3 because I would like to enjoy it but at this point I’m thinking not. Those who think D3 is fine are just going to have to deal people who don’t. If D3 sucks, I will get a lot more work done and I guess that is a good thing.

Creepsville no one can accurately claim it’s a “vocal minority of complainers” anymore than they can claim it’s a majority. There has been no scientific poll taken, only a petition site which was prematurely closed and a counter petition site which got far fewer numbers. Accurate numbers are an assumption at this point. Also those trivializing 50,000 plus signatures on an unadvertised petition by contrasting it to millions of WOW subscribers is a disingenuous comparison as well.

There is no way to know how many people were aware of the petition or how many fans would bother signing either petition for or against. I helped start a .com from the ground up and know what “subscriber base means”. There are subscribers and then there are active paying subscribers, every company fudges those numbers in their favor as much as they can. Further Blizzard is a private company and does not have to release it’s earnings or numbers to anyone, they can tell the public whatever they like and we have no idea how profitable they are.

Jay Wilson is defending his project, of course he course he is going to say these things. I’ve worked with enough 3D animation applications to know they could have done more than his defense would have us believe, if it wasn’t important he wouldn’t have bothered taking the time to defend them nor would the fan disdain have hit the news. Blizzard doesn’t want to alienate it core fan base, no company would.

Yes Blizzard does make games for a niche of "fans”, it is the core niche of fans that buy the Diablo books, spend $300 on a statue, purchase Diablo when it was first released and then turn around and bought the battle chest, later. Since word of mouth is the still best form of advertizing, you don’t improve business by alienating your most loyal customers. They are the ones who will inspire people to buy D3 for the first time (maybe even get them into gaming) to those who would otherwise not pay attention to the game at all because of their excitement for the game.

Oh they got the message now, knowing exactly what the complaint is and what the fans want. If they had just done a little market research they wouldn't had any backlash at all. I think it's clear reading all the defense from Blizzard that Jay Wilson was likely the one who just pushed his agenda even taking the fan mockups to task. In his own words "There's no going back now," he said to MTV. "We're very happy with how the art style is. The art team's happy. The company's happy. We really like this art style, and we're not changing it."

I think its pretty clear he and others didn't even bother asking or wondering what the fans wanted. In their defense a lot of the art look good but there is a very specific look and feel that Diablo has held for the last two games and it got lost in the game play demo.