That part is actually true. Making it easy for buyers and sellers to find each other dumped the virtual economy on its head. Market efficiency matters. I’d be surprised if anyone who played diablo3 more than 50 hours or so is wearing three pieces of gear they found themselves, on any character.
On platforms where the auction house is unavailable, good gear drops at an incredibly, outrageously higher frequency (something like 14,000%) AND the monsters stats are nerfed, just to make the game equally hard as the PC version. The AH turned the game from a treasure hunt to a lottery.
If they increased the probability of crappy drops though, which is what AeM seems to be saying, the auction houses would work, and someone who didn’t want to use them would have their game experience be negatively affected.
the single players’ expectations that they operate at the same level as those who come together to trade the best items are unrealistic. if you want to play alone, you cannot expect to get the same level of items as people who pool their resources together. as a single player without those resources, you should not be able to survive in Inferno at all. the highest level of difficulty would be a joke if a single player could handle it by their lonesome.
crappy drops are relative. a level 10 item is a nice upgrade when you’ve got a level 3 item equipped, then anything above level 10 would not be crappy. that progression goes out the window when you buy that level 999 item and complain that nothing good ever drops for you as you scrap that level 20 item that just dropped.
no, the problem is not the drop rate - it is the items themselves that are crap. unlike D2, which is more than 10 years old now, i don’t even remember a single epic item from D3 at all; except for a vague recollection of a weapon that froze everything when combined with a high attack speed. it ended up being used by my follower because it was utterly useless to my character as it lacked dps. no items stood out because they were all just sockets to carry the same primary stats. bleah.
As far as Diablo2 online play, the only reason I did it was the fact that it allowed me to “mule”. I could log in one of my mules and, if I was quick enough, I could log in another character and pass gear to the mule. And the the mule could pass that gear to other characters who could make better use of it.
You guys are acting like the loot difference between PC version with its AH and the console version is some sort of crackpot theory when Blizzard devs themselves have commented on the issue and openly said console version has better loot. This isn’t all that great a cite but I’m not going to go through all the 350k search results to find a better one.
I think the Normal-Nightmare-Hell progress was balanced around no Auction House, and they intended Inferno to be something people would slowly progress through. I remember they said they didn’t have an auction house in their internal tests, and it surprised them how much the AH sped up the gearing process.
The original game didn’t have monster power levels at all, because they expected inferno to take longer to clear. What happened was that a few powerful Demon Hunter and Wizard specs could clear all of inferno with relatively poor gear while only focusing on dps stats, and seeded the auction house with powerful gear.
You could do the original game up to Inferno without any auction house fairly easily. I remember taking one of my early character to the auction house around lvl 20-25 or so. After spending about 20.000 gold (very small amount), I quintupled my damage and health and proceeded to basically one shot everything for the next couple of acts.
I have a hard time trying to prove this, but I’d be extremely doubtful that even a bare majority of players ever went online for Diablo 1/2. And I’d suspect most of those who did spent only token time. Why? Well, because even by the time of Diablo 2, large portions of the market didn’t have a very good internet connection available. Dial-up sucked, but it was almost all people could get at the time. D2 came out in 2000 - and while the market for Diablo games may be more internet-savvy than most, I suspect even among them most people didn’t go online constantly. Certainly not like today.
The fact that early Battle.net was a nightmarish mess of hacklers, bugs, and lag didn’t help.
Well, consider this - Diablo III is, out of all Diablo games so far, the “best case” for multi-player being dominant. They don’t force you to play multiplayer, but they sure as heck want you to. They force you to be constantly connected to the Internet, through their Battle.Net service, even if you’re only playing single-player. So, in this best-case-so-far scenario for multiplayer, do most people play multiplayer?
No.
“Blizzard: Single-Player, Not Co-Op, ‘Is The Clear Choice’ of Diablo 3 Players”
Even Blizzard admits that most people don’t want multiplayer Diablo. (Well, technically, Blizzard pretends that we all really do secretly want multiplayer, but that they haven’t pushed it enough yet. Or something.)
Nevertheless, I routinely hear that “everybody” played Diablo II online, with other people. I think this is a perfect example of confirmation bias. If you play a game online, with other people, then you look around and see that everybody you can see is playing online, with other people. Unconsciously, people just assume that this is a representative sampling.
I will admit to confirmation bias. I know about half a dozen dudes who played DII, and a couple of them tried Online, but they did not play that way after a few tries.
I will concede that most D2 players didn’t realistically have the option of playing online. But I played it first solo, and then online multiplayer, and I can say that in my experience it was vastly superior as a multiplayer game. I believe that this was by design, given how many features of the game show up only or to a much greater extent in multiplayer play.
I honestly don’t understand why people don’t play D3 more multiplayer. There’s no downside, other than not wanting to ramp up the monster power - which is a minor factor in some cases, and a desirable factor in the vast majority of other cases. Can anyone who’s gone to the single-player end of the spectrum give me some insight?
Probably because most people online are idiots, and folks don’t want to deal with them. Not everyone has a message board full of cool online friends like we do.
I dunno - I haven’t played with anyone here, and I tend to just open my game up to the public for people to join. 95% of the time, I get good/great parties to play with. There’s little people can do to be idiots in D3, since there’s no item stealing or TKing. The only thing that can be done is to play other parts of the map (experience is shared only within the same area), or to rush through too quickly leaving mobs to kill the rest of a team.
Well, I remember playing multiplayer D2 with Chronos and a few other dopers, plus my son and we had a blast for a while online. I kind of split my time half and half of grouping up with others in D3 now, including hardcore. I’m trying to get all 5 of my HC classes to lvl60 and my regular DH to paragon 100 by the time the expansion comes out. Just a mindless goal I have in mind, if I have to retire one them for the new crusader class (not sure if we get two more slots for a reg crusader and a HC one).
I’m kind of that point in my life where I just want to do mindless pixel-killing and weapon/armor upgrades, so I will just keep staying on this game for the foreseeable future.
I came to find or create a new thread about the new patch, but I guess this thread will do. So, who’s up for making/joining a SDMB community or clan?
The patch is still downloading, so I can only speak about the pre-patch days. IME/O, trading your follower for another player was not enough of a help to offset how much harder the monsters got. Maybe it’s because I wanted to play at the same MP I’m accustomed to (which is 1 lower than the one where I am constantly dying). Unless you have a well planned team that sticks together (I am constantly towning because I pick up and salvage or vendor all blues), it’s rough out there and it gets frustrating.
After reading the patch notes, there’s no telling how much this will change.