DiabloFans

Quote from Deadend

On the other hand, you will be able to make something out of items you find even if they aren't valueable for yourself, maybe because they belong to a class you don't enjoy. Even if you, like you say, don't need the money, you can use your e-balance to trade these items for something you want without having to rely on possibly completely unstable ingame currencies.

While that's true, it doesn't treat the real problem as I describe it.

The problem is, I know that at any time I can buy incredibly good gear from the RMAH. So, if I don't, I grind for my gear knowing full well that I am purposefully gimping myself, taking the path of highest resistance. That is completely contrary to the impulse which makes gear-based games fun. Rarity, time commitment, and skill are all required to feel rewarded by the drops you acquire.

The RMAH bypasses all of these things. So in the back of my mind, every moment I spend grinding content for rare drops will be done knowing that I'm just being stubborn and obtuse.. because what I really want is just a few clicks and around an hour's worth of day-job pay away.

The Gold-based auction house still works, so long as they can balance the currency, which isn't nearly as difficult as you imply it is. If it requires roughly the same amount of time to gain the gold necessary to purchase an item as it does to grind for that item to drop, then the system is working.

Quote from Vagelis4VP

...people need to remember that Blizzard in not a single entity... it is comprised of many different persons...
and usually in companies who are involved in delivering art outside to the people, it divides (generally) in 2 major groups... those who work for the art... and those who work for the money...
... those who work 1st for the art and in a lesser extent for the money are usually in the dev's department, and they deliever what we all play and love ...
and those who work 1st for the money, and less (if not at all, for the art) are in the "offices" and concern about sales, profits, and make the final desisions on the way that the company should move...
so, the end product/outcome, gives a feeling of love&hate to the people outside that recieve all of this...

That is a brilliant insight. +1

First of all, clearly this issue is not resolved for some people, which is why it keeps coming up. So to those who have, please don't bother asking "Are we still talking about this?", it's condescending and rude. If you're so over it, don't bother commenting on a thread you find beneath you in the first place.

My main issue is this: I personally believe the RMAH cheapens the reward of finding an extremely rare piece of gear. Why? Because I know I can find something comparable at any time on the RMAH. This means I'm consciously gimping myself by diligently grinding for gear (which is the game's primary source of replay value).

That profound feeling of accomplishment and reward in landing a sweet drop is only possible if the path of least resistance is extremely difficult and rare. Simply knowing that I can insta-godmode myself by forking up some cash cheapens the game for me. Not to be a class warrior, but maybe it bothers me more because I know I have enough disposable income to bypass the gameplay entirely.

Quote from jaclashflash

Quote from SFJake

Quote from jaclashflash

Quote from Scuravolpe

2. The moon physics are way over the top. Tone it the hell down. I'm fine with hitting a zombie so hard it goes flying, but it should obey physics while it does so.

You are ok with hitting the zombie so hard he goes flying off...but not ok with what? him falling back down?

Obviously he means that even if something hits something hard enough for it to be sent flying, it should fall faster, have a normal mass and not just be "floaty floaty" and fall at 1 meter per minute.

Watch this video,

At 11:06 you can see that zombie went up and over a ~10 m tree, based on approximation of our ~6ft hero, in ~3 seconds.


a=Voy^2/(2*h)
t/2=Voy/a

So, 8*h/t^2=a

Thus,
8*10/(3^2) = a = 8.9 m/s^2 ~ equal to EARTH(Especially if you consider drag)

In fact, to get the moons gravity of 1.624 m/s^2 the tree would need to be,
8*h/(3^2) = 1.624 => h = 1.827 meters tall, which is likely SHORTER than out hero.

Sir Isaac Newton just said PWNED!!!

BAHAHAHAHA dude amazing post +1, freaking love it.

Bad news is, I guess you didn't hear... Newton was wrong. BUT I'LL ALLOW IT because we're assuming our fearless hero and enemies are not traveling near the speed of light.

Quote from snowhammer

I don't think its quite fair to say compare D3's beta to Battlefield 3's beta. One is open and one is closed.

Yeah I agree that wouldn't be fair.. That's not exactly what I was trying to do, but a point-to-point comparison is kind of inevitable I suppose.

Quote from snowhammer

To say "Blizzard's PR should be like this!" and point to a Beta that is structred tottally differently (a competitive, online shooted as aposed to a coopertive RPG) just doesn't work IMHO.

Another good point. I'm not really saying Blizzard should be any particular way, and especially not specifically like any one company. I just think some elements of Blizzard PR are not working, and I wanted to find out what they can do better by comparing them to specific communications by other companies.

Quote from snowhammer

Do I wish they would tell me when waves of invites are going to REALLY start going out? Yes. But if they do tell us "this Friday at 4pm" and then nothing happened they would have to explain what went wrong.

Exactly, they purposefully avoid accountability to their own customers.. which in itself is ok.. but they way they portray that idea to the community (in my opinion) comes off as arrogant and obtuse.

This is where Blizzard sets themselves ahead in quality, but behind in PR. Let's think it though, though. Is their philosophy working?

The idea is, "Hey, if we don't tell them a release date for X, they won't get disappointed and grill us!" Thing is, it doesn't work like that! The community at large still gets really angry when Blizzard takes a long time, and they get super-pissed when *perceived* delays happen (such as DH resource re-write, rune re-writes, etc). They don't tell us it's a delay, but we assume it is.. Because SOMETHING is making this take a long time, and we don't have any useful info as to why that is.

Blizzard LETS US ASSUME THE WORST.. and often, we humans tend to do that.

The negative response is almost exacerbated by the fact that we have NO idea what time impact anything is going to have, because Blizzard, in trying to "save us from the disappointment of a missed deadline" is, in fact, letting us assume the worst.

It's not that we can't handle delays. What we can't handle is being manipulated and mis-directed, which is the only tool to use when hiding things like dates from your customers.

I can't question their game quality, it's obviously top-rate. But since they refuse to talk straight with their loyal customers, I can't have much good to say about their PR.

Quote from Zero(pS)

Are you positive you wanna bring up Valve to a PR debate? Like, really? It's one of the companies with the most amount of delays and problems in PRs to date.

[...]

But I wouldn't at all put those other companies in a pedestal and pretend they're much better. Those a far from good examples of great PR to me.

Although I agree with everything you said in your post, I think you're misunderstanding the point of this thread.

All I'd like to do is provide shining examples of good communication and PR. I'm actually trying to remove the particular quotes from their context, because as you fairly point out, no company is perfect. But if we compile a big list of "wins" and use our imagination to interpolate, we can get a really clear picture of ideal PR and fan communication.

Although there may be no company that does a satisfactory job in the eyes of the hungry gamer, if we set our own expectations as a community based on evidence, everyone wins.

Gaming companies deserve respect for the daunting task of not only developing complex products, but managing a particularly bitchy customer base. The way we can best help gaming companies help us is to communicate our expectations clearly, with more evidence and less emotion.

I've been pretty vocal about two things. One, my love for Blizzard games. Two, my distaste for the way Blizzard manages their community and PR. Though in some cases people act really spoiled, there's a simple credo I follow in my work when dealing with customers:

If they are always complaining, you're either setting the right expectations and not meeting them, or you're not setting the right expectations.

I just saw this post on the dota site. I was blown away not only by how responsive they are to their fan base, but how excellent their wording is.. just makes you feel good, like they are making this game to please YOU, and not themselves.

If you find any examples of great PR, post them here!

Source: http://blog.dota2.com/

We’ve been a bit quiet lately. As always, we learn a lot whenever we put something out and get feedback from you all. Showing Dota 2 to the world at The International gave us a lot of feedback to chew through, and the many recent forum threads talking about the information leaking out of the beta has added to the pile. After a bunch of thinking, we’ve decided to change our plans a little.

Our original plan was to spend the next year or so in beta, adding new features and slowly growing the number of heroes until we reached a level of parity with Dota 1, at which point we’d release Dota 2 to the world. But the feedback we’re seeing everywhere is that people just want to play it, even though there’s still a ton of heroes yet to be implemented. We’ve also seen that the folks who are already in the beta are chomping at the bit to show everyone else some of the fun games they’ve had. So we decided our original plan was dumb.

Welcome to the new plan: We’re going to take the current version of Dota 2, which has The International set of heroes, and get it out there as fast as we can. We’ve still got some work to do in a couple of areas, so we’ll be keeping it invite-only for a (hopefully short) period of time. But there’ll be no restrictions on what players can do with it – they can release screenshots, make movies, shoutcast matches, write guides, publicly make fun of our HUD, or anything else their hearts desire. While they do that, we’ll be shipping regular updates with more heroes, new features we’ve been working on, and improvements on the existing content as we get more and more feedback.

What does this mean for you? It means it’s even more important that you get on the list that we’ll be inviting from. If you’re talented, you could take a shot at winning an invite in the GosuGamers competition or the Playdota contest. Once you’ve got your hands on the game, feel free to talk about it however you’d like – we’re excited to see what you’ll produce.

In the meantime, we’re going to be ratcheting this blog up a little too, so you can expect some more regular posting from us.

Edit 1: Here's how you explicitly and clearly communicate about a beta:
http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield3/1/beta

Quote from Rez

Blizzard is one of the FEW companys still out there that actually care about the quality they put out...Look at half the MMO's that come out these days.

Making quality products is NOT the only thing required of a great company. Blizz makes the best games in the biz, everyone in the WORLD knows that. However, Blizzard continues to be HORRID at marketing, PR, community management, and fan-base interlock.

Why is it the beta announcement didn't even make a blip at n4g.com? Why is there so much universal outrage when Blizzard botches their announcements? Put simply, they don't treat their customers well. But when your customer base is mainly young, socially inept males, who have no viable recourse for being repeatedly bitch-slapped by the Aspberger's syndrome kid that is Blizzard's HR/PR/Marketing department, they can get away with it. Barely.

Blizzcon? Yeah great, I'm just STOKED TO THE FING GILLS FOR THAT ONE. So lemme get this straight.. I have to pay craptons of money for a ticket and fly to California once a year just to suck on some informational table-scraps that can be gleaned from the forums? They don't even say anything at Blizzcon, they use the same politico say-nothing pablum as Bashiok and the rest of the blue forum trolls, with the only added benefit apparently being able to smell Jay Wilson's musk while gazing creepily at Mike Morhaime's unfortunate visage.

Blizzcon can suck it.

I'm grumpy.

I'm fairly convinced Blizzard has Aspberger's.

Definition (from medterms.com):

An autistic disorder most notable for the often great discrepancy between the intellectual and social abilities of those who have it.

Asperger syndrome is a pervasive developmental disorder that is characterized by an inability to understand how to interact socially. Typical features of the syndrome also may include [..] social impairment with extreme egocentricity, limited interests and unusual preoccupations, repetitive routines or rituals <aka iteration>, speech and language peculiarities, and non-verbal communication problems.

Blizzard has really shown their cards here, in trying so hard to hide their cards.

The truth is, they are doing MAJOR re-writes, evidence keeps trickling out. A ton of feature functionality isn't even in the game yet, including but certainly not limited to:

-Runes: getting a re-write, being iterated
-Demon Hunter: skills and resources (class is clearly broken)
-Items: most of the item affixes/suffixes posted are actually placeholders, so says Bashiok, and the real aff/suff are not yet implemented).
-battle.net clearly unstable (many crashes, has been down for a looong time)
-skills and damage scaling

The cornerstone of Blizzard's development model is Agile/Scrum style iteration. But the OP asks a great question: "How much is too much iteration?"

I've been trained in Agile/Scrum, and literally THE BIGGEST caveat they teach you to control and manage is exactly that: too much iteration . Blizzard has this dream-list of features that they CHANGE CONSTANTLY, coupled with a pie-in-the-sky vision of "quality" that forces them into infinite "no-go" iteration cycles.

But hey, that's their prerogative. They DO produce amazing games, no question. But as I always say, Blizzard needs to get IMMENSELY better at managing their public image, and their loyal fan base.

Why you ask? We'll just buy their games no matter what?

Here's why: The SECOND Blizzard releases a sub-par game, they will be absolutely slammed. I mean let's be honest guys.. Blizzard puts their fans through hell. Their PR approach is boarder-line insane: Have daily interaction through these proxy-users (Basiok, etc) whose job is to literally keep loyal fans engaged but woefully un-informed. This approach breeds SO much resentment. There's a serious psychological explanation for how people react to Blizzard PR, and it's very similar to how a human reacts when a potential love interest plays hard-to-get. They remain attractive by being both secretive AND actively engaged. This is why seemingly normal people react so strongly every time Blizzard pulls a number like this.

I doubt any of this is on purpose. It's becoming more and more clear to me that behind those big blue doors, there is a lot of confusion.

My personal feelings on the matter? Custom mods like crushing blow ended up being a single, must-have, build maker/breaker. Yes, they were bad-ass, but to the point of being grossly imbalanced.

On the surface, omitting such stats seems to cheapen legendaries. But in my opinion, it will prevent dumbed-down min-maxing, which results in the inevitable domination of a few, OP cookie-cutter builds.

Oddly enough, we keep seeing this interesting trend: The less "unique" any given mechanic is, the more potential there is for unique builds... because no one thing overpowers build philosophy enough to become a must-have.

I like it.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people will find this to be anti-climatic. I know I did. I didn't mind other moves Blizzard has done recently, but this leaves a sour taste in my mouth for some reason. Blizzard could have simply taken bigger cuts and some some cuts for Paypal as well, but they are going down another path.

It's just another way for Blizzard to make money while trying to restrict players from cashing-out. They want to keep your money as opposed to giving you complete freedom with the currency. It's also a clever way to get you to spend on WoW time.

If the Diablo economy gets stale at some point, this feature will end up becoming stale as well. Blizzard is just trying to play catch up, because they failed to make Batle.net 2 into something you would actually pay for. Can't say I blame them, but eh.

One upside is that Blizzard will finally be making some of the money for themselves that they have lost to 3rd party sellers in the past. Gold farmers and item websites will finally stop making the money they never deserved in the first place.

If only they put this much energy and excitement into new IP...

Quote from Kodachii

This is your all's reaction when the hype builds up to be new wallpapers >;] Scary! jokes

^

Quote from Dolaiim

Disclaimer: I neither endorse nor deny the release date estimate of April 5th, 2012. However, if the game is actually released on April 5th, get ready for the biggest shit-storm of I-told-you-so's in the history of human language.

Dolaiim - LOL!

I used that phrase earlier today when talking to my Boss about an issue at our studio: "When your idea doesn't work - get ready for the biggest shit storm of 'I-told-you-so' in the history of human language!"

She told me to take the rest of the day off and pull my head out of my ass.

Quote from FallenBurgasFan

who cares its still released 2012..

Who said it was being released in 2012? Oh right, the same people that said it would be released in late 2011...Blizzard. HaHA expect the game in 2013 at best! they haven't even begun to reiterate the in-game dyes yet, it could take a while.

List of stuff they need to reiterate:
The height of the characters
The D3 boxart
the font of all typed writing
the voice of Cain
The voice of Diablo
All of hardcore mode
The number of trees in each act (cant have too much clutter!)
The RMAH (maybe Amazon interested now)
The amount of gold dropped when you kill Azmodan
The voice of Jay Wilson (sorry spoiler, hes the final boss)
....and the list goes on and on.....

Quote from DiabloSin

There's also one other thing, after what they just tweeted, it would be a major let down if they don't give us the release date at the spike VGA. That tweet is intended to build hype.

Are you trying to say that Blizzard is above over-hyping something only just to disappoint with the actual announcement?

You must be new to this.....

The current situation is not acceptable. As it is, Magic Find is the definition of selfishness. By sacrificing damage for magic find you penalize your team's killing speed/item drop rate in favor of increasing your own item drop rate. The most ideal situation is to sacrifice as much damage as possible for magic find, and to have party members who sacrifice as little damage as possible for magic find. It's disturbingly similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Quote from Doez

I really don't understand people's gripe about the RMAH.

Suppose I get the Uber Axe of Awesomeness, perfect for my Barb, and valued at 30 dollars on the RMAH. Without the RMAH, I wouldn't even think about selling it (why would I want the gold if I already have a perfect weapon?). But now with the addition of the RMAH, if I don't sell it but use it, as I really want to, there's always gonna be this bug in my head that says "WTF are you doing running around with $30? Sell that shit, it's $30 for some stupid virtual advantage!" That's no fun.

Quote from Chewzilla

Wall of fire argument = stupid, fire isn't solid, zombies are.

Damn, beat me to it.

D3maniac, throughout this thread, you've consistently argued each and every point with "lol, you're retarded, I can't believe I'm arguing with these kids, lol so stupid" while rarely addressing any actual arguments made against your point. We're over 170 posts now and you're still the only person who's called another poster a retarded child. Do you think that lends credence to your argument? If you want anyone to take your opinion seriously, try respecting theirs first. No one has a problem with the fact that you have your own opinion. We all think it's wrong and we're trying to present our opinions so that you can see why we disagree with yours, but no one has said you're stupid for having a differing opinion. You're still the only person who has resorted to name-calling. Think about it.

Quote from d3maniac2012

WD skills for surviving WITHOUT pets, yes these can be runed to make them better or have less of a cool down but not so much better to make them worth not having zombie dogs or gargantuan. not even close. pets are 10x > then these. but pets used in CONJUNCTION with these makes him super awesome.

1. mass confusion (1 min CD)
2. horrify (20 sec CD)
3. spirit walk (15 second CD)
4. grasp of the dead (8 second CD)
5. Hex (10 second CD)
6 haunt with crimson rune 45% dmg returned
7. firebats with golden rune for 20% dmg returned, but using this skill up close to hit makes u super vulnerable without pets and you will die in inferno/hell

No love for Wall of Zombies, the one skill that literally and directly prevents enemies from getting close to you? Nothing we've seen indicates that the wall can be attacked (so it's guaranteed to be up for 5 seconds), it has no cooldown, and enemies can't pass through it. Did I mention you can rune it to slow enemies or to double its width? Couple it with Grasp of the Dead and enemies will be sitting ducks ready for you to spam your damaging skills.

I agree that his survival passives are somewhat lacking, but I think he has way better Life restoration capabilities through Runes than any other class (Alabaster Grasp/Spirit Walk, Crimson Haunt/Spirit Barrage/Soul Harvest, Golden Hex/Firebats, etc.).

Don't forget also that most of his CC spells are - or can be runed to be - damaging spells as well. Overall, I think that playing without pets will be somewhat of a hindrance, but it doesn't seem as bad as you're making it out to be.