When I set my mind to something, I usually exceed at the given task – as would anyone else really.  When I decided a few years ago (middle of Lich King expansion) in WoW that I would spend a month making as much money as possible, I spent a few days reading on ideas, another day building an economical model with possible price points, another day developing a strategy then a plan, and finally after a week I jumped in.  I made 10K the first day.  After the month was over, I had over 300k in cash, had bought the best flight training on every character I had and a few knickknacks along the way.  I easily cleared 500K from my numbers.  And then, I gave up trying because money was all of a sudden useless to me.

At the time, my brother wasn’t necessarily broke but he did think about how to spend his cash in game.  I didn’t have a worry in the world, I could buy whatever I wanted at a moment’s notice.  I could easily skip content and speed up the game process.  In effect, this cheapened the game experience.

Diablo 3 has an auction house but the main difference here is that all the items in the game are tradeable.  That uber-mega weapon in WoW that you can only get by killing Heroic Lich King?  For sale in Diablo 3.  I have a level 54 and a level 48 and across all the levels, I have used 2 items that have dropped.  Every single other item has come from the auction house.  Why is this a problem?

Think of it this way.  In the best case, you have a 1% chance to get an item you can use and is an upgrade.  So you need to get 100 items to drop to see it.  That takes you about 4 hours (25 rares per hour).  Let’s say there are 4 million people on your server (US), that means that every 4 hours, there are 4 million pieces of upgrades found – or 1 million an hour.  Not everyone will sell it but even if half those people do, they are going to compete for your money and sell it at a decent price.  So at any given time, you have access to thousands of quality items, for a decent price and next to no chance to see an upgrade on your own.

From normal, to nightmare then hell difficulties, this isn’t so much of a big deal.  Skill is more of a factor but if you needed to buy items, you could do all 3 difficulties and still come out a millionaire at the end of it all.  Inferno though, is a massive gear check.  If you were getting hit for any noticeable damage in nightmare, you will die in a single hit on Inferno.  This puts an artificial barrier on entry to Inferno where you have to buy your way in.  Since fewer people are there now, and the amount of money that drops from enemies is significantly higher than in Nightmare, prices are 20-50 times higher than they were at level 59.  The cheapest item is 200k and the majority in the millions.

To top it all off, the money sink of the game, disenchanting (or blacksmithing breakdown) provides basic materials that sell for 5-10% of the value of vendoring the item.  And using those items to craft costs about 200K at level 60 and has the same chance of providing a good item as an item drop (1% in our example).  So 200k for a chance, or 200K for a guaranteed item?

It’s an interesting business model. Once more people get into the millionaires club, the prices will rise accordingly, putting an artificial barrier for lower level items.  I mean, if I can sell an item for 1 million, why bother posting something for 5K?  Without item decay, item loss or just a simple money sink, the economy is doomed to spiral to a ridiculous level in just a few months.

Maybe, in the end, this is what Blizzard wants, so that they can sell in-game money to buy the items you need to actually play their game.  Maybe not.

I’m not saying TOR is a failure, I’m saying it’s not a huge success.  Serious errors of judgment were made along the way.  TERA launched to some acclaim and apparently, the fervor is up and done.  Guild Wars 2 is still on the hype train as the savior of MMOs (which I highly doubt) and then we have the Secret World, with an open skill-set game plan.  Sort of like super power sets I guess.

From a “major MMO” perspective, we won’t be seeing anything for a long while after.  Elder Scrolls Online I guess is the next one, with questionable goals, followed by perhaps EQ Next.  One is aiming for some new stuff while the latter is aiming to get back to the original EQ feel.

I played EQ in beta, at launch and for 4 years.  To quote Tobold

So what would you think if Everquest Next had level loss on death, naked corpse runs, 15 minute forced breaks for meditation between fights, forced grouping, 20 minutes waits for boats, and all the other features of the original Everquest?

What is it exactly people are looking for in the next MMO?  What’s wrong with their current one for that matter?  I can think of 20 MMOs running right now that could easily compete for your hard earned money, yet there’s always people clamoring for the next big thing. When trying to compare feature sets, you quickly realize that all the bases have been covered.

If you’ve narrowed down your list to a set of features, say PvE Raids, Mounts, Auction House, you have 5 big games to choose from (WoW, LOTRO, SWTOR, EQ2 and Rift).  Oddly, 4 of the 5 are in the same fantasy setting and use the same “skill bar combat” but the major differentiating factor is the content diversity within those features.  WoW clearly blows the rest out of the water, if only for the amount of time it’s been around.  Rift gives “better” character choices, TOR gives a better story and LOTRO gives a better integration into the game world.

In the end though, why do people move from one of those 5 to another game?  WoW has had the same features since launch (minus a LFG tool 2 years ago and some recent customization options) so why did 2 million people leave?  Why did 400,000 people (25% of the playerbase) leave TOR after only a couple months?

It’s that exact question that buggers MMO developers and game developers in general.  Why does Batman get an average playtime of 10 hours and Skyrim is 50?  Are both successful?  If the metrics say the average MMO player puts in 10 hours a week into a game, do you have 500+ hours of content for the year?  What’s your proverbial carrot on the stick to get people to continue playing?  If it’s a story, then make that story last hundreds of hours.  If it’s item acquisition, make it hard and long to accomplish.   If it’s the social environment, put in the community tools necessary to get people together (guild banks, LFG, housing, customization, etc).

I just hope developers and investors pay attention to the gaming trends.  The medium is saturated with choice and for your product to stand out, it needs to both do something different but also do it for a long enough time to keep people interested for months.  Fingers crossed.

A week in and people are complaining that D3 Inferno is too hard – even though some have completed it.  Mind you, they used abilities that completely (or nearly) negated all damage taken.  Two particular quotes for this:

There are definitely some aspects of Inferno and the way damage comes in that we’re looking at. Before we get there though we want to address the skills that are ‘must haves’, and see how the skill and gear game settles out a bit before we address content. If there’s a skill that you absolutely can’t survive without, that’s a much more serious issue to customization, build diversity, and the game as a whole than someone not being able to progress as quickly as they feel they should.

I think tweaks to content difficulty is a given, it’s going to happen in some shape or form, but we’re not there quite yet.

And

We purposely launched the game with Inferno being far more difficult than what we were able to progress in ourselves, assuming people would find it as difficult but with a few skilled players able to pull it off, or the difficulty would simply help root out problem skills and builds that allowed flaw-filled progression possibilities.

I think the main problem we’re running into is people progress more or less linearly to Inferno, and the brick wall effect makes it seem like these broken skills were the correct way to overcome the difficulty because the belief is that Inferno must be an immediately surmountable challenge, which it isn’t intended to be. Or the reverse, that because these skills allowed progression the classes that did not have them were too weak/broken, which isn’t correct.

From a player perspective, this seems incongruous to Blizzard’s “when it’s done” mantra and usual level of polish.  Mind you, their last release, Starcraft 2, was a PvP game with an insane amount of games in beta.  How could you possibly test the hardest difficulty with a testing team of like 20?  Answer – they didn’t, which is the problem.

There are a few points I take from this and my playtime:

• Someone thought that releasing untested content was a good idea.  Sort of like untested raids in WoW that were bugged for weeks. A beta test would have shown this in a day.
• Melee are at a serious disadvantage on Inferno where they must be taking hits in order to attack, which in turn requires them to reduce their offence and increase their defense.  Ranged attackers do not have this problem.
• Any skill that increases absorption is superior to avoidance – this has been tested profusely in WoW. The difference between spikes and smooth damage taken.  Get hit 1 out of 20 times for 40K or 19 out of 20 times for 2K.  Both take the same damage over the same time except the former needs 41K health to stay alive during that process.
• Healing skills do not scale.  Best heals are 12K and people are running around with 40K+ health.
• People are following a somewhat linear curve from normal to hell, then a big spike in Inferno act 1 and a huge one in Act 2. (30% differences between the last few)
• Blizzard realizes that some skills are seriously underbalanced, others are overpowered and until there is some level of balance on those skills, they can’t tweak the difficulties.

Here’s where I have issue.  If this game was released by any other company, it would have been trashed for the issues mentioned above.  Imagine if in Batman, when you fought the Joker, none of your abilities worked and he one-shot you from behind a wall.  Frustrating a bit?  Blizzard gets away with a lot these days, way more than other companies.  If they had not released Inferno at all, the game would be fine (minus the lag, broken ah, and disconnects).  Yet they pushed a feature in multiple promotional articles and it is for most intents, broken.

Le *sigh*.

I finally entered Hell difficulty last night with my monk.  He came in with about 2K DPS, 10K in hit points and a fairly solid build.  I 1-shot Diablo in Nightmare and overall the path was simple enough.  Then Hell started.

First, every enemy has 12-20K hit points.  Each hits for about 500-1k.  On their own, not so bad.  In a group of 5, you need to deal 100K damage and take 5K per second.  Monks don’t have a choice here, we’re a melee class.  Still, it’s doable and I like the challenge.

Then we get to the Champions/Rares with multiple affixes.  In Hell, you get 3 affixes per though I think I’ve seen 4.  Anyways, I always seem to get a combination of the following Vortex/Jail/Frozen (which removes any mobility) and Molten/Plagued/Desecrator/Arcane (all of which can kill you in under a second if you get hit by their effects).  So combine the no-movement ability with the if-you’re-not-moving-you’re-dead ability and you can guess what happens.  One particular pack had me stuck at the entrance to a zone, so I died a solid 10 times just trying to get in and not die.

To top it off, the jump in difficulty is also a jump in loot quality.  If I were to go back to Nightmare to try to find gear, it would be significantly worse (35% or so) than what I get in Act 1 of Hell.  So going back isn’t so much for the gear as it is for the levels.  What do levels bring?  More skills, certainly but I have the ones I need to succeed already.  I need more Hit Points and each level causes a significant boost to the exchange of Vitality to Hit Points. I could use the hit points and the cash boost wouldn’t be bad either.  I’d then have access to the best AH gear too.  Mind you, with 400K in the bank, I would be able to afford all of 2 pieces of level 60 gear and cheap ones at that.

Finally, massive nerfs/bug fixes were hotfixed yesterday.  Monks had a skill completely removed (that allowed tanking in Inferno no less), Wizards has a damage shield removed and Witch Doctors an immunity.  I should point that every character than has cleared Inferno Diablo so far was one of those classes – the first ever was a Monk.  I should also point out that these problems would have been clearly evident if Blizzard had allowed testing past level 13 in their beta as it took all of 1 day for people to find these issues and a week for Blizz to “nerf it into the ground”.  Their game that was supposed to take months to complete was beaten in 4 days.  I’m sure someone got an earful.

After reading some more on the situation, particular Gevlon’s take, I am perplexed as to how Blizzard is planning to make money on the RMAH.

The fact that 4 days after launch the game was completed, speaks volumes as to the game’s difficulty level.  Evidently, there is enough gear available in 4 days of playing to complete the hardest of the hardest content.

Certainly, the players who completed this feat are good players, min-maxers as well.  That given, the toolset they had is the same as every other player.  They have the same skills and the same loot everyone else had.  They didn’t farm gear in order to progress (sort of like gear-checks in MMOs), they simply tested a few things and went forward.

The point I’m trying to make is that the game can clearly be beaten by highly skilled players with crappy gear.  This means that average players with average gear should be able to beat it and that crappy players will need powerful gear.  Blizzard is apparently hedging their bets that the latter group is a) of significant size and b) willing to spend real money to beat imaginary characters.

What an interesting experiment.

After a weekend of Diablo 3, 51 levels on my monk and a few on some others, I think I have a pretty solid view of the game as sent to the masses.  In a sentence, it’s worth the buy.

Presentation

Up: As with all Blizzard games, the game oozes style and presentation.  All character models move well, the colors are perfect and on the whole, the entire process of zone distribution from Act 1 to 4 is solid.  The cinematics are really well done too, which is expected.

Down: I’m bugged that the entire game is a complete zone rehash of Diablo 2.  Fields -> Desert -> Castle/Ruins -> Heaven (or Hell in D2).  There is one massive dead/boring spot in Act 2 as well, which is unfortunate.  The story is pretty bad but is the typically Blizzard-power-corrupts trash.  The voice acting is solid but the actual sound levels are all over the place.  Sometimes my monk is screaming only to whisper on the next line.  Bosses are incredibly disappointing in presentation after Act 1.  The Skeleton King and Butcher are just crazy awesome fights.  Belial is a avoid-the-massive-poison-puddles fight with no other mechanics.  Azmodan you can stand head to head with and avoid the death zones.  Diablo though, he’s a pile of problems on harder difficulties.  He looks like a wimp though.

Gameplay

Up: The shining grace of it all is the tool set provided for combat.  With 60 levels, you get a new skill (or 3) per level.  Either this affects an existing skill or is a passive buff but you still get something for leveling, which is great.  Being able to swap skill sets is awesome too, depending on the fight.  I hated D2 because you had to make multiple characters depending on what you wanted to do (like a MF Sorc) but D3 gives you options, lots of options.  Each character is pretty solid, stats are well distributed and each playstyle is quite different from another.

Down: The difficulty curve is ridiculous.  Normal is a joke, Nightmare is almost easier since there are no extra enemy types.  Hell changes the game a bit more with enemies taking twice as long to kill but still rather simple.  Inferno though, that’s just crazy.  As a monk, you need somewhere close to 35K hit points and massive defensive stats to have a chance.  The illusion of choice is apparent here since it’s simply impossible to play in a different style.  This part also highlights the class differences where some like the Demon Hunter and Barbarian are weak compared to the Monk and Witch Doctor.

Extras

Up: The Auction House is a nice addition, making trading a whole lot easier.  It also makes the game a whole lot easier too.  The loot/bag/crafting mechanics are interesting and positive changes – but already done in Torchlight.  Achievements are cool in that they make you try content again with an added twist, perchance to see things you didn’t know was there.  The ability to quickly jump into a friend’s game is awesome.  This is the way multiplayer games should work.

Down: The online-only aspect is annoying when the internet or Blizzard decides they don’t want you to play – which is a few times per play session.  The auction house interface is pretty slow and difficult to properly navigate.  The chat system is atrocious.  The systems while playing (friends list for example) are completely separate from the ones out of game. I wish I could access the Auction House from inside the game, repair items from there or just view the stats on my gear when I’m shopping.  There is a distinct lack of polish when it comes to game systems and their integration.

Overall

Even with all the hiccups, Diablo 3 is still worth the pickup.  I can see myself playing coop games with friends for a long while, maybe going on some loot runs on my own.  I don’t see it having the staying power of Diablo 2 though or of people making any real money on the auction house (which is still delayed).  Diablo 2 (like WoW) came in at a perfect time but in today’s market, there are literally dozens of places I can spend my time for the same cost and provide a similar or even better experience.  I put in well over 150 hours in Skyrim, time will tell if that number is the same in D3.

Day 2 for D3 was a bit better.  This time I could log on but there was still some rubber banding issues.  Servers went down for a 15 minute restart near 9 and came back up after 10.  So, 3 cheers for Blizzard’s inability to launch a service that they’ve been running for years?  Still, there are no monthly fees here so I can’t complain too much.

My biggest gripe with D3 is that you have no idea how your class plays from 1-5 or so.  All classes are pretty much identical here but are either ranged or melee.  This is sort of how WoW was for the first 20 or so levels – and every other MMO for that matter.  D2 had you in your class from the start, so it’s kind of weird to have to play 2 hours to get an idea of the  synergy within a given class’ skill set.

I killed the Skeleton King last night, an old boss from the first Diablo.  This one was a bit more hectic but a lot less difficult with a ranged attacker.  Fun battle, lots of enemies, decent challenge.  Good combination.  Pretty sure this is where the beta ended too.

We’ll see how it goes tonight.

Activision (aka the Devil)

So when Infinity Ward sent out Call of Duty MW2 and then Activision fired the 2 leads, I was perplexed.  The 2 devs that left (among others) sued for a pile of money and Activision played dumb.  Recently, Activision payed them $42 million (up from the 36 asked) and then settled after the fact for even more money.

The kicker of it all was that Bobby Kotick (CEO of Activision) led a campaign to find incriminating evidence on the group to get them fired and not have to pay them.  Project Icebreaker.  Amazing.

So now the thing is settled, the gents got way more money than they were asking for, their reputation has been restored, Activision looks like an even bigger pile of douchebags and the bar of disreputable behavior has been lowered once again.  Victory!