DiabloFans

Nov-Dec 2011 just because those are when my holidays start. Don't get me wrong, I'll skip school for a month straight to play D3 when it's released, but the failing grades will always be there, picking at me incessantly - ignoring my constant nagging to leave me the hell alone and to stop acting like my mother. So yeah, either they should release it right now, or a year from now. And it doesn't seem too likely they'll be shipping them out tomorrow...

or will they?... ok no, they won't

Rewards for detecting and reporting bots could be a good feature actually. But let's assume in D3 that there will be bots such as baal bots. Every player that joins these games will benefit from it in the sense that runs are completed very quickly and efficiently. Will the reward be better than the benefit of doing the run with the bot? If it is, wouldn't this reward be kind of too much which will infuriate others?

As for solo bots, you need to remember that there are always people on the other end of the computer that run the bots when they're not playing and then turn the bot off to play normally again when they're ready. This would make it very hard to track if someone is botting or if they're just idly doing solo runs for a few hours straight. Blizzard can't accuse anyone of botting when it could just be that they're a major computer nerd playing night and day or even two or more people taking shifts to play on the same account.

It really is a losing battle.

Quote from Tilt_17

What they could do is reserve a colour (I'm Canadian, all you Americans spell colour wrong)

Hear hear!

I reckon the best move they could make would be to let the victor have the loser's items. It would create such a rush for me and other players when the stakes are that high.
Losing the items forever is still high stakes, but when the winner doesn't really benefit then it isn't very exciting at all.

Quote from NeoPhythe

Quite straightforward question

Well yeah, until you put me off with this:

Quote from NeoPhythe

What will be the class you will roll as first.

So which is it? The most appealing class or the class I'm going to roll first? Because they aren't necessarily the same. I'm choosing the barbarian first because I can quite easily feel the progress I'm making in power with each level up and new items I acquire, but I find the witch doctor most appealing in terms of his spells.
So I'm going with the witch doctor till I get my answer.

Quote from Aever1

Well, with my old time favorite, the Paladin, gone (still don't understand the lack of a heavily armored class in D3) I voted Wizard.

What does the barbarian wear? A night gown?

I won't be happy until I can spam everyone's screen with my undead pets.

Quote from ErU

D3 pvp is not that different from what D2 has, its blood moor with walls and a little more organized(with the ranking and such), from the videos i can say it plays the same as D2.

Yes, of course. So I find it hard to comprehend why people are still gripping onto the D2 pvp system. Nostalgia can be the only reason...
Everyone had their fair share of running back to town after getting owned in a duel when they first started playing. After this they stopped running back because they realized gold isn't that important, and that they don't want to be frowned upon by the others.
This was very different in hardcore. In many situations it was acceptable to run to safety because they know the consequences. It's much easier to take the flame than to lose your character.
So all pvp had to offer in terms of rules in D2 was the word of each dueler.
I'm glad for the change. Now these rules are enforced and we have an organized system.

Wait, he was right? I think not!!!
He expected a demonhunter while we instead got a demon hunter.

Notice the space? Yeah that's right!

Quote from ErU

If you call a 20 second walk back to town ''walking a lenght'' then thats your problem.

Having someone spam their spells at the entrance and you standing there for a good minute, running to the way point and then having to run from cold plains back to town. Oh such a joy.

Quote from ErU

Again, i never said it was easy to organize team battles in D2, i really never cared about then,

As how many people felt, because team battles took way too much effort to establish. If the work was cut down to just a click of the button and then you can pass it on to the matchmacking system to do the rest, then a lot more would be up for it.

Quote from ErU

really, i did say that the matchmaking is a improvement, but needs to go ways from what blizzard currently has (aka: SC2)

What exactly is wrong with sc2 pvp?

Quote from ErU

it looks like the same system they have in SC2, on the higher tiers the game does take a while to match you up (about 2 minutes on average here), and most the time you end playing the same people over and over.

You're complaining about fighting the same people over and over when in d2 that's exactly what you did. As for the wait time, I don't think you'll have just one duel when you get matched up. If you take a look at the arena battles footage, they have points at the top of the screen which have so far gone up to 4-1 which suggests that you can have at least 5 battles before having to go back in the queue and what-not.
3 minutes waiting in line, or 3 minutes waiting outside the town, spamming spells at the entrance. It's all the same.
At least in the first option you can go off and do something else in the mean time.

Quote from ErU

Oh, and are you claiming that there will be any more traditional dueling? Link it.

I had to search for this because I wasn't even sure myself, and it seems like a few others here weren't either. Apparently they're getting rid of the hostile option altogether to avoid griefing.
Anyway, it's a welcome change in my opinion. It cuts off PK and moves the fighters over to PvP, and team PvP at that.

Quote from VladDracul

1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 were all very very easy to make and change in D2 PvP.

Obviously your opinion is strongly biased. What's with people being afraid of accepting new and better things?
"If it's not broken, don't fix it". Is this your motto?

Quote from VladDracul

And thirdly there are health globes in the arena which is really dumb cause it encourages running away and healing which shouldn't be allowed in an arena.

And fourthly, Diablo 2 had health pots and a safe zone - aka town a few feet away - which encouraged running away and healing which shouldn't be allowed.
There were 4 health globes, 1 for each person, if the guy wants to run away to heal then obviously the enemy will know where to find him.
And what about being low on health? Won't that encourage running away? Don't be stupid.

Quote from ErU

I only ever dueled in hell games, everyone was overleveled/overgeared at that point, about the entrance sitting, heres a secret, waypoint! Don't let it out tho, not many people know about it. And my memory may fail me, but didn't D2 had a lvl restriction system of some sort, to prevent lvl 99's from stomping newbs?

And I missed your point? lol obviously you're the one missing the point here. Sitting at the entrance spamming spells is just one example of why the dueling outside town wasn't organized, it was a bust. It doesn't matter if you could go to some lengths to get around it, the point is that you are forced to go to some lengths just to have a legitimate duel. The arena setting even allows for you not to run away, whether it be in town or taking the duel out deeper into the wilderness. Without maphack it was easy to lose track of where they went too.

I meant overleveled compared to you. If level 60's are battling it out, then that's definitely fair, but to have a level 60 go down on a 50 isn't. The arena matchmaking system won't allow for this imbalance in levels.

Quote from ErU

Why yes i did team battles, most of then were 2x6, 2x5, and a few times i had 1x7(some didn't end that well),

Right, thanks for sharing. Now how about answering my main question, rather than the rhetorical side-question?

Quote from Puttah

And tell me how quickly you managed to organize a legitimate 3v3 battle in D2. Wait, you DID do team battles in D2 pvp didn't you?

And thank you for supporting my point about how unnecessarily hard it was to organize team battles. 2v5,2v6, where are the fair and even duels?

Quote from ErU

anyway, you totally missed my point on this, in D2 if i want to duel i enter a a duel game and get right into action, no waiting line, in D3 i will have to wait a good 3 minutes to get it on? Every single time? Ops, thats a fail.

You're assuming you already know the wait time, oops thats fail.
You're claiming that there won't be any more traditional dueling games, oops thats fail.
Anymore?

The only valid reason I see as to why arena duels would be a bad thing is that Blizzard might start balancing PvP which would lead to imbalances in PvE as already mentioned in this thread. But they've already stated that Diablo is focused on PvE and the duels are a fun thing on the side, and already accept that there will be imbalances which the players need to accept.

Quote from Zakaz

Quote from Number1337

Edit: Cats > Dogs.

No. Show me a cat cuter than this:

... does the cat need to have been hit in the face with a shovel, too?

I originally wrote this article for the popular Australian games site, Games.on.net - Since a recent change has caused the original to become irretrievable, and since the problem seems to be getting worse, I thought I would post it here. I hope this gets some constructive conversation going around the problem.



Spam is one of those everyday occurrences in modern gaming, that most people are pretty much used to by now. No matter the game you’re playing, if it’s a persistent online world there will be someone trying to make a quick buck from you. The problem comes when you have a company who has an extraordinary amount of experience dealing with spammers, and yet do anything about it. And that, is what’s happening in Diablo III.

The Problem

It all started in Diablo II, twelve years ago. Item farmers got the idea to setup chat bots to promote their trades. Then came the gold and item sellers, who had built websites around the idea, and it snowballed from there. Despite the number of people complaining about this to Blizzard, their hands were tied - with only a skeleton staff and no regular money coming in from the game to fund development costs, nothing could be done.

It took them until a patch about two years ago to implement a rudimentary block system into the game, that to this day frequently wipes itself when you leave. Spam bots still run rampant in the game, and third party programs designed to maintain a blocklist would frequently cause Blizzard to ban your account, despite helping you maintain a quiet peaceful online experience.

And now Diablo III is upon us - and on the third day of its launch, the spamming began. It was a trickle at first, one or two bots that would post about once every 30 minutes, but quickly it got to the point where for every three lines of dialogue, chat bots would completely flood the window. Why is this happening? Well for one thing, Blizzard, bizarrely, has allowed guest accounts to chat.

That’s not all they did, however. For some reason, they haven’t even included the URL blocking feature from their other massive online game, World of Warcraft. They also still don’t have a report option for goldsellers, instead relying on the generic ‘Spam’ tag that most people abuse to report others they simply disagree with.

So how does Blizzard fix this? The answer is surprisingly simple.

The Solution

You might think an easy solution would be to simply stop guest accounts from using the chat service. While this would work, the solution would only be temporary at best. If a gold seller can make more money in the time it takes to get banned than the cost of the game itself, they’ll simply purchase keys over and over and over again.

It also would not be incorrect to assume that the Real Money Auction House will curb many of the sales that go on, and make gold selling less profitable... except that there will still be groups of uneducated masses who do not even know the RMAH exists, and will likely continue to provide a regular customer base for gold sellers. This needs to be fixed now, before it gets completely out of hand.

Step 1: Provide a report option specific to gold sellers, or advertisers, or whatever you want to call it. This is important! While a single person being an idiot and spamming random insults in general chat can be annoying, we can block him and know he won’t bother us anymore. We need a specific way to deal with the problem.

Step 2: Initiate a group reporting system. Say four different people who aren’t on each other’s friend lists (and therefore can be assumed to not be working together) report someone for gold selling. This triggers an automatic muting and flagging of the reported person. Leave them muted until a Blizzard rep can look it over. Make sure that their account is muted, and their IP as well if possible.

Since it’s a temporary mute, you’re unlikely to run across issues with other legitimate people using that IP, and if you do, it’s temporary for a reason.

Step 3: This is the big one. See those URL’s people are posting? Setup a server side filter that prevents those messages from being displayed. Don’t mute the people saying them, and don’t inform them that the message hasn’t gone through. Every time a bot makes it to Step 2, find the unique wording in his message, add it to the filter. Make sure anybody hitting that filter more than once in an hour period is immediately flagged.

This would help immensely, and pretty much make it financially impossible for gold selling bots to do business. A spam bot has put spaces in their website to fool the filter? Add it to the filter, and all of a sudden w w w. b u y m y g o l d . c o m will no longer work, and the people running the bot will be none the wiser. As far as the gold sellers will be aware, Diablo III must just not be a profitable market anymore, and they will move onto other games.

The reality is that Blizzard has had 12 years of experience with spammers, five games, and a whole host of expansion packs to figure this out somewhere in the development cycle. It is disappointing that spam problems still continue to plague their latest title, despite the advances in protecting against it that they’ve demonstrated in their other games. For the good of the community and the health of the game, Blizzard needs to address this sooner rather than later.

I will be pre-ordering the xpan as soon as it's announced tbh, I'm enjoying every one of my (so far) 200+ hours on this game, the only games i've played this much are online FPSs, MMOs, and Skyrim.

It sounds like he just got burnt out. It happens when you go so hard so fast.

It's called buyer's remorse. He realized how pathetic it was to buy an pixelated item for real money. Every time you look at the "thing", it screams failure at you. This is why he quit. He said it more than a few times.

People complaining about them changing things:

Why is your opinion on the matter more important than someone else's? IE - if you don't like gear swapping you don't have to do it.

Newsflash: MF swapping is incredibly effective, and even if it isn't enjoyable (for a large number of players), many feel compelled to do it because of its effectiveness.

Again, why is your enjoyment of the game more important than theirs? Pretty hilarious telling those players to go fly a kite because they don't like something, and then go into an uproar when something you don't like takes place. It's fun, isn't it?

Leave the hyperbole and outrage at home. Try some intelligent, calm, rational discussion on the topic and actually offer a solution without the "OMFG THIS GAME IS DEAD/DYING AND WE'RE BURNING THE CITY RWAAWRWARBLARGETYBLARG!!!!!" It's amazing how well it works.

She is actually pretty good at it, her highest level character is almost 50 (barbarian). This is her playing her Wizard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDpgO3iJk_k&feature=plcp

I think it's a shame some people are so sensitive that a post from a Blizzard Community Manager will get under their skin. They need to lay down the law. And they won't make a post that says "Guys, shut the fuck up" because that would actually be offensive. Blizzard houses one of the worst forum communities and the blues do a pretty good job of handling all the bullshit while also collecting feedback.

Grow some stones, Kormac.

hidden behind spoiler tags because i am a nice guy

Hey guys! As promised I am releasing the strategy I used to obtain the gear I now have. First use a gold find set and farm this cellar using my checkpoint method, then farm the gold, then buy your gear in the AH finding good deals by filtering by buyout price, or typing in a buyout price you can afford.

Here is the video! Enjoy!