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[hachnslay]

I hope they give a good demo version otherwise there will be a lot of people that will happily sing a certain lazy town song.

I on the other hand will look out for LPers playing the game and not play the role of a sheep in the mindless blizzard fellowship herd.

[Darkmere]

Alright, I've slept and can look at this fresh. And like I said, I'll be more civil.

I said it's been refined. It's been tuned. It's a system they understand very well and it's probably down to a very concise formula that accounts for a lot of factors to give them an end result they want.

When that kind of expertise is applied to money-market system, that they control, I do get suspicious. Is it greed and corruption to manipulate that system? Probably not. But am I entitled to find it kind of distasteful should it happen? I think so.

I guess what I'm having trouble with here is that we don't even know what items are good or will work, or what the %age take on sales will be, or the frequency of RMT exchanges, avg transfer amount, things like that. I'd be interested in figures from D2 item sales sites, what %age of players bought items compared to how many total players had those items, etc. Sadly, I don't have access to this information. It would have been tough as hell to track anyway, everyone had duped runewords and the like, so very few had need to buy things anyway.

I'm not mentioning that you somehow imagine 2-3X more people will play D3 than have played wow.

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?serverid=-1&factionid=-1&minlevel=10&maxlevel=85&servertypeid=-1

Almost 4 million, right now, only counting characters over level 10 and been online in the last 30 days. Call it 3 million for dupe accounts. My numbers may be high but over the lifespan of WoW I'm sure easily 15 million have played it one point. In 8 years when D4 comes out, you do the math. I think will easily see that many sales in that time span.

If the census mod works like it used to (and I suspect it does, it was a simple, effective system), here's how that data was obtained:
Someone runs the mod and leaves the computer while it's running. The mod does /who commands (/who <parameter> will return up to 49 results for players matching that parameter) until each list returns less than 49 results, then tallies that information and sends it off to the census site.

That's neat, but it only accounts for people who chose to download and run it, and then upload the data over a period of time to get semi-realistic results. I'd actually say that figure is a ridiculously low estimate of active accounts, as most people have at least 2 characters (main, bank alt), if not more (I had 3 I played all the time, another 3 semi-regular, and low-level toons that mostly sat there).

You say up to 15 million, I think the highest I've heard was 13 million, but that's fairly close so I can agree with a figure around there. I'd still say D3 won't have near that many, but that's just a guess. SC2 was sponsored tournaments and the like, and it's hovered around 2-3 million logged on at peak.

It's quite possible the RMT AH is a total flop and no-one uses it. It's also possible that somehow it creates a race of supermen-barbarians fueled by money and vengeance. I'd be willing to bet it's not that close to either extreme.

Cute. I think you're overlooking that it makes perfectly good business sense for them to do so though. It's their world, they can manipulate it how they want. I'm still asking myself to what degree I'm willing to tolerate it should it happen. Because I don't want to buy into the AH and wouldn't, but now it kinda feels like just buying the game is affirming "it's what the players want." My like of the game is kinda held hostage by the stuff I don't like, and my endorsement of the game is a tacit approval of their methods. Why? Because they took away any chance for it to be otherwise.

I see where you're coming from, buying preference-wise. I guess the question is, do you feel the game will be worth playing, in spite of the issues you don't like? hard to guess, at this point. I'm not sure how one would go about confirming Blizzard's item drop manipulation, though.

I'll be honest, I followed a lot of the development of this game on diii.net so I've heard these arguments before in some form. That contributes to my bad mood, but it gets worse when disingenuous statements like "removed talent trees!" get thrown around and taken as "no talents!", feeding a pointless fire.

I was on the D3 forums pretty much the week it announced. This is the first semi-real conversation I've had about the game since the last big announcement about the Bnet features. Guess what? That was full of a lot of negative results in terms of player privacy and how much control Blizzard wants to have too. There's been a trend of disappointments for a lot of fans of D3, and many are wondering honestly how bad it could get. Which is funny because most of this has little to do with the game itself, and more about all the extraneous BS that surrounds it.

Yeah I can't argue with this at all, there's a whole lot of focused hate from the old guard Diablo fans. I do think some of it is overstated, as the talent trees or stats or no mercs or spell runes arguments tend to be. I'd like to talk about some of these, but I've babbled too long already.

[etgfrog]

my issue that i could see is kind of tin foil hattery, with the $$$ as a reason to manipulate things in the game to make even more money they could do something like lower the drops from certain powerful items but spawn them on market carecters to sell(hence things dont apear to be different) and just keep the money for themselves, such a thing could near undetectable except by blizzard employees. even if this doesn't happen at all and blizzard keeps thier hands clean from any sort of market manipulation then there would still be rumors spreading like wildfire.

[G-Flex]

Is there anyone who wanted to buy Diablo III, but will not, because it's going to be mod-less and online only..?

That and damn near every other decision I hear being made about the game, but then again, I'm not a huge fan of the ultra-accessible, your-dementia-ridden-grandmother-could-put-it-down-for-a-year-and-still-remember-how-to-play, design-by-committee, low-returns-per-unit-so-we-have-to-start-marketing-to-people's-two-year-old-children-and-small-pets-too, massively-formulaic, cold, artless excuse for a commercial video game industry to begin with.

Also : After the success of WoW, wasn't it obvious that D3 will be nigh-MMO? You could tell that the second They announced "tactical" boss encounters. What did you expect? That you'll control many characters at once?

It's certainly not a surprise. The industry loves to point fingers at whatever is profitable and say "make it more like THAT" even when it isn't good for the product or it's their own product they wind up competing with.

[webadict]

It is significantly unlikely that drop rates will be affected. Instead, I believe that new items will be added that will be for sale immediately. It's just easier.

[G-Flex]

They also won't be taking a percentage share of auction sales, just a flat cut. Part of the reason for that is so there's little incentive for them to artificially manipulate prices.

[ChairmanPoo]

Is there anyone who wanted to buy Diablo III, but will not, because it's going to be mod-less and online only..?

Me. And no, I was not skeptical about it beforehand. Except insofar Blizzard had already pulled that DRM gambit with starcraft 2 and I feared they might try the same with Diablo.

[Bdthemag]

The thing is, its not just the lack of modding and being online. For me its the dumbing down of gameplay, the art style, and the lack of modding. Modding makes the game alot more fun to play, I mean look at Fallout New Vegas. They have a massive modding community making quests involving commanding your own spaceship, and they have mods that vastly improve over the game. Its silly to prevent people from doing this.

[Krelian]

In my case, unlike some trolls have suggested in this thread, I DO like the game; a LOT. It is the DRM that makes it unrealiable for me to play. A cracked version at least, will allow me to play it without worring about my conection.
In my case, its a case of a lost sale due to ubisoft-like attemps to stop piracy. I does not work, and intead it disrupt the game for potential clients.

[Levi]

In my case, unlike some trolls have suggested in this thread, I DO like the game; a LOT. It is the DRM that makes it unrealiable for me to play. A cracked version at least, will allow me to play it without worring about my conection.
In my case, its a case of a lost sale due to ubisoft-like attemps to stop piracy. I does not work, and intead it disrupt the game for potential clients.

I'm not 100% convinced its to stop piracy.  When I first read that it needed a constant internet connection I assumed it was more to prevent things like duping weapons and exploits.

[Krelian]

In my case, unlike some trolls have suggested in this thread, I DO like the game; a LOT. It is the DRM that makes it unrealiable for me to play. A cracked version at least, will allow me to play it without worring about my conection.
In my case, its a case of a lost sale due to ubisoft-like attemps to stop piracy. I does not work, and intead it disrupt the game for potential clients.

I'm not 100% convinced its to stop piracy.  When I first read that it needed a constant internet connection I assumed it was more to prevent things like duping weapons and exploits.

If that were the real case, then it would be just like D2, you can play offline on your own, but if you want to participate in the Bnet world, you are forced to play with permanent conection, with another character unavailable on SP.
It would cost literaly nothing. To me, it is clear a DRM manuever.

[Saint]

my childhood has been ruined...AGAIN.

[ChairmanPoo]

In my case, unlike some trolls have suggested in this thread, I DO like the game; a LOT. It is the DRM that makes it unrealiable for me to play. A cracked version at least, will allow me to play it without worring about my conection.
In my case, its a case of a lost sale due to ubisoft-like attemps to stop piracy. I does not work, and intead it disrupt the game for potential clients.

Same here. I only marginally cared about no.modding, even though its a bad thing to have (I dont like any of diablo ii's jods' but I like having the option to install them)

[Wh1tefang12]

I personally dont care about the DRM, the lack of mods annoys me but its not going to kill the game it just kill replay value, what angers me is the auction house, i have no problem if its ingame money only but real money just pisses me of it defeats the point of playing online completely because it will likely be filled with guys who drop $$ just so they can kill anything defeating any possibility of pvp (which i imagine they likely have or have in the works) I probably will only buy it if they get rid of the $ auction house.

[Mephansteras]

Speaking as someone who modded Diablo II heavily...I'd really rather there was mod support. And the always-connected aspect of the DRM might make modding even single player difficult. I'm not too happy with that, although I imagine a few bright folks will find a way to make it work.

I've also been disappointed in the direction the Diablo franchise has moved in general. It's gone from a fantastic horror/fantasy into an epic fantasy. In the first game you actually had to think about what you were doing, how you were fighting. A gang of regular goatmen was a threat that you had to properly set yourself up to take out. In 2 you just spammed a bunch of powers and wiped them out. Elites *might* cause you problems and boss fight could be tough. But most of the game was spent smacking monsters with very little threat to you. It looks like 3 is going to be even more-so. How many creatures can you wipe out in one attack? Let's find out!

Nothing wrong with it by itself, but I do find myself a bit less interested in the game because of it. The multiplayer stuff doesn't interest me at all, since I doubt I'd use it much at all. Certainly never with random people. The always-connected DRM even for single player is horrible. The reason they gave for that was nonsense. "Some players might get discouraged because all the work they put into single player doesn't carry over to multi-player"?. Ridiculous. And to a large extent dishonest, which disgusts me.

Will I get the game? I don't know. Maybe, if my friends really enjoy it. But I'm not going to pre-order it and I may hold off for a long time. I have a lot of games to occupy my time, many of them from good indy developers who are less interested in screwing us over for money than they are in making a good game.