Well? Who’s in it? What do you think?
I really wish Blizz would send me one. I was in the last WoW beta, so I feel like I at least have some kind of chance. (I know that might not matter, but let me hope.)
Not in yet, but hoping. I will post when/if I get in.
Not I : (. I’ve been watching the youtube videos with baited breath though. Diablo III is shaping up quite nicely. Just 6ish months to go… probably!
Nitpick: you mean bated breath. As in held. Not baited, as in worms on a hook. 
Don’t tell me what I have and have not eaten recently! =)
I’m in! Would like to try some co-op to see how it goes.
My battle.net id is my SDMB handle @gmail.com.
Is it cool? I can’t wait for this one!
Ugh, they seem to have forgotten my many years of loyal Blizz-game playing. I still haven’t gotten in to the beta. Maybe they’ll draw my name in the Facebook thing tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
I first heard about the forthcoming release of Diablo 3 many years ago when I was a youngster. I remember saying to a friend that I’d buy it as long as they didn’t do something utterly stupid, like getting rid of runewords. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what they did.
Blizzard apparently has no idea whatsoever why D2 was popular in the first place.
Maybe he had sushi for lunch. 
I don’t think runewords alone were responsible for the success of D2, and I wouldn’t entirely give up on the crafting system. We haven’t even seen the runestones in the beta thus far, which only goes up through level 13 and the first quest series - it’s not even half of what we got in Act 1 in D2 content-wise.
Love the username, by the way.
It is cool - many of the familiar addictive reward cycles of D2, with added polish and quality of life improvements. I think my favorite may be the Companion animals. You find Scrolls of Companion in your journeys; right-clicking one gives you a small animal companion that roams around and picks up gold for you, which saves repetitive stress on the wrist and hand and is sometimes cute. So far I have had:
- Spider
- Roach/beetle/scarab (hard to tell)
- Scorpion
- Millipede
- Snake
- Pig
- Chicken
- Bat
I want a dog or cat like Torchlight, though.
This is funny since overpowered duped runewords pretty much ruined public D2 games. Any mechanic that requires you to check a website isn’t working right. The runestone/skill system in D3 should make D2’s primitive tree systems where half the spells are useless look like a joke from a bygone era.
Unfortunately like all 3D Blizzard games everything looks like it’s made out of plastic. And their endgame is basically going to be farming gear to sell on the RMAH instead of, say, a bunch of cool uber dungeons like the D2 Median mod. You win some you lose some.
Runewords can’t be what made D2 great, given that they weren’t even introduced until the expansion. Personally, I think that what was greatest about D2 was that they managed to create a system that was sufficiently complicated that unanticipated emergent phenomena arose, and runewords really weren’t a part of that at all. Someone sat down and decided that this particular combination of runes in this order would give +x% damage, y lifeleech, and z resistances. But I guarantee you that nobody planned, or even anticipated, that the highest damage-dealing build in the game would be a sorceress who doesn’t even cast sorceress spells-- That just sort of happened.