DiabloFans

I agree with you. It was easier to stick with games in the earlier days because there was less variety. If you look at PoE though, they get record numbers of players coming back every new league because they spice things up. It's not just a couple tweaks to balance and gear like D3, they add fresh mechanics, new abilities, sweeping balance changes and so on. It's a model that's been working extremely well for them and I think is the only way to keep people interested in an ARPG long term. It's a game they intend people to play "forever", as Chris Wilson stated.

BTW PoE was far more successful overall than D3 in terms of revenue. The game itself is free to play, but their financial model works better than a box sale price ever could.

I'm posting this here as well, since I'm hoping it gets some much needed attention (/ego)

As an avid ARPG lover I feel like a mark might be missed with the D4 release, and I'm really hoping it's not.

MMO vs ARPG - they are not the same

The main issue I see is the focus on longevity of a single character's playtime. With MMOs it makes sense, since you tend to play your "main" for countless hours, months, years, expansion after expansion. With ARPGs this is NEVER the case.

Your first character is the most exciting because it's all unknown. You learn the story, the gameplay, the systems, the UI, the settings, and so on. But there comes a point when you finish the story, leveling slows down or stops, upgrades are few and far between, and you've "done everything" the so-called end-game has to offer, likely countless times over. And it was glorius, but it's time to move on.

Whether there's a level cap or not, any additional power you may gain and experiences you may have will thin out or become repetetive. And that, my friends, is the real end game. What do you do when this happens? You make a new character, and experience that progression stack all over again but with fresh eyes, knowledge, leveling gear, and best of all - a completely new class or build.

Re-rolling - make it a core part of the design

I have yet to see anything that truly incorporates a solid re-rolling incentive as a core end-game system. It should be. The next character I make should gain some passive or even active bonus' from my previous characters, beyond some near-meaningless paragon-style power bump.

Each character I make should become part of my army. As I build that army I feel my account grow stronger and stronger. I can utilize that army in interesting ways to accomplish things that a single playthrough cannot. The bigger my army, the more difficult the objectives become.

Eventually my army will be able to take on the pinnacle of difficult content, at which point I can obtain the most difficult to obtain rewards.

Item Rarity - it should take a veeeery long time to obtain the best of the best

D2 nailed this. The balance between rarity and time-invested was spot on. Ensuring this is formulated in such a way to keep people chasing is critical to longevity. If I can make a fully (or near-fully) geared out character build in a few days, then the longevity is strictly tied to how many possible distinct character builds there are multiplied by the number of days it takes to make one.

If I've made all the character builds I'm interested in, but none of them are at max power level, then I can keep chasing items for my army to make it stronger and stronger.

Perfect items should be one in a million, especially dynamic items like rares, which should exceed the power of uniques/legendaries in distinctive ways, making them the true "uniques" that are sought after by the elite. Everybody has an SoJ, but who found the original (non-duped) Raven Spiral rare ring.

Respec vs Reroll - in pursuit of "the perfect build"

In the earlier days of D2 there was no respec. This meant a build at level 99 was set in stone. If you made even a minor mistake, too much STR for example, then making "the perfect build" meant re-rolling and re-leveling to obtain that extra 50 or 100 HP. And we did it.

With full respec capabilities, it means you only need to level a character class once. If you feel like playing a different build for that class, and you're bored of the old one, just respec. Easy right? Well sure, but the fun is capped early. The real fun, as much as people claim to deny this, is in leveling and growing in power. The feeling of unlocking that level 30 skill and throwing out your first Frozen Orb, feels... amazing. You slogged through crypts firing a single fireball at packs of monsters, dreaming of having that one ability to make you feel like a god.

PoE does this incredibly well. They throw a few respec points at you throughout the story, but never a full respec. In the late stages you can technically full-respec, but it has a notably high cost. Do you pay that cost, or simply make another for free and experience that growth and excitement one skill point at a time. Trust me, we re-roll, because that's the fun part. That's the end game.

Please give this some attention. If you want to understand why D2 did (and continues) to do so well, and why everyone flocked from D3 to PoE, it's not because people like running cows and maps over and over and over. It's because there's another build they want to try, and this time it's going to be perfect.