This blog post will address some areas of improvement that to Diablo 3. Those areas will be lag, UI, legendaries, RNG, loot quality and the social gaming aspects, especially with regards to Clans.
The first major improvement that Blizzard absolutely needs to work on is the lag/latency issue that has plagued the game since it’s release. Despite the game being out for a few years, the occasional lag spikes that occur in the game can be unforgiving at times, leading to frustrating and occasionally impossible game play. Obviously, the people who are the most heavily affected are the hardcore players as they may experience untimely deaths. However, I find that the game cannot be played with excellent settings without essentially running it bare bones. Streaming the game, playing the game in window mode or even having other network heavy applications (say watching a stream or two) make the game experience nearly unplayable. And it’s sad because I find that the game is pretty easy to stream when it comes to content.
The next major improvement I feel is necessary is the UI, particularly the mouse cursor in the game. The mouse cursor at times becomes nearly invisible to the point where you no longer can figure out what you’re targeting. Half of that problem is due to the sheer amount of graphic spam on screen. The other problem is that the cursor is just too small. Picking up items and maneuvering can be insanely frustrating because of how small of a radius picking up an item can be. Because of the speed at which a character can move vs the sensitivity of picking up an item, you often times just wander around aimlessly attempting to grab stuff. For monsters, I find myself occasionally wasting resources endlessly just because I have a hard time figuring out where my cursor is.
I would like for Blizzard to introduce a better way of picking stuff up. With gold and potions, the situation is pretty reasonable but items still can be cumbersome. I mean it’s nice to see various items drop around you but manually picking up each one can be extremely tiresome. My suggestion is to offer something similar to World of Warcraft where you can AoE loot corpses and see a list of items with everything marked off as checked before putting them into your pack. Then you can quickly uncheck items that you don’t want and leave them on the ground.
Onto the next major fixing: legendaries. I was watching Archon the Wizard’s video on upcoming fixes to other elemental damages. The big issue is that most people have gravitated towards Fire damage mostly due to Cindercoat’s massive damage increase. The answer Blizzard is doing centers around changing the way runes for other elemental damages are handled. While that portion is interesting, the main issue still points to the way legendaries are still centered around the concept of a best-in-slot mechanic.
Although Loot 2.0 has massively improved the gameplay, a lot more work can be done to improve the overall experience for the loot system. For legendaries, most legendaries still are useless unless they provide certain affixes. So even with an interesting specific capability, most legendaries remain as spare materials rather than being saved for certain situations. I think that the affixes on legendaries should be fixed even more so where your reroll is not really a reroll but an upgrade to a certain ability. An alternative is to allow two separate mechanisms, one would be to allow for a changing a stat type and the other is to have percentage or fixed amounts of an upgrade with a scaling cost. So let’s say you have 4.5% critical hit chance on a helmet. Rather than rerolling the stat indefinitely and wasting hard earned materials that took you hours to farm, you will gain a +0.5% guaranteed increase with a reasonable cost for the upgrade.
The next thing to address on the legendary aspect is that Blizzard should be releasing more legendaries as part of content releases. Although that part is being planned for ladders, the thing is that even with ladders, the base game shouldn’t suffer stagnation from lack of new content. Having more legendaries with affixes like Cindercoat would allow for that build diversity and stimulate more item hunts but still allow people who find Cindercoats the option of retaining their hard work. The idea here is to not kill off builds but increase the pool of builds by adding to the items that can contribute something meaningful and fun.
Another thing about legendaries that I feel should happen is that there needs to be more focused efforts for being able to find specific ones rather than relying on pure RNG. I’m a huge fan of the Horadric Cache Bounties and crafting materials dropped by specific mobs. This really helps put a better focus on the game that feels lacking once Rifts and Bounties no longer become the meta end game. However, things like set items or the Stone of Jordan are insanely tough to find. What ends up happening is the lack of focus forces people into just doing endless RNG Rifts that end up burning one out. The burnout is all mental and emotional expenditure as one quickly can grow frustrated in not receiving anything for days, leading people (especially those of us who lack time) to slowly tone down their play of the game, which I’m certain is something Blizzard doesn’t really want to see.
With that said, there really needs to be more of an end game that allows one to focus on specific items through narrow avenues of play. Raids in World of Warcraft are good in that sense because one can just examine a boss’ loot table to determine which ones to go after. Perhaps, a similar mechanic is required in Diablo 3. As Bounties and crafting materials have demonstrated a positive focus, I feel that it’s time to expand that aspect to almost all items in the game.
Now, that’s not to say that you just go back to farming Act 3, etc. You could do something such as Act 1 drops a specific set armor piece from a boss. Like the easier bosses drop lower level set pieces while harder bosses on high torments drop better set pieces. If one wants to still just do campaign or adventure mode, there’s no reason not to include those items in the loot table. But at least provide another outlet for having people focus their efforts.
Before tackling the loot quality aspect, I want to discuss RNG for a moment. I think RNG is Blizzard’s cheese tactic for generating and stimulating cheap content. However, I really feel that RNG is not RNG all the time. For instance, I’ve found myself one night just finding the same gloves over and over. Matter of fact, when I won these certain gloves another Clan mate one his simultaneously. Before you reply “RNG is RNG” let’s look at a little patch fix that Blizzard did with Mighty Belts and Quivers. I remember for a period how I would receive a ridiculous amount of Mighty Belts during my runs on a Wizard no less. These issues point to me that Loot 2.0 isn’t what people really believe.
Because I really distrust Blizzard’s so-called RNG mechanism for the most part, I would like to see a lot of that removed from the game or at least better tested. Loot is one aspect but monsters in Rifts as well seem to be affected. I’ve been in Rifts where the monsters are all the same every level and for a few Rifts. It made me really question how the RNG is programmed.
Now, what I’m leading up to is the idea of loot quality and progression in the game. Right now, I feel that the RNG aspect provides the illusion of progression. Your only real progression outside of the leveling process (including paragon leveling) is gearing and eventually seeing how far you can make it in difficulty. However, the difficulty level is pretty irrelevant in my book because of the way the loot system works. I do realize that in an upcoming patch they will address this but not to the extent where everything really starts to make sense.
Part of the problem is that the stats for gear are all the same no matter which difficulty you pick. The only difference in gear occurs between Torment and other modes along with completing bounties on certain acts for the bounty specific gear. But that’s simply for set items and bounties. I’m talking about the quality of an item, not just the stats. RNG and time are the only determining factors for progress, which make the game frustrating and loses focus quite quickly. Without that focus, it’s easy to get mentally burnt out, which is what I predict is happening to a large number of hardcore players.
There are plenty of (trolls) on the Blizzard Diablo 3 forums who “argue” (if you want to describe their lack of coherency in trying to generate a thread) that the people who QQ the most probably only put 15 minutes into the game and expect to be instantly geared. Naturally, these people are either A) there to incite a riot (for which I wish there was a way to ensnare these trolls and hurl them into the center of the Sun as a science experiment for humanity in discovering the rate at which one turns to atoms); B) they really are that stupid, have no life and farm for way more hours than should be allowed. Ignoring category A) for a moment, let’s take a look at group B) whom I feel are a differently entitled bunch. First, do you really want a game fostering an environment where people play endlessly for 24 hrs/7 days/week? This is the same type of environment that is burning out the so-called hardcore players because at a certain point the amount of time invested into the game does not yield the real fun people want.
Second, just spending hours grinding does not make for a great game. Most of it is just pointless and demonstrates only for a select few how intact their virginity is (yes, I went there; come on, these people make themselves into a target!). Grinding with a purpose does make for a good game. I like the idea of being able to just log on during the weekends for say 3-4 hours max on a Saturday, run through a few acts then get a few items that I really want then moving on. In its current form, the game does not allow for this style of play.
So here’s what I propose: the endless grind model vs the short grind model. We only have this “hardcore” mode of play in which the only consequence is restarting the game after your death. But there’s really nothing special about it outside of futilely restarting the game if you have bad luck or did something incredibly stupid. So most people end up sticking with softcore because it feels more rewarding and less pointless.
Yet my argument is that the game still feels pointless and unrewarding as a meaningless time sink. Yes, when you receive that crappily rolled Natalya’s ring, you instantly go, “YES!!!” But it’s so bad that you still have to look for another. Again, what’s the point? Or when you’ve gone through 50+ bounties (or in some people’s cases 1000+) trying to farm the Ring of Grandeur and not getting a single one, you start to look at yourself and think, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” The game doesn’t instill any good morals, ethics or even lessons to be learned outside of the fact that you simply wasted a huge chunk of your life trying show off your penis size (or bra size to be fair towards our female gamers).
People are clamoring for ladders but will it really solve anything in the end outside of just demonstrating that a few really stupid people who have nothing better to do with their lives than grind away endlessly that they can get to the top in something? It’s not really reassuring and puts a really negative view not just towards the game but towards Blizzard’s view on gaming on a whole.
Sure, there will be room for ladders but it still does not satisfy what I believe is where the 80% of the market really is: the casuals. Ever hear of Apple’s 80/20 design rule? Design for 80% of the users? When Steve Jobs was around, why did Apple climb back? Part of it was because of that principal. Blizzard needs to aim their design at that 80%.
So what does “endless grind” vs “short grind” do? “Endless Grind” is aimed at the 20% who want to play at the competitive level. It’s all about the effort put in and the job of just getting items, climbing paragon levels and whatever vanity achievements you want to throw in. “Short Grind” targets the casual player who wants to feel powerful in the game, really experience things like Torment 6, or at least get items to do more. Drop chances are increased for legendaries, specific items are dropped by certain bosses, the affixes are not as random and you get what you want faster through more focused game play. You can still use bounties and Nephlam Rifts to gear up but the rewards are even more focused, boss based and the quality not just quantity of items are increased. The end goal is to allow players to try more builds with gear and find more depth in the game while lowering the amount of time needed to get all the items. The mental reward is not just from getting these items and trying builds but experiencing diversity and having short bursts of entertainment. You would be considered “lower on the totem” pole than people in “Endless Grinds” similar to how a Heroic (or rather Mythic) raider can distinguish themselves from those running Normal/Flex/LFR raids. But the experience is not about the epeen.
Regardless, I hope to see Blizzard take a serious look at implementing this idea. It’s something that’s been missing from the game. They did fix a lot of problems but there’s still a long way to go.
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