Oh the power of fanaticism, how many souls hast thee claimed?
I actually despise most of what is blizzard, so don't go pulling how I'm a fanboy or any of that. I feel like they are a bunch of uncreative dolts for the most part, maybe less so today, but I feel they can properly eat themselves for ripping off the warhammer universes. However Diablo was much nicer.
I really don't know what you mean. The modding community does no harm to a game, and in almost every case helps to extend the game's scope and lifecycle. Look at minecraft as an example. It is a popular game, but I would be willing to bet that a significant portion of the people who play it include one or more mods to make it more interesting or to add features not in the vanilla game. This does no harm to Minecraft and leads to increased sales and a longer life for the game.
Well first you need to realize the part about how this is a heavily concentrated online game, and that there is competition in ways, online in this game. PvP may be not the biggest part, but it is there. Now this eliminates the possibility of using a good number of mods due to inconsistencies between users and so forth. The way it seems the the system is set up, you're always on THEIR system. So there's no, running your own unofficial private server or so forth for which you could have these mods going and what not. I think they all run through the official system of theirs. Maybe I have that wrong but it looks like a mess to handle basically.
Sure it technically doesn't harm a game, but to the developers I guess you could easily take it from a darker stance. You spend this time developing a game and whatnot and then you have hundreds of script kiddies bouncing all over the place doing everything you just did, better, or a bunch of people taking your work and twisting it into their own version and will. It just seems silly. I don't know why its wrong for some artists to want their stuff to not be tampered with, while others are fine with it. I understand the importance of mods and I know a lot of great mods do exist, and support modding. But I also support the stance that just some games don't need it as much, or shouldn't even really have it.
I agree it adds life, and more sales but it just seems like a much less significant point for diablo 3, considering diablo 2 has lived this long, with a lot of people still playing vanilla. I'm sure it might last even longer with the whole new way pvp acts and such, might even get competitive.
if there is no skill and tree and no stats, is it still an action RPG or is it just an action game? Is it an RPG because....why is it an RPG again?
There are skills and levels and stats, just not stats like in Diablo 2, and not skilltrees. It's still easily an RPG.
As an alternative to insanity, we could just chill out and when the game is available make judgement then.
Exactly.