Diablo

I finally purchased the Diablo 3 Necromancer thing. I'm always extremely late to the party.

Here's my big problem with Diablo 3, and for me at least, it really is a big issue. I was almost a deal breaker in fact, and I had to think long and hard before buying the game. In the end I sucked it up and bought the game.

It's the account-wide sharing of resources.

The fact that all your items, gold, crafting resources, crafting level, rescued NPCs and Paragon Points are actually shared between all your characters.

I absolutely HATE this feature!

Basically, there's almost no method of starting the game 'from scratch', with no gold, items, points etc. The only known method is to either choose a different server - and there's only three to choose from, or create a ladder character, which is time-dependent.

When I begin a game I really want to start with literally nothing. No items, no money, no super-powerful skills. Just my character, some form of basic attack and a rusty sword held together with sticky tape and gum - that's it.

I need that rags-to-riches feeling of starting off as nothing, and gradually becoming more powerful over time. Account-wide sharing kills it stone dead.

My first character was on the EU realm, my second was on the US - so I've had two clean starts so far. I guess I could choose the Korean realm next, but I find that one very slow and laggy.

Instead, for my third character I just manually destroyed every single thing in my stash, took all my gems and combined them again and again until most of the gold was gone (still the best way to use up all your gold), and bought vendor items with the few thousand I had left,then deleted all characters but the new one.

But I shouldn't need to go though this rigmarole every time. There should be some kind of toggle feature, or reset button to put progress back to zero. Even with all my efforts, it wasn't quite right. That blue Paragon Points button was constantly staring me in the face and was hard to ignore. All the crafting NPCs were in place and fully upgraded right from the start. I still have extra stash tabs etc.

Blizzard just assume that everyone wants to rush through the game at lightning speed and spend all their time farming rifts. They refuse to entertain the notion that some players may prefer the journey over the destination. It's this same 'end game is all that matters' mindset from the developers, that caused me to cancel my WoW sub.

Well... rant over.

Well yong is garbage so...?

This season thing you mention - is that not some kind of competitive ladder play type of affair in which I'm expected to compete against other players? I must admit that I know next to nothing about it. I hate multiplayer, I play solo at all times. Can these 'season' characters also be played solo? Is there some kind of timer that will delete the character once the 'winner' reaches whatever criteria is required to win?

Mobile games, just another cancer of this industry.

There are leaderboards even if you play nonseason. Whether you care about them is up to you. But you do get the fresh start and an option to work on the season journey. Set your personal goals and simply have fun with the game. 

Because these dlcs/expansions barely worth 3-5$ rather than what the fanboys pay at the release date with 20-30$! Some even are 60$... Only insane or rich people pay for such. like dude it's an expansion not the original game at release date 1.

Jason Schreier with his numerous sources has done it again! It's a massive article so I'll just paste a couple of segments and link it at the bottom.

Some of those people also raised questions about Activision’s influence on the beloved video game company. Activision merged with the publisher Vivendi (at the time, Blizzard’s holding company) to become Activision Blizzard in 2008, but over the past decade Blizzard has prided itself in remaining a separate entity.

With its own management structure and its own campus in Irvine, California, Blizzard has always stood out from Activision’s other divisions and subsidiaries. (Activision HQ is based about an hour northwest, in Santa Monica.)

This year, however, Blizzard employees say that one of the biggest ongoing conversations has been cutting costs. To fans, and even to some people who work or have worked at Blizzard, there’s a concern that something deep within the company’s culture may be changing.[...]

“A lot of people felt stunned by it,” said the person who was there. “I think a lot of them felt like, ‘We made mistakes on Diablo III, but we learned and we made Reaper to show what we could do. We have fixed it, and Reaper’s really good.’ I think a lot of people felt like we’d figured it out and we know how to do this, and expansion two, whatever it would’ve been, would’ve been the highest expression of that… To have them pull the plug without really seeing how Reaper did really stung.”

“At the point they had the strongest Diablo development team ever, they scattered them all to the winds,” said one person who worked on Reaper of Souls. To those developers, it was a baffling move by Blizzard’s management. Giving the team more time to see how Reaper performed and how the second expansion was shaping up “would’ve been much more Blizzard-like,” that person said.[...]

In the spring of 2018, during Blizzard’s annual company-wide “Battle Plan” meeting, chief financial officer Amrita Ahuja spoke to all of the staff, according to two people who were there. In what came as a surprise to many, she told Blizzard that one of the company’s goals for the coming year was to save money.

“This is the first year we’ve heard a priority being cutting costs and trying not to spend as much,” said one person who was in the meeting. “It was presented as, ‘Don’t spend money where it isn’t necessary.’”

2016’s Overwatch had been a smash hit, but in 2017 and 2018 the company shipped very little - there was a StarCraft remaster, a World of Warcraft expansion, and of course, patches and updates for other games. That was it.

Traditionally, Blizzard has remained entirely separate from Activision, with its own quality standards and branding, to the point where they felt like two different companies. You might be able to find World of Warcraft Easter eggs in StarCraft II, but you’d never see an Overwatch character in Call of Duty.

In recent years, however, that’s changed. Blizzard’s digital store, Battle.net, now features Activision games like Destiny 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Bungie appeared on the BlizzCon 2018 stream to announce that Destiny 2 would be temporarily free. And there’s been a perception among Blizzard developers that the two companies are growing more and more intertwined.

As it turned out, 2018 would be a weak year for Activision. The publisher was unhappy with Destiny’s performance and would take a major stock hit in November following fiscal third-quarter results that disappointed investors.

One worrying trend for the bean-counters was the stagnancy of Blizzard’s MAUs - monthly active users - which are seen as a pivotal metric for service games like Hearthstone and Overwatch. Throughout 2018, as Activision has told investors, those numbers have declined.

Combined with Blizzard’s lack of new games, it’s easy to see why Activision’s executives may have wanted to intervene.

“You would’ve thought Blizzard was going under and we had no money,” said a former Blizzard staffer, who told me they left the company this year in part because of Activision’s influence.

“The way every little thing was being scrutinised from a spend perspective. That’s obviously not the case. But this was the very first time I ever heard, ‘We need to show growth.’ That was just so incredibly disheartening for me.”

Blizzard appears to be bolstering headcount for its development teams—one current developer said their team was encouraged to get bigger—while cutting as many costs as possible elsewhere.

It’s a process that may not be done yet, as Activision seems to still be looking to boost Blizzard’s content output and release more games on a regular schedule. Ahuja’s comments in the spring of 2018 may have simply been the beginning.

“We are being told to spend less at every corner because we have no new IP,” said one former developer. “Because Overwatch set this bar of how much we could earn in a single year, there’s a ton of pressure from Activision to get shit moving. They want something to show shareholders.” (During an earnings call after Overwatch launched, Activision said it had brought in over a billion dollars in revenue.)

Then, in October 2018, Blizzard lost its leader. Co-founder Mike Morhaime, the soft-spoken CEO who jovially addressed fans at every BlizzCon, said he was stepping down, to be replaced by veteran World of Warcraft producer J. Allen Brack. Allen Adham and chief development officer Ray Gresko also joined Blizzard’s executive management team, perhaps to help ensure that the studio would be helmed by game developers who lived and breathed Blizzard.

It was a massive shake-up for Blizzard, and it came during a time when there were already questions about Activision’s influences. Morhaime was widely beloved at the company. One former Blizzard developer described him as the “anti-CEO.”

”He doesn’t care about profitability,” that person said. “He just wants employees to be happy, and he just wants to make good games and keep the community happy.”

Suddenly, there were whispers in hallways, concerns about future cost-cutting initiatives and furtive exchanges about what plans Activision CEO Bobby Kotick might have in mind for Blizzard.

“There’s a perception within Blizzard that finance is making more calls than they ever did in the past,” said one person who left Blizzard recently. “You never heard that three or four years ago.”

www.kotaku.com.au/2018/11/the-past-present-and-future-of-diablo/

I'm just gonna stick with Torchlight.

Quoting myself but....GOG's version of Diablo now comes with the unofficial Hellfire expansion!

Oh I am very excited naturally. D4 will from what they've said so far not penalize solo players like D3 did. No RMAH. The aim seems to be more elaborate rune system, talent trees, unclear for now on passives. So far art looks great and after the focus on the eternal conflict a more grounded story seems like a breath of fresh air.