I guess the expansion comes out March 25th. They are going to nix the auction house and make the item drops better.
Those were my main complaints about Diablo III, that and how hard it got in Inferno. I guess they are revamping the difficulty system as well.
So I guess I will give the expansion a try. I have been playing the game again after years and it is a little better than I remember it, probably because of patches.
So are you going to play the expansion or are you done with Diablo III?
I’ll probably come back to it. For me Diablo was never this huge time sink that it seemed to be for everyone else and for whom D3 was a disappointment in it’s lasting power/content.
I enjoyed my time with it and I’ll go back to it once the new content hits.
I think people forget how incomplete D2 was before the expansion. I certainly don’t think they’re going to capture the spirit of how great D2 was with this, and there’s still quite a bit wrong with it, but it sounds interesting.
I may try it at some point, just not sure if I’m willing to spend the $30 on it just yet.
I like the changes they’re making to the game, but I don’t feel like it’s enough to justify a 40€ price tag for an expansion. That’s very close to the price of a full game. I might pick it up when the price is lower. I did the same with Heart of the Swarm.
Dropping the auction house is a mistake, and I expect that they’ll quickly realize that. Trading has always been an integral part of the game, and auctions just streamline that, so much so that if they don’t provide an auction house, someone else will.
Of course it’s a mistake, and they already know that. There’s a reason it was implemented as one of the core features of D3.
I think they’re just throwing up their hands in resignation to the irrational backlash against the AH. If people want to flip out over an integrated economy, well, fine then, you can have your black-market economy just like D2 did, with all the pitfalls inherent in such a thing. Enjoy!
The auction house removed gear upgrades through actual playing almost completely. D3 became a game that was more about grinding gold than improving your character through playing. I played in the early days, and the best way of improving your gear was typically to camp the auction house for good deals that had a 1d11h timer. The best way to make gold was also to camp those good deals to resell.
It also made ingame gear progression non-existent. If you hit the auction house at lvl 20 and spent a small amount of gold for each slot, you would start getting upgrades for those items much later perhaps around lvls 40-55. Effectively the auction house became the only real source of upgrades, and everything else was just means to get gold to use in the auction house.
I did make a fair bit of real money off the RMAH, but the most fun I had in the game was on my self-found items only hardcore characters.
I considered the expansion, but I wasn’t interested enough in D3 to even finish it, the always online still bugs me especially because they removed it for consoles, and the new stuff just earned a big “meh” from me.
As strange as it may seem to say, the writing in D1 & D2 as simple, but very good. It got the point across, set the mood, and was done. The writing in D3 started bad and went to worse, until by Act 3 I simply couldn’t take it seriously anymore. Their attempts to revive the tension and psychological heft induced snarky comments and grins. Their attempts to go M0AR! EPIK just made me roll my eyes. Sure, Diablo was never about the story. But it was heavily about atmosphere and that was completely missing.
And then, on top of that, the game was just, “OK”. Not great, not bad. I could play it for quite a while if the flow was good, but the odd bit of lag would irritate me, the lack of interesting strategic choices made it boring, and the overall repetitive grind made it dull. I quit because there were simply far better options to spend my time on, and even if D3 was free, it just wouldn’t be worth my hours.
That could only be true if the auction house were a source of gear, which has never been true in the least. Every single item ever sold on the auction house existed because someone else had gotten it through play. If nobody was grinding and everyone was just buying from the auction house, who was selling?
But, as a practical matter, it turned the search for loot into a search for junk to sell so you could buy somebody else’s loot. Or you could just pay actual money for it. You would most likely never get the drop you wanted - you’d sell a drop in order to get somebody else’s stuff they didn’t want. Which may sound like a small change, but it’s a critical one. Suddenly your motivation is no longer the experience of getting a great drop. It’s become a mercantile transaction, and nothing more.
I got five years of enjoyment out of Diablo 2. I played Diablo 3 for two weeks after release, before saying, “Fuck this!”. Why? In D2 I was accustomed to mobs dropping gear that was an upgrade to what I was wearing. In D3, at release, mobs dropped gear that was a downgrade. Vendors didn’t sell anything that was better than what I was already wearing.
I’m looking forward to the elimination of the AH. Maybe now the mob drops won’t be influenced by what’s available on the AH.
