Daily Game Review

A Review of Borderlands 2

2012-12-30T18:19:00.001-05:00

Borderlands 2 Game Review

Gearbox's smash hit gets an awesome sequel!

The first borderlands game was an excellent first person shooter/role-playing game loot fest, taking concepts from game franchises like Diablo, with it's RPG stat setups and the joy of finding bigger, badder items along your journey, and mixing it in with a first person shooter created a surprise hit for gearbox, gaining a large following. The sequel to Borderlands offers more of the same, with some serious improvements across the board, making it a prime example of how a sequel should be composed, taking the formula that makes it good, but improving upon it, rather than removing things that makes it work.

Borderlands 2 Story is about the adventurers of a new set of vault hunters hunting down and destroying the tyrannical president of Hyperion, Handsome Jack, who is controlling Pandora with an iron fist, with a megalomaniac, egotistical mindset, making this guy someone you will hate rather quickly. With the assistance of the previous vault hunters, the story proceeds much better and offers you much more insight than the previous game, which had very little in the way of story and narrative. Borderlands 2's story offers much more narrative, cut scenes and the Echo recorders scattered about Pandora which offers more insight on character back stories including the new Vault Hunters. Overall, I enjoy the story for Borderlands 2, as it offered great plot twists, story advancement, and character interaction between those you meet up with in your adventure.

The game play for borderlands 2 is also an improvement over the original, adding more items to collect and loot, a bank and character transfer system so you can move items between your characters, slot machines to gamble your cash for loot and prizes, and much more. The vehicle combat is something I noticed a huge improvement on, as the vehicles can take quite a bit of punishment in regards to the "tin can" armor of the first game, which would explode for taking even the slightest gunfire. Vehicles in the game have a power sliding feature and far better controls, making vehicle combat much more satisfying and rewarding.

New in this series is something called, "Badass Points". completing numerous challenges for each character offers you these points, which after accumulating enough turns into tokens, which can be spent to increase permanent stats which affect all characters, and using these tokens will give you an option to increase 1 stat with 5 options chosen from 15 stats. These points really get me into doing all the challenges you complete and also get you more customization skin options, which I find to be a really neat addition to the game.

Customization options are another new thing in Borderlands 2, as you find these from mission rewards and other means, you can customize your characters head and their clothes, making your character look different and unique. The game features multiple skins and head pieces for all characters, so finding them all can be a bit of a challenge, but fun!

The 4 starting characters, and the DLC Mechromancer, all have unique skill sets that compliment them and offer a wide variety of different builds and setups. Axton the Commando, Salvador the Gunzerker, Zero the Assassin, Maya the Siren, and the DLC character Gaige the Mechromancer, offer very pleasing styles and setups, and the class mods and relics you can find can boost certain stats and offer bonus points toward certain skills.

Playing in cooperative play is a blast with friends and you have the option of skipping story bits if you have already completed them in another players game, or playing the mission yourself if you choose so. Trading with characters is much easier now, because of the new trading system. Rather than dropping items on the ground you can now initiate trade with another player and safely trade items and money to each other, or if you want to fight for it, you can also wager items and perform a duel for them, the winner takes all in this case.

Overall, I found Borderlands 2 to be a real treat and an excellent sequel to the original Borderlands. The combat is satisfying, the loot fest is nice, the cooperative game play and story being vastly improved over the original, and the vehicle combat having a huge improvement makes this game a blast to play, especially if you have quite a few friends to play with. Also New DLC is right around the corner and will compliment the gaming experience as well, so be on the lookout for that!

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League of Legends - How to be better at the league of legends, Instantly!

2012-05-10T18:16:00.002-04:00

Hi guys,

I'm just a 1700 player not that high ranked but I think i have a few pieces of advice that could be helpful to ANYONE who plays this game, whether a seasoned player or a new lvl 9.Much of this advice is mostly relevant to mid or top. but can be applied to every lane.

First of all there seems to be a stigma or negative connotation for 'tryharding'...My philosophy on that is that the game requires the same amount of attention regardless of how 'hard' you are trying.You can't really play this game and do something else at the same time so regardless of whether you're focusing on playing well or not you will still be only doing 1 thing:playing.So why not play well?So be a tryhard, focus 100% on playing well.How do you know if you're focusing?Little things such as paying attention to where their jungler is/last was or where yours is, matter a lot.So that'd be my 1st tip.Try to focus, be a tryhard.

Get good at every role.Please, Please don't adopt the maining mentality, where you only play 1 champion or 1 role.To play this game at a decent level you should be ready to play every role, and hopefully you know a handful of champions at each role...why?Countering is very essential in this game.You see a riven on the opposite team?You could go malphite and ruin his day.Winning the lanes often leads to winning the game.

Pick intelligently.Hey I know your best top champion is tryndamere but if you are up against a yorick you should consider picking someone else or you're gonna have a bad time.better to play a champ you're decent at with a good matchup vs a champ you're good at with a terrible matchup.

Adjust your play according to your opponents.My friend is an example of a person who doesn't do this.He was playing gp vs garen, however he has this static build that he doesn't deviate from.He got mercury threads and was still getting dominated by garen at top, however this would have been a clear time to get a ninja tabi.You have to itemize vs your laning opponent in the early game.Its an easy way to gain lane dominance(if the lane is tied so far) or help yourself catch up.Another way to adjust your play is by gauging your opponent's skill or his playstyle.If you realize your opponent is misplaying often or not playing very smart vs your match up.TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT, exploit his weaknesses, is he going to balls deep for a single creep?or risking himself with no wards?Make sure you snowball off of this as opponents won't hesitate to.

Ward.Ward.Ward.I know i know, this subreddit is full of people saying this.But that is only because its the easiest way to gain an advantage in game, to instantly die less, and be more confident in your lane.Always buy a ward, you won't be able to play to your full potential without them.You can't play confident if you have no wards you will be begging for the opponent to come and rip you a new one(hey they don't know you don't have wards but they will quickly realize when they see you overextend and not b once their jungler comes around and a smart jungler will take advantage of this.)

Don't make the same mistake multiple times in one game.Hey i know that renekton just killed you by clutch and you might be a little bit mad but don't you think it wouldn't be smart to get into range of his slice and dice just to last hit a single creep?Either way till he pushes or go roam(if he freezes)...Dying to him 1 more time isn't gonna help you win.I have seen many people repeatedly try to 1v1 the guy who killed them earlier in the lane, but if he killed you once he can snowball off of that , so play smart being guided by your brain not your emotions.

Lane positioning is a lot more important than it seems.Learn when to push, when to freeze, when to go for a gank at mid.Your ward ran out(cause its impossible that you never had one ;)?Try to freeze the lane right in front of the tower if possible, if not you have other options if your opponent B'd then you can push the lane to their tower,then B while its there that way the lane resets to the middle and you get your much needed ward to be safe in the lane.If your opponent is freezing at their tower, DONT RISK IT, go gank mid/top or B up.

Relay to your team useful info.you know your top opponent doesn't have wards?let your jungle know.Their jungle just tried ganking you at top?Let mid know he might be headed there next or maybe try to steal your blue/red depending on side.

Go into games with a positive attitude, none of that 'feed or mid stuff' you can easily say say "Hi team, I'd prefer to play mid as I consider it my best role." but really you shouldn't be tunneling one position, there are chances that you personally excel at mid but maybe the other person on your team who wants to be mid isn't better than you at mid but he is a lot worse at top so why not be top?You can't really affect trolls or anything so just ignore them and move on and try to be as nice to your team.I have made a handful of friends in ranked mostly cause i try not to be an ass and as soon as I'm in a lobby i state that i like top and mid but can play whatever the team needs.Don't type negative things when your top gives fb and then your mid dies...it's still 0-2 its not by any means GG.Focus on your game, improving yourself , and helping as much as you can in taking your team to victory.

Dont stay too long in lane even if you're winning it.By not going B you are giving the opponent that you are 3-0 against a chance to catch up due to him having items over you.Just don't do it.B up, get items, snowball to victory.

Don't be wasteful.Are you about to die to an ignite and have 100% no chance of getting away?Then don't waste that flash that you will surely need within the next 4 mins.

Don't get cocky.Hey you are 7-0, that's cool.Doesn't mean you can take their entire team on, what it does mean is that when you try you will be giving one of them 600gold.Remember the score is 7-7 so really you dying can give the game away.

Don't assume, be aware.This is mostly a lack of awareness because there is no way to miss the fact that your teammates are not with you.People see somebody right next to them and assume they can read your mind on your next play.Make sure you ping or let em know before hand or you will likely be flashing bangage toss and ulting 5 enemies without followup from your team. Don't be the one saying 'WTF TEAM?' when you should have known that they weren't around or went to do red, etc.The information is freely available use it.

Think about everything you do and what you want to do it for.Facechecking that bush?what purpose does it serve?If the answer is none then don't do it, you are taking a risk for no reward, don't aimlessly walk around without an objective.Autoattacking the creepwave?Does not help you obtain more cs might in fact make it more difficult, don't do it!

That's all I can think of for now.Hope it helps at least 1 person out there :)

Guild Wars 2 - Beta Event Guide

2012-04-27T11:48:00.001-04:00

The beta weekend launches Friday afternoon. Are you ready?

In the event that you aren’t (or even if you are!), we have a list of tips for how to handle the beta, the game and everything you will see this weekend. Credit for this goes to a member of SomethingAwful.com who asked to not be named. Thank you, anonymous contributor!

GENERAL INFORMATION

Don’t just skip through the questions after you design your character. Your answers impact your story and will also impact some NPC interactions in different areas.
Guilds can be created the second you are out of the opening cinematic. Hit “G” to create a guild or to represent/stand down from a guild.
The intro instance boss encounter WILL down you. This is so you can see how downed works. Even if you stay downed, the NPCs will win the encounter for you. For most classes, the 3 button will get you back up.
Right away, hit H then select the PVP tab. Hit “Be in the Mists”. After you port, there will be an Asura Gate in front of you. Take it to Lion’s Arch. After this port, cross the bridge to Lion’s Arch. At the fountain make a left. Here there are Asura Gates to every major city. The gates to Asura and Sylvari land will be blocked. Port to each major city and get the waypoint for zippy travel around the world. (This of course will also let you choose your newbie leveling zone)
There are no breadcrumbs and no quest hubs. You progress in this game by EXPLORING. Pick a direction that looks good and you will stumble upon adventure. Getting sidetracked is how you will spend most of your time.
If you have no idea where to go, look for a scout. They are marked with binoculars. They will reveal hearts for you. Also sometimes NPCs will beckon to you or run up to you and say “hey jerky, help a bro”. Talk to these NPCs. They will reveal previously hidden dynamic events.
Waypoints are graveyards. As you begin exploring and leveling, you want to collect waypoints as fast as possible. Before you start working on a heart or dynamic event, get the closest waypoint or you will be very sad when you die and have to schlep all the way back.

COMBAT

Your weapon skill unlock makes progress by killing a mob. When you get a new weapon, grinding out the unlocks real quick will make for a more varied and strategic game experience early on.
Your first skill is auto-attack. Everything else has a cooldown. Since you have a small number of skills, this means you can do something you’ve probably never done in an MMO: look up. The primary thing holding your attention should be where and how you are moving and tells from the mob. To take care of that, you’ve got to watch carefully.
Circle-strafe is your friend.
If you run up to a mob, usually they will pause for a split second to punch you or to wind up a big attack. Use this to your advantage.
Look at your skill tool tips and check for conditions. Conditions are fight changers. Sure you can just spam 1 and win, but proper use of conditions will greatly increase your survival and speed of killing.
If you pull off a combo (a special attack combining your skills with another players skills) you will see “combo” in the heads-up combat spam. Experiment with this for hilarity and hi-jinks. The easy combos involve a field + a projectile or a field + a jumping/leaping attack.
Move, move, move!
In-combat weapon switching unlocks at 7.

EXPLORING, EVENTS AND KARMA

DO NOT RUN AWAY AFTER COMPLETING ANY DYNAMIC EVENT. This is the best advice I can give. Most of the time, after a dynamic event completes, the NPCs will chat for a minute and then another dynamic event will start. You owe it to yourself to hang out and see what the next bit is. If you stay in a place for 3 minutes or so and nothing happens, it is safe to move on. The world around will change A LOT. Whether you are there to see it, is entirely up to you.
If you see a different looking dynamic event box that has a background and stays active in a wide area, this is the zones meta dynamic event and requires coordination over a wide area to progress. The end of these events are usually really really satisfying. For instance in the human zone, there is a gigantic scary netherworld monster.
You will start getting karma quickly. When you fill up a heart, the NPC will sell you gear or other goodies for karma. DO NOT BANK KARMA. Keep in mind you aren’t getting gear quest rewards… because there are no quests. If a karma vendor has an upgrade for you, buy it then and there. This will insure that your relative power stays above the mobs you are fighting.
There is no reason why you have to go to a higher level zone. You will automatically downlevel for an area and get appropriate rewards. If you finish a 1-15 zone, consider going to another 1-15 zone.
Your 7, 8, 9 skills unlock at 5, 10, and 20 respectively. To get skills you need skill points. Do skill challenges for skill points. Every major city has a few skill points that you can just buy.
Traits unlock at 11.
You want to gather. There is no gathering skill. If two people hit a node, both get full reward. You can get upgrades for your equipment in the form of crystals from gathering. Even if you don’t intend to craft you should gather for the crystals. You will need a consumable to gather. Axes are for logging, picks are for mining, sickles are for herbs and veggies. Most merchants sell these.

Skyrim DLC Hinted At in Latest Game Files, Includes Snow Elves & Crossbows

2012-04-27T10:44:00.003-04:00

There have been plenty of rumors surrounding potential Skyrim DLC.

People have said that Bethesda will implement everything from dragon mounts

to the entire province of Morrowind in the game. However, today we’ve got

some rather concrete evidence of what future DLC may have in store, thanks

to some handy files found within the latest patch.

On one hell of a hunch, a BethSoft forum user scanned the files from patch (1.5.26)

and found some very interesting file names. Here are just a few:

Animations\[b]DLC01\Chair_SnowElfPrinceDialogueA.HKX[/b]
Animations\[b]DLC01\Chair_SnowElfPrinceDialogueB.HKX[/b]
Animations\[b]DLC01\Chair_SnowElfPrinceDialogueC.HKX[/b]
Animations\[b]DLC01\Chair_SnowElfPrinceDialogueD.HKX[/b]
Animations\[b]DLC01[/b]\Chair_SnowElfPrinceDialogueE.HKX
Animations\[b]DLC01[/b]\Chair_SnowElfPrinceFireBall.HKX
Animations\[b]DLC01[/b]\Chair_SnowElfPrinceSitIdle.HKX
Animations[b]\DLC01\SnowElfPrinceAscensionBurning.HKX[/b]

crossbow_direction_behavior.hkx
Animations\CrossBow_1stP_Run.hkx
Animations\CrossBow_1stP_Walk.hkx
Animations\CrossBow_Aim.hkx
Animations\CrossBow_Equip.hkx
Animations\CrossBow_IdleDrawn.hkx
Animations\CrossBow_IdleHeld.hkx
Animations\CrossBow_Release.hkx

That’s right, Snow Elves and crossbows. Even the Snow Elf Prince.

If you’re wondering just what in the world a “Snow Elf” is, you should know that they were once a proud race who were driven from Skyrim by the Nords. Those who survived the persecution sought refuge among the Dwemer but were betrayed, turned blind, and enslaved… you now know them as those hideous Falmer than lurk deep within Dwemer ruins. Oh, those poor Snow Elves.

Ah, but what of this mysterious Snow Elf Prince?

This elf stood high above all his kinsmen. It was he was who led his people against the Nords at theBattle of the Moesring and it was he who died in that battle, killed by a mere child. Out of respect for this brave warrior, the Nords laid him to rest there in Solstheim. (You can read all about it in that book you’ve probably glanced over in-game)

A Nord warrior sees much in a life of bloodshed and battle, and is rarely surprised by anything armed combat may bring. But few among us that day could have imagined the awe and uncertainty of a raging battlefield that all at once went motionless and silent. Such is the effect the Snow Prince had on us all. The glorious Snow Prince, an Elf unlike any other, did come that day to bring death to our kind. And death he so brought. May our gods honor him in death, and may we never meet his kind again in life.

I can’t wait to meet him.

Given that the Falmer were also quite fond of spears and we’ve already seen Bethesda show off full spear animations, perhaps crossbows aren’t the only new weapons coming to this DLC? One can only hope.

So string up your crossbow and get your hiking boots ready, it looks like we’re headed underground and possibly back to the island of the Bloodmoon to relive a battle for the ages…

Stay tuned for more on this story as it develops, Bethesda may have some news for us next week.

Valve Updates Steam's Account Policy, You Can Now Access Your Games While Banned

2012-04-22T13:51:00.001-04:00

There was a flurry of comments and criticisms about Steam after news broke thatElectronic Arts updated their Origin account policy back in early March of this year, enabling banned users to access their games in offline mode.

A lot of gamers were questioning why it wasn't possible to access games in offline mode in Steam while an account was suspended or banned, but the real news is that you already can, Valve just never told anyone. What's more? Your games aren't limited to offline mode.

While Valve doesn't have a lot of legal lingo surrounding the use of their digital distribution service, they do make it known in the subscriber agreement consent form...

Valve may terminate your Account or a particular Subscription for any conduct or activity that Valve believes is illegal, constitutes a Cheat, or which otherwise negatively affects the enjoyment of Steam by other Subscribers.

One user put that clause to the test and was aptly banned, however, he later found out that he wasn't completely blocked out of accessing his games because of a recent policy update in Steam for account access, which has now been deemed as "account locking" instead of "account banning". According to a Steam volunteer moderator, he makes it clear that...

Steam support stopped disabling Steam accounts a bit more than two months ago. This has been replaced with "account locking": you still have access to your games, but some restrictions are applied to your account (no trading, no cd key activation, no purchase allowed, etc.).

He provides proof of this with screenshots of an account being banned but still having access to games in offline or online mode, which we were kind enough to let you view below just so you know that you're not having your junk pulled.

This means that gamers who have been banned either for fraudulent or nefarious purposes with the intent to use their Steam account for other activities other than gaming like an upstanding member of the interactive entertainment community, can still access the games they paid for. There are simply restrictions added to the account but the content you paid for is content you still have access to.

Valve actually offers quite a bit of leeway in using their service, so getting banned is not something that's particularly easy to do so long as you follow the rules. There are, however, some rare exceptions where tertiary license agreements are put into place for Steam games, particularly, EA's games on Steam, where an EA EULA for a [now absent] product on Steam basically outlines the same sort of restrictions you would find on Origin. Of course, since it's Steam, there's no worries about "losing entitlements" or having third-party software scan your PC for you.

Valve's head honcho, Gabe Newell, recently spoke out against these sort of practices that EA is using for Origin, saying that as the service stands right now it's just not up to par to where it should be for consumers and gamers, and it's justnot doing anything super-well at the moment. It's kind of hard to argue against that point.

At least gamers who went off the deep end and managed to get banned can still play their games and access the content on both Steam and Origin. So, in that regards, it's a win-win situation for gamers no matter which digital distribution service you use.

[Update: Steam's official support representative has stated that "Games registered to suspended accounts will no longer be accessible; even in offline mode." Of course, the support didn't clarify if this applies retroactively for suspended accounts or the distinction between a suspended account or a locked account, so we're awaiting official word from Valve on the matter.]

Diablo 3 Dumbed Down Compared To Diablo 2? ... Not So Fast

2012-04-22T10:16:00.003-04:00

With the open beta going on, everyone is getting a chance to try their hand at D3. Of course, an insurgence of varying opinions regarding the game should be expected. But just how valid are some of these claims? While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, I feel more and more like a minority reading through the Diablo subreddits.To put my opinion into perspective I have played through Diablo and, much more thoroughly, Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction (which will simply be referred to as "D2"). The following arguments depends on at least a passing knowledge of D2, but I will try to be as clear as possible.

There seems to be a number of D2 redditors that feel D3 has been dumbed down significantly compared to D2. The argument is more or less centered around the lack of stat point allocation and no skill trees/skill builds. While these things may be lacking in D3, the impact of these changes is actually a lot better than you think.

The Stat System

Stat points. 5 points every level up. Strength, Dexterity, Vitality and Energy to choose from. Simple. Of course, things aren't always as easy as they seem, but to say this system was complex seems like a bit of an overstatement to me.

Strength was used purely for equipping gear. It (barely) improved your damage, so dumping points into it for this purpose would be wasteful. If there wasn't some sort of item you needed to equip, skipping this stat entirely on a level up was quite common.

Dexterity was required for some weapons. It improved your attack rating (chance to hit) and defense rating (chance to be hit). These benefits were negligible. The most important use of dexterity was to increase your chance to block. Determining whether or not you needed dexterity was as simple as asking yourself if you were going for max block (with very few exceptions).

Vitality was more or less the only stat that mattered in D2 (with the exception of Energy Shield Sorceresses). Once you had the strength and dexterity to use your gear, this was the stat of stats so to speak. Nothing else mattered.

Energy was really only useful for (energy shield) sorceresses. It really served no other purpose than to fuck up your stat build or let you carry around less mana potions. A point in energy was a point not in vitality.

So why does any of this even matter? Consider this:

You're level 92. You want to make the most effective character possible. To do this, there must be some sort of complex way of figuring out a perfect stat build. Well...the idea isn't too far from the truth. However, the method is anything but complex. So what exactly do you do with your almost 500 stat points? You shift-click vitality. Every single point goes into vitality. All of them.

Now you're thinking, "hah, nice try asshole but I want to actually be able to use my gear!" Well, you can have both. With the right items, you can use all of your gear and still have every point in vitality. This is, more or less, the ideal stat build. Let that soak in for a moment: being able to use your gear with every point in vitality is the best stat build. Seriously. The greater your deviation from this build, the weaker you are. This isn't the complexity most of you talk about. This is simple. And yet, deviating from this build will yield a system most would describe as complex. This is because you can beat D2 with far from perfect stats. You can go ahead and wander around on your level 33 barbarian with almost 200 strength and feel like King Shit of Turd Island swinging around your cracked greatsword, but eventually, you will die. Not only this, but you will reach a point in the game where your character will be unable to triumph. So you load up a new barbarian. This one has 100 less strength and 100 more vitality. You can still use your favorite greatsword. What changed? You can take much more of a beating. You carefully navigate the dungeon and emerge victorious. Well, what really changed? Your new build was tailored to more closely resemble a perfect stat build. There's still room for improvement, but you beat the game with your "close enough" stat build.

In the end, it's this "close enough" build that so many people thought was deep and complex. You hit level 23 on your barbarian and wonder what to do with the stat points. You stare blankly at your character screen considering the possibilities of this momentous decision. Eventually, you decide to put all 5 points into strength. Content with your choice, you let out a sigh of relief. But did it really matter what stat(s) you bumped up? In the grand scheme of things...not really. Let's rewind a bit: same barbarian, 5 stat points...but you choose to dump them all into energy for whatever reason. And so you fight on. You can still kill everything, you can still beat the game, you still have fun. In the end, it doesn't matter too much what you decide to do with your stat points; a few points in strength, some dexterity, a bit of vitality and even some into energy, yet you can still beat the game. Your choice will slightly change your character, but it won't make the game unbearably easy nor will it render the rest of the game an impossibility. The stat system in D2 doesn't offer unique gameplay experiences as much as people would like to think.

The Skill System

To compare D2 and D3 and say D2 has more depth because of its skill system is a really difficult argument for me to swallow. The D2 skill system is far more linear than people make it out to be. If you wanted to make a fireball sorceress, what skills do you max? Well you max fireball. Then you mouse over fireball and see it has synergies: it receives a damage bonus for points spent in fire bolt and meteor. Great. You max those as well in hopes of getting the strongest possible fireball. You max fire mastery...because it boosts the damage of fireball. As your character levels up you gain skill points one by one until you've finally used over 80 points leveling these skills up. What do you get for it? Well you have a strong fire bolt. But who cares, you have fireball. You have meteor as well, but it's only twice as strong as fireball and not nearly as spammable, so who cares. At the end of the day, over 80 character levels were used just to get one powerful ability. Sure, you can opt for a wider variety of skills, but they will be far too weak as you progress through the game. You are more or less forced to use fewer but stronger spells. And yet this is more complex than D3? You can level 5 times in D2, put every point in zeal and feel stronger each time. Great, but how did the gameplay change? It really didn't. In D3 over the course of 5 levels a player will witness huge changes. Not only are you unlocking skills that areimmediately useful to you, you are unlocking runes for skills you already have that can significantly change the way you play the game. The abilities all scale with your gear so you can use whatever skill you want whenever you want and still be effective.

To conclude I would like to say that I think the changes implemented in D3 are good design choices by Blizzard. The game is not only more approachable, but the gameplay is also far more varied. The real complexity of D2 was the gear system, but the two games can't be compared in this regard until the full game releases.

Skyrim - Easy Money, Again.

2012-04-18T00:11:00.003-04:00

Infinite skill level gain

This trick requires that you own a house with an alchemy lab. Obtain the Oghma Infinium book, but do not read it. Go to your house, and open the bookshelf. Read the Oghma Infinium book, then select the skill set to assign the skill gain. Close the book, but not the bookshelf. Store the book on the shelf, then take the book back off the shelf, and select it, but do not read it. Repeat this as many times as desired to get as much skill level gain as desired.
Duplicating apparel items

Place any apparel item (armor or jewelry for best results) on a mannequin. Then, put the item back into your inventory. Leave the location of the mannequin, and go to a different area (for example, exit a house), then return to the mannequin to find the item still on the mannequin, which you can then take. Repeat this as many times as desired.
Duplicating books

This trick requires that you own a house with an alchemy lab. Activate the bookshelf, then place the desired book to be duplicated on it. Leave the menu, then immediately activate the bookshelf again. If your book has not yet physically appeared on the shelf, wait at the menu screen where you can loot the bookshelf. Once you see the book in front of you (it will hover in front of the shelf while the menu is open), loot the book from the shelf in the menu. Immediately close the menu, and you can click on the book itself to read and then take it. You will now have looted the book twice, putting two of them in your inventory. Repeat this as many times as desired. It is especially useful with expensive books such as the Oghma Infinium.
Easy experience

When you reach the part in the tutorial at the beginning of the game where you choose to enter the keep with either Hadvar or Ralof, choose Hadvar, Have Hadvar cut the bindings off your hands. Grab the iron sword off the wall in the room. Then, simply keep hitting Hadvar with the sword as he stands by the door to keep leveling up the One-Handed skill. Once you knock him down, make sure to not hit him anymore until he gets back up. To level up the Sneak skill, keep sneaking up on Hadvar while he stands by the door, and then attack him with the sword. Do this for the first 32 levels. Once you reach level 33 for the Sneak skill, you can simply sit behind him and hit him with the sword every six seconds. To level up the Two-Handed skill, progress a little further in the game, and get the two-handed sword. Once you reach the area with the bear where Hadvar gives you the bow and arrow, keep hitting Hadvar with the two-handed sword to easily level up the Two-Handed skill. Note: Do not press [Sneak] while doing this or Hadvar will move on. To level up the Destruction skill, keep burning Hadvar. If you leveled the One-Handed, Sneak, Two-Handed, and Destruction skills to level 100 using this method, you should have 37 perk points and be at level 37 to start the game. Note: This glitch was done on an unpatched version of the game. You can delete all patches for the game by using the "Clear hard drive cache" code for the Xbox 360.

Go to Riverwood village, and find Alvor & Sigrid's house. Inside is a man named Hadvar. Rest until it is after 8 a.m. so Alvor leaves the house. Sigrid and the young girl should remain downstairs, and Hadvar will be upstairs. If he is not, just wait until he comes upstairs. Then, save the game just in case there is a problem during the next part. Equip your strongest sword or weapon that you want to increase the skill level for, and sneak behind him until he cannot see you. Do a heavy strike, and he will stumble to the floor. When he gets up, he will have no knowledge that you hit him. He also never dies, so it can be done indefinitely. Repeat the process to level up as much as desired. This will also maximize your Sneak skill, and whatever weapon type you are using.
Easy gold

Take a horse and carriage to Winterhold. Once in Winterhold, immediately turn right. Travel southwest from Winterhold to a location called "Sightless Pit". Just above Slightless Pit on the mountain is an alter with a skeleton on it. Beside the skeleton is a book called "The Doors To Oblivion". Pick up the book, and then kill the skeleton on the table. Two other skeletons will rise around the alter; kill them as well. Return to the skeleton near where you picked up the book, and loot its body, taking everything. Loot it again, and you will notice the book on the skeleton keeps reappearing. You can keep taking "The Doors Of Oblivion" book worth 50 gold each. Every time you view the Skeleton's inventory, even if you do not take the book, it should add one book to the skeleton's inventory. Repeat this as much as desired. Note: This glitch was done on an unpatched version of the game. You can delete all patches for the game by using the "Clear hard drive cache" code for the Xbox 360.

At any time, go to Dawnstar. Once in Dawnstar, locate the entrance to the Iron-Breaker Mine, but do not enter it. To the left of the entrance are some rocks around a tree. Walk under the tree, and aim your crosshairs around the edges of the rocks until "Search Chest" appears. Open it to find a large amount of free loot, including crafting supplies, weapons, armor, enchanted items, gold, and more. Note: The chest is invisible as it sits under the ground, but it is still lootable. Loot everything, then sell the items for a large sum of gold. It is recommended you bring a horse, as you will quickly become over-encumbered and unable to move quickly or fast travel. To reset the chest and get more loot, go back to the entrance to Dawnstar. You will see a Khajiit trader caravan. If the caravan is not there, wait a few days for it to return. Look for the Khajiit named "Ahkari". Save the game while looking at her, then attack her after saving. It is not necessary to kill her, as damaging her should be enough. Then, reload the saved game file, and talk to her. Ask to see her wares, then exit the "Trade" menu, and return to the invisible chest by the mine. Repeat this process as many times as desired.

When doing the quest to get married, marry a follower. Then, make them follow you and trade items. They should have 750 gold because of the store they run. Take their gold, leave, and wait one day to get more gold. Repeat this as many times as desired.

While doing the quests to get the "One With The Shadows" achievement, you will get a special request for Windhelm called "Summerset Shadows". Once you have completed this quest, Niranye will have 4,000 gold on her every two days. Keep stealing as much gold from her as desired. It is possible to steal almost 145,000 gold in thirty minutes. This also is an easy way to get the "Golden Touch" achievement.

At the beginning of the game, when you reach the first town of Riverwood, find Hod. He usually stands at the top of the sawmill during the day. He will pay you for as much wood as you can give him. There is no limit to how much you can make by chopping wood and selling it to him, as he never runs out of gold like the merchants. Chop and sell as much wood to him as desired for easy gold.
Easy gold and Alchemy and Speech skills

This trick requires some time to set up, but once it is done, you can get as much gold as desired. It requires the following:1. Fortify Alchemy Enchantment2. Helmet, gloves/bracers, two rings, and a necklace3. Five Grand Soul Gems filled with Grand Souls. Grand Souls can be taken from Mammoths or bought.4. The ingredients for Fortify Restoration potions: Abecean Longfins, Cyrodilic Spadetails, and Salt Piles. The fish can be obtained easily by swimming around Goldenglow Estate near Riften. Collect as many of these as you can, at least ten to fifteen of each ingredient.5. Ingredients for a Fortify Enchanting potion: Snowberries, Spriggan Sap, Hagraven Claw, and Blue Butterfly Wing.

Start by enchanting your helmet, gloves, one of the rings, and the necklace with Fortify Alchemy using the Grand Soul Gems. It works best if your Enchanting is at 100 with five perks in Enchanter. Equip the newly fortified equipment. Go to an alchemy lab, and create a potion of Fortify Restoration. Exit and drink the potion. Without exiting the menu, go to "Apparel", unequip, and re-equip the gear. Then, create another Fortify Restoration potion. Drink it, unequip, and re-equip the gear until you can craft very strong Fortify Restorations (in the millions of percent). If you go too high, the potions will start getting negative numbers. Do not drink those or the game will glitch. When you are satisfied with the strength of your potions, drink one, then craft a Fortify Enchanting potion. Go to an Arcane Enchanter, drink your Fortify Enchanting potion, and enchant the remaining ring with Fortify Alchemy. This negates the need to repeat this process. Then, go to any apothecary, and buy a Giants Toe and some Wheat. While wearing your ring, craft a potion using these two ingredients. You should get a massive increase in Alchemy. It will be worth hundreds of thousands of Septim. No merchant will have that much money, but sell it to them for whatever they can pay, and your Speech will rise to 100. If it does not raise your Speech skill to 100, make another potion, and repeat. After your Speech is leveled, add perks until you get to the "Invest" perk. Go to the Riverwood trader, and invest in him. Go outside, and wait 48 hours. Return, and he will have 10,000 Septim. Sell him a potion to get all his gold. Go outside, and wait another 48 hours. Return, and sell him a potion to get all his gold. Repeat this as many times as desired. It is possible to get over 100,000 Septim in ten minutes in exchange for the cost of making the potions.
Easy gold and Enchanting and Smithing skills

Note: This trick requires a Soul Trap weapon and access to a smith and arcane enchanter. First, purchase an equal number of Iron Ingots, Leather Strips, and Petty Soul Gems. Fill the Petty Soul Gems (by killing with the Soul Trap weapon), then go to a smith. Create as many Iron Daggers as possible, then go to an arcane enchanter (there is one in Dragonsreach). Enchant all the daggers with the Petty Soul Gems (disenchant the Soul Trap weapon, if required). Go to a shop, and sell the daggers. Depending on your barter skill, you will make approximately 170 gold per dagger in profit, and will level up your Enchanting and Smithing skills. Note: Smith every three or four daggers, and enchant every one or two daggers early on.
Easy super weapons and armor

This trick requires the necessary perks in the Alchemy, Enchanting, and Smithing skills. First, enchant armor/boots/gloves/etc. with alchemy boosting properties. Then, equip the enchanted gear, and create a potion that enhances your enchanting skill for a certain amount of time. Go back, drink the potion, and enchant new equipment with alchemy boosting properties again. Your new equipment will now boost your alchemy even more, which will allow you to create a potion that enhances your enchanting even more than the first potion you made. Repeat this as many times as desired. Then, create smith boosting equipment and a smith boosting potion. Go to the blacksmith, and create your gear while you have your smith boosting equipment/potion, and upgrade it to the desired stats.
Adding Fortify enchantment to a weapon

This glitch requires you have 100 enchantment and the perk that allows you to add two enchantments to a weapon. First, go to the enchantment table, and select the soul gem you wish to use. Then, choose a weapon enchantment such as Frost damage, Stamina damage, Soul Trap, etc. Select a fortify enchantment, de-select the fortify enchantment, then select it again. You should now be able to select a weapon to enchant.
Infinite arrows

Pickpocket someone who shoots target dummies with arrows, and take the arrows they were using (usually iron or steel). Then, give them one of the arrow type you want more of. They will now shoot that type of arrow instead of the one they were shooting before. Simply collect the arrows as they hit the target dummy to get as many arrows as desired.

After killing the first dragon and being appointed Thane of Whiterun, talk to the new house earl, and trade items with them. Give them one arrow from your best set of arrows, then remove their sword, and assign them a bow. Every time you go into battle, they will fire multiple arrows from the one you traded. Then, collect all of the arrows after the battle is over.
Infinite weight limit

Containers are persistent and items do not disappear. Thus, any barrel, box, or chest can be used to store your items. It works best to use containers near a quick travel loading location. However, since the game is buggy, your items probably will not disappear when placed in a random barrel or chest, but there is no way to guarantee they will not disappear unless you purchase a house and store your items in it.
Easy armor, spells, and general experience

Set the difficulty to "Novice", and have a weak one-handed attack enemy hit you while healing. This will level the armor you are wearing, Restoration, and also may level up Illusion.
Easy experience and Illusion skill

Most spells require you to actively use them in combat situations or on specific objects to progress, but the Muffle spell does not require this. Muffle is an Illusion spell that quiets your movements. Continually cast Muffle while you are walking around the world of Skyrim to boost your Illusion skill and increase your overall experience.
Easy Archery skill

Go to Riverwood, find an elf named Faendal, and then deliver a note to Camilla. Next, find Faendal, and ask him to follow you. Make sure you have at least 200 gold. Ask him to train you. When he does, ask him to trade with you. Go into his inventory, and take your money back. You can do this five times a level, and it really helps early in the game. Repeat this as much as desired.
Easy Blocking skill

Use the following trick to level up your Blocking skill or save a few spare perks. Find a weak enemy that does not enter water (for example, a wolf). Pin yourself between the enemy and the water, then use a rubber band to hold the trigger button that controls your shield for as long as desired to keep leveling up the Blocking skill. Note: Make sure the enemy will not move from where he is attacking you.
Easy Conjuration skill

Buy or steal a horse. You can get one in Whiterun. Learn the Soul Trap spell. Then, use the Soul Trap spell on your horse. It will not harm your horse, but it will keep leveling up the Conjuration skill. Repeat this as much as desired.

This trick works best with the Bound Sword spell, as you are able to conjure two of these at the same time to gain experience faster. This works best when there is an enemy that is trying to fight you, but you are at an area that they cannot reach you (for example, fighting a troll or bear while you are too high for them to actually hit you). Use the Bound Sword spell, put the sword(s) away, then repeat the process to level up your Conjuration skill quickly.

This trick requires dragons roaming around and being far enough in The Dark Brotherhood to have Shadowmere. When you find where a dragon is located, fast travel there so Shadowmere can be with you. Start the battle with the dragon, but do not worry when the dragon goes after Shadowmere, as Shadowmere is invincible and will fight and eventually kill the dragon for you. While he is fighting the dragon, use the Bound Sword spell, put the sword(s) away, then repeat the process to level up your Conjuration skill quickly.
Easy Destruction skill

When you join the Fighter's Guild, you will be prompted to go outside and duel with one of the members. When you are outside, switch to destruction magic, and use it against the opponent repeatedly. He will keep telling you to use a sword, but you will gain experience, and he will not die. Repeat this as much as desired to get easy XP for magic.
Easy Pickpocket skill

Go to jail in Riften, then unlock your cell door. Directly across from your cell is a guy named Black-Briar. You can pickpocket him even after he catches you. Pickpocket all of his stuff, then place it back into his inventory. Repeat this as many times as desired to easily increase your Pickpocket skill level.
Easy Restoration skill

Go to High Hrothgar. Go out the door to the area where you are taught the Whirlwind Sprint, then go to the right. Look for a small staircase that goes up to a blizzard of some kind. Go forward just enough to start getting hurt by it, then start using the Healing spell. Your health will go down slowly because you are using the healing spell, but you will also gain experience. This method is better than fighting an enemy and leveling up your experience since you can control how much damage you are taking by simply walking backwards.
Easy Smithing and Speech skill

Every time you go to a forge, make sure to talk to the person in charge of it, and buy all the iron ingot and leather or leather strips they are selling. Then, make as many leather strips as it takes for each iron ingot. Take it to the forge, and make an iron dagger that only takes one of each ingredient to create. If you sell it back to the merchant, sell it one at a time so you create more transactions to level up the Speech skill.
Easy Sneak skill

At the beginning of the game, you will encounter a sleeping bear in Helgen's Keep. Hadvar will say you can either sneak past it or kill it. Just off to the left of where Hadvar stops is a small rock pile. Go to the back side of it, and you can sneak in the crevice there and remain hidden from the bear. Keep sneaking at the rock to increase your Sneak skill level. Repeat this for a long as desired, as the bear will only move if it detects you. To make sure you are in a good location, sneak for a short time, then check your Sneak skill to see if it is rising. If not, move slightly closer to the bear and keep trying.

After the prologue part of the game, go to Embershard Mine. Kill the two bandits in the first chamber of the mine, then go into the short tunnel. Lower the bridge by pulling the nearby switch (explore along the tunnel on the far wall from the entrance). Continue through the next few rooms until you reach an area with a bandit in a sort of pit (the pit has a forge in it). Kill the bandit in the pit to attract the attention of the guard on the bridge. She will start shooting arrows at you. Hide about half way down the bridge in the shadows, and just keep walking into the wall while sneaking to easily level up your Sneak skill.

Reach White Run, and go east. Move toward the mountain until you find White River Watch. Kill the two bandits outside, and enter. The blind guy inside will ask if you are Ralph. Say yes, and then keep walking into the wall in the shadows while sneaking to easily keep leveling up your Sneak skill. You can also place a rubber band around the Analog-stick and controller and leave it for a few hours to keep leveling up while you are away.

Once you can go to Bleak Falls Barrow, go there, and talk to Sven about his love troubles with a girl. Accept to deliver a fake letter to the girl he mentions. Find the girl, and deliver the letter to her. Then, go to Faendal, and accept the "Golden Claw" quest. Go back to Sven, and talk to him about the quest. Tell him to follow you, then sneak behind Sven, and sneak attack him. Repeat this as many times as desired to easily level up the Sneak skill, the weapon skill for the weapon you have equipped, and general experience. Note: Make sure you do not kill Sven. Sven will get mad at you when you keep attacking him, but he will never try to attack you back. Additionally, make sure to not get the perk that increases one-handed weapons to do 6x damage or the sneak attack will kill Sven.

Once you can reach the Greybeards at High Hrothgar, keep sneaking behind one of the Greybeards, and wait until you become undetected. Then, attack them, and keep repeating this as many times as desired. The Greybeards will not attack you, and this is not considered a crime. Additionally, you can use a weapon while you attack them, but there is a chance you will kill them. It works best while unarmed.
Easy Speech skill

Go to Riften, and talk to the Dark Elf named Ungrien. Choose the "Tell me about Maven Black-Briar." option, and then select the persuade option. After that, the persuade option will not disappear, allowing you to keep selecting it as many times as desired to get easy experience and max out your Speech skill. Note: This glitch was done on an unpatched version of the game. You can delete all patches for the game by using the "Clear hard drive cache" code for the Xbox 360.

Skyrim - Unlimited Easy Money Glitch

2012-04-18T00:08:00.001-04:00

A glitch in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim apparently allows players to earn unlimited gold by picking up copies of The Doors of Oblivion over and over and over again.

The book is worth 50 Gold, so by picking up copies of the book over and over again, you have a seemingly endless supply of money that is dependent largely on how long you want to pick up the book from a skeleton.

The skeleton might disappear, but, if you remember where it was, you can still pick up the book.

Diablo 3 - Increased Difficulty Changes To Inferno Mode

2012-04-18T00:02:00.003-04:00

Bashiok has announced some important changes to Inferno mode which will increase the difficulty of the end game and increase longevity/replay value.

This is may be a good a time as any to REVEAL TEH SEKRITS! that Inferno monster levels aren’t linear any longer. They get progressively more difficult. This was really a reaction to Inferno playtesting. Our original intent was to have a flat difficulty level where you could go wherever you want, farm for items, and it’d be no more or less difficult than any other area in Inferno. This caused a few inherent issues for us, though:
It just felt wrong. It didn’t feel right to be progressing through the game and have it stay pretty much the same difficulty the whole time. It felt like a let down to get to the final boss of the game and it be no more difficult than the first.
There’s a wide variety of players out there and we wanted to make sure everybody had something to sink their teeth into. We expect that anybody with enough time and dedication will reach level 60. But the jump in difficulty to Inferno needed to be different amounts for different people. For the crazy people they need a HUGE ramp in difficulty, for a more “casual but still hardcore” audience you want an obvious but milder increase in difficulty. So for the crazy people who play non-stop they’ll hit Act I and get a challenge, but 1 month later they’ll still have something to work on (Acts II, III and IV). For the “hardcore-casual” they will reach level 60 later and not get brick walled when they reach Inferno. They can experience some “small victories” working on Act I with the dream of maybe someday reaching the later acts.
Longevity. We know people really want goals to work towards and challenges to overcome. We made Act III and Act IV really, really brutally hard, for the most elite players only. It felt wrong to make ALL of Inferno that brutally hard.

Now, you may be saying “I thought you wanted us to be able to farm anywhere we wanted. Now we only have half as much area in the game to farm in? What gives?” Our goal is to make the loot mathematically better in the later acts without making the earlier gear completely obsolete. We feel Diablo II actually did a very good job with this and we expect Diablo III to perform similarly.

Specifically, people in D2 did Diablo runs, Mephisto runs, Pindleskin runs, Pit runs, Baal runs, etc. because the loot in Diablo is extremely random. Even though the theoretical best items might come from the later Acts, well-rolled items from earlier acts will still be better. Internally we find sometimes after an intense session of brutally hard Inferno it can be really fun to cruise through Hell Act III or IV and it’s not too uncommon surprise when an upgrade drops. We expect this to carry through to Inferno difficulty where somebody who can theoretically farm Act IV will likely still enjoy romping through Act I simply because the drop potential is still there. It’s all because of the highly random items having lots of overlap in their power distribution curves.

Inferno mode is shaping up to be exciting to say the least!

Buying & Selling Characters In Diablo 3

2012-04-18T00:00:00.004-04:00

A feature of the RMAH that is unknown to many Diablo 3 fans is the ability to not only buy and sell virtual items but characters as well. While it’s looking like the option to do this won’t be in at launch (more on this later), Blizzard have previously confirmed their commitment to allowing characters to be bought and sold for real money; it’s more than just a rumor!

What items can be traded in Diablo III?

Nearly everything that drops on the ground, including gold, can be traded with other players directly or through the auction house system. Aside from certain quest items, there will be very few (if any) items that will be “soulbound” to your character and therefore untradable. We are also planning to allow players to buy and sell characters in the auction house at some point in the future and will have more details to share on that at a later date.

While it’s still unknown just how many people will use the RMAH, it’s more than likely going to be a huge success. Many players will want to cash in on their unwanted items to get the money to buy the stuff they really want and this might also include level 60 characters.

For those that want to take it up a notch in their attempts to make a living from Diablo 3, leveling up characters for the sole purpose of selling them could be a lucrative aspect of the market they can get involved with but it’s unlikely to net any serious money when compared to farming Inferno quality items.

Selling level 60 characters during the first few weeks of launch could’ve been quite lucrative despite the downsides to player longevity. This is probably why Blizzard are delaying the functionality – not to spite users who want to make money but to avoid having people buying a few characters and then quickly growing tired of the game.

They quite obviously want the RMAH to be viable for years to come and are not willing to take a quick short term gain in spite of a long term one. Given everyone has to level their own character during the 1st or 2nd playthough, Blizzard are also ensuring there will be a good supply of characters ready to be sold when they do patch in the ability to buy/sell characters.

Specific details of how buying and selling characters will work aren’t known but it’s safe to say that you won’t need multiple accounts to participate on a casual level. When selling a character, it will be a simple process of moving the character from your account to the account of the person buying it. Any achievements earned on that character are unlikely to be transferred as it appears achievements are tied to an account and not a specific character – this won’t do anything positive for value of selling a character.

An unknown factor that makes it difficult to speculate on the value of a character is the amount of time required to hit level 60. If it takes a short amount of time (15-20 hours), characters won’t have much value as very little time investment is required. If it takes a much longer period of time (60+ hours) – which is the likely scenario, one might expect cheap labor in the 3rd world to undercut those in the 1st and reduce the profit margins to a point where it’s better to farm for items instead. It’s yet unknown what Blizzard will do (if anything?) to combat farmers leveling characters purely for resale.

Speculating on the value of a character isn’t just about time investment either. There will be forces outside of a player’s control such as patches which might increase the value of one class and/or decimate the value of another.

For example, let’s say a patch nerfs the Witch Doctor and gives buffs to the Wizard which are perceived by the community to be OP thus making the Wizard the most desired class. If you don’t have a level 60 Wizard, you might be inclined to sell your Witch Doctor to fund the purchase of a Wizard. If you play a Wizard and have grown tired of it, want to explore builds that other classes use but don’t have the time or desire to level to 60, this would make for a good opportunity to sell your character at a higher than usual market price.

Of course, this then raises the question of whether or not those who intend to level characters for pure profit should stick to 1 class on which they can ride the higher priced market waves when a patch hits or diversify by leveling all 5 classes. Those that spent considerable time playing Diablo 2 know full well just how many people come back to the game when a patch is released and this is sure to fuel demand.

Another factor that will impact pricing is the 10 character limit per account. Unlike WoW where you could buy up vast quantities of items for resale at a later date, buying up large quantities of cheap characters will require additional accounts. Given most players won’t have more than 1 account, this will help to put a floor under the price of characters.

It’s a given that most players will playthrough the game to enjoy the story while leveling their own character to 60 in the process but what happens when they want try out different classes and the builds that go along with them? There is no compelling reason to level another character from scratch (besides fun) when a level 60 might be purchased for under $500. This is especially important if those 60 hours you would spend leveling to 60 will now be spent in Inferno where you could possibly find more than $500 worth of items in those 60 hours thus recouping the cost of your character purchase.

Do you intend to buy and sell characters or do you feel that it’s a bad idea and should not form part of the RMAH? Will characters be worth $0 or $1000′s? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Diablo 3 Hardcore Mode: 5 Tips To Get You Started

2012-04-17T23:56:00.001-04:00

In honor of the addition of hardcore mode to the Diablo 3 beta and the impending May 15th release date, here is a brief overview of hardcore plus tips and strategies to maximize your experience and enjoyment while playing the most challenging mode Diablo 3 has to offer.

Overview

Hardcore mode is a special mode distinct from the normal realms of Diablo. Unlike general population realms and their characters, hardcore realms and characters are distinct from one another and cannot share items, gold, or join normal games.

However, with the Battle.net chat function, a hardcore and softcore player will be able to communicate.

The difference between the two realms is that while softcore characters receive a gold and experience penalty after death, yet can still respawn in town with all their items and character intact, hardcore characters do not respawn after death. This means that if you kill your character (even to lag) you must rebuild them over and all of their items.

One other thing to keep in mind, the auction houses are also distinct. Hardcore and softcore items exist on independent realms and therefore auction houses are not shared nor does hardcore have a real money auction house (at this time). Blizzard has stated that they do not want to deal with the consequences of players paying real money for items and then losing them. It’s something that I and many other hardcore players disagree with and here is to hoping Blizzard will change their minds.

With that said, the constant danger and adrenaline-pumping action makes hardcore mode an exciting challenge for Diablo 3 players. Let us take a look at ways to make the most of the game mode and keep the nerd rage from losing your level 60 to a minimum.

1. Hardcore means hard, not fast

The most valuable asset a good hardcore player can have is patience. Hardcore isn’t anymore difficult than softcore, but the stakes are much higher and so a good player always tries to minimize their margin of error. The best way to do that is by playing slower.

While it may be fulfilling to rush through content (and it is in softcore where a death doesn’t mean anything), you need to make sure you’re slowly leveling and tackling new content at a much higher level than you think you need to be. For example, in Diablo 2 you could simply start a new game and walk through to the end on most characters, as long as you were willing to die. Not so in hardcore.

At every moment of the game you should ask yourself, “Is this getting dicey?” if the answer is yes, relog and redo areas to gain a few levels. The same goes for items. If you’re struggling, do a few low level area runs to improve equipment.

This advice is extremely important between jumping difficulties. Blizzard has already explained that the jump from normal to nightmare is huge, and that’s just the first jump. Take your time and use the most recent difficulty to find better items and to obtain a higher level. A little patience now is worth it in the long run.

2. Maximize Life Saving Stats

While on the lookout for items in Diablo it’s really easy to get a sense of damage lust. And again that’s not a bad thing when playing softcore where a death has no large consequence other then gold for repairs. In hardcore, it’s a different story.

Life/Vitality are stats that are extremely important. You need to make sure to give extra weight to stats that prolong the life of your character. Why? Death in hardcore never comes because you couldn’t kill something. It happens because you had too low of hit points for what you were facing and you couldn’t town portal or escape fast enough.

If you’re not killing something practice step 1. If you’re about to die, leave. Having more life and other related stats will make that cushion between the moment you realize “oh crap” and need to hit escape that much longer. While it is obviously too early to tell, gems are probably going to be a great way to increase that cushion.

3. Play with Others

Having friends that you play the game with will make challenges significantly easier. While the difficulty does increase some, it should never outpace the benefit of having another person available.

You will clear areas faster, have twice the drops and play safer because someone can tank damage while the other focuses strategic mobs or blasts from afar. This is easily evident from the Diablo 3 beta. Co-op play can clear the beta level twice as fast if not faster. The importance of playing with others rises exponentially when the difficulties get harder.

4. Build for Control

Honestly, again the game has yet to be released so it’s extremely early to tell but it’s obvious that some builds are safer than others. This doesn’t necessarily mean weaker but it does mean that you utilize skills that increase your cushion from death. The iconic example of this is the Skellymancer of Diablo 2. By being surrounded by his summoned minions, the Necromancer was an extremely conservative build to play through hardcore mode with.

Some championed that style of play to be less fun, but it doesn’t always have to be that way. The frozen orb Sorceress from Diablo 2 was an extremely aggressive character that utilized teleport and orb to lay waste to anything in her way. It was an extremely viable build for hardcore mode.

What did the passive summon Necro have in common with highly aggressive orb-it-all Sorceress? They both focused on control over raw fire power. The summons gave a sense of control in that they kept the enemies away from your caster.

The combination of teleport and frozen orb allowed the Sorceress to be highly mobile but freeze enemies with chill effect of frozen orb. In Diablo 3, always look at skills that give some element of control over mobs. Ask “how does this skill keep me from getting hit.”

5. Have a sense of humor

It’s going to happen. You will kill a character in hardcore mode (or Blizzard’s lag will). The number one way to ruin your hardcore experience is to take a loss too hard. If you can, make fun of the death of your character.

I once had a Sorceress die to a special effect on an item called the Oculus that when struck randomly teleported your character to a different location on screen. It teleported me 7 times in a row, finally sticking me dead in the middle of a horde of axe wielding bovines. It stung but I learned to laugh at it.

Always looks on the positive side of things and realize that a death allows you to build another champion and have quality time with your friends and strangers of Sanctuary.

Diablo 3 Beta Finishes On May 1st

2012-04-17T23:55:00.004-04:00

With the release date so close, it’s no surprise the beta servers are soon coming down while Blizzard put the finishing touches on the game.

We’d like to thank everyone who has participated in the Diablo III beta. You’ve done an admirable job of testing, and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback you provided during this critical phase of development.

In preparation for the launch of Diablo III on Tuesday, May 15, the beta servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, May 1. At that time, all beta accounts and character information will be reset. Leading up to Diablo’s May 15 launch date, players will only be able to create comments and forum posts on the official Diablo III community site if they have pre-purchased Diablo III or have a StarCraft II or an active World of Warcraft game license attached to their Battle.net account. In the meantime, we encourage everyone to stay tuned to this website for exciting news and updates regarding the upcoming release.

Thank you again for your participation, and we’ll see you soon on Battle.net!

Diablo 3 Beta Patch 17 Notes

2012-04-17T23:54:00.001-04:00

No real changes made to classes or gameplay in this update, it’s pretty much bug fixes. Characters and achievements will once again be wiped when this goes live.

General
All characters have been wiped. Items, gold, auctions, achievements, followers, and artisans have also been wiped, and Beta Bucks have been reset to 50.
Cross-game chat is available! Beta participants can now keep in touch with their Real ID and BattleTag friends, no matter which Blizzard game they’re playing.
Please note that some restrictions do apply for BattleTag chat:
You can only send BattleTag invites while logged into the Diablo III beta client
You can only receive BattleTag invites while logged into the Diablo III beta client

Bug Fixes

For a full list of documented game and service bugs, please review the Known Issues sticky located in the Beta Bug Report forum.
Players should no longer be desynced from the server after watching or skipping a cut-scene
Projectile spell effects should no longer be invisible when casting them
The Auction House should no longer lag and generate ERROR_1 when attempting to switch currencies
The Auction House should no longer display your amount of Beta Bucks as 0 unless you actually have 0 Beta Bucks

Diablo 3 - CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION EXPLAINED

2012-04-17T23:52:00.000-04:00

This thread will attempt to address some of the differences between Diablo II and Diablo III. I have seen quite a few threads expressing distress at the lack of player customization on their character. I will examine the core of D2 customization and compare it with its corresponding D3 system so that players may gain understanding of the differences between the two.

Before a discussion of the differences between the two can take place, you have to understand one very important thing. Customization has been largely exported to crafting. The player inventory may now house the majority of character customization. Whether or not this is an improvement is up for debate. However, it cannot be argued that it is less player customization, that’s empirically false. It is however, MUCH different, therefore the controversy. This thread contains a side by side of some of the major game systems from each game.

Enjoy!

I. Character Stat Points – Now gems/itemization

1a. Strength(D2) vs. Strength(D3)
1b. Dexterity(D2) vs. Dexterity(D3)
1c. Vitality(D2) vs. Vitality(D3)
1d. Energy(D2) vs. Intelligence
1e. Armor, resistances, and dodge
1f. The primary stat system2. Gemcrafting, the replacement of stat allocation
3. Itemization, the extension of stat allocation
4. Player choice on stats
5. Stat Points – Conclusion
II. Skills – Now Runes
1. Skill Viability
2. Skill Damage
3. Skill Diversity
4. Skill Points
5. Skills – Conclusion
III. Runewords - Now Blacksmithing
1. The effect of runes (D2)
2. The effect of blacksmithing
3. Item drop frequency/usefulness
4. Player customization improvements
5. Currency and crafting
6. Blacksmithing - Conclusion
IV. Game Accessibility, Scalability, Simplification
1. Accessibility

1a. Stat point allocation
1b. Crafting
1c. Skill System
1d. Accessibility – Conclusions2. Scalability

2a. Level Cap
2b. Skills
2c. Scalability – Conclusions3. Simplification

3a. Stat Points
3b. Trading
3c. Simplification – Conclusions4. Ease of use – Concluded
V. Auction house, gold currency versus bartering, magic find
1. Auction house
2. Gold currency vs. bartering
3. Magic Find
4. D3 Economics – Conclusion
VI. Conclusions

1. Character Stat Points – Now gems/Enchants

Stat points were the invisible difference between you and another player. The D2 stats were Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Energy. The new stats are Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Intelligence. I will make a brief side by side, then get into the new primary stat system.
*Note* Primary stat simply means that for the associated class every 1 point in the stat is equal to 1% increase in damage for that class. Example: 35 Strength would give +35% damage to a barbarian and no damage bonus to all other character classes wearing the same exact item.

1a. Strength(D2) vs. Strength(D3)

Strength added base physical damage. It was also required to equip most items. Typically it was used to meet these item requirements then disregarded. Additionally, you (the player) never knew for all your spreadsheets and abacuses exactly how much damage it was actually giving you. It also placed artificial barriers on gear usage. A distinct issue was that lower level gear gave fewer bonuses so that by the time you were a high level, you may get more item bonuses and want to reduce the amount of points you put into it (in D2 pre 1.12 you cannot). It was not useful for non-melee characters other than to wear gear and it was especially punishing because you overspend points on it at lower levels.

Strength is now the primary stat for barbarians. Strength in D3 no longer restricts characters from equipping items (as items have no stat requirements). This is an excellent change as caster classes who want to wear sacred armor no longer need to sacrifice 150+ vitality points. It also provides armor to any class that wears gear with +strength modifiers. The benefits here are obvious, barbarians are primarily melee and so they will need more physical resistance to survive. In D2 strength was required to equip higher armor value items but that was such a restrictive system they’ve just removed the middleman (item requirements). Now strength directly adds the armor value! This means that Barbarians will have naturally higher melee sustainability. Not only that but it is now very viable for all classes (especially that melee wizard you’ve been eyeballing).

1b. Dexterity(D2) vs. Dexterity(D3)

Dexterity was a very complicated player stat. It added damage (more ranged than melee), chance to block, armor, and chance to hit monsters with melee. It is also required to equip certain items. This provides several severe design flaws. For one, dexterity has too many uses, it is confusing as to how much you may eventually need. Secondly, it inherently punishes non-caster classes (miss chance for melee, making them more heavily stat dependent). Inevitably this crushed melee balance in hell difficulty and made melee classes very heavily gear dependent (in contrast to casters who could spend 0 in the stat and not suffer). Finally it had the same problem as strength. The longer you played, the more your gear gave, the less hard points you wanted, or you have to hoard. Not typically useful for casters.

Dexterity is now the primary stat for Demon Hunters and Monks. It’s important to note that in D3, some of the functions of dexterity were removed, others were relocated. The largest change (for melee and ranged characters) is 100% hit! This is certainly a welcome change for anyone who played a melee character. The armor component was relocated to strength. The chance to block has been removed and added to itemization/skills. Dexterity adds +dodge for all classes. The amount added is easily calculated/viewed simply by highlighting the stat in your character screen. This is a much better alternative to hit recovery/block speed. Ranged characters would naturally have a higher propensity to dodge than to block so its defensive elements aren’t wasted on someone with a bow.

This also means a tank witch doctor is possible. You can itemize dexterity and strength to avoid and mitigate damage as opposed to stacking offensive stats. How about that melee/tank wizard? Stack up that dodge and say hello build diversity!

1c. Vitality(D2) vs. Vitality(D3)

Vitality is a stat that was and is “working as intended”. The difference between adding vitality in D2 and D3 is that you have new options for your stats now. Previously it was all vitality since the other stats didn’t benefit casters and gear bonuses largely outweighed natural point allocation anyway. A great example of this issue is the Breath of the Dying runeword. 30 to all attributes, this was 120 stat points on 1 item slot. You are only allotted 540 points at level 99 with max quests completed. If 1 item slot can give 20% of that, the points lose value quickly. Vitality was and is working properly and now it is easier to calculate. It adds 10 points of health for every 1 point invested. It is viable for all classes.

1d. Energy(D2) vs. Intelligence(D3)

Energy had one benefit, it increased your mana pool. It was largely unused for a variety of reasons. *Edit* It added mana regeneration but was not unilateral across all classes. This is another partially punishing stat. Some classes only gained 1 mana per point, others gained 2. Calculating a quantifiable regen bonus would have been impossible using only in game methods. Secondly, potions and leech invalidated most of its usefulness. Had it added magic damage, the player builds would likely have changed drastically. Rather than keeping the stat and adding a damage component, it was simply phased out entirely. There was an attempt to replace it that was removed in late 2010.

Intelligence is now the primary stat for witch doctors and wizards. Wouldn’t you know it they added a damage component! Intelligence adds .1 to all resistances per point you have of the stat. Naturally a caster fears other casters the most as they typically snare/immobilize their opponents and attack at a long range. It makes sense that wizards and witch doctors will naturally focus more heavily on resistances and that’s a great reason to make it their primary stat (instead of adding +resistances onto gear with low strength requirements as done in Diablo II, wiz spike, skins anyone?) and bypass the middleman (item requirements). This stat is now viable for all classes.

1e. Armor, resistances, and dodge

Resistances give a damage % reduction from monster spell attacks in varying schools of magic. Armor gives a damage % reduction from monster melee strikes. Dodge gives a % chance to avoid damage altogether. As with D2 these values come primarily straight from gear/skills, not from player leveling bonuses. As the stat system now provides armor/resists/dodge as well as the item system, players will be able to specialize their defenses more easily. This allows players to build characters which are more defensible in certain areas or against certain monsters even as they level. These attributes are viable for all classes which is why they’ve been spread around.

1f. The primary stat system

The primary stat system is a change which was introduced in a recent patch to the beta. Now that each skill has been tailor to specific classes what does that mean for me? Primarily it means that you cannot wear the same gear across all characters. If you have a lot of strength gear because you made a high damage barbarian, you can’t place that on a wizard and expect to do a lot of damage. The changes effects are not as apparent in the beta version as defensive stats aren’t necessary in normal mode. Tuning later difficulties likely prompted the changes from previous iterations. Overall it is much likelier to be a better system since it will create gear disparities and encourage trading.

2. Gemcrafting, the replacement of stat allocation

Gemcrafting is the new way in which a player may give themselves stat points. It gives the player a choice of which stat to modify, small bonuses are given at a time (4-6 points per level of gem). Gems will drop frequently, be tradable, and provide the same kind of allocation players are wanting. Many people may not understand the mechanic well enough to know that it’s just transferred, not missing.

As listed on http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/#filter=jeweler gems may be placed in 4 slots (excluding helms and shields). Shields are not counted as they cannot be used by every single class/spec. Helms are excluded as gems do not give them socket bonuses. If we assume 2-4 sockets in a given slot (on average), we may have anywhere from 7-16 slots to play with at any given time. With an end game gem giving +58 to a particular stat, that’s a whopping potential of 928 stat points. Eat that Diablo II! (This number is based on conjecture and is likely too high). My estimate is 1 socket amulets, 2 socket belts, 2 socket bracers, 6 socket armors at end game (probably around 600 points or so).

3. Itemization, the extension of stat allocation

The removal of the mystic does leave some questions to be answered regarding how much control the player will have over their stats. The most likely scenario is that the wide range of enchant values created an absolute balance nightmare. Imagine a rookie player entering inferno with +400% damage (no gems or enchants). Then imagine a pro player entering with some of the bigger enchants and gems. There could be a disparity of 200%, 400%, 1000% damage or health, who knows!?!? Balancing that would be hell, it’s for this reason that the mystic was removed.

To compensate for that change, consider that players haven’t yet realized how much an effect itemization will have on their customization. Based on preliminary numbers there may be some really high gear bonuses. If a gem adds 58 to a stat, what stops the item itself from adding 58 or more without gems? Some of the data files show +100-200 modifiers for single stats and up to +70 to all stats. The end game items could likely drive stat allocation numbers well over 1,000!

4. Player choice on stats

Now that we’ve explained the differences between the stats in D2 and D3, let’s look at the way in which you increase their values. D2 allocated a player 5 stat points for every level they acquired. Some quests also rewarded stat points. Gems gave stat points as well. Gems were largely useless as a source of stat modification. The max level gem only gave +10 to a particular stat, and only to helms or armor. Runes may fill in the gap but they weren’t really used for that purpose.

D3 takes stat allocation to a whole new level. A lot of players make the argument that they are losing out on the ability to customize their character, let’s take a look at that. What did we lose? If you look at the gem distribution you’ll note that they all add a significant amount to your stats, all the way from 6-58. You’d only need 10 max level gems to have more control over your base stats than a level 99 character in d2. It’s basically Blizzard saying “okay player, instead of spending 5 per level up to 500 points, we’ll give you items which give (instead of 6 levels worth at end-game D2) 20-40 levels worth of stat points as 1 modifier on an item”. There could be an item in Diablo 3 (or multiple items) that give more stat points than the entire level 2-99 bonus (490 points) COMBINED. Now put some gems into it! Now that’s the polar opposite of a “pretty !@#$ty customization system”. The biggest lesson here is that the higher the numbers go (outside of leveling bonuses), the more control a player has over where to spend them.

Beyond that, the choices for using the stat points are now meaningful. You may note that the end of each section says "this stat is now viable for all classes". It isn’t simply “100 str, 75 dex, 400 vitality, 10 energy”. Now you have to choose, do I want to dish out the damage? Would I rather absorb the damage? Can I just avoid the damage? These are a lot more meaningful choices and they still progress along the same line as leveling. You can also a directly quantifiable return from investing these points. It just might take a little longer to get to the same point in D3 as there’s an item find and gold element to the increase now, instead of a level up curve.

Honestly this translates to a time commitment anyway so the only real question becomes this: Does it take the same amount of time to earn enough money to add 540 points (via gems and crafting) to a character as it did to hit level 99? That’s the real customization question. In all honesty 540 is worth less in Diablo III since the values will go MUCH higher than D2. 540 might need to be compared to 1,000 or even 1,500+ to get an accurate side by side. Beyond those facts, will it be more fun to run something other than Baal in that timeframe?

5. Stat Points – Conclusion

Stat point allocation has not disappeared, it has transferred. Like several other game systems it has become something that you may buy on the auction house. Crafting systems exist to transfer player customization into a marketable form. Gemcrafting is an excellent example of that. You have the potential (with both tradeskills and items combined) to add thousands to any stat of your choosing. Whether or not the player wants to buy the level up or earn it is also a player choice. It must be noted that there are many more options than there were previously. Players cannot logically argue that they have less customization. The real bitterness may come from the fact that many hardcore players just do not want the choice to exist in its current iteration.

II. Skills – Now Runes

Skills were the most visible difference between different characters in D2. Grouping with other players quickly illustrates how they have specialized their character. You’ll know if you grouped with an orb sorc, summon druid, or psn necro. Each class had roughly 30 skills to choose from. Most of the time however, these selections degenerated into a few “cookie cutter” builds. This brings us straight into:

1. Skill Viability

The problem with the D2 system for skill points was that a skilled required quite a few points to be viable, anywhere other than normal mode. This was exacerbated with the introduction of “synergies”. These were passive bonuses from putting points into another skill in the same tree. This meant to acquire the most powerful version of a skill, you now had to place not only 20 points in the skill itself but 20 points in 1-4 other skills that added damage or duration! This is the reason for the very low amount of mathematically correct character builds.

D3 Attempts to solve this problem by simply giving you all the skills of your class while restricting your ability to actually use any more than 6 of them. They also removed flat damage amounts from skills. All skill damage is now based off weapon damage %’s. The result is that even the earliest skills in the game remain quite viable all the way through to the last boss in inferno! This is quite an excellent improvement.

2. Skill Damage

Skills originally had set values at each level for how much damage they would do. This follows a traditional action rpg model. D3 hopes to innovate by making all skills; melee, ranged, or magical scale from weapon damage. Scalability is something that Blizzard doesn’t mention but it’s an important design decision they’ve made. When everyone has a skill that does 90% weapon damage, you can just alter the weapons, not the individual skills themselves. Conversely the skill %’s may also be adjusted across the board and still be relatively well balanced. Flat damage runs contrary to expansions, item inflation, and game balance. The balance needs to be easier to maintain since many more builds will likely be viable. How many more builds? Let’s take a look.

3. Skill Diversity

Skill diversity is a pretty cut and dry argument. No sensible person could make the argument that D3 contains less diversity. This is both in terms of the animations, ranges of damage types, and utility. The rune system means that each class has roughly 150 different skills, most of them with unique animations. Allowing only 6 at a time is distinct from D2 allowing all skills to be learned at once. The difference here is that while you could theoretically learn all ~30 class skills, the reality is that only the max level ones would be viable. 6 at a time is typically more than any D2 character used anyway. In D3 you’ll start to see a much larger array of abilities used, since so many exist and because the damage scaling makes them all potentially viable.

4. Skill Points

The largest controversy of the skill system is the removal of skill points. Players felt that points allowed them to inject their own brand of customization into their character. This was direct opposition to Blizzard customization (the designs of the skills themselves) and allowed a player to decide whether to receive some of the following bonuses: more damage, more duration, less cooldown, higher range, more projectiles. Did you really (as people have said) lose these choices?

If we look at D3 we’ll notice that runes have all the same bonuses. Runes actually add even more choice to the mix! Runes alter damage types, change animations, create secondary effects, and much more. If you were looking for incremental damage gains like skill points, this is another area where the rune system shines! As you leveled in D2 you had to choose what abilities became more powerful. In Diablo 3 the answer is that the character itself becomes more powerful. As you acquire better items and improve your primary stat and weapon damage, all of your abilities follow suit. Now I can use frozen orb and hydra, still getting max damage from both. How cool would it be to play a sorceress that mastered firewall, blizzard, chain lightning, enchant, and static field all at the same time? That sounds pretty darned fun!

5. Skills – Conclusion

The skill system of each game may look different (since you have points in one and points have become primary stats in the other) but they have the same elements. The system in Diablo III really expands these elements so that the runes do much more than a skill point. Incrementing a skill by 1 point in Diablo II may have you noticing a minor difference. Adding a rune let’s everyone see that you’ve increased in power. This, in a way, makes the skill systems power entirely purchasable on the auction house through trading gear and gems. In D2 it was entirely purchasable only after doing thousands of baal runs to hit level 99. Whether you like the new system better than the old, it undoubtedly adds flexibility and customization.

III. Runewords - Now Blacksmithing

One of the more significant changes to D3 is the frequency with which players acquire gear. In D2 it was largely a search for a few specific items. A HoZ, Shako, pVmagi, Draccs, etc. If you didn’t find items off this very tiny list, you essentially got worthless drops. This meant that even a great player who spent 5 hours playing the game, may receive absolutely nothing for their troubles. This was viewed as a blessing and a curse.

This is one of the ways that the skill gap came to prominence. There is a big difference between D2 and D3 in this regard. Many hardcore gamers would argue that it separated “casual” players from the more elite. Really it just rewarded people who gave massive time commitments to the game, punishing those who played infrequently. It also heavily favored bots. Arguably it was (hardcore gamers) AWESOME because once every 10 hours it gave an amazing reward. It was also (casual gamers) BORING because many wasted an hour of play and got NOTHING.

Wait a minute, you said this section was blacksmithing and runewords, all you’re talking about is item drops?!?! It’s not as linear a corollary as say Strength(D2) vs. Strength(D3). Runewords attempted to solve a problem with useless item drops as well as adding item diversity. It’s hard to make a 1 to 1 comparison without understanding what the developers viewed as fundamentally broken about the Diablo II item hunt and how they hoped LoD might address it. But I digress, let’s talk about runes for a bit.

1. The effect of runes (D2)

Character customization was greatly improved by the addition of the runes. It allowed 1 player to take a 3 socket item and add 60% attack speed (shael), another player could add 90% magic find (ist). A third player may add 150% damage increase (ohm). Customization was ironically hampered (many runewords were not viable) and expanded (diverse item attributes) by the addition of runes. It was also not effective to stack desired attributes from runes (6 ists in a weapon) since you’d lose out on the other modifiers a runeword would have given (enough +damage to make it usable in hell).

The rune system was implemented in Diablo 2’s expansion, Lord of Destruction. Runewords were items created from combining a set of runes into a piece of gear to essentially create a player made ‘unique’ item. Gold became overwhelmingly useless with the prominence of duplicated items, and specifically runes as a means of currency. Runewords extracted these new items from the economy as a cost for the artificial crafting system D2 possessed. In a way, runewords were a combat to inflation (note that many more were added in later patches).

Runewords also allowed players to craft items! This was the foray of the Diablo franchise in the direction of player crafted gear. Runewords gave incremental gear rewards, in the same way that bosses may have provided an incremental item upgrade. They were also quite exciting to make. Due to the partial randomization it was always very exciting to place the last rune and see if you made a great or mediocre item, just like using an ID scroll on a powerful unique item. There’s quite a lot to be said for runes and runewords but I’ll try to stay on common sticking points to prevent a 15 page discourse.

2. The effect of blacksmithing

Okay so D2 had runes, what does D3 have? Blacksmithing! The way blacksmithing works is that you may now disenchant unwanted items into materials used to craft new gear. It’s important to understand that runewords (and the item recipes) were largely artificial means of creating player gear. The reason it was artificial? Lack of an independent value assessment material that determines worth – I.E. currency. Without a strong currency economies inevitably collapse to bartering. The blacksmithing is designed head-to-toe with the idea of a working currency and non-barter trade. It’s a massive gold sink, every end game craft costs thousands of gold to make.

What effect does this have on the game? Instead of a shako being worth a pul rune, it will now be worth 140,000 gold. With the gold being a valuation tool, players will now be able to determine item worth in-game. This is in stark contrast to the previous system where websites and spreadsheets explained everything and new or returning players had no idea what their items were worth. Scamming will drop significantly as a result.

Blacksmithing will have another predictable in-game effect, the unprecedented prominence of rare items as end game gear. This is largely due to the advent of auction housing as a means of trade. You will find that in D3, most players will use a wide array of rare items. Previously it was mostly runewords and uniques. The longer Diablo III exists, the more rare items will be used. Auctioning allows viable rares to be traded for gold. Blacksmithing = runewords for the entire player base. Imagine if (eventually) every player could create an enigma? Blacksmithing allows that (good or bad).

3. Item drop frequency/usefulness

I mentioned in the introduction that you would find useless items in Diablo II. What qualified as a useless item? Any item that could not be traded to another player for something of value was essentially useless. Gold had no value so selling items wasn’t worthwhile. When Blizzard looked back at D2 they saw many hours of player time wasted on looking for high level uniques/rares/runes/sets with everything else being completely disregarded. The new D3 philosophy is that no time investment should be completely useless. Additionally no item should be worthless.

Item usefulness came in the form of disenchantment and gold carrying real value. Due to the ability to reduce items to raw materials, literally every drop in the game contains value, even if it could not be compared to a gold value. Let’s look at a D2 example. 1 hour of hell mephisto runs. 30 rares, 4 unqiues, 3 set items, all normal mode gear. You may come up with 0 items of any real value. Let’s look at a D3 example. 1 hour of inferno may yield a similar amount of drops but now blue items are counted as well. Even if you had nothing to trade or wear, you disenchant all the items you find and get enough materials to craft something. Of course you could just sell the materials for $ (legitimately).

Even if the crafted item fails to prove useful result it let you choose the item slot. It’s still “random” but you choose the slot for that randomness. This is an important distinguishing factor from D2 where you never had control over what slot the gear was for when it dropped. This meant that unique, set, and runeword items all were more inherently valued. As players now have a level of control over item creation, they could spend 10 hours crafting nothing but leggings. Inevitably something more powerful than a set or unique item will emerge. You’ll start to see rares more prominently displayed. If you were a huge fan of runewords it’s even better now because you can craft legendary and set items instead.

4. Player customization improvements

Inherently this change (the addition of crafting) adds a very rewarding objective for those who want their character to feel like they customized it. There aren’t many players who will argue that the D2 crafting system was inherently better. Smithing is the obvious area that improved over the previous iterations (runewords and to a much lesser extent orange items). It should be noted for the player who feels like there is less customization that you now have control over what slot will be filled by an item.

A 10 hour D3 session might yield nothing equippable or even sellable. However it still guarantees that you can go to town, take the materials you earned, and roll 6 different rare shields. When could you ever do that in D2? You might go 10 hours without even seeing a rare shield. It’s not like it would have been useful when you did find it either. In D3 the less effective affixes (looking at you damage taken to mana) have been removed or reworked.

5. Currency and crafting

Runes (D2) were not likely intended to become game currency. The drop rate was far too low for them to be reasonably amassed in any quantity. Inevitably they did become game currency due to a broken gold system and because of the prevalence of duping which added many of them to the economy. With gold as a currency, time invested will have a direct correlation to player customization. If you play for x hours you’ll earn x materials/gold and be able to craft y amount of items.

Crafting heavily values a working currency as well. The ideal is that you can craft items to compensate for what you really needed not actually dropping. Smithing is purchasable customization but not as easily as skills, stat points. Smithing only gives a chance at a good item, not a guarantee. This is arguably the most D2esque of the system reworks. Even if you spend $400 on crafting materials, you might come up with $400 worth of junk! However there are at least tangible rewards based on currency and materials acquired.

Currency has another effect. It reduces barter trade. Barter trade was the root of all manner of scams. Any non-malicious player will tell you that the bartering needed a rework. When there’s an independent valuation between players (gold) it’s easy to see if you’re getting a fair shake. To this day I have no idea what a mal rune is worth. I can tell you that I traded several of them for things but I couldn’t assign a value directly to those things. The currency is unilaterally a good thing, it incentivizes vendoring, trading, and crafting.

6. Blacksmithing - Conclusion

There is an ideal that has taken hold in the modern era of gaming. Blizzard adheres to this ideal. They believe that games which punish their players are just not as fun as games that reward players. This is the main area of debate around D3. It’s simply not that punishing of a game. That’s absolutely correct. This is most evident in the crafting systems, especially blacksmithing. The addition of enchanting materials means that there is no time wasted without some form of progress.

Overall, blacksmithing looks to be a significant improvement over D2. I don’t know about you but I played for years and never found a single rare armor that was worth anything. Had I been able to craft rare armors instead of just relying on drops I might have found one to my liking. You don’t have to wonder about the iLvl, you already know what you’re getting. It tells you what item slot, how many affixes, and it’s a visibly attainable requirement to achieve. The real question: Even knowing what I am getting, how long will it take to roll a near-perfect rare bow? Will it take as long as it took to find a Windforce in D2? I saw one of those in twelve years. Blacksmithing, like the other two systems I discusses, better or worse, still adds quite a bit more customization than its predecessor.

IV. Game accessibility, scalability, simplification

This section of game discussion has several different facets. I will define each of these terms as they pertain to video games (Diablo specifically) before breaking down each element. They are each very important in terms of how effectively a game developer (Blizzard) can communicate information to a player (inside D3). Additionally the make changes much simpler to implement.

Accessibility – The ease with which a person who has never seen a Diablo game may become immersed into its various systems without becoming confused or needing assistance from sources other than the gameplay itself. Systems – Crafting, Story, Quests, etc.

Scalability – The ease with which a developer may add new content to a game without destroying systems which are already present. Content – Expansion pack, level cap increase, new items, new areas.

Simplification – The way in which a developer communicates the way a game system functions to the player AND the ability of a player to understand that information inside of the game itself without requiring help from websites/spreadsheets. Communication – Character sheet, User Interface, Crafting window.

1. Accessibility

Accessibility is one of the hotter topics among Diablo players. Many veteran players liked the previous (inaccessible) system. How was D2 inaccessible? Excellent question, let’s look at examples.

1a. Stat point allocation

In D2 you were given points every level to allocate however you please. As a brand new player to the game I personally recall placing them everywhere. I had a level 40 barbarian that had equal parts strength, dexterity, vitality, and energy. I also recall deleting that character because it became useless. I didn’t understand their effects, how they benefitted my character, and which ones were best. In D2 there was also a disparity between classes as well. Melee characters received more health from vitality (I never found that out in game). Casters gained more mana from energy. How much per class? Don’t know, had to alt+tab to find out.

D3 Stat point allocation – In D3 you can go to your character sheet and see EXACTLY what each stat does. I know 1 primary stat = 1% damage. I know 3 vitality = 30 health. It tells me right inside the game. What is even better is that all the classes get automatic allocation to their stats. Many players were adamant that this was a terrible decision. Let’s take a look at it though, due to benefit BIAS (Vitality for a barb > Vitality for a sorceress) it’s clear Blizzard intended barbarians to have more health than sorceresses. With auto-tuned stats, that’s a definitive reality. The player doesn’t get the opportunity to ruin an otherwise excellent character with decisions they make before understanding the mechanics. That is a shining example of accessibility. Let’s take a look at another.

1b.Crafting
D2 is another fantastic example of inaccessible. It’s perhaps the best example. First and foremost, the crafting system cannot be understood through gameplay, ever. A persistent player might not ever discover a runeword in their entire D2 experience. No one would discover these horadric cube recipes. Does anyone believe that a new player would eventually put 6 chipped gems and a sword into the cube? Accessibility is all about disseminating information through gameplay. This system fails in every conceivable way. Even when you do look up the recipes, brace yourself, you’re going to be thinking like this:

… okay I think the mlvl was this… and that mlvl gives a treasure class of this, I need this item… let me check the spreadsheet again… and so my ilvl is probably this… so when I craft “Ilvl has to be calculated: ilvl = int(.5*78) + int(.5*85) = 39 + 42 = 81”. How many suffixes was that again?!??! Oh it had to be bramble mitts…white ones aren’t working!?!? where do… sapphire was it? Oh I needed an amethyst… OH FORGET IT I’LL JUST KILL MEPHISTO SOME MORE.

How does D3 crafting (purely from an accessibility standpoint) differ? Many ways! For one, the item requirements are simple. Disenchants are as follows: Blue items give x, Yellow items give y, Orange items give z. Want a cool new sword? 10x+2y+z=new sword! That’s some pretty accessible math. Another big point of accessibility for crafting is the lack of a base item (with a pre-determined and invisible item level) to create new gear. The user interface shows you exactly what you need and exactly what you’ll make. You can also track your progress towards the new item just by glancing at your inventory. I think a lot more people are going to be crafting end-game rare/set/legendary items! That seems pretty accessible to me.

1c. Skill System

The skill system was not inherently inaccessible by design in D2. D2 had a pretty solid skill system. The skills had icons that more or less explained what they did. The descriptions were succinct, 10-12 damage, costs 8 mana, 12 yard range, available at level 6. The increase in soft levels was indicated by a blue icon instead of white, synergy functions also existed within the tooltip. A new player could pick up the game, gain some skill levels, and be relatively sure what they would do. Why do I mention this in the accessibility section? Hell mode. Hell mode specifically (to a lesser extent, nightmare) was inaccessible. This is largely due to the skill system. New players were unaware that their 20 point frost nova would become completely useless. When they hit that point what happened? Reroll a new character, read more spreadsheets, inaccessible.

How does D3 combat the problem of skills becoming useless late game? All skills are always useful. That’s a pretty bold design decision to be sure, likely to turn some heads. Players are used to 2 skills being useful (Blizzard, Blessed Hammer) for an entire class. Now all of a sudden… everything is useful!?!? This causes quite a bit of controversy. Adding scalability to the skill system (being discussed further down) really improved the accessibility of late game content to all players. Having all skills without making a new character also greatly aids in this area.

1d. Accessibility – conclusions

The biggest complaint I see is from players who like pre-nerf sunwell. The 1% of fanatically hardcore super gamers that could solo uber tristram. Those guys HATE accessibility because it makes distinguishing yourself from the rest of the player base much more difficult if not impossible. Now everyone will have a chance to fight that monster which has 5 damage immunities. Because of a skill system that allows players to experiment, simple to understand crafting, and simple stats. The real distinguishing features then become cosmetic (dyes, runed skills). Those features are accessible to all players, not just a fraction of the population. A portion of the player base disapproves. They are quite vocal.

2. Scalability

Scalability is something that rarely gets mentioned. This is interesting because it’s a MAJOR design philosophy which Blizzard is ardently seeking to achieve with this release. I already briefly defined scalability, here are some examples that show it being put into practice. There are a vast multitude of examples beyond these but a forum post cannot contain the entirety of my thoughts on the matter.

2a. Level Cap

The level cap is a great example of scalability. There is an important notation that must be made. An ATTAINABLE level cap is scalable. A non-attainable level cap is not scalable. What does that mean? Put simply the D2 level cap was not nearly as scalable as D3. The player level, monster level, and item level were all tied into item drops/crafting/game progression. Making a change to how quickly you level or the max level would require other systems to be changed as well. This makes for a difficult time when releasing expansion packs, new areas, and new recipes. All these systems rely on player level for certain requirements to be met.

D3 has been designed with growth in mind. The inferno difficulty is the best evidence of this fact. When an expansion comes out and the level cap becomes 80, Blizzard just goes into a “monster level in inferno” spreadsheet, changes 1 value (61->81) and all the monster damage, reaction speed, projectile quantity, level of ability are now end game again. They all tie into level to derive their power. Just like a players auto-stats are tied to their level. A few stat point adjustments can be made behind the scenes (for balance reasons) and the player may never be the wiser.

Imagine Lord of Destruction raising the level cap to 120. All the monster levels have to be adjusted in various ways, crafting has to be adjusted, loot tables have to be adjusted. It would have been a nightmare and taken a long development time to balance. If D3 got that adjustment it’s much simpler because the crafting is largely outside of leveling and isn’t tied directly to monster drops. The cap is also attainable, meaning a vast majority of players will achieve it. Expansion packs will take less iterative testing because it’s more “drag this slider bar” and less “let’s look at every single monster again”. The inverse being “every single monster that isn’t new, is now useless”. Monster level caps are a very important tool for adjusting their power quickly. If we get to act 3 inferno and x monster is too easy they just slide the level up a notch. There’s quite a bit more to be said about level caps for both players and monsters but know that it’s important that they are attainable rewards.

2b. Skills

Skills were not scalable in D2. Skills having their own damage numbers is inherently bad for scaling. If we take LoD as an example you can quickly see why. When the expansion was released several skills went from useless to completely invalid. Even worse than that was punishing the player by giving synergic incentives to actually pump points into these skills. Why did firebolt not work in hell? It wasn’t designed to scale that way. Level 20 firebolt does 60 damage, level 20 fireball does 258. Firebolt is inherently non-viable due to it having low damage. How does d3 address this issue?

Flat damage has been removed from Diablo 3! Flat damage is one of the largest hurdles for game balance. Everything that is flat has to be looked at again every time you expand the content. Skills are no exception. All damage being based off a weapon (with an attack component) is fantastic for scaling. Did the expansion give monsters 15% more damage? All new weapons now do 15% more damage. The key is that the focus will be on newer content instead of searching for game breaking issues with balance. We can tell at a glance that bola shot (DH) and Frenzy (Barb) should do comparable damage. Weapon upgrades will improve them both equally.

2c. Scalability – Conclusions

Keep in mind that skills are not so simple as I am saying, obviously there are individual tweaks required every now and again. The main point is that skill scalability achieves several design goals. It saves Blizzard time. It makes it easier for you to compare one class to another. It centralizes character damage improvements to weapons. Finally it reduces incidence of imbalanced, underused, and broken skills because nothing is flat, 1 change slides everything up the scale with it.

3. Simplification

Simplified tooltips are frequently mentioned on the forums. There was quite a bit of pushback from the hardcore player base. Hardcore players want excel spreadsheets, abacuses, and planetary orbits to play a role in their character build. Blizzards design goal in this area is to keep you (the player) inside the game. That’s the driving focus in this area. What do you mean keep me in the game? I mean that off the top of my head I can tell you that the runes to craft chains of honor are Dol+Um+Ber+Ist. Why can I tell you that? Because I alt+tabbed to the arreat summit 10,000 times to look at it. This is not simplified. Simplification ties directly in with accessibility but they aren’t quite the same.

3a. Stat Points

I gave quite a lengthy discourse on the difference between stats in D2 and D3. One of the more prominent takeaways from that section is how complicated D2 stats became. Dexterity was the most complicated since it had 5 different effects. The other stats weren’t simple either. Every class gained different amounts of life from vitality and damage from strength. When you tack on stat points as a gear requirement as well it becomes really confusing. Low level characters are punished for overspending points early in the game. Higher level characters are recreated to get those 15 points back.

How are D3 stats simple? The quickest answer is that they all have only 1 universal effect. Armor, Resists, Life, and dodge. That’s as simple as you can get. Obviously primary stats give damage bonuses too but those are displayed right on the tooltip and they are linear. All classes get 1% damage from 1 point of primary stat. Not only do they only have 1 universal effect but that 1 effect is exactly the same through all classes. 10 life per point of vitality. 1 point of intelligence gives .1 to all resists. It doesn’t take an excel spreadsheet to find out how to get the maximum damage for your character. You just stack primary stat gems, you’ll hit like a mack truck. In D2 you needed Dex for Zon, Strength for Barb, equal strength and dex for asassins. Then stats didn’t even help caster classes, you had to get +skills modifiers! Even when you did get damage bonuses it was significantly less than 1% per point. It was a convoluted mess, thankfully this new system is extremely simple and easy to understand, all within the confines of the game itself.

3b. Trading

I will be writing another section that discusses the economy but this merits a bit of a mention here. I wrote quite a bit about skills and stats and very little about trading. One of the major design goals for D3 was to make trading as simple as possible. Previously we had a barter system, my p nagel for your 10 p gems or an ist for a max armor shako. Mid rune for 20 life sc. Any player coming in to the game with the intent of trading would need a 4 hour training course on the intricacies of the D2 economy. How does D3 address this problem?

The auction house was born. Currency comes about in all modernized societies. Currency allows the buyer to value what they are offering against a neutral party (the currency itself). The auction house facilitates trade even when the player is not online. The problem of D2 spamming for trades or sitting in town with mules will be almost completely nullified. Now if you want to trade an item you just list it on the auction house. Sell item X for Y amount of currency and buy Z item in exchange. You effectively traded with another player. The new system benefits everyone, except maybe scammers. Best of all it’s simple!

3c. Simplification – Conclusions

Simplification has been implemented in every game system. Trading, crafting, damage valuation, gems, etc. The prevalent goal is the keep you inside the game. If you need to alt tab and look up a formula or build or trading website then the game isn’t simple enough. Again this frustrates many of the more hardcore players who derive artificial game lengthening from convoluted systems and inefficient design. A small portion of the player base loves confusing implementations. It allows them to create artificial gaps between themselves and other (less studied) players. If you like games that have these gaps, you probably won’t like Diablo 3. Unfortunately for you the vast majority of players hate these gaps. I doubt they will be returning to any Blizzard game anytime soon, especially D3.

4. Ease of use – Concluded

There’s a theme these 3 concepts share. The theme is ease of use. Many players pick up a game like D2 and are inevitably put-off because their build didn’t work, they don’t understand how to build a character that will work in hell, the stats gave no explanation of their function, trading for an item you wanted was impossible, and they didn’t feel like reading the arreat summit for an hour a day in their spare time.

Blizzard wants games that are easy to use. Does this really contrast with traditional gamers wanting difficult games? The type of difficulty Blizzard seeks with D3 is not that of Punch out. They don’t want you to memorize Mike Tyson’s punches because he beat you over and over and over again. If that isn’t the case, what does Blizzard want?

They want you to be able to craft items without hitting level 85 and farming for 10 hours. They want you to trade without sitting in town for 2 hours in a mule game or buying items on a website. They want you in the action, killing demons, and not doing a book report on their archaic crafting formulae. Some of you may hate it, others may love it. The real question is this: Does ease of use obliterate an otherwise very steep skill curve? It certainly did not with Starcraft 2 and that’s a pretty easy game to use.

V. Auction house, gold currency versus bartering, magic find

This section will be a succinct look at some of the economic implications in D3, contrasted directly to D2 of course. The first two points, auction house and gold as a currency, differ slightly from magic find because they are new to the franchise. Let’s take a look.

1. Auction house

The auction house has far reaching effects on a game. If you are anything like me you love trying to play the market. Buy all of X for 30g apiece, list a few X for 50g apiece, wait 20 minutes for undercutting and relist ALL of X for 40g apiece, MWAHAHA PROFIT! Auction houses are an interesting feature in a game because when implemented properly, they are like a mini game. Some players will devote their entire game session to playing the market to make a tidy profit. What about D3 will the auction house alter?

In the interests of 1 to 1 comparisons, let’s take a look at Diablo II’s auction house, d2jsp.org. For those of you unfamiliar with this website it was a trade board backed by an artificial currency. It worked pretty much the same as the D3 auction house but it’s a lot less friendly. Players would buy or trade items and services for points. Points were the currency, the tool for ascribing values to items. Runes had a rough market value, as did items, leveling services, uber runs, baal runs, etc. This site was not affiliated with nor supported by Blizzard, they also likely made quite a bit of money just for facilitating transactions between players. Site members could purchase points for real money from the site owner.

D2jsp suffered from a number of issues. Namely it was an unofficial method for trading items (obviously poor game design). Secondly it was outside the games interface (see the section on simplicity). Thirdly, it left a lot of possibilities open for scammers. Finally, perhaps most importantly, it was inefficient. Even if this site was an officially supported method for trading via currency, the inefficiency made it unappealing to quite a large portion of the player base. You had to research (by reading a bunch of forum posts) which items carried which values, some players wanted a lot more and you still had to haggle. You also had to wait on a player to respond to your inquiry (you might wait 2 weeks to hear from someone or never hear back!). How is D3 different? Let’s look.

D3 provides a central, in game, gold standard, auction house. Efficiency is inherent! Items you want to buy are given to you instantly, items you want to sell don’t require weeks of forum trolling WTS threads. If you want to know the value of an item, you do a quick search. The search even gives you recent sale prices for that item! How cool is that? No more conjecture, we have hard evidence. Everyone can use it which is a huge plus (many players don’t want to sign up on a forum). One of the really great things it promotes is the buying and selling of rare items. I’d wager that less than 1% of D2 trades involved rare items. I’ll bet that >50% of D3 trades involve rare items. This is really cool because customization (wanting specifically +all stats, +all resists, +MF, +Gold find) is feasible. You may well see Godly rares (which otherwise rot on a mule somewhere) up for grabs! It will certainly be a different experience from the last game.

2. Gold currency versus bartering

Many D2 players abstained from the “auction house” system (d2jsp) that the previous game provided. They instead preferred to barter for their items. Based on what we have seen so far of D3, it is likely that bartering will be mostly eliminated from the new game. Let’s talk about what it was and how it may evolve.

D2 bartering was an in-game system. It was backed by an official blizzard trading post channel and forum. In the early days of D2 (pre-d2jsp) channels and forums were utilized heavily. Some players eventually resorted to making games named and subtitled to describe what they had to offer and what they wanted in return. You may see a title like “WTT dracs” with a subtitle of “lkng4soj+20lfsc+ire”. If you played D2 you can likely translate that mess into actual information and even try to initiate the trade, except the game’s 26 minutes old and the creator left. Whoops!

Currency based exchanges have drawn no criticism at all. There’s really not a lot to talk about, it’s fairly self-explanatory. Currency is easy, simple, and scalable. It fits all the Blizzard design philosophies. It’s the real money trades that have people up in arms. Real money trades in a video game!?!? It’s new and different. It could be horrible and might be amazing. There’s only room to speculate at this point. Let’s not run off discussing things we don’t yet know. The real question: Who doesn’t want to make a few bucks playing their favorite game?

3. Magic Find

There is a lot of controversy surrounding magic find being implemented in D3. Players don’t like the idea that they’ll be carrying someone who does not contribute to the success of a group but still benefits from it. They say it should be removed from the game entirely. Players who oppose this position say magic find does not need to be adjusted or at worst needs to buff group members you have partied by a fraction of the bonus you have. ::Update 4/17:: Magic find now spreads among all party members evenly. Let’s look at implementation in both games.

How did magic find work in the previous Diablo game? First we need to understand how drop percentages are calculated. Example: Skeleton has a 1% chance to drop a magic item. 100% magic find would double this amount to 2%. Low amounts gave tiny benefit and even high amounts had diminishing returns. Anything over 400ish% tapered off in effectiveness. It was possible in D2 to gear for magic find to the detriment of most other bonuses. A 3 socket helm with full topazes and nothing else or maybe a tarnhelm could theoretically be used. This was a strategy that made some players (who had no end game gear) largely ineffective. They required groups to attain any type of game progression. However, no one complained because all item drops were visible to the entire group. This meant that the fastest click got the gear.

How would magic find theoretically work in D3? It is likely that it would not cause nearly the issues players have speculated. Due to crafting, currency, and auctioning you’ll get item upgrades much more frequently. In addition to that, useless affixes have been reworked or removed. This makes it more likely to get viable bonuses in addition to magic find when rolling gear. When you think about it, MF is only 1 affix. It wouldn’t gimp a character any more than someone who stacks defense and resistances instead of primary stat and magic find.

Most of the posts have blown the issue out of proportion. Look at the end game magic finding gear in D2. Skullders Ire, Shako, infinity, and a slew of other great items. Arguing against someone keeping items for MF is like getting mad at people using an amazing rare that happens to have 10 thorns damage on it. 1 affix does not make or break a character or an item. Ultimately magic find is just a footnote in the argument against D3’s altered game systems. Most players in magic find mode tend to make solo games in D2, to guarantee access to anything that drops. In Diablo 3 there will likely be many group magic find games as everyone gets their own drops.

4. D3 Economics – Conclusion

Diablo 2 had an economic structure created by video game developers. Diablo 3 has had input from economists, mathematicians, science-types, and so on. No one can make the argument for D2 having a superior economic structure. Players are just not used to an action rpg being so incredibly complex. It’s really unprecedented in this genre. There are other games that have an economic structure similar to D3. They are all MMORPGS. When you think about it in these terms, it’s easy to understand where 7 years of development went. Try to compare the economy of Titan quest, Torchlight, or Dungeon Siege to D3. Interestingly, none of them have one at all. They aren’t even as developed as Diablo 2 on that front.

Powerful economic tools could either prolong the game experience by having you constantly search for marginal upgrades or shorten it by allowing you to quickly obtain everything you want. The real questions we should be asking: Will an auction house and a sound currency shorten or lengthen the life of the game? If it does shorten the shelf life, will we remember it even more fondly than D2?

VI. Conclusion

This post was quite the adventure in understanding game design changes. I hope that I’ve helped to inform as many people as possible about why some of the changes have occurred and ultimately that they represent our best interests. I am one of those eager types who followed the development since D3 was announced in the middle of 2008. The wide range of topics I was able to cover came from a memorization of basically every announcement since then compared with my understanding of the D2 game systems and their intended effects. I say intended effects as some of them were implemented for the purpose of ‘x’ but ended up serving a function of ‘y’.

I said all that to give a disclaimer. Ultimately, while I believe myself to be correct, some of what I discussed is based on my opinion, although I attempted to be as unbiased as possible. If I am being honest, I am one of those “hardcore” types that is used to punishing gameplay. I can beat a lot of those crazy difficulty NES games like battletoads, ninja turtles, double dragon, and punch out. I actually represent the demographic I hope will read this post. What does all that have to do with Diablo? Well let me explain.

The difficulty from games like those I have described was partially artificial. As much as I’d like to believe I was overcoming a challenge and developing my skills as a player, I think ultimately I just memorized a lot of things very well. As a result (and EXACTLY like D2) I can go back to any of these games and remember >95% of the monsters, level layouts, and attack timings. This mindset of Video Gamer Memory was required to master the games. There’s a flip side of that memorization difficulty coin. Starcraft 2 gives us an excellent example of non-memorization game difficulty. There are multiple strategies you can use to complete a given scenario. The challenge may be different every time you play it. I know it seems like I’m way off topic but this is a mentality that you have to understand before you can realize why players like myself tend to formulate the opinion that “D3 is for casuals”.

We develop that belief for 2 primary reasons. Reason 1 as already mentioned is artificial difficulty. Artificial difficulty can be sampled very well in a game like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The game is already pretty hard but if you die and use your continues you have to go back to the first level and start all over again. This makes it take a lot longer for players to master the later levels of the game. The later levels are the most difficult and you get less time to spend on them because you’ll die more frequently. It’s punishing because someone who has less time to play will never be able to even experience the late game content. It’s like playing hardcore in D2. This is the reason many players prefer hardcore, it’s what they already expect a game to feel like. If you die, you start all over. It is important to note that most people will never beat that type of game. A large percentage of the audience gives up before completing it or just gets frustrated because they aren’t gaining any tangible reward (other than play experience).

Reason 2 is the introduction into game development (in general terms) in recent years of incremental reward systems. Incremental reward systems are probably the largest contributing factor to the increasing popularity of video games. Diablo is no exception to this trend. As I’ve already covered in the crafting sections, you’ll be seeing more item upgrades more frequently. There are now checkpoints if you disconnect. D2 if you failed to acquire a waypoint, you started the act over. In D2 the vast majority of items carried no value. The only “attaboy” you received in the late game was the pervasive High rune drop or an elite unique. The average level 85+ character wasted the vast majority of their time in game for no usable rewards.

Understanding those fundamental design philosophies will help shed some light on D3. Since Blizzard is offering more consistent rewards and removing those artificial difficulty barriers, here is what it will come down to in the end: the player (which it has always come down to). A self-proclaimed “hardcore” gamer will power through all of the new content very quickly. I beat every mission in Starcraft 2 on brutal only 4 days after release. Players who game like that are the most vocal. We beat the game, did everything it had to offer, then came to the forums to talk about it. I believe the real question is ultimately: What percentage of the player base is that dedicated? With Blizzard games I’m sure it’s a much higher % than most companies. We are voracious for content and play games like drug addicts seek a high.

There is a conclusion that I have reached after considering some of these gamer mentalities. Most people are not like me. Most players won’t sit in front of their computer for 10 hours a day just to play D3 (over a year after release). Most players won’t cut their sleep down to 3 hours a night in order to spend more time item farming. Most players who like video games are quite a bit less dedicated than myself and many others on these forums. I’m okay with that fact. The world doesn’t turn for me, a lot of different personality types will want to enjoy what D3 has to offer.

Having said all of that, here’s my actual conclusion. I feel (based on the evidence) that D3 will keep me engaged for years to come. I believe that the addition of dyes, runestones, and the range of stats on gear and enchants will mean that the new difficulty is not “clear the ubers” but rather, make the perfect character. I think even someone like me who dedicates countless hours to this game will be, years later, still trying to get those extra 4 points of attack on an enchant, or just one more rank 14 gem. Diablo III is going to exceed my expectations. The beta itself has more depth than the entirety of other games in the genre. I already put 50+ hours into the first 1% of the game, in beta no less! I cannot wait to play the other 99% and my fellow hardcore gamers, I look forward to playing it with you.

I’ll even include a TL:DR for this 10,000 word post.
TL:DR You won’t be disappointed.
https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3811455085?page=1

New League of Legends Supremacy

2012-04-17T11:41:00.001-04:00

Domain names can often be a good indicator of a company’s plans. And based on the large of amount of domain registrations and acquisitions recently, it looks like Riot Games is preparing to release a brand new game mode for League of Legends called Supremacy.

Back in late February, another domain blog Rogue Domaining had noted that leagueoflegendssupremacy.com and .net had been privately registered by the internet brand protection company MarkMonitor. While registering two domains may signal nothing more than a company trying to protect its intellectual property, I’ve discovered additional strong hints that Riot Games will be introducing League of Legends: Supremacy in the near future.

First off, Riot Games is a client of MarkMonitor, a firm that over half the fortune 100 rely on for brand protection online. While the key is to be discreet when registering names for yet-to-be-released games, months ahead of its Dominion game mode release, MarkMonitor registered names like leagueoflegendsdominion.com (Whois).

This week, MarkMonitor registered a slew of typos of League of Legends: Supremacy domains including:

leageoflegendssupremacy.com
leageoflegendssupremacy.net
leagueoflegendsupremacy.com
leagueoflegendsupremacy.net
leaugeoflegendssupremacy.com
leaugeoflegendssupremacy.net
lolsupramecy.com
lolsupramecy.net
lolsupremecy.com
lolsupremecy.net
lolsupremicy.com
lolsupremicy.net

Now add to that, Riot Games has apparently acquired the generic domain names Supremacy.com (Whois) and Supremacy.net (Whois), which you can most certainly assume did not go for cheap, dropping hints that League of Legends: Supremacy is definitely on its way. You don’t spend the kind of money it takes to buy generic names like these for defensive purposes unless you have a plan.

Days ago, both names transferred from their previous owner to MarkMonitor. The tie-in between Supremacy.com and the other League of Legends names, is that on the same day MarkMonitor registered the typos of leagueoflegends.com and lolsupremacy.com, it also picked up typos of supremacy.com like supramecy.net, supremecy.net, supremicy.com, and supremicy.net.

While nothing is official yet, with all these new domain registrations revealed here in the past week, news of a new game mode seems very close.

Firsthand Experience with Diablo III Runes

2012-04-12T20:36:00.002-04:00

With the release date of Diablo III fast approaching, we compare how much of a difference the newly implemented Rune system makes on the game's gameplay in regard to our previous tour through the beta a few months ago.

It has been a while since I'd played Diablo III beta, main reason is that most of the patches that arrived after my inital playthrough were in fact some minor tweaks, or had something to do with fixing/nerfing of class abilities. Then Blizzard started to talk about their Rune system being implemented, and how great an effect it will have on gameplay. Little did I know then that my main concern, Diablo III having only five classes to play, is going to be banished from my mind completely.

To illustrate this little bit better, I have to mention Titan Quest. The game had nine masteries to play with and upon reaching the eight level you got to choose another one, thereby gaining a class (two combined masteries). That engine enabled 36 combinations alone, and I don't have to explain the level of variability, uniqueness, brutal fun and difference in gameplay it offered. On the other hand, and I have to mention it again, Diablo III had five classes to play.

Nevertheless, when I played the beta for the first time, four or five months ago, I had an awesome experience, as was mentioned in the previous preview; but with the added perspective of the Runestone system gameplay – it feels as if I was playing some hollow version of Diablo III - a stripped game on crutches. You can read and theorize how it changes game all you want, but until you get to try it out, you just can't comprehend the difference it provides.

The runestone system also had different versions; originally, it was item oriented, then Blizzard changed it in a way that when you level up - you gain access to new runes. Skill assigning was also changed so that four numbers on the keyboard correlate with schools of magic (or skills) that your class gains access to. In this text I will use the Witch Doctor (WD) as an example, as I played him to the highest level (13) accessible in the beta.

In this screenshot we can see schools of magic that WD has at his disposal – Defensive, Terror, Decay and Voodoo, in addition to primary and secondary skills which are reserved for mouse buttons.

So the first option for primary skill (usually spamable shit) is poison dart. It was a little bit dull in previous versions and I haven't found it interesting. But with the introduction of runes you have the option to, for example. fire three darts at once (splinters) or fire a single dart that has a slowing effect (numbing dart). So you get to choose your rune on gameplay that you prefer (or difficulty), within choice of skill in specific school tree, in this case primary, that you like.

Splinters in action

Another really, really awesome thingy is that spell effect graphics change as you change runes! I can't wait until the desired level to fire snakes from that hollow gun thingy.

If you prefer a more swarming approach, corpse spiders are your friends. The Doctor throws some vases around and four spiders leap out from each one that last around 3-4 seconds. At first you have small white spiders, then you can advance to Leaping spiders which are larger and black. Those can jump around and instantly reach the foe, therefore becoming even more effective.

Leaping Spiders

Next rune allows to summon Spider queen that births spiderlings on its own!

Ok, enough of primary shit, lets get to secondaries.

First in line is Grasp of the Dead, a static AoE damaging and snaring spell. If you want to deal more damage with it, eels are your choice (small green things cover the floor); if you want more snaring effect – choose Unbreakable grasp (undead hands break from the ground).

Eels beat skelletons

I don't know how the third rune really works (25th lvl...) or how it looks – but the description - dead corpses falling down from the sky - explains it all. GIEF!

If you desire active, real damaging AoE, look no further then the next in line – Firebats; this is a cone shaped AoE attack unlike Grasp that works in a circle. Truth be told, in previous patches I haven't used them as much, as I preferred the snare effect that Grasp provided; not to mention that those flying bastards need to be channeled so you can't move. But once you get the grip of it and acquire some dogs to steal enemies' attention, those little bastards blast your foes apart. Got cornered? Just channel the damn things in every possible direction. They burn mana a lot, to say the least.

Everything is fine and dandy until you unlock the first rune – Dire bats. Unlike cone-shaped Firebats, these big boys have more range, fly one after another and deal even more damage (crits are just sick) to anything that comes in their desired path. A well placed dire bat works wonders (as does Grasp also).

Crittin' dire bats

I mentioned dags. You like dags? Dags? Ye, DAGS!!! This rambling brings us to the first spell school that I had available – Defensive. Obviously, it is meant for defensive purposes! Eureka! So, at first I had three zombie dogs that do shitty damage but are very, very aggressive and engage enemies really fast, thus leaving me quite cozy to throw some vases around and blast an occasional bat or two. Later on come rabid dogs that deal some moar poison damage. And look really rabidish (acid green). This school also consists of other, more subtle spell effects like Fear or Hex for example.

Rabid Dogs

Second, and the only other spell school available in the beta (grrr, they moved rotting zombies to Decay school, luckily, in previous patch I saw how beautiful these guys work) is Terror. Its first spell available is Soul Harvest, an insanely powerful buff that increases your intellect a lot. And by a lot I mean 140 intellect (on level 8?) if used properly. Another one is Sacrifice that blows your dogs up, does really nasty damage to nearby enemies and has an interesting rune to combine with dogs rune Final Gift (extra health globe drop rate).

So, lets imagine a situation like this. Three summoned dogs charge into enemies, you blow them up, each has 15% probability to leave a health globe (you can improve gains from health globes in passives). Furthermore, each has 35% chance to resurrect and be blown up again. Poor bastards, monsters and dogs. Well, that's just one thrilling combination I thought of just by looking at skill descriptions; dunno how it would work in-game but the options given are just mind boggling.

Deadly Combo

Did I even mention passives? (first one has 5% chance to raise dog from corpses of killed enemies). Another evidence of how dramatically things change with new skills or runes acquired is leveling. Usually while leveling you will open up some new runes and acquire new spell. Your gameplay style after using just those two new cheesy stuff will set monsters fleeing for their lives, in painful misery, wishing that they never were programmed to be in Diablo III (at least on normal hehe).

And all this is just from the single-player in beta; without two other schools, without decent gear, without MULTIPLAYER!

That's all folks, they did it again. We are badly screwed - wives will moan, girlfriends will bicker, work and school will be distant past. Weeping and gnashing of teeth. Maya people fucked up with their calendar, it's not 21st of December – the end of the world as we know it comes on 15th of May 2012. And I cannot hibernate to make the wait shorter.

Razer Naga Special Edition - Molten (RZ01-00280500-R3)

2012-04-07T14:01:00.000-04:00

Razer Naga Special Edition - Molten (RZ01-00280500-R3)

Technical Details

Style: Naga Molten

Glowing Cracked Surface Design with Blazing Red Backlighting
5600dpi Razer Precision 3.5G Laser Sensor
17 MMO-optimized buttons (including 12 button thumb grid)

From the Manufacturer

The Razer Naga™ Molten Special Edition features an exciting new look to the original award-winning and massively popular Razer Naga™ that shifts the balance between keyboard and mouse by putting an unprecedented number of in-game commands in one place. A multi-button thumb grid and Razer's MMO game interface add-on combine to place every command you need in the palm of your hand. An ergonomic form shaped to maximize ease of use lets you game in comfort for hours on end. With the Razer Naga SE, you will Get Imba.

Features

7 ft lightweight, braided fiber cable
Scroll wheel with 24 individual click positions
Anti-slip rubber coating
MMO-optimized multi-button thumb grid
Gold-plated USB connector

17 Fully-programmable MMO-optimized buttons
(including 12 button thumb grid)

5600dpi Razer Precision 3.5G Laser Sensor

1000Hz Ultrapolling™ / 1ms response time

Zero-acoustic Ultraslick™ feet

Unlimited character profiles with AddOns

Optional MMO-specific software AddOns

Approximate size: 116L x 69W x 41H (in mm)

	17 MMO-optimized buttons Effortlessly access more abilities and macros than ever before with 17 mouse buttons including the revolutionary Razer Naga thumb grid. The Razer Naga Molten Special Edition’s driver software allows you to easily organize your key binds and character abilities for any game by enabling you to fully remap and assign macros to all 17 buttons.
	Maximum Comfort for Long Gaming Sessions Game for hours on end with the Razer Naga Molten Special Edition’s ergonomic design, optimized for comfort and easy access to every button.
	Custom Interface addons for MMO games Organize your skills and eliminate visual clutter with the Razer Naga Molten Special Edition's in-game custom interface AddOns or integrated in-game support for the most popular MMO games. (Available for World of Warcraft™, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning™, City of Heroes™ and more.)

Package Contents

Razer Naga Special Edition Molten Gaming Mouse
Certificate of Authenticity
Quick Start Guide
Master Guide

Razer Naga Special Edition - Molten (RZ01-00280500-R3)

The Darkness 2 Review

2012-04-06T19:49:00.002-04:00

The Darkness 2 experienced intense ambiance at it is heart; the dark areas of the New York City style roads created for a cold, lonesome and completely dangerous living while demon-armed mafia man Jackie’s ancestry into a hellish World War II apocalypse mid-way via produced what felt such as the type of fever dream a really deranged junkie may have after a dosage of his favorite brand and a whole wheel of parmesan cheese.

The Darkness 2

Financing a hand towards the visuals was several stellar voice-acting, amazing dialogue and an advanced script that Naughty Dog might without doubt have gladly tipped it is hat to between it is waves towards the 1000′s weeping with congrats over Uncharted.

The Darkness 2 additionally packed a suggest old’ punch with hit recognition and rag-doll animation that created capturing the military of pin-stripe sporting mobsters as fulfilling as a particular other first-person present shooter.

The actual kickers, nevertheless, were Jackie’s 2 Darkness tentacles – such as dragon-headed snakes dropped in oil created on his 21st birthday celebration and hanging over each make – which permitted him to rip up opponents and usually scare them shirtless. Nano-suits? They are a bit too poncey compared.

Whilst The Darkness 2 might be some way down most individuals ‘Most Anticipated’ list at the rear of the kind of Arkham City, Uncharted 3 and Skyrim, anyone that played the initial will be nearly as itchy to keep the story of demonized mobster Jackie because they are to don the messy boots of Nathan Drake once again.

Or may they? Significantly, The Darkness has transformed developer fingers, from Star breeze to Dark Sector dev Digital Extremes, and it has gone through some pretty substantial modifications in the looks section. On top it is sufficient to furrow the brow considerably.

That change in visible style is really a stark one; eliminated is the try at photo-realism and in it is place is exactly what Digital Extreme’s is naming ‘graphic noir’ which views hand-drawn textures with bright, solid colors and obvious, black describes developing a noticeably comic-book effect, harking back to The Darkness’ source materials.

There is no doubt it is visually rich however it is also a big sufficient change to bring about a Marmite reaction. While we are sure there are many readers available who will encouraged the graphic style along with open tentacles, particularly people who value art over photorealism, some people are not quite sensation it.

The reasons easy: Funnily sufficient it had been the night of the original Darkness that held us on advantage. It is probably the most lightless games we have ever used the shadows getting used both as a video game mechanic and an atmospheric gadget; we were nervy all through as fire often originated from shadows within the streets and jumpy, ghostly premonitions did not make life any simpler in No Man’s Land possibly.

With this particular new style, not just is everything far better but objects and opponents are clearly understood to be well, which pretty much eradicated driving a car of the unfamiliar during our half-hour hands-on. Having a cartoon style it manages to lose a few of the grit, grime and seediness how the original had too.

We ought to emphasize once again, though, how the visuals will be a matter of individual preference, anybody coming straight from the comics, for instance, will feel correct at home. The art design that stays much closer to the origin material than the unique and really impresses due to that.

So far as actual gameplay can be involved, there is no doubt this is The Darkness 2 whatever way you view it; snappy capturing, unforgiving odds and severe violence are planted to the sequel with confidence.

Whilst we are able to see the second option aspect as being a sticking point for many, we can say undoubtedly that if you are a blood-thirsty FPS head who wants bit of story as well or a fan of The Darkness 2 originally, you will want to focus on the follow up.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Flash Games

2012-04-06T13:33:00.001-04:00

Today most gaming sites have switched from the downloaded software of the past to modern Flash technology. Flash offers gamers many benefits and few drawbacks. Flash use in advertising and games is becoming increasingly common. In the past online gamers were required to download game software which in some cases was a long complicated process. In addition the downloaded software took up valuable computer space and in a few cases affected the overall performance of player's computers. Downloaded software in some cases posed security problems. There have been many cases of viruses, Trojans and other malware bundled with downloaded software. In many cases users were unaware of the malware until it was too late and their computers were compromised. Although flash technology has eliminated these problems players should still use a firewall and a good antivirus program to stay safe online.

Flash has several advantages. Cross browser compatibility is one of these benefits. Players do not have to worry about HTML and CSS codes being interpreted differently in most browsers. Once the flash player plugin is installed the player will be able to view flash content with no problems no matter what browser is used. Flash supports animations, audio, and advanced videos and provides players with more interactive features. Flash bingo technology gives online bingo operators the ability to make their sites more interactive.

Websites using flash games require users to download the flash plugin. Usually the process is very quick and requires no special computer skills. Players have the option of getting automatic updates to their flash plugins. Once the plugin is installed players may access flash based games instantly. Flash does have one major downside for mobile bingo players. Currently iPhones and Blackberries cannot read flash making it impossible to access many online bingo sites using flash based games. Small screen sizes are also a problem and limit access to chat rooms and side games. Online bingo operators and software developers are working on the problem but the process will not be quick. The mobile market is growing and cannot be ignored by game providers.

Downloaded software limits players to the specific computer with the downloaded software. Flash games give players the ability to play from any computer, including laptops and some mobile devices. Bingo is an ancient game that has adapted to modern technology quite nicely. Online players receive big bingo bonuses, and there is always a promotion or tournament going on somewhere. Many industry experts are predicting more technological changes in the very near future.

Diablo 3's 83% regressive tax system

2012-04-06T07:43:00.000-04:00

Blizzard is still fiddling with their Diablo 3 real-money auction house, and recently introduced some major changes. And as Azuriel remarks on his blog, these changes amount to Blizzard taking an 83% cut from any auction posted a minimum price. The minimum amount you can sell anything for is $1.50, and while you don't pay anything if that sell fails, you'll pay $1.25 if the sale succeeds.

For me that is just further proof that the only one that will get rich from the real-money auction house in Diablo 3 is Blizzard. If you want to "flip" something, buying low and selling high, your sales price needs to be at least $2.75 for an item you bought at minimum price. Selling your average loot drop for real money will either fail because nobody wants to pay $1.50 for a minor item, or end you with just 25 cents. As people can only have 10 simultaneous auctions, they will rather sell only expensive stuff and not even bother with the cheap things. And the buyers will ask themselves why it is called a "micro-transaction" if most things on the AH cost $10 or more.

This is a stupid regressive tax system, where cheap stuff is taxed at 83%, and expensive stuff is taxed at a much lower rate. The real-money AH will resemble Tiffany's more than Walmart, with relative low numbers of items posted at relatively high prices. For once Blizzard should have copied CCP and hire an economist before making changes like this.

Gold Sinks You Should Avoid In Diablo 3

2012-04-02T21:46:00.000-04:00

Blizzard has been gradually increasing over time the cost of the shared stash in Diablo 3. So much so that it is a rather large gold sink for most players, especially low level ones. Here is an image of what the shared stash looks like when upgraded to full size, and I have highlighted in red/yellow the area you would see if you didn’t upgrade it below:

Shared Stash in Diablo 3

The highlighted four row area is entirely free and every player starts with it. This shared stash is a small chest in each major town that you visit, and basically it is storage space that all of your characters can access throughout the game (unlike in diablo 2 where every one of your characters could only see their own stash). Each character has a decent number of slots themselves, so I see no reason why you should purchase the shared stash beyond the first four rows as highlighted above. Blizzard has created some pretty heavy gold sinks for upgrading the shared stash, at the tune of 10,000 gold per 2 rows and 100,000 gold per tab (there are three tabs total)

You can have 10 character slots on your account, so why not start off using a few of the dormant ones as bank alts? A single character can hold almost as many items as an entire tab of your shared stash after all. Doing this will save you a lot of money, and early on in the game your character will need every gold piece he or she can find. You can also take the gold you saved not upgrading your shared stash and upgrade your artisans instead or craft the gear you need to progress in the game.

All in all, I think it is much wiser to save your gold, especially early on when it is a premium, and use “bank alts” to carry your excess loot. In the example image I showed you, that cost 30,000 gold to fill out the first tab. I have the gold to fill out the other two bank tabs, but what’s the point when I don’t even have enough gear/loot to fill the first one? You don’t need a lot of storage until you start playing multiple characters and at that point you will probably have plenty of gold to use expanding your storage space. Even if you’re a crafting fiend like me who makes a hundred thousand plus gold each night on the auction house, you don’t need a lot of storage since you can only post 10 auctions per auction house.

I could easily see players using their alts and naming them things like “MYGEMS” or “WEAPONS” and just storing gear and/or loot in their bags. After all, you can sell on the auction house from any character, and you can trade gear with the shared stash to get it from your farming character to your bank alts.

Diablo 3 - Nephalem Valor Buff Explained

2012-03-21T12:08:00.003-04:00

We’re working hard on balancing and testing Diablo III, and one of the major components is making sure that the end game experience is fun and exciting. We’d like to share a few of our goals for end game:

We have an enormous number of skill build combinations, and we want a lot of those skill builds to be viable and interesting
While there are millions of skill builds available to players, we don’t want players swapping skills regularly to beat specific encounters as they come up
We don’t want repeatedly running specific three-minute chunks of the game to be the most efficient way to acquire gear for your character
While a three-minute run shouldn’t be the most efficient, we also don’t want you to feel like it’s a two-hour commitment every time you sit down to play
Bosses should still feel worth killing

Nephalem Valor is one of the major new systems in Diablo III and it kicks in at level 60. Keep in mind that this is still in testing and we’re still working out the details. Here’s how it currently works internally: Rare and Champion packs already have great loot on them. By killing a Rare or Champion pack, not only do you get their loot, but you’ll also receive a buff granting you increased magic find and gold find. However, if you change a skill, skill rune, passive, or leave the game, the buff disappears. As an extra reward, if you kill a boss while this buff is active, you’ll receive extra loot drops from that boss.

The exact amount of magic find and gold find provided by the buff is still being reviewed, as is the amount of extra loot you get from a boss while the buff is active. We’re also playing around with whether or not the buff stacks, what the duration should be, and whether or not it should persist through death. We want to make sure the buff is strong enough to make staying in your current game more rewarding than creating a new game. At the same time, if the buff is too strong, it risks making shorter play sessions feel not worthwhile.

We expect this system will encourage players to stick with a skill build of their choice, select an area of the game they enjoy, and sweep it for rare and champion packs on their way to a boss, finishing off a run with a boss that’ll be worth killing. If you wanted a shorter play session you could be done at that point, but if you have more time, the path of least resistance would ideally be to stay in the same game and make your way towards the next boss.

blizzard loses another 100000 subscribers but dont worry mop will fix it

2012-03-01T16:51:00.001-05:00

World of Warcraft haemorrhaging yet another 100,000 subscribers is just deserts for Blizzard—a company that seems intent on alienating their long terms subscribers and fobbing off the current worries and concerns of their player base with the, ever insulting, “MoP will Fix it”. In fact, they deserved to lose even more subscribers. It was only the holiday period and the genius marketing move that is the Annual Pass that saved their skin from yet another, much greater, humiliating loss. Their complete disregard for PvP throughout the expansion has been utterly appealing and their act of distancing themselves from the current mechanics of Cataclysm is doing very little to inspire their player base.

Blizzard deserves to lose and, yet, no other company has managed to do a better job of the MMO genre, certainly with WoW styled rated PvP. The consequence of SWTOR wasn’t really represented in the loss, but, and let’s be frank, that game is hardly any sort of revolution. How does a company that spits in the face of its customers time and time again still reign supreme? They certainly don’t deserve to, but who’s going to step up and do a better job? We’ll soon see whether Guild Wars 2 will have what it takes.

Today we’ll be taking a look at these issues and why, despite still been supreme, Blizzard shouldn’t be smirking. The future might not look devastating for WoW overall, but it still looks bleak for Blizzard. It should be a wakeup call for them to finally pull their finger out.

Let’s take a look at the subscriber figures over the history of World of Warcraft. Firstly this will highlight WoW hasn’t struggled in the past as some seem to think and, secondly, that WoW is currently in decline in spite of claims that subscribers are stabilizing.

By the end of Vanilla, WoW had reached 8 million subscribers. This grew to 10.9 million in TBC and, eventually, surpassed 11 million before the impending release of Wrath of the Lich King. In December 2008, a month after the release of Wrath, WoW had reached 11.5 million subscribers. It eventually peaked in October 2010, attaining 12 million subscribers. This, as shall be discussed further in a moment, was in spite of a yearlong content drought. The game was still growing and the eagerness of the player base to get their hands on the forth coming expansion, Cataclysm, must have certainly played a role in the peak.

Cataclysm certainly opened well, surpassing Wrath of the Lich King in becoming the fastest selling PC game of all time, selling more than 3.3 million in its first 24 hours and selling more than 4.7 million copies in its first month alone. Yet, despite starting with the largest amount of subscribers ever, Cataclysm didn’t continue this trend of growth. As theActivision Blizzard conference calls have continued to show, WoW is in decline. In Q1 it lost 600,000 subscribers, 300,000 in Q2, 800,000 in Q3 and a further 100,000 in Q4. This has brought Blizzards active subscriber numbers from 12 million at the end of Wrath to 10.2 million today. They’ve lost 15% or 1.8 million subscribers, £16,182,000 or $26,982,000 a month as well as sales of their “Value Added Services” from those subscribers. It isn’t pretty however you look at it.

There are claims that Wrath of the Lich King also lost subscribers, but such claims show a massive misunderstanding of what actually occurred in Wrath. Blizzard was in the process of moving WoW to a new operator in China. Due to this move and the game been foreign, it had to be put through a strict approval process (read censorship) by the Chinese government before it could commercially operate. It was nothing to do with losing subscribers because of disappointment with the game. Indeed, while struggling with this matter and taking a hit, WoW continued to grow in the west despite the economic downturn. In fact, just over midway through the yearlong 3.3 ICC content drought and with WoW back online in China, subscribers once again reached 11.5 million in August 2010.

Let me put that bluntly: 3.3 was released in December 2009 and, apart from a one boss raid (3 mini bosses plus Halion) in the form of the Ruby Sanctum, there had been no new content for 9 months. The WoW player base was in the midst of the longest arena season and tier content to date and yet, in spite of this, it was able to maintain 11.5 million subscribers and then peak at 12 million a month before Cataclysm. In its darkest day, WoW was still able to grow. A tired player base ready and eager for new content, Cataclysm certainly couldn’t have hoped for better prospects.

Yet, those looking through rose tinted glasses even seem to believe the loss of a “mere” 100,000 subscribers is somehow a positive note for Blizzard. It’s positive in about the same way pissing yourself in public is a step above shitting yourself. It’s hardly anything to brag about. It’s an improvement from losing 800,000 subscribers in Q3; let’s give them that at least.

Of course the reasons for the fewer losses in Q4 are worth discussing. Indeed, some are even thanking the more casual friendly approach in 4.3. Yet, as the stats show above, this doesn’t appear to be true. If catering to casuals is the formula to success, an advocate of such an argument should really wonder why WoW boomed from the start of TBC (8 million subscribers) to the end of TBC (11 million subscribers). This was surely when the game was at its most elitist and very much casually unfriendly. Wrath was certainly more casual friendly, but by today’s standards, it would, quite frankly, come across as too elitist to some.

Yet if catering to casuals brought in subscribers, we’d have seen numbers drop during TBC and, perhaps, Wrath and numbers growing in 4.3. In fact, if content being too difficult was really the reason people left Cataclysm, why are they not returning now this casual era has dawned upon us? It appears they’re still just as dissatisfied or bored of the game as they were when they left. Speaking of been bored, WoW is an old game so we can’t rule out people just simply becoming bored of it after all this time, but it isn’t the sole reason subscription numbers are plummeting.

We can’t really know the true reason for the decline, but holding up a casual friendly approach as the savior of WoW is suspect and had the annual pass not been announced, WoW would undoubtedlybe in even more trouble. The announcement of a casual friendly expansion certainly hasn’t reignited peoples desire to play WoW again either.

In what has to be an act of pure genius, Blizzard announced the Annual Pass. This was, quite aptly I might add, announced before the underwhelming trailer for Mists of Pandaria was played—it must have been a WTF have I gotten myself into moment for many. In fact, the annual pass was an act of sheer marketing brilliance by Blizzard. Promising players MoP beta access, the retarded horse 2.0 and a free copy of Diablo 3 for contractually pledging to subscribe to WoW for a year, Blizzard caught over a million of their players hook, line and sinker. Yet, despite this move, as well as the announcement of MoP, the release of 4.3 (Hour of Twilight) and the holiday season, WoW still lost subscribers.

Yet, these measures certainly must have had some form of effect and, at least, worked as a form of damage control. However, while Wrath peaked at 12 million on the horizon of Cataclysm, MoP has so far failed to garner any such intake whatsoever. To be fair Wrath peaked at such levels a month before Cataclysm launched, so it might be too soon to judge the worth of MoP, but early indications certainly don’t look promising. Indeed, the lukewarm reception and polarizing effect MoP has had thus far can’t be giving Blizzard much hope.

Over the next year, the Annual Pass might keep a million subscribers secured in spite of whether those players are active or not, but it really is a band aid solution. Indeed, once the first round of passes have extinguished, Blizzard could potentially see the largest drop in subscribers to date. It’s a potential ticking time bomb. They’ll need to ensure MoP is a success and keeps those players hooked or, at least, brings in a batch of new players to replace them or they might drop below Vanilla levels. It is true that it’d still be the most subscribed to MMO in such an event, but that’s a huge drop in profits.

You’d think Blizzard would be pandering (Ah, like Panda. Get it? *Sigh*) to their audience and treating them in a respectable manner. Yet nearly every major concern has, in one way or another, been met with “MoP will fix it”. They’ve certainly addressed a few issues in the latest patch, but those fixes were minor and could have easily been added as hot fixes and, in fact, should have been in regard to the PvE trinkets and the Vengeance change. The development of the next expansion should not come at the expense of the current game.

Blizzards current view on Frost Mage Control is an example of this:

Currently, we think that Frost mages have too much control in PvP. This is just something that has grown over time because we always felt that these “chilling” and “freezing” effects should naturally slow you down. Part of the design that we are implementing with the Mists of Pandaria talent changes are to move some of that control Frost mages have to the talent tree. This means it will be possible for a Frost mage to choose these options, but they come at the expense of others, Arcane and Fire mages also have the opportunity to get those control choices as well!

This is pretty much to say that they think Frost has too much control, but aren’t going to bother addressing the issue until MoP because, well as we all surely know, the current state of the game (that their customers must endure) is secondary to the development of an expansion. To put it another way, the player experience is of minor consideration to the development of untested philosophical concepts that might fix nothing and which are irrelevant to the current state of the game since the entire dynamic of the game will have changed by then.

The worst incident of this though has been with Restoration Druids and their abysmal state in rated PvP. While it’s certainly easy to joke that the god status of Restoration Druids throughout Wrath and, especially, in season 8, saw many want to ram a bottle of herbicide down the throats of Restoration Druids everywhere and throw salt on their wounds for good measure, it certainly doesn’t make one unsympathetic to their current state and Blizzards rage inducing response to the matter.

The matter was brought up in the Class Design and Balance Q&A in November:

Q: There hasn’t been any questions answered about Resto Druids yet. Can you talk about our extremely weak state in PvP and the fact that we’re the only healer not only not seeing a buff but seeing a nerf in 4.3?

A: We will definitely be addressing some of the PvP weakness of Resto Druids in 5.0.

Let me state this again: This was answered in November, three months ago!

They effectively said, “Yep, we agree you suck and you’re going to suck for the rest of expansion. Don’t worry though, we’re on it and we’ll charge you another £29.99 for the privilege! Oh and don’t forgot to pay your £8.99 a month. Thanks, do recommend Blizzard to all your friends.”

Don’t worry though if Restoration Druids do happen to suck throughout the MoP beta, Blizzard will declare they’ll “be in good shape if not great” by the time the expansion launches and then, in actuality, fail to address any of the issues with them until the following February.

If there’s an issue now, fix it now.

It’s perfectly acceptable to leave massive changes such as the talent system or dispel mechanic until the next expansion. However, leaving issues that impact on the current player experience or those that Blizzard currently deems to be an issue is not acceptable. If they think Frost control is too strong, they should address it now, not in MoP where sweeping changes will have taken place, making any statements about balance at this current time totally irrelevant.

They need to work in the current constructs of the game. Its fine telling us how much better things will work under the new talent system and what a wondrous improvement it will be, but we aren’t operating under that construct and so changes need to be made within the current confines where necessary. It seems Blizzard has thrown in the towel on all the Cataclysm mechanics and that’s fine, but they have to fix issues with them until the new mechanics are in place. The coming “messiah” known as MoP isn’t an excuse to do nothing.

In fact, forget about “MoP will Fix It”, the entire expansion has done very little to inspire the PvP community. Indeed, Cataclysm is no more than a slide show of blunder after blunder.

Here take a look at this, now amended, list:

From the abysmal state of “good shape if not great” Discipline Priests, MMR abuse, win trading, allowing PvE gear (Legendary…) in PvP, the honour gear fiasco, the poor balance, flavour of the month classes, **takes a breath **, bugs left for patches on end, the return of Ring of Valor, forcing arena players to do RBGs, overpowered as fuck guards in the world PvP zone, the removal of skirmishes for no adequate reason, **takes another breath**, the shambles that was the WoW Regional Tournaments, the enormous cost of PvP weapons for PvE reasons, the removal of arena armoury features (match history…), **takes yet another breath**, changing the rating system two weeks in to season 10 without resetting MMR, “shut up PvP guy”, epic gems available to PvE players only, “let’s leave in show enemy debuffs bug in spite of our minor patch because we’re idiots” and that’s just some of the blunders.

The worst blunder though is the failure to reset MMR after fixing the bug two weeks into Season 10. In fact, Blizzard should have delayed the start of season 10 until the issues were fixed. Furthermore, they should have prematurely ended season 9 instead of extending it another week when MMR abuse was becoming more rampant. Yet to make matters worse, Blizzard responded to the PvP community with this patronising piece of crap:

We’d like to remind everyone about the importance of fair play. To be clear, cheating is not tolerated in World of Warcraft, and exploitation of ranked PvP play is no exception.

Despite the fact cheating was tolerated and they didn’t give a damn about fair play.

Of course this matter became more amusing when Blizzard once again committed another blunder by failing to mention an MMR reset in the end of season 10 notice. Fortunately, there was a huge outcry from the PvP community and MMR was reset before season 11 went live. Frankly it wouldn’t have been a shock if they said “MoP will fix it” instead…

From just a PvP perspective they deserve to lose subscribers. They’ve treated the community appealingly over the course of the expansion and continue to do so.

The loss of another 100,000 subscribers might be a step above the 800,000 lost in Q3, but the ticking time bomb that is the annual pass and MoP polarizing the community, highlights the ill fated situation WoW currently finds its self in. Subscriber numbers booming in a time when, albeit still fresh, WoW was at its most elitist and yet still falling in its most casual era, makes Blizzards latest casual friendly strategy somewhat questionable. The failure to address and to reply to any current concerns with, the ever insulting, “MoP will fix it” and the outright disregard shown to just the PvP community over the course of Cataclysm, is likely to have turned off a large number of people. Blizzard needs to pull their finger out and communicate and address current issues.

The worst part of all this though is the fact WoW is still the best MMO on the market at this current time. Really there’s been no innovation and games have simply copied WoW. A game run by a company that fobs off any issue as something that will be fixed in the next expansion are still running the best MMO? Even Guild Wars 2 for all its focus on PvP is questionable. Will it hit WoW where it hurts due to the one off payment model or will people play both? Hopefully it’ll be so spectacular it’ll leave WoW in the dust. We’ll see. You certainly can’t hold the player base at fault though; WoW really is the best at what it does despite the shoddy management of late. It’s just a shame it could be so much more. Hopefully the subscriber losses will prove a wakeup call to Blizzard rather than an inspiration to rely more on overpriced “Value Added Services”.

Buffalo Studios blasts Zynga for copying Bingo Blitz social game

2012-01-30T19:04:00.003-05:00

Nimblebit drew some blood last week when the developer of Tiny Tower cast a stone at Zynga, via an infographic, for copying Tiny Tower in an upcoming mobile game called Dream Heights.

Buffalo Studios is using the same tactic tonight as it calls out Zynga Bingo for being a copycat of Buffalo’s popular Facebook game Bingo Blitz. In the infographic at right, the company points out the similarities in graphics, layout, and game play between Zynga’s recently unveiled Zynga Bingo game and Bingo Blitz.

The copycat charges in social games are turning into an epidemic. Earlier today, Spry Fox announced it was suing 6waves Lolapps for copyright infringement for allegedly copying Spry Fox’s game Triple Town by creating Yeti Town.

“We wanted to alert you to the striking similarities between Zynga’s recently announced game, to our game Bingo Blitz,” said Salim Mith, vice president of product marketing and operations at Santa Monica, Calif.-based Buffalo, in an email.

Buffalo launched Bingo Blitz on Facebook a year ago and it is the No. 1 Bingo game on the social network with more than 1 million daily players.

Mith said that Zynga copies aspects of the game including the use of different themed Bingo rooms and cities, as well as updated powerups.

Buffalo was founded in 2010 and it has 45 employees. Bingo Blitz is the company’s only game. We’ve asked Zynga for comment.

Sims 3 Master Suite Stuff Pack [Download]

2012-01-27T12:21:00.001-05:00

Price:

$17.99
Digital Download on amazon.com

Download size:

170.0 MB

Download time:

4 - 15 minutes on broadband, 7 hours on dial-up

Home is where the heart is! Whether your Sims relax in a bubble bath in their luxurious bathroom, enjoy some down time in their exquisitely furnished bedroom, or wear new intimate apparel for their special someone, The Sims 3 Master Suite Stuff adds some sizzle to their home life! From stylish bedroom sets to spa-inspired bathroom furnishings to romantic new lingerie and hairstyles, your Sims will relax in comfort and style.

Features

Create the ultimate master suite with a romantic canopied bed, a 40s-inspired chair, and more.
Give your Sims’ bathroom a makeover with contemporary, spa-worthy furnishings including a well-crafted vanity and a sleek and stylish tub.
Add the finishing touches. From vases of flowers to candles and rose petals, the little things can help set the mood.
Dress to impress. Whether your Sim is seeking a romantic rendezvous or an indulgent evening of relaxation, the new intimate wear options are bound to please.
Complete the look with a casual yet elegant new hairstyle that complements your Sims new commitment to relaxation.

This stuff pack is exactly as was shown in the producer walkthrough. It is a stuff pack centered around romance and the master suite of the house namely the bedroom and bathroom.

It has awesome new romantic clothing for your sims for seducing other sims and spending that special time alone. This pack has more clothing then ever before and it introduces a new never before seen accesory item.

It has a beautiful collection of furniture and decorations to decorate your bedroom and bathroom in a romantic theme.

This pack is just in time for Valntines day.

If you have romantic sims and enjoy spending time in sleep wear and playing that aspect of the game then this pack is for you.

Get it now on Amazon.com! Sims 3 Master Suite Stuff Pack [Download]