DiabloFans

Imagine that, items that make your character immune to monster damage were overpowered and made the game trivial.

Yeah, when they showed off the "everything is now BoA" it pretty much confirmed their long term vision of the game; it's a console game you play, you beat, and you put away. There is nothing to do w/ any of this gear. There are no Raids, there is no PvP ladder, there isn't even a trading economy. At least when the RMAH was around, there was financial incentive to keep the game fresh, to add new content and to keep stringing people along. This, this is a game you trade in at Gamestop for Assassin's Creed IV. Except you can't do that on PC.

Regarding Trifecta.
You can't fix math. Exponentially compounding stats are a no-brainer. Small change in stat results in huge increase in damage? Small increase in any other damage stat makes the trifecta stat even better than it was before? Stop trying to beat math, and instead USE IT to make more and better items. That means killing or capping trifecta. That means making main stats scale linearly (additive) and not exponentially (multiplicative). Save percentage and exponential stuff for a very handful of exceptional items that are also limited in scope. Currently, the way the wording works, an item w/ "increases Skill damage by X%" isn't any better than an item w/ X INT/DEX/STR. Only the item w/ the main stat can be used for ANY SKILL IN ANY BUILD. Only a moron would choose a narrow stat over a general one. The only way to make it work is if the Skill damage stats so overpower main stat values, but that leads to even more and thornier problems, ones only exacerbated by a no-trade environment. Then you couldn't even USE a skill unless you built up a lot of gear specifically for that skill, kind of like Sacrifice on live today.

Quote from Zero(pS)

By the way, can't we all like agree that this is their ultimate stance in order to fight third party website trading (it's a CONSPIRACY!) and pretend there's nothing we can do to change it? This way we can kinda move forward with the argument and discussions, instead of being in this endless stalemate.

I don't know if that is true or not, but at least believing in that would make us move on, like we had to do with "online only DRM" or "unmoddable game" issues.

Of course this is the "nuclear option" against 3rd party trading sites. Just like online only was to combat piracy and hacked client-side items (that are infesting the console like a damn plague). You'll never get Blizzard to actually ADMIT this though. But they knew chopping off the AH would just bring d2jsp back unless they did something drastic. This is not as drastic as it could be (no trading anything whatsoever), but it's a hell of a lot more drastic than I figured they had the stomach for. They've been so wishy washy about this game, I never thought they'd have the guts. Too bad they don't have the guts to kill Magic Find.

That "Legendaries spam your clan chat" thing cannot go live. Are you kidding?

Adios. Now we'll just get bot spam, WUG games, and all the other stupidity in D2. They're going to have to eliminate ALL P2P trading across accounts; no drop trading, nothing. These morons had it right in WoW, and they borked it so stinking badly in D3. How did you go from one of the best systems to what they had?

They can't fix the items in a single patch, b/c they have to totally redo so many different things it would blow up the game. Expansions, however, are perfect for that kind of overhaul.

-Remove or hard-cap critical hit damage
-Change main stats from percentage increases to linear/additive increases

These two things speak the problem of geometric increases (percentage increases) and arithmetic increases (linear/additive increases). Geometric increases grow exponentially, and small changes in a stat lead to huge changes in damage. This means that the geometric stats are "mandatory" to a degree that the arithmetic stats are just pathetic in comparison. By switching most of your damage to more manageable, linear stats, then there is more flexibility in the stats and gear you can choose. Of course, this means they'd have to completely overhaul monster health pools...

-Switch critical chance and attack speed to ratings, like armor and resist

This is nice for lower levels. You can give them some pretty neat and powerful stats w/o "breaking" the lower levels or making upper gear obsolete. It also allows you to have something to grow on if they ever introduce more levels and skills. Guess what game and developer already learned this simple lesson? WoW and Blizzard. Why these idiots didn't learn from their own company's games is frustrating.

-Completely redo helm and weapon gems

Self-explanatory.

-Completely redo crafting

During early beta, the blacksmith recipes were pretty useful. You could pick a few stats here and there when crafting basic blues and some rares. When they decided to "streamline" it into simple gambling roulette, the smith turned into Gheed, only more useless, b/c you couldn't gamble on ilvl 63. The BoA recipes were a good first step, but still run into the problems of crit being way overpowering. They need to give the smith way more control over what stats are present on an item. The smith is a workaround from over-randomization, not another layer to it.

-Remove percentage life leech
-Remove or hard cap life-on hit

You're always trying to improve your DPS. Adding more survivability to DPS is a recipe for game-breaking face-rolling. Good for bots, boring for people. As earlier, percentage stats are dangerous; small changes lead to huge outcomes. Of course, losing this leads to major changes to armor, monster damage, and skills. Not something that's very "palatable" mid-expansion.

-Redo two handed weapons
-Redo shields

Right now, shield blocks are fixed. There is no way to increase the amount they block (there are a few % block chance mods out there, almost exclusively on shields themselves). The max ilvl 63 block amount is 4706 damage. That's it. Wow, that's pathetic. Also, two-handed weapons are still garbage. The one exception (other than Skorn) are bows/crossbows, b/c Hunters can use quivers. Maybe other two-handed weapons could use the quiver model? Especially Wizards/Doctors. It's a real shame, b/c caster staves look pretty cool.

-Bind on Equip Legendaries

Another WoW lesson that these morons selectively forgot. The myopia and naivete are profound. If they ever watched a D2 ladder, even w/o the bots/dupes, they would see what happens when you can freely swap gear around w/o any way of removing it from the game. A Shako flood of biblical proportions.

So yes, if they do all that in a single 1.09 patch, it'll be fixed. Somehow, I doubt that would go over very well w/o a full expansion.

Don't worry, you can just buy CTA and weapon switch, right?

"Dead Spacer No. 1: I guess the real problem is that I'm a gamer. And gamers are inherently conservative. We don't want to admit that, but I think it's true. Loving a video game can be such an intimate experience, you know? People who don't game have a hard time understanding that, I think. A great game feels like it's yours, which is why gamers fear change. Change by its nature endangers connection and intimacy, and we don't like that one bit. And here's the thing: We have this brand-new art form that's often crass, bizarre, and stupid in ways both great and troubling, and which is, for now, largely and indisputably subject to the commercial anxieties of a few large, risk-averse corporations. When a game that sells 15 million copies gets an annual sequel, we call out "Commercialism!" — as though this even makes sense when you're talking about a $90 million production budget. "But I paid my 60 bucks!" the gamer will say. "What about what I want?" And sure, 60 bucks is a lot of money. But a good game is going to give you … what? Ten hours of entertainment? Twenty? Maybe even 50? At the lowest imaginable ratio, you're still getting six dollars' worth of entertainment per hour. Try being a young, underemployed person who loves theater. Try paying upwards of 50 dollars per entertainment hour and see where that leaves you. Comparatively speaking, video games are a goddamn steal. It's like we don't even consider what drives video-game development. When some game we profess to love alters its formula the tiniest bit — and these are tiny alterations, mind you, because how much "innovation" is even possible in a game about chopping up monsters with industrial tools? — we wage our one-man guerrilla wars against it. Please realize I don't want to be this way. No one wants to be this way. But I know it's possible to love something so much you also wind up hating it. To be a fan of something is to demand of it things you have no right to demand, and when this thing you love feels so personal on the one hand yet is so obviously mass entertainment on the other … You know what? It's so unbelievably confusing sometimes."

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8936118/tom-bissell-reviews-dead-space-3-where-scientology-survival-horror-video-games-meet

Sums it up nicely (even though he's discussing Deadspace 3).

Quote from Zeyk23

I agree with most of their answers, with the one exception being the value of crafting. I don't understand why he thinks crafting becomes more valuable the better your gear is. If you have to pay a billion gold for an upgrade on the AH, you are also going to have to craft an insane number of items to make an upgrade. The reason those items are so expensive is because they're incredibly rare. I feel like either crafting is balanced against the AH costs or it isn't, and that's going to be a very difficult balance to reach as long as the cost of crafting is static compared to the fluctuating AH economy. Even if crafting is a better deal, that just means that AH prices will fall until it comes out on top again.

It provides a stable platform for AH prices. You have an X% chance of crafting a godly item at Y gold. Therefore, similar godly items on the AH can't really be much more than 100/X * Y gold (this is a gross simplification, not actual real math, and also ignores the very real problem of gold bots). Also, as mentioned in the QnA, they want people playing the game, not the AH. The goal is to get more and more great gear off the AH and into the game world, namely the blacksmith. I applaud their long range focus on this, but they had this in before the game shipped, and inexplicably did away w/ bound gear by launch. Whoever made that decision (Jay?) was incredibly short-sighted. There's a reason (okay, multiple reasons) D2 had to flush the economy down the toilet every ladder reset.

"Development Article soon ™" is code word for there is a delay we need to come forward with.

FML.

apparently nothing is delaying d3 release. it's magically happening with no explanation.