I feel that this website is becoming the last great beacon of Diablo 3 hope. Honestly, this game has been a total let down from my initial expectations. It's not a total loss, as the gameplay still has some redeeming qualities, the real money auction house is epic, and the promise of ranked pvp sounds perfect. What this game really needs, however, is less hyped up hope and more delivered promises. The latest announcement on cancelled death match really hurt Diablo 3. Now they have to get a new director for the game, and I'm not sure if the pvp will be done in the next 6 months.
The longer Blizzard waits, the more people leave this game. You can see the decline in most player driven websites already. I would not be surprised if some of the biggest sites have seen their traffic cut by 80% (this blog has). What makes me believe that this website is the last great bastion of hope for Diablo 3? The simple fact that we're still having fun, and doing it in style. Thanks to the GAH and especially the RMAH, there are custom goals we can set for ourselves and a community at this website to share them with.
Without those two key elements (goals and community), I believe that every last one of the members of this site would have quit the game prematurely. Let's keep the community strong and work to create new goals for our members. Then, when Diablo 3 has the new pvp system and droves of people return to the game, we'll be ready for them.
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I think that your error is thinking that all of this wasnt planned by blizz. Look at major game patches, everyone bring something new to people come in and put $$ in new gear.
ReplyDeleteCancelated PvP : as planned, because of belay in consoles. D3 isnt wow with subscribe, so low playerbase is less cost in servers.
When legal actions (use xbox or ps3 cash system to RMAH) take its time and D3 come to consoles, we will have a major patch with new itemization, good PvP (unbalanced between few patches of course to make people roll and equip new chars).
And all of sudden we will have lots of players returning, putting $$ and having fun for more 3 months until economy chashes again and a new patch cycle comes.
Well, It isnt a conspiration theory, it is a great market strategy to cut server costs and maximize earnings in playerbase peak. Jay was great with it, even bot economy with 1 month waveban was arround it.
I lost the link, but few years ago in my ecconomy class I read a very good Dr.ate thesys explaining the natural game industry cycles between major patches. It is the exacly model that D3 is doing to maximize earnings.
Consoles will hit, 2 or 3 xpac will hit. I believe that we will have at least more 4-5 years of active development.
The lefters will be the only losers, when they come back will need to put $$ to update.
MarkCo, it saddens me to say I agree with you. Anonymous, you make some good points too, but I think both of you are missing the big picture.
ReplyDeleteBelow I'll tell you what all evidence indicates has happened in 7 points.
I have the answer, the Meta reason for all that's transpired.
I saw this one coming, the unpleasant notion festered for a week or so and the picture became clear last week, when I wrote on it the 27th of Jan.
(I challenge anyone to prove me wrong to (a.) stimulate discussion and (b.) be proven wrong.
So far, I've had no responses which mean people agree. If you don't understand that "silence implies consent", Google "Qui tacet consentiret" -A cornerstone of the US and most legal systems the world over.
Basically, D3 has been a perfect storm of miscalculations but, every single problem, complaint, rage post from gamers, etc, etc, ad nauseum is traced back to ONE SINGLE, HUGE, FATAL MISTAKE by Blizzard:
A non sustainable revenue stream.
I'll make something HUGE in scope brief in 7 points:
1.) WoW has been a phenomenon for over 10 years because their costs are covered by monthly membership fees. They were free to spend all their time on improving the game.
2.) I suspect after WoW, Bliz felt invincible, and pride comes before the fall. Their hubris lead to the hair-brained idea to make their revenue stream contingent on players using the AH.
3.) Making the AH so important, all efforts went into improving it, as it was a PITA from day one.
4.) In short, no game play improvement, no players, no AH transactions, no revenue.
5.) No revenue, no great improvements in gameplay and focus on connecting all updates to the AH (ex. - new crafting materials (to craft items FOR the AH).
6.) The game has been on a downward spiral for a while, with I'm sure, employee/designer/content creator demoralization that spread through the whole organization.
7.) This culminated with Jay Wilson jumping ship. He's in Vegas right now, probably doing lines of stripper t1ttt1es, or whatever it is Major League Game Developers do when a 10 year project flops.
A flawed business model. This is my theory, but I believe I'm dead-on.
It's Bliz's big dirty secret. The thing that should not be mentioned.
Next up: They bring in an up-and-comer to perform triage on D3, and he'll be left to deal with a failed product.
Best move they can ever do: No announcements, no hints. Make it a subscription service like WoW.
This will allow them to stop obsessing over the AH'es and the freedom to actually IMPROVE THE GAME. Monthly fee's will suck but (i.) the AH is still there to make $ and (b.) With the absolute best developers in the business fully devoted to improving the game Diablo 3 will become EPIC.
Just image!!! If the developers had that freedom from day one, PvP would have been out a long, long time ago!!! Think about it, you konw this to be true!!!
But, because it costs money to improve game play, and they aren't making the money off the AH, they don't have resources to improve the game, and gamers leave. D3 has been a textbook example of the phrase "Vicious Circle." (I call it an Ouroboros, or snake eating it's tail, he he).
WOW, huh? What a FlusterCluck!
Oh and, as you read this, Jay Wilson's going all "I'm Rick James, Bitch" in Vegas. I can't image being part of a team that worked for ten years to end like this. This is the single largest blunder ever in the gaming world, and a Shakespearean tragedy (minus the blood).
Please read the full story. URL is in my Signature.
Tesseract
I think the first Anonymous has it right :)
ReplyDeleteAlso in my opinion, D3's main reason and purpose for existence is to be the stress test / experimentation ground / beta version of Titan's Rmah. It's a Rmah platform prototype. They need a fully functional Rmah when Titan mmo will launch. They couldn't do it in Wow (for obvious reasons) so they regurgitate an old title (a title they knew people will flock to it blindly, only because it’s called "Diablo").
Maintaining a completely functional, bug free Rmah, must be a tremendous task. I can't even imagine how many things must synchronize with each to work perfectly, in order for the system to be fast, accurate, handle millions of transactions without losing people's money.
Everyone is wondering why D3 went out so bad. I think the answer was given by Jay Wilson himself:
"...While we're not perfect, we try to make the best decisions we can with the information and knowledge we have at the time. That doesn't mean we always make the right decisions, but if we made a mistake then I feel we've made an exceptional effort to correct it..."
In what special situation could the all mighty Blizzard and an obviously talented game director basically say "we did the best we could at the time" ? “We did the best we could” ? Sounds like a person that was asked to build a skyscraper and was given as a tool, just a spoon to do it.
I think that Jay was forced to work with few resources all this time. Maybe because his assigned task was not to deliver a masterpiece, but to release a gaming platform, as "decent" and playable as possible (slap Diablo title on it and it wouldn't matter if it's just mediocre), as fast as possible and capable to support the Rmah system. Fast.
“ - Hey Jay, here is your programming team. You can use them for a while, and after you finish (and you better finish soon) we put them back to Titan. Make sure you make the game right, because you won’t be able to use them after we move them to the next project...”
Of course after this, any attempt to repair the mistakes, would be as Jay said, “...an exceptional effort to correct it...”. Why would the leading gaming company need to do “exceptional effort” ?
Diablo 3 was suppose to be a "fire & forget" project. Create-Launch-Test-Test-Test. But it didn't turned out great. The player-base didn't liked the game and they were forced to do changes. After all you can't stress test the Rmah system if there aren't enough transactions. But sadly, all they did and could do is to just adjust numbers, because the programming team is...gone. And it’s not coming back. More levels to level, tweak drop rates, adjust spell coefficients ? Sure. New zones, new monsters...you know...endgame ? Forget it.
The ideal situation was to make Diablo 3 a smashing success, to keep people entertained for a long time and use the Rmah in the process. Because it didn’t turn out this way, they will have to adopt and rely on the strategies underlined by the Anonymous commenter above. They won’t be able to add new content to the game (it’s either too soon or it wasn’t planned in the first place) so they’ll have to work their magic on tweaking those numbers. Cause it’s all they can do for now.
On a side note, same as D3 is the beta test for the Titan’s Rmah, I believe Wow (after the Lich King - patch 3.3 Fall of the Lich King) became the Titan’s testing platform for game groundbreaking changes: major talent redesigns, pets & mounts transactions, pet battles, in-game games (aka Farmville) etc. For all this kind of features Blizzard will learn from its community what is easily accepted and what not, how far they can toy around with game design before too many players rage quit and so on.
Forget Wow, forget D3. Play them, enjoy them as they are. Watch, experiment, learn from what blizzard is putting in these platforms...and prepare for Titan :)