Diablo III real-money action house finally goes live | Hacker News Reader

Diablo III real-money action house finally goes live

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I'm a bit disappointed with D3 so far. Everything about the game just seems setup to squeeze money out of people.

For example, in D2 the skills you chose were a crucial component of how well you did later in the game. You could create a build with relatively crap equipment who could do well later in the game based on their skills. But in D3 skills don't matter and everything is based on equipment - and you can buy equipment for real money and give Blizzard a cut.

Also, it doesn't seem big enough. I got my first character through normal in something like 3 days. And then I'm repeating the same old thing. It was 11 years between the release of D2's expansion and Diablo 3. I know they have other games, but they could have spent a little more time making the world bigger. My guess is they start selling service packs. They know people will buy them, so why not?

I'm enjoying it, and I'll probably play one character up to 60 and try out the others, but I just can't see myself playing it like I did D2.

>For example, in D2 the skills you chose were a crucial component of how well you did later in the game.

So much so that a mistaken skill allotment would essentially render your character worthless later in the game. In the end, there really was one or two right ways to allocate your points. So I disagree. If there's one thing that Blizzard got right with D3 is the skill system. It's great.

> But in D3 skills don't matter and everything is based on equipment

How much skill do you think there was in D2? It was 100% grind.

There was as much skill as you wanted there to be.

Maybe not many people did it, but if a person wanted to, they could avoid the cookie cutter builds, think through their character's skills and come up with clever original builds using the less popular skills. Maybe they wouldn't be soloing through the later acts of hell, but they could still have a ton of fun dominating nightmare and early hell, and they could still help out in grinding hell leveling runs.

That entire aspect of the game is basically gone now. You get lucky with items, buy items, or your character just sucks.

You can still play on nightmare and early hell with crappy items in diablo 3, just as you could play on nightmare and early hell with a crappy skill set in diablo 2. The only difference is now you can take your character from suck to non-suck by grinding it, while in diablo 2 you had to start over and grind it.

It's embarrassing that D3 is the result of 11 years of development. It's one of the most unoriginal, badly written, cynical and frustrating games I've played in many years. I'm at the very end of the damn thing (final boss, Normal) only I can't really bother to finish it because it's too repetitive.

I've enjoyed a lot about the game, but I agree with you about the story. I suffered through all the dialogue in normal mode. Franticly clicking the X on all the conversations in nightmare mode has made the game much more bearable.

try using the spacebar - much faster

I love you.

I recommend Escape, actually - it skips the whole conversation. :)

What happens after you beat Diablo? Do you start from the very beginning with the same hero as before? Because my guy is a ~30 wizard and it's got to be pretty difficult to get to a higher level on Normal.

Yes. You beat the game on a character in Normal, after getting to like ~30 or whatever (dunno, made up number). Then you can play through again from the beginning doing the exact same thing, with tougher monsters, in Nightmare. Beat nightmare and you're at 40~50 or whatever. Repeat again on Hell, at which point you're probably 60. Repeat again on inferno.

So basically you play the same game over and over again.

11 years development? I believe D2 came out 11 years ago, but D3 wasn't in development for the last 11 years. They released quite a few other games in meantime. Notably WoW, which kept the whole company completely busy for at least 3-4 years.

"Development on Diablo III began in 2001 when Blizzard North was still in operation," [1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III#Development

Bobby Kotick is the one to blame for this. I think every single design decision in the game was always measured against "Will this make more money for Activision or not?"

I'm surprised you don't need to spend additional real money to finish the game.

This kind of perpetual squeeze might work in games where, for whatever reason, players are unusually motivated as seems to be the case with Call of Duty, but Diablo III is a PC game, not a "bro" console game, and this pay-as-you-go model doesn't seem to be translating as well.

Yeah, I started playing about 2 weeks ago.. played every class to 20, but played my Monk to 32 and finished 'Normal' mode. Was disappointed that the road to 60 is paved by going through the same content again, just a little bit harder. You would think after 11 years they would have been able to release a complete game.

It sounds to me like you never played Diablo 2. The basis of that game was repeating through the same content (albeit with randomly generated maps) in search of better and better gear. This mechanic hasn't fundamentally changed in Diablo 3.

I feel it has fundamentally changed with the removal of the skill tree. Instead of making choices and ending up with a semi-unique character, I can change my skills at any time.

My character isn't "mine" any more. The only real way to progress is to grind for loot now. Or pay someone for it. (something my friends and I never did in d2)

A good chunk of runes aren't available at 30, and you only have the full set at 60.

I know that my skill set changed pretty radically on subsequent difficulty levels, the same tactics didn't work terribly well.

Once you max out you're the same as every other character of that class.

In D2 I'll admit the skill tree had some severe flaws, but it allowed unique customization to an extent.

I don't see how 'I skilled and use these skills, they skilled and use those skills' is that different to 'I use these skills, they use these skills'. Except for experimenting with own builds is much easier now, so the motivation for following a cookie cutter build is weaker.

For whatever reason, the Diablo 2 experience seemed much more enjoyable in comparison. It was possible, with simple determination, to grind your way from the beginning to the very pinnacle by slow, incremental progress. If you kept pushing, you could keep going.

Diablo 3 seems to have an entirely different curve where progress diminishes to near uselessness until you get a lucky loot drop and you can finally make headway again.

In Diablo 2 there was always a "sweet spot" where you could earn maximum experience and you never seemed to be so woefully under-equipped. A surprising drop would mean a big boost in performance for the next few levels, always a treat, but if you didn't get one you could still do okay.

In Diablo 3 the theoretical sweet spot is always way ahead of what your gear can handle and you're left struggling, out of your league, or coasting in a less difficult area with near zero experience awarded.

It's just not tuned right, unless of course the idea is to drive people to the Auction House.

How many hours did you play to make it through on normal?

How many hours do you expect from a "complete game"?

I've now played through normal, nightmare and hell with my main character and have the mindset that inferno isn't really part of the game. I see it as a "turn the difficulty knobs up to 11 and force the unlucky people to buy things on the auction house".

Even if I decide that inferno isn't worth the hassle I've played roughly 60 hours on that one character.

I found that there was enough "hey, that didn't happen last time!" moments that the 2nd and 3rd play throughs were enjoyable.

$60 for 60 hours of play is exceptional value for entertainment. :)

Diablo 3 is a lot better than I expected. Its a lot of fun bashing mobs in co-op mode with your friends. While its the same maps on all difficulty levels, there are random mobs and encounters quite often, and it never gets old finding nice items to sell on AH.

The only problem is that inferno is too difficult at the moment. Patch 1.03 will adjust the monster damage by about 25%. Right now, you cant kill elites with a melee character. In fact, you die to normal mobs very often because of their huge damage output. So people stay on Hell and play that content instead, which is not really intended. Inferno is supposed to be hard but doable, not impossible. Right now only ranged characters with the best gear can play that difficulty level.

Overall, I love the game and will play it for many more weeks or even months. I will never use the real money AH though. :)

Successfully recouped the cost of buying the game by selling off a few items I'd picked up on my way to lvl 60.

I'm glad I did this early into the real money auction house, as I can't see how the whole econ won't crash due to the fact that there is constant growth of the amount of gold and items in the system.

I wonder if arbitrage trading is anywhere as feasible with the real-money auction house as with the play-money one. So far, I have probably spent more time in the auction house than in the game itself, buying low and selling high.

Currently, you need to find a way to bypass the auction search result caching and have a reaction time of about 5 seconds to grab the really good deals.

I wonder how well this will do considering myself and all the people I know that were playing have basically stopped as we got bored in Hell.

Only inferno-level items will have value as anything else is too common. Player use of it will have a similar curve to online poker in that it's a zero-sum game at high levels fed by a low-level casual group of players that is incapable of making money and occasionally makes purchases.

Does blizzard have a way of increasing the drop rate of items around those players who they can see are more likely to use the real money auction house?

If anything they would decrease the drop rate. They do not need to encourage sellers.

Why not fix the typo in the original article's headline?

'Action house'? sounds exciting!

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