Honestly, you can't expect a fresh new character at 70 to do Torment 1. Just because you were able to do torment 1 at 60 does not mean you are geared for it at 70. For a level 70 character, your gear has now become bad and is outclassed by what level 70 characters can have. Even by level 60 standards, your gear was far from top-class. You will need to re-gear to be able to do Torment again. I'd suggest farming Normal difficulty for gear, as there is no reason to do a harder difficulty until you can jump to Torment I.
You're changing the concept of value here to obfuscate the point.
When I use the word value, I am referring to economic value, not personal value. The point I was making many, many posts ago were all referring to economic value, not personal value. The topic was in-game gold. A person can own a picture of a long lost loved-one, but unless that person was famous in some way, it likely has no economical valuable at all. This is not the value I'm talking about, and that should be obvious I think but is going over everyone's head it seems.
I tire of these conversations though. It's not like anything I post matters anyhow, so I don't see the point.
That's how forums work when you have to debate things with many other people instead of mainly agreeing with one more.
And is also the reason almost no streamers visit or write in forums. Sad.
It's kind of hard to have a debate when people are changing terms/definitions to prove their case, or are trying ignore the facts the reality to make their case correct when it it's actually not correct. It has nothing to do with agreeing with one person in a youtube video.
And besides, I don't think people have to worry about that anymore either.
No, the reality is that they are inter-related. Even in D2, you had to constantly compare your items with d2jsp fg for example because otherwise you could lose wealth very quickly in similar ways. That's just the way it is. Everything has some economic value.
Losing your wealth?
Man, the only value items have are the benefits they give my character when equipped. And that doesn't go away, even if you don't play for 6 months and then come back. You'll still have the same items, they have the same stats, you can farm the exact same content with them (unless Blizz tweaks the difficulty with patches, of course).
All else is just going too far.
EDIT: good point on the durability. Dying is costing me thousands!!
You're changing the concept of value here to obfuscate the point.
When I use the word value, I am referring to economic value, not personal value. The point I was making many, many posts ago were all referring to economic value, not personal value. The topic was in-game gold. A person can own a picture of a long lost loved-one, but unless that person was famous in some way, it likely has no economical valuable at all. This is not the value I'm talking about, and that should be obvious I think but is going over everyone's head it seems.
I tire of these conversations though. It's not like anything I post matters anyhow, so I don't see the point.
I give up. You're basically saying my argument is flawed because you personally choose not to give value to certain things in the game, while I am simply using the facts of reality.
Perhaps if I just didn't speak during the shows, they would half as long and all of the points that you disagree with would not be put into the shows, then you guys would certainly have a lot less to complain about.
No, the reality is that they are inter-related. Even in D2, you had to constantly compare your items with d2jsp fg for example because otherwise you could lose wealth very quickly in similar ways. That's just the way it is. Everything has some economic value.
Nor is it really Blizzards problem that you decide put some dollar value unto your in-game gold.
Man, I couldn't agree more. This whole "in-game gold = real money" is getting way out of hand.
No individual simply "decides" to put a value on in-game gold. It has a value.
Do you decide that your house has no value? Your car? Your computer? It has a value. If it didn't, you wouldn't have worked to obtain them in the first place.
In-game gold has a value. It is basically a conversion of time/effort. It is not very valuable - especially these days as you need to transfer billions of in-game gold to get anything worth-while - but it does have economic value nonetheless.
Ignoring this fact won't make the value of that in-game gold go away.
In my humble opinion, the fees to level the blacksmith is also robbery if you're not doing the whole self-found thing, but that's another topic altogether.
I wouldn't want to discourage flipping on any items. I see no reason to favour one group of players over another by doing this. We don't want any economic controls at all.
They have an AUCTION house which is modelled after REAL WORLD AUCTION HOUSES which typically have FEES (sometimes %ages on the sale, sometimes flat fees, sometimes both).
It is not an "economic control." It's a goddamned fee for using the service. If you don't want to use the service then feel free to use the chat channels which have no fees associated. You are paying for the convenience of listing your items and then moving on and not having to spend hours in chat trying to sell them. It's not some governmental scheme to dick you out of your money. Get a grip.
I don't have a problem with a $1 fee on the RMAH, but it amounts to a $75 tax on a 2 billlion gold item - which is 30% of what you could make on the real money AH.
If you're going to have an AH in the game and not have any systems to control item saturation and gold inflation, then I don't understand why you want to also have systems to encourage not using the AH in addition to all of the other economic problems this game has.
$75 is not worth using it as a service fee. That's insane. That's 75x the auction fee on the RMAH. That's more than the cost of the damn game itself, even at launch! That's also 1-2 weeks worth of gold pick ups if you were constantly farming this game every day.
I'm sorry you don't see a problem with this, but using an electric service to help you sell/transfer a digital item is not worth $75. People can eat for an entire week for that amount.
And the difference with a real auction house is that there is no people to pay to run the auction, no security guards that need to be hired and no building to rent to host the auction. If you want to account for the fact that someone had to build the software, I thought that is what the 10+ million sales @ 59.99 was supposed to be for!
Also unlike the real world, there isn't different auction houses competing against one another, so there's no way to drive the fees down. It is whatever Blizzard says it is. It's a monopoly, just like government. In Diablo 3, the internal government and blizzard are one in the same. It's nothing like the real world at all. Of course, all the 'black markets' have fees nowhere near these amounts, which says a lot.
^ flipping may happen in real life, but when it does, it happens with taxes!
The best example I can think of is predatory scalping sites. They will buy large quantity of tickets (paying sales tax) and then resell them to consumers for much higher prices (who also pay sales tax on them again). Beyond the fact that this happens in real life, there MUST be a gold sink in this game because otherwise gold is infinite and infinitely decreasing Real Value. Unless you can think of a better way to do this, don't talk about removing the AH tax, because you're just shooting yourself in the foot in the end
Just because the government taxes people for economic production doesn't make it right for blizzard to do the same. Taxing production in the real world is also counter-productive (and I say immoral, since no government has the right to steal from the fruits of your labour) as well.
On Bind on Equip:
The main reason I don't want to see bind-on-equip is simple, I like being able to hand off items after I use them. It makes it easier to upgrade knowing your old stuff isnt completely usless now.
It's not useless if your character needed that item, and it could still be re-purposed into crafting materials after it's no longer useful. Of course, this assumes a better crafting system - and I'd highly encourage you to listen to our crafting episode to understand what I mean here. It's too much to explain - I won't do it.
While binding does introduce some drawbacks, they are nowhere near as bad. You have to pick - do you want the ease of sharing items, or do you want the economy to be destroyed? Take your pick. I choose the former. No choice is perfect, but one is better than the other.
I actually agree with you to an extent, but only on the high dollar items.
For me, the wasted/stolen effort is wasted/stolen effort. It makes very little difference what the amount is. The game should be consistent in this matter.
I wouldnt mind just seeing a cap on it, like you said flipping isnt a bad thing, but I would still like to discourage people from flipping mid and low lever gear, that could still be annoying for 2 reasons: it encourages playing the AH to gear, and gives a benefit to players with tons of time to scan the AH.
I wouldn't want to discourage flipping on any items. I see no reason to favour one group of players over another by doing this. We don't want any economic controls at all.
yesterday, moldran and other two top elites euro players were doing a competition - 12 hrs marathon finding legendary. Whoever finds the most legendaries within 12hrs wins and claims all the legendaries the other find. Diablo 3 hits 10k viewers on twitch which was surprisingly good for a 6 month old game.
If you were watching the streams for just a bit, moldran was farming on mp5 while the other two farm on mp10. Closing toward the hours, the monk invis won the competition with 45 legendaries found. Moldran came in behind with just one short - 44 legendaries. The monk was farming mp10 and going through the runs a lot slower than moldran did, yet he had found the most legendaries. The 3rd player, avoidlol, a wizard, only found 34 legendaries on mp10 within 12hrs.
Therefore, it is a myth that farming higher mp gives you more legendaries, but it is also wrong to say farming for legendaries at lower mp is better because you're going through more packs. If you can go through mp10 at a reasonable pace, then by all mean go for it cuz at least you see alot more rares and golds in the process comparing to lower mp.
In the end, it all depends on RNG.
I disagree. This is just a small sample that depends on the particular RNG at the time, but in general, it doesn't depend on the RNG - there is going to be an objective choice based on your build, gear, run speed per MP level, etc.
Thanks for the list. Only partially agree on some of these. For example, BoE is part of WoW, not Diablo, please don't.
We have very good reasons to promote bind-on-equip, and we specifically talk about the relationship of this to WoW and why we still support it in Episode 6 and 7 (the later being the best case for it).
Ultimately, blizzard wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They want an AH for efficient item trading without having any of the item destruction/binding systems that would typically go along with it.
Just because other Diablo games didn't bind in the past does not mean newer Diablo games with auction houses should act in the same way. The existence of AH changes everything. The lack of item destruction/binding has destroyed the economy. Now everything you find in the game is worth nothing.
The same thing even happened in D2. If you were participating on d2jsp, it was *very* apparent that items lost tremendous value due to the lack of binding, including people's beloved rune-based currency. It wasn't just dupes - all items tanked. This made farming less rewarding as the ladder season went on, which is a bad thing for a game without ladders especially - i.e. Diablo 3.
Also, about the 15% tax system, this is absolutely necessary economy-wise to prevent extreme AH flipping (you need at least 20% benefit from flipping in order to make money).
There's nothing wrong with flipping though. In real markets, flipping signals to the economy the value of items. If people are willing to pay more for an item, that economy now knows the item was undervalued. It helps people value items to their true values in the future.
Taxing production is universally a bad thing. Why do you want to punish the person who spend 1500 hours farming that 2 billion gold item? That doesn't make any sense to me. Sometimes these items sell for such high values, the tax is equivalent to hundreds of hours of farming - that's a ton of stolen/wasted effort.
On top of this, the 15% tax encourages transactions to be held outside of the AH, and as gold continues to inflate, more and more transactions will occur outside of the AH. Is that the behavior we want to see in the game? Do we want to see the AH relegated to low and mid-tier items only? This will eventually happen, and is happening now. If don't want this to happen, we have to realize the AH tax is encouraging this behavior. It is an unseen consequence to this game mechanic.
Your very first and last points are two things that annoy me. 24% MS default? Dear god, did you ever play Diablo 1? Default MS in D1 felt like 20% of that in D3.
Sometimes the older games had better mechanics, and sometimes they had worse mechanics. Newer ARPGs have much faster base run speeds. If you play Torchlight 2 or Marvel Heroes, you'll realize that characters move much faster, and this really makes the game more enjoyable. It lets players experience more in limited time frames.
Ultimately what it comes down to is the game designer being respectful of the player's time. Making them walk/run very slowly is just wasting their time. In the past, movement speed might have had an impact on mechanics, but kiting builds are a thing of the past, and besides, there are ways to rebalance those encounters to take into account the movement speed boost.
And on top of this, I would rebalance the movement speed buffs to bring everything closer together, so we wouldn't see DH's vaulting around faster than they are now for example. Same with Wrath of the Berserker. Again, this is one of those things that goes unsaid by just giving a cole's notes version of our show
---
As an aside, I do encourage people to watch/listen to the shows. We put in a lot of time to make the shows, and to repeat ourselves means we spend less time making new shows and doing other things
- increase base movement speed to what 24% is now.
- ability to level up abilities/skills (yeah right)
- give a reason to group with players (more loot, more mf, more mob density, etc.)
- add more randomness (but take out stupid randomness)
- increase mob density in act 1/2. Give us reason to go to act 4
- fix the broken wizard class
The Top 10 list
10) give us a pvp system where we define the rules, rewards. Stop wasting 7+ months trying to design the perfect pvp system. let us just pvp and we'll build a system that comes out of it organically. Make use of ptr for pvp.
9) improve drop rates OR stop creating garbage items for garbage sake (i.e. tighten up properties, etc.)
8) cut the length of the journey to paragon 100 by 1/2 or 2/3. Or change how magic find works. And some other things we said.
7) add genuine gold sinks to the game (enchantments, socketing, buffs, etc.). Remove 15% tax bull****.
6) add more game modes - ladders, classic mode, etc.
5) improve itemization - have 15-30 legendaries per item slot that are designed around builds, uses for white items, magic items, more socketables like 20 different gems and random jewels, create healthy ecosystem of gems and depower emeralds.
4) add a crafting system that allows players to create items that don't drop and also incentivizes the destruction of items
3) add bind on equip
2) gives us something to do other than farming
1) blizzard needs to listen, interact and be honest with the community
Also, to our defense, I had a version of this top list on the official forums several days ago before we did the show - probably before it appeared on these forums as well.
As for improving things that don't work - I thought that was what the PTR was for...
Thanks for the list. Only partially agree on some of these. For example, BoE is part of WoW, not Diablo, please don't. There was also a blue post about it after it got removed from the beta; salvaging was meant as a function to take items out of the game, but this requires a working crafting system (I agree on that point).
Also, about the 15% tax system, this is absolutely necessary economy-wise to prevent extreme AH flipping (you need at least 20% benefit from flipping in order to make money).
Your very first and last points are two things that annoy me. 24% MS default? Dear god, did you ever play Diablo 1? Default MS in D1 felt like 20% of that in D3. This is similar to the "give us 5 pickup radius by default", "give me pew pew by default". Hell no. If you want to be faster, get the gear. There are people and builds that work fine with 0% MS on gear in D3 (and that are still fast enough). And about the last point: the typical Blizzard bashing topic again. Blizzard listens more, interacts more, and is more honest with the community than most other (if not all other) game companies. They don't meet people's expectations, but that's just because some people feel like Blizzard's dying as soon as they don't have a weekly email from Jay Wilson in their inbox, personally asking everyone "how are you doing, what's on your mind this week?"
This is why I think its important to watch the shows. The reasons to support the points are in our shows already :/ I was a bit hesistant to list them for this reason :/
- increase base movement speed to what 24% is now.
- ability to level up abilities/skills (yeah right)
- give a reason to group with players (more loot, more mf, more mob density, etc.)
- add more randomness (but take out stupid randomness)
- increase mob density in act 1/2. Give us reason to go to act 4
- fix the broken wizard class
The Top 10 list
10) give us a pvp system where we define the rules, rewards. Stop wasting 7+ months trying to design the perfect pvp system. let us just pvp and we'll build a system that comes out of it organically. Make use of ptr for pvp.
9) improve drop rates OR stop creating garbage items for garbage sake (i.e. tighten up properties, etc.)
8) cut the length of the journey to paragon 100 by 1/2 or 2/3. Or change how magic find works. And some other things we said.
7) add genuine gold sinks to the game (enchantments, socketing, buffs, etc.). Remove 15% tax bull****.
6) add more game modes - ladders, classic mode, etc.
5) improve itemization - have 15-30 legendaries per item slot that are designed around builds, uses for white items, magic items, more socketables like 20 different gems and random jewels, create healthy ecosystem of gems and depower emeralds.
4) add a crafting system that allows players to create items that don't drop and also incentivizes the destruction of items
3) add bind on equip
2) gives us something to do other than farming
1) blizzard needs to listen, interact and be honest with the community
Also, to our defense, I had a version of this top list on the official forums several days ago before we did the show - probably before it appeared on these forums as well.
As for improving things that don't work - I thought that was what the PTR was for...
0
0
Yes you were.
Gee, I wonder why.
As will I.
Reason in short supply these days. A very rare commodity indeed.
0
It's kind of hard to have a debate when people are changing terms/definitions to prove their case, or are trying ignore the facts the reality to make their case correct when it it's actually not correct. It has nothing to do with agreeing with one person in a youtube video.
And besides, I don't think people have to worry about that anymore either.
0
You're changing the concept of value here to obfuscate the point.
When I use the word value, I am referring to economic value, not personal value. The point I was making many, many posts ago were all referring to economic value, not personal value. The topic was in-game gold. A person can own a picture of a long lost loved-one, but unless that person was famous in some way, it likely has no economical valuable at all. This is not the value I'm talking about, and that should be obvious I think but is going over everyone's head it seems.
I tire of these conversations though. It's not like anything I post matters anyhow, so I don't see the point.
0
Perhaps if I just didn't speak during the shows, they would half as long and all of the points that you disagree with would not be put into the shows, then you guys would certainly have a lot less to complain about.
0
0
No individual simply "decides" to put a value on in-game gold. It has a value.
Do you decide that your house has no value? Your car? Your computer? It has a value. If it didn't, you wouldn't have worked to obtain them in the first place.
In-game gold has a value. It is basically a conversion of time/effort. It is not very valuable - especially these days as you need to transfer billions of in-game gold to get anything worth-while - but it does have economic value nonetheless.
Ignoring this fact won't make the value of that in-game gold go away.
0
0
I don't have a problem with a $1 fee on the RMAH, but it amounts to a $75 tax on a 2 billlion gold item - which is 30% of what you could make on the real money AH.
If you're going to have an AH in the game and not have any systems to control item saturation and gold inflation, then I don't understand why you want to also have systems to encourage not using the AH in addition to all of the other economic problems this game has.
$75 is not worth using it as a service fee. That's insane. That's 75x the auction fee on the RMAH. That's more than the cost of the damn game itself, even at launch! That's also 1-2 weeks worth of gold pick ups if you were constantly farming this game every day.
I'm sorry you don't see a problem with this, but using an electric service to help you sell/transfer a digital item is not worth $75. People can eat for an entire week for that amount.
And the difference with a real auction house is that there is no people to pay to run the auction, no security guards that need to be hired and no building to rent to host the auction. If you want to account for the fact that someone had to build the software, I thought that is what the 10+ million sales @ 59.99 was supposed to be for!
Also unlike the real world, there isn't different auction houses competing against one another, so there's no way to drive the fees down. It is whatever Blizzard says it is. It's a monopoly, just like government. In Diablo 3, the internal government and blizzard are one in the same. It's nothing like the real world at all. Of course, all the 'black markets' have fees nowhere near these amounts, which says a lot.
0
Just because the government taxes people for economic production doesn't make it right for blizzard to do the same. Taxing production in the real world is also counter-productive (and I say immoral, since no government has the right to steal from the fruits of your labour) as well.
0
It's not useless if your character needed that item, and it could still be re-purposed into crafting materials after it's no longer useful. Of course, this assumes a better crafting system - and I'd highly encourage you to listen to our crafting episode to understand what I mean here. It's too much to explain - I won't do it.
While binding does introduce some drawbacks, they are nowhere near as bad. You have to pick - do you want the ease of sharing items, or do you want the economy to be destroyed? Take your pick. I choose the former. No choice is perfect, but one is better than the other.
For me, the wasted/stolen effort is wasted/stolen effort. It makes very little difference what the amount is. The game should be consistent in this matter.
I wouldn't want to discourage flipping on any items. I see no reason to favour one group of players over another by doing this. We don't want any economic controls at all.
0
I disagree. This is just a small sample that depends on the particular RNG at the time, but in general, it doesn't depend on the RNG - there is going to be an objective choice based on your build, gear, run speed per MP level, etc.
0
We have very good reasons to promote bind-on-equip, and we specifically talk about the relationship of this to WoW and why we still support it in Episode 6 and 7 (the later being the best case for it).
Ultimately, blizzard wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They want an AH for efficient item trading without having any of the item destruction/binding systems that would typically go along with it.
Just because other Diablo games didn't bind in the past does not mean newer Diablo games with auction houses should act in the same way. The existence of AH changes everything. The lack of item destruction/binding has destroyed the economy. Now everything you find in the game is worth nothing.
The same thing even happened in D2. If you were participating on d2jsp, it was *very* apparent that items lost tremendous value due to the lack of binding, including people's beloved rune-based currency. It wasn't just dupes - all items tanked. This made farming less rewarding as the ladder season went on, which is a bad thing for a game without ladders especially - i.e. Diablo 3.
There's nothing wrong with flipping though. In real markets, flipping signals to the economy the value of items. If people are willing to pay more for an item, that economy now knows the item was undervalued. It helps people value items to their true values in the future.
Taxing production is universally a bad thing. Why do you want to punish the person who spend 1500 hours farming that 2 billion gold item? That doesn't make any sense to me. Sometimes these items sell for such high values, the tax is equivalent to hundreds of hours of farming - that's a ton of stolen/wasted effort.
On top of this, the 15% tax encourages transactions to be held outside of the AH, and as gold continues to inflate, more and more transactions will occur outside of the AH. Is that the behavior we want to see in the game? Do we want to see the AH relegated to low and mid-tier items only? This will eventually happen, and is happening now. If don't want this to happen, we have to realize the AH tax is encouraging this behavior. It is an unseen consequence to this game mechanic.
Sometimes the older games had better mechanics, and sometimes they had worse mechanics. Newer ARPGs have much faster base run speeds. If you play Torchlight 2 or Marvel Heroes, you'll realize that characters move much faster, and this really makes the game more enjoyable. It lets players experience more in limited time frames.
Ultimately what it comes down to is the game designer being respectful of the player's time. Making them walk/run very slowly is just wasting their time. In the past, movement speed might have had an impact on mechanics, but kiting builds are a thing of the past, and besides, there are ways to rebalance those encounters to take into account the movement speed boost.
And on top of this, I would rebalance the movement speed buffs to bring everything closer together, so we wouldn't see DH's vaulting around faster than they are now for example. Same with Wrath of the Berserker. Again, this is one of those things that goes unsaid by just giving a cole's notes version of our show
---
As an aside, I do encourage people to watch/listen to the shows. We put in a lot of time to make the shows, and to repeat ourselves means we spend less time making new shows and doing other things
0
This is why I think its important to watch the shows. The reasons to support the points are in our shows already :/ I was a bit hesistant to list them for this reason :/
1
From memory, we had 6 honorable mentions:
- increase base movement speed to what 24% is now.
- ability to level up abilities/skills (yeah right)
- give a reason to group with players (more loot, more mf, more mob density, etc.)
- add more randomness (but take out stupid randomness)
- increase mob density in act 1/2. Give us reason to go to act 4
- fix the broken wizard class
The Top 10 list
10) give us a pvp system where we define the rules, rewards. Stop wasting 7+ months trying to design the perfect pvp system. let us just pvp and we'll build a system that comes out of it organically. Make use of ptr for pvp.
9) improve drop rates OR stop creating garbage items for garbage sake (i.e. tighten up properties, etc.)
8) cut the length of the journey to paragon 100 by 1/2 or 2/3. Or change how magic find works. And some other things we said.
7) add genuine gold sinks to the game (enchantments, socketing, buffs, etc.). Remove 15% tax bull****.
6) add more game modes - ladders, classic mode, etc.
5) improve itemization - have 15-30 legendaries per item slot that are designed around builds, uses for white items, magic items, more socketables like 20 different gems and random jewels, create healthy ecosystem of gems and depower emeralds.
4) add a crafting system that allows players to create items that don't drop and also incentivizes the destruction of items
3) add bind on equip
2) gives us something to do other than farming
1) blizzard needs to listen, interact and be honest with the community
Also, to our defense, I had a version of this top list on the official forums several days ago before we did the show - probably before it appeared on these forums as well.
As for improving things that don't work - I thought that was what the PTR was for...