Rockstar is trying a neat approach to cheaters, they will only allow them to play against each other.  Anyone detected cheating gets placed in a pool of other cheaters and they can go wild there, with no impact on the leaderboards.

That’s a really novel way to visually punish cheaters, though obviously there’s an ongoing cost for the developer.  I think though, in multi-player games, this is an excellent solution.  Perhaps they can put all the foul-mouthed rinky-dinks in the same pool?

In a move that surprised all cave-dwelling Martians, EA has declared that Steam Sales hurt IPs.  This coming 1 week after Origin’s 1/2 off every game (all 4 of them) sale no less.

I like Steam and make no illusions about it.  The service is quick, simple, secure and non-intrusive and has a library of thousands of games.  Origin is none of those.  It is so far from Steam that I would barely call it an online game service.

Steam’s ability to promote and package indie sales allows developers to reach an audience they would not have otherwise.  Would you buy an indie game for 20$ or for 5$?  Maybe after trying one company’s game, you’ll be more willing to try another?  It seems every day there’s some sort of sale going on and it isn’t so much about waiting for something to go on sale as to take advantage of the sales that are available.

This is the same reason that WalMart and co. make money.  Put various items on sale and have impulse buyers pick it up.  They don’t need it, probably never heard of it, but it’s a good deal so they buy it.  To say that this cheapens an IP when you increase market penetration is so absolutely ridiculous that I have trouble believing it was said in the first place.  Plus, it’s from a company that has pillaged every IP it has to mind-blowing proportions.

Yet another drop in the bucket as to why I won’t buy EA games.  They just don’t get it.

I think this will be my last Diablo 3 post for a bit.  I’ve grown somewhat weary of the game’s insane difficulty curve and last night’s 50 solo attempts on Belial, when I could kill pretty much anything before him, were a fairly clear sign to me.  I then decided to ask my brother the Barb to come along.  He has decent gear but he died way faster than I did and he did as much damage as my companion does solo.

This particular post will go over the seemingly un-ending disparity between ranged and melee character.

As as DPS player (and in D3, everyone is DPS) you have two primary concerns.  Dealing damage and staying alive to deal damage.  For a ranged player, you need to worry about ranged attacks, which have a travel time. You need to worry about floor effects, which you can move out of.  In point of fact, you can avoid 95% of all damage unless it’s AE.  That means you can focus 95% of your effort into stacking DPS stats.  So for example, a DPS Wizard would have 40-50K DPS without much effort and about 20-25k hit points.

Now as a melee, you need to worry about the same things except with a different spin.  Ranged attacks still happen, it’s just you don’t have the time to avoid it since you’re face to face.  Ground attacks are harder to see because you’re surrounded by enemies.  Then there’s the melee damage that every enemy does that you need to mitigate.  Depending on the potential damage intake, what was successful originally might be completely out of date  a few hours later.  As an extreme example, if you can face-tank the Butcher in Inferno, there are still really strong odds that you will die to the bees in Act 2 about 5 minutes later.  No matter what you do, you will always need a defensive focus, especially on self-healing.  So your DPS needs have to drop since you’re focusing on defense near equally (if not more).  It isn’t uncommon to find a Barb with 60k hit points and less than 20k DPS.

Let’s not forget the one-shot attacks that neither class can take.  So no matter how much defense the melee might take, that 1 hit is going to kill you.

Monster Affixes

Rare/elite/champions have affixes that give them different abilities.  Let’s see how ranged and melee compare.

• Arcane – ranged can avoid them easily, melee need to navigate through them to get to target
• Avenger – ranged shouldn’t get hit at all but melee take a beating when only 1 is left
• Desecrator – ranged can avoid completely and melee need to pay attention to where they are standing
• Electrified – ranged can avoid most of the effects while melee will eat about 30% of it
• Extra health – same problem for both
• Fast – a near guaranteed death for ranged and you can’t keep them away, while melee are generally good
• Fire Chains – ranged can move out of it while melee need to continually move position to not get hit
• Frozen – ranged can complete avoid it and melee can rarely get out of the frozen effect range
• Health Link – same issues for both
• Horde – Depends on the other affixes.  Typically a worse deal for melee since you now have twice as many hitting you
• Illusionist – A issue for ranged without good AE attacks but melee, just wow.  They can go from 3 people on them to 9 in a flash.
• Invulnerable minions – ranged without piercing and an open spot to kite are dead, melee need amazing life on hit to live through it.  Usually pure death
• Jailer – can be a pain for ranged but most have abilities to break it.  Melee are good here, unless you get a Desecrator.
• Molten – Not too bad for ranged, as long as you avoid the fire trail.  Melee need to keep their distance and once an enemy dies, move away to avoid the explosion
• Mortar – Currently broken range where ranged can avoid it nearly completely and melee can still get hit
• Nightmarish – No effect on ranged if they don’t get hit, huge pain in the butt for melee who will get hit continuously
• Plagued – No effect on ranged unless cornered, melee need to avoid the very large pools
• Shielding – Same problem for both but the ranged can avoid the potential damage while the enemy is immune
• Teleporter – A larger issue for ranged as an enemy can close the gap quickly, can be a pain for melee if they teleport away
• Thorns – Really bad for ranged since they hit in slow heavy shots and have poor self-healing while melee are usually full of self-heal abilities
• Vampiric – No effect on ranged unless they get hit, really bad on melee if they don’t have enough DPS to offset the enemy healing.
• Vortex – Bad on ranged if they are too close with no exit strategy, no effect on melee
• Waller – Can be bad on ranged if you get cornered with no exit, no effect on melee

By and far, the affixes benefit ranged players.  Unless you get an invulnerable minion, fast or thorns enemy, you can usually blow through them.  Melee in the meantime are praying for vortex wallers.

Hopefully patch 1.03 will address this but until that day comes, there’s no reason anyone should bother playing anything but a ranged class.

Blizz put up a new blog about the massive patch 1.03, which essentially says “we messed up” and is putting in a whole pile of quality of life changes.  Of note:

• All items can not drop from Act 1 Inferno, rather than only the best in Act 3/4.  Actually, drops rates in general have been improved.
• Nephalem Valor is being tweaked to provide a better benefit on rare packs with 5 stacks than against bosses.  Currently, people get 5 stacks, kill a boss and repeat.  Blizz wants people to keep playing with the 5 stacks.  We’ll see…
• Monster damage is no longer going to increase in multiplayer games.  Honestly, there is zero incentive to play in a group game currently.  Your magic find drops, health pools go up, damage goes up and there aren’t more loot drops.  In 99% of cases, it’s better to go alone and use /tells to swap gear.
• Nerfs to damage and health of Inferno Act 2,3 & 4 monsters.  Where the rest of the game has a rather linear difficulty curve, Inferno has walls.  I can solo Act 1 pretty easily but get my butt handed to me on Act 2.  I get hit for over 60K a hit and it’s impossible for me to mitigate that damage as a Wizard (already 40% armor and 40% resists).
• Repair costs are going up 4-6x.  Right now, it costs me about 5K if I’m at 100% broken, which is frequent on super bad packs.  20-30K per repair bill is huge.  I don’t expect this to go through.
• Changes to Increased Attack Speed, which is currently a god stat.  This is a problem that existed in WoW, not sure how they didn’t see this coming a mile away.
• Massive changes to prices for crafting tier 2-8 gems.  Which has absolutely no impact at all on anyone in Hell or above.  Odd change.

So as you can see, it’s mostly quality of life changes.  As the game stands, your best bet is to play the AH game, by which you can find super deals, resell them and make about 2 million an hour.  You can then buy your way into Inferno for about 2 million total and have 95% of the best gear available.

For example, I sold a mediocre necklace for 500K the other day and I bought it for 20K.  Because the AH interface shows the highest armor values first, it also tends to show the most expensive items as well.  Meaning anything at the bottom of the 50+page list is dirt cheap and with some massaging can turn a huge profit.  Heck, I bought a weapon for 50k and sold it for 2 million.  Money is a complete joke.

The downside to all this is once the RMAH launches (another month at least), inflation will be so high that gold sales will be the best option.  Meaning you could farm the gold auction house to make gold that you would then sell on the real money version.  Can you say MASSIVE BOTTING?

E3 is upon us and if you have cable, then you can check out Spike TV for some decent coverage.  I had the chance to watch a bit of it yesterday and read about the rest that’s gone on so far.

Microsoft

Again with the gimmicks.  Sure, there was Halo 4 and yet another Call of Duty but no one who likes video games wanted to see those.  It’s like asking for more corn flakes.  The South Park game sorta looked cool.

The odd part was even more integration with Kinect and the launch of Smart Glass – allowing a link between your mobile devices and the new Internet Explorer web browser on the 360. So on one hand, you have more hands-free control and the other, you have more hands-on control.  What?

Sony

Some cool games that I had seen before.  Beyond looks like Heavy Rain, Last of Us is like Uncharted but in the apocalypse.  Assassin’s Creed 3 is coming out, which is a mixed blessing.  I thought every game after #2 was crap and milking the franchise but this game promises to close the story loop that started 7 years ago.  Sort of like my early anticipation for Mass Effect 3, which took a massive dump on the story instead.  Overall though, this presentation was more about games in the new IP universe.  Better but not great.

Electronic Arts

Another Madden with more realistic physics.  For me, sports games have reached such a complex level that I don’t even bother.  A new Sim City – which sounds cool.  Battlefield 3, which is a great sales pitch for every game under 20. SWTOR up next.  They are essentially going to launch an expansion pack as a normal content update – new level cap, more dungeons, zones and whatnot.  Well, other than the new level cap, I would call it a content patch which is confusing.  Interestingly, there is zero positive buzz about this.  I think it’s cool.

New FIFA, new UFC, new Need For Speed, new Crysis.  All sequels.  /sigh

Ubisoft

Everything was an underwhelming sequel, except for Watch Dogs.  Sort of a cross between the openess of GTA and the story aspect of Heavy Rain.  Sounds interesting.

So far

If you’re showing a game that has a number next to it, I don’t want to see it.  1 day in and not much to report.

Similar to Syp, I too have one heck of a time figuring out what to make of the Elder Scrolls Online.  It seems like everything that made the games great, they are trying to avoid like the plague.

So what makes an ES game?

• Dynamic content
• Skill-based progress
• Fantasy setting
• Hero of the world
• Multiple paths of progress (main story, guilds, etc..)
• Massive enemies from the start
• An end that is a new beginning
• Actions are linked across the world
• World areas stay the same based on your actions
• Housing

Essentially, it’s a snow-globe hero adventure, where every action you take can have repercussions down the line.  It is the pretty much the exact definition I would give to a sandbox game.  TESO however is aiming for the themepark variety, where the world is static, it’s level based, item based, PvP centric and divided into single player and multiplayer like a giant fence you need to climb.

How does anyone who has worked on any ES game before this think it’s a good idea?  How does anyone think we need another fantasy themepark MMO after stumbling of Rift and TOR.  Especially another split between single and multiplayer that is the single point of failure in that game.

It almost makes you feel like they took everything that was core to the ES series, pulled it out, found the worst stuff about MMOs and put it in.  And really, the more the devs talk about the game, the more you go “wut?”  Public dungeons?  Was that not clearly enough of a failure every time it’s been tried?

I am here crossing my fingers that this game gets cancelled soon.  As much as I would love an ES MMO, there is no way I would ever pay to play this game.

So this morning is a patch for Diablo3 and an 8 hour window.

You know what other single player games I have that requires an online connection?  Plants vs Zombie, Fallout 3/NV, Skyrim and all the other games I have on Steam.

You know what the difference is between those an Diablo 3?  I can play them.

It took a bit but I finally unlocked Whimsyshire, Diablo 3’s answer to the Cow Level of D2.  The link has the info as to where the items drop and it was pretty smooth, except for two parts.  The plans from Izual take time since it’s a ~5 minute trek to get to him and a 10% drop rate.  The Gibbering Gemstone drops from a boss that has a chance to spawn in a cave that has a chance to spawn.  Getting to the cave is fast, lightning fast, but it’s still 20-50 runs on average.

Trained my blacksmith, paid the 100K for Wirt’s Bell and 50K to make the darn thing and off I went in Normal.  Access to other difficulties requires you to kill Izual – essentially be on the last quest of the game in Act 4 – then buy the next recipe from a vendor in Bastion Keep.  Nightmare cost me 100K to make and took the first staff, which is fine and dandy by me.

There are a few neat things about Whimsyshire that I should share, above the fact that you know, it’s ponies, teddy bears and clouds.

• all enemies are melee only with no special attacks
• champions roam around, though I’ve yet to see a unique
• enemies are about equal in difficulty to the last enemies in the game (late act 4)
• the zone is made up of roads more than open spaces, making combat much easier
• it’s a loot pinata

Playing in a group is a blast and probably one of the best designed zones in the entire game.  Minus the Act 3 bridge crossing segment, that thing rocks.