Diablo III Is Broken

[Do4600]

Why are people complaining about this?. D2 had an real money auction house, it just wasn't legal (stone of Jordan anyone?). Many, many people paid real money to buy those hard to get items through ebay and other means. Blizzard has just made that whole process more accessible to everyone in an attempt to get rid of the constant gold-seller spam (which hasn't worked, why are people still trying to sell gold?). But yeah, this poster is in complete denial about how D2 actually worked.

For my part, I never bought items for D2 and i've never used the auction house in D3. That's my choice and it hasn't impacted my enjoyment of the game in any way. People in complete denial about item sellers in D2, now whining about how it's no longer "underground" in D3... well that's just whiners for you I guess.

Seriously of all the things to complain about in D3, the auction house is the most stupid, baseless, asinine thing to complain about. It has absolutely zero effect on peoples enjoyment of the game unless they want it to. It's simply Blizzards means of getting rid of this:

http://d2items.com/?gclid=CObk4NGj2LECFYao4AodbnEAMA

http://www.d2craft.com/index.php?cPath=2_383

http://lewt.com/?gclid=CLatmNOj2LECFcJo4AodMVcAFw

Did anyone know that you can turn off general chat? Or that you don't have to open the auction house?

You're not seeing the real problem here. The auction house is the answer to those online sellers but it unbalances the game even if you don't use it. It does this because Blizzard balanced the drop rates in the game for the auction house. I played Diablo 3 personally for 130 hours and have found one terrible unique item, Doombringer. It happens to be my favorite item in the diablo universe, but in Diablo 3 in order to advance to the stage where it would drop I had to buy a weapon that was in every aspect was better than the Doombringer. If I had played Diablo 2 for 130 hours I would expect about 30-40 unique items, not all would be good but they would keep me playing.

In Diablo 2 unique items are rare for the individual and because you only have access to eight players at a time your visibility of tradable items is very small. Websites that sell D2 items give you a much better idea of just how common those items are. A Stone of Jordan sells for $0.50, meaning they are very, very common. Just for argument I'll estimate that 1 in 10 players have the best ring in the game. Also remember that it was abundant enough to be used as a defacto currency until runes gained ground.

In Diablo 3 the auction house provides perfect visibility for all tradable items and the individuals drop rate is balanced for that. The best unique rings in Diablo 3 are I believe Stone of Jordan, Oculus and Skull Grasp. Last time I did a auction house search on those items they turned up maybe 8 pages of results each, if memory serves me correct there 50 results per page, if not lets say there are 100 results per page and lets just say "fuck it all" and say there are 40 pages of results for each ring meaning that within the auction house there are 12,000 of the best rings in the game meaning that if we have a player base of 3 million there is one ring for trade for each 250 people, and I vastly overestimated how many rings there are in the auction house over an auction period. Even after I inflate the stats, and add all three ring totals together they are still 25 times harder to find than my conservative estimate on the rarity of an item that is relatively more powerful in Diablo 2.

The auction house adds transparency to trade and to balance that transparency the drop rates on epic gear have to be significantly lowered and stats have to be randomized so many of the items are useless. If they didn't do that a Stone of Jordan would cost $0.50 a piece just like they do on those D2 sites. That's why the auction house ruins the game, because the game is based on finding cool epic loot and killing things with it, and the auction house adds the economic necessity of it being nigh impossible to find for an individual, and that doesn't change if you just "never use the auction house." This is the true problem, I hear it from everybody that plays or has played Diablo 3, "I can play for 10 hours and never find an item worth using or selling"

Even with all the math, the only way that argument makes any sense is if those rare epic items of awesomeness never ever drop. In which case, they'd never show up in the auction house. I find a new piece of gear that either the toon i'm playing, or one of my other toons can use, every hour (I only played for 1.5 hours today and found about eight pieces of gear that were better than the ones I had equipped). I do hear what you're saying, it just doesn't match my personal experience with the game.

Something that this article doesn't address is that the majority of Diablo 3 players are casual players who won't get to endgame. The "necessity" of the auction house, if it's to be believed, only kicks in on Inferno level anyways. So if the majority of players won't keep playing past normal, then they'll never need to use the auction house. So here's this story telling them that they "have" to use the auction house to play but it's just not true.

What bothers me is that before there was an article, it was just people whining about a feature that they could've avoided if they had some persistence. Such complaints are easily written off because people ***** about everything whether it makes sense or not. Now it's got a little weight to it because you see this "Diablo 3 is broken", whereas it's really just some of the players that are broken. I still think that there are better problems to be complaining about (lag? LAG? LAG! Yeah I die way more often because of lag than I do from any difficulty setting or "lesser" gear).

Actually no, I came to this conclusion in about the middle of June, not because some article was published recently, and actually, I haven't played it since then either. This article just proves to me that it hasn't been fixed yet. The fact that these rings are 25 times less abundant acts as a microcosm for the rest of the loot drops. In Diablo 3 there are far fewer good items and far more players than in Diablo 2, this means the drop rates are astronomically low comparatively. This creates a ceiling on character development driven by items, which is the only kind in Diablo 3.

If your character can solo act 2 Inferno(like mine can) each item your character is wearing is already ridiculously rare, because good items are even more rare in this game, finding an upgrade to that gear "by myself" are comparable to the chances of getting struck by lighting. Because items are now the only method of character advancement this character is stuck, repeating the same areas over and over again waiting for lighting to strike. I don't know how far you are in the game, but finding eight pieces of gear better than the ones you have in middle inferno(which is what this article is about) in one and a half hours is impossible, I don't believe you for a second.

This creates a problem because gameplay could be defined as a series of challenges, risks and rewards. Up until Inferno the balance of challenge, risk and reward is fine. Inferno lacks the reward of leveling up, the challenge increases unevenly from Hell act 4 to Inferno act 1 and the risk is several times greater. The difficulty increases by every standard and the rewards disappear shortly after Inferno act 1. Then the only way to advance after that is by buying equipment from a wizard who glitched his way into Inferno act 4 and has been doing aspect runs nine hours a day for the past two months. That's what the end game is in Diablo 3, buying equipment or grinding long, long hours for equipment, neither option is fun, and the drop in players by the millions reflects that.