The saddest part to me is that I don't know if this general apathy is good for Blizzard, or bad. On the one hand, they already got a massive amount of money off of purchases of the game, and the more people quit the less servers/bandwidth they have to dedicate to D3. On the other hand, this could severely dampen their ongoing sales. I could imagine that this game will have much fewer purchases a year out than D2 did. I mean, shit, I bought another copy of D2 a few months back, to replace the hard copy I'd lost that I bought a couple years before that. While that shouldn't be an issue with the way Battle.net handles purchases these days, I couldn't see myself 8 or 9 years down the road buying another copy of D3 - assuming the servers are still live.
[Gaming] Diablo 3 : Ser Farm-A-Lot
- Thread starter Jay
- Start date
Necronic
Staff member
Eh, I dunno. It will still be on my rotation. I put over 100 hours in that game (more like 250). I don't do that and never come back. I just burned myself out on it. I mean shit, for as much as you guys hated it you're still commenting on it on page 33. That's not a failure.
Well, that's because I found a fun way to play the game. I just didn't know that HC mode was the actual sequel to D2 and that SC mode was just a beta version with a bunch of missing loot drops and such.
Edit: R.I.P. Meldin, level 41 Wizard, killed by a massive pack of Illusionist Fire-Chain skeletons in the cave with Kulle's head. Well, on to the next character.
Edit: R.I.P. Meldin, level 41 Wizard, killed by a massive pack of Illusionist Fire-Chain skeletons in the cave with Kulle's head. Well, on to the next character.
What on earth did they do to the game while I was out of town?? Super choppy/laggy, hardly any blues much less rares dropping and my repair bill was 16k?!
They call it patch 1.0.3. It's the patch that's supposed to make the game more fun, more challenging, more rewarding, and actually give a penalty for death so that people can't just death zerg/corpse run their way through.
You know, because what I do in my game has sooooo much impact on your game that if I decide I want to just throw myself into the face of every mob I come across until I can beat them all, your gaming experience will be ruined. And we can't have that.
On the other hand, I've opted for the ultimate penalty for death, and just decided to go Hardcore only. I don't have to worry about repair costs for deaths, the AH is much more reasonable (items more reasonably priced, less crap clogging things up, etc.), and for some reason I only have specific zones that are consistently choppy (the oasis in Act 2 is the only one I can think of off the top of my head), blues, rares, and legendaries drop at a good rate... hard to say no to hardcore these days. It's the only reason I'm still playing.
ETA: And really, I don't know what the higher-ups at Blizzard are thinking right now (aside from maybe "please don't let us get canned when Vivendi sells Activision") but they really, really need to stop letting Jay Wilson talk. The man should not be allowed to open his mouth about the game any further, because every time he does it just pisses off more people. His most recent blunder was telling people that they're mis-remembering why they had fun with D2... because, ya know, there aren't a ton of people who replayed it just before D3 came out. And in the same interview/press release/why ever the hell he was talking he went on to say that the reason everyone loved Deckard Cain was because it was annoying listening to him say "Stay awhile and listen," every time you interacted with him. So they killed him for a good story point and they definitely didn't add any followers who are constantly repeating the same audio over and over and over and over and over and over again. Because that wouldn't have been GLORIOUS of them.
Is the AH different for hardcore than for normal?
The number 1 reason that I won't play Hardcore is simply due to the fact that there are so many ways to die by lag, it would just super piss me off. I've had HC characters in most of the offline games that offer them (my best character in Torchlight is my HC Destroyer), but the fact that I could lose that entire character to a lag spike... nope, not gonna do it.
The number 1 reason that I won't play Hardcore is simply due to the fact that there are so many ways to die by lag, it would just super piss me off. I've had HC characters in most of the offline games that offer them (my best character in Torchlight is my HC Destroyer), but the fact that I could lose that entire character to a lag spike... nope, not gonna do it.
Haven't played in well over a week...
Y'know what, you can discuss it 'till the cows come home, and numbers-wise you can be right as much as you want - D3 simply isn't grabbing me as much as D1 or D2 ever did. Too much polish to gameplay to make it a smooth and polished experience blahblahblah, too much focus on balance and smoothing everything out, too much whatever, but lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. It was fun but I'm just not drawn back into it. A game of this type needs to hook you and drag you in, instead I'm....Meh.
Hoping TL2 is more fun, though I don't know - I prefered D2 over TL by a LOT. Style wise, that is.
Y'know what, you can discuss it 'till the cows come home, and numbers-wise you can be right as much as you want - D3 simply isn't grabbing me as much as D1 or D2 ever did. Too much polish to gameplay to make it a smooth and polished experience blahblahblah, too much focus on balance and smoothing everything out, too much whatever, but lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. It was fun but I'm just not drawn back into it. A game of this type needs to hook you and drag you in, instead I'm....Meh.
Hoping TL2 is more fun, though I don't know - I prefered D2 over TL by a LOT. Style wise, that is.
True. For all the abuse D3 gets (and I give it too!), it's a well-made game. It just can't compare to the genre-defining awesome that is D2. They're right up to a point about the rose-tinted glasses all fans are wearing. On the other hand, some of it's their own fault. I still think it's ridiculous they didn't use actual crucifixes and pentagrams, for example.
Yep, two separate auction houses for normal characters and hardcore characters. You also don't have access to your normal characters' stash, gold, or crafters/crafting levels. And really, there are a lot of complaints on the forums about people losing their characters to lag spikes (and certainly, several people really did lose characters to last night's spikes), but really big spikes like last night are extremely rare. You'll get low-level lag, stutter, and rubber-banding; but the thing very few people are willing to admit is that unless it was a big time spike like last night's issue (an AT&T backbone puked), if their character died to lag they probably weren't going to make it out of that fight alive anyway. I've lost 4 HC characters so far, and only one of them was even during a laggy episode, and that one was a level 9 barb that just didn't have the mobility/survivability to face the group he was fighting. The other three were a level 10 monk that died in a poison cloud after killing a tree in act 1, a level 23 DH that vaulted the wrong way and landed in a lot more mobs, and my 41 wizard who just ran out of luck against Illusionist Fire-chains.
A crucifix wouldn't make any sense, in universe as there was no Jesus Christ, therefore no crucifiction. Same with Pentagrams. That's from Earth culture, not the universe of the game. I would find real symbols completely out of place in the game.
Although, for me, the true testament to how badly D3 is doing right now, are the two facts that a) most people here, even really really rabid fans, have stopped playing (some of you for over a month now), and b) it's Friday night, school is out for summer, and there are only 1703 people in public games right now on the US servers. That's just sad.
Yeah, I may go back to it another time, but it's definitely moved to the bottom of my play pile. Especially because I have a backlog of games to get through and only 2 months before classes start up again.
I have seen a couple of people pop on my friends list while I was playing WoW, so some people are still playing, but not nearly as many as there used to be.
I have seen a couple of people pop on my friends list while I was playing WoW, so some people are still playing, but not nearly as many as there used to be.
You haven't played Diablo in a while, have you? The pentagram WAS the big main symbol of the three prime evils (in contrast to the lesser 4); the upside-down crossew weren't a reference to any Jesus figure but simply a good way of getting rid of people who annoyed Diablo. D1 was littered with crucifixes....Occupied ones, that is. I don't mean they had to stuff them in willy-nilly,b ut in some places it was very noticeable they replaced what should have been a pentagram with an octagon and such crap. Not exactly world-breaking, but it does, to me, sort of symbolize their direction with the game. Offend nobody, make it smooth and frictionless, there can't possibly be any reason to incite people to care negatively,...
This is true. However, that number was up around 10k before the disaster that is 1.0.3.
And yes, this game doesn't perform for shit. Boggles the mind that I've had absolutely zero problems running Skyrim, ME3, and Tera, but D3 stutters and chops its way along on the exact same system, with the graphics set lower than they are for the other games.
Yeah, they uh... they really fucked something up, and I'm not sure why/how. Since the conventional wisdom of "if it's not running well, turn down the graphics" wasn't working, I decided to see what would happen if I jacked the graphics up as far as they would go - which should tax my system since I'm only running a GeForce 9800 GT and their "recommended" system specs call for at least a GTX 260. And now? Now it runs like a dream. It almost runs too well. It's almost a little too fast for me to keep up with, until I get used to how quickly and smoothly things run.
Edit: Hmm, nope. Still not smooth. Now though, instead of massive chop or or stutter, I have more of a jitter. Smaller interruptions that happen much more quickly, and much much more frequently. Guess I'll settle for occasional stutter instead of frequent jitter.
1st time that happened to you with a game? Because it's not that unusual.
Although most of the time is more about using the right settings, not the highest ones. I always took it as being a result of where they optimized the game most...
The change to how it runs on my laptop is the part that worries me the most. It was fine before this patch and ME3 and other games run fantastically on it. I'll try setting the graphics to high later on.
The other changes (repair costs) are annoying but can be dealt with.
The other changes (repair costs) are annoying but can be dealt with.
It's been well over a decade since I played the original Diablo, so yeah, I forgot about that because Diablo2 doesn't have any pentagrams or crosses.Pentagrams in the Diablo universe? What crazy person would think there's any precedent for that sort of...
Oh...
Nope, don't recall any broken images in D2.dafuq?
As for the icons, well, you got me there.
Either way, now that they've established it as a completely different universe (which they hadn't really prior to D2), the religious iconography, by which I mean upside down crosses and pentagrams would serve no other purpose other than to goad religious groups, which I think video games have had enough of.
I can see the images he posted just fine.
Also, this:
Is what people are saying is wrong, it's a different feeling world than was in D1 and D2. Unless you're saying that, prior to D2, the world was meant to be earth. That's not true, because the shit about Sanctuary and the Horadrim and all that is right in the Diablo 1 manual.
I tried several combinations of settings and its still super choppy and just odd. I think there is also quite a bit of lag tonight too.
www.diablowiki.net/Diablo_I_Manual
Sanctuary isn't mentioned once.
Basically, my point is that when it started out, it was supposed to feel earth-like, but with the newer game, it's pretty much moved to the realm of fantasy.
Sanctuary isn't mentioned once.
Basically, my point is that when it started out, it was supposed to feel earth-like, but with the newer game, it's pretty much moved to the realm of fantasy.
I only played D1 and D2 a little and my assumption was that you were playing in medieval Europe, on Earth.
Just putting this out here, Blue on stuttering:
http://blues.incgamers.com/Posts/10/1/42/881/172096/new-stuttering-workaround
While the following isn't guaranteed to resolve all stutter symptoms on all systems, we have seen significant improvements on several computers using this method. This workaround involves partially disabling Windows Drive Indexing, a tool that speeds up Windows searches.
Disable Drive Indexing
1. Click Start
2. Click Computer*
3. Right Click your Hard Drive (typically C
and select Properties
4. Select the General tab
5. Uncheck Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed...**
6. Click Apply
7. Select Apply changes to drive C:\ only
8. Click Ok, and then Ok again
9. Load up Diablo III and see if your performance has improved!
* = My Computer on Windows XP
** = Allow Indexing Service to index... on Windows XP
Turning off indexing to the "drive only" will still enable your Windows' searches to be quick. If you still have stuttering after this workaround, you may wish to experiment with turning it off to subfolders and files as well. Once you've turned indexing off for everything, the option will change to one that lets you re-enable it if need be.
In the meanwhile, I'll pass this information on to the devs so that hopefully more changes can be made on our end to reduce stuttering. Thank you!
http://blues.incgamers.com/Posts/10/1/42/881/172096/new-stuttering-workaround
While the following isn't guaranteed to resolve all stutter symptoms on all systems, we have seen significant improvements on several computers using this method. This workaround involves partially disabling Windows Drive Indexing, a tool that speeds up Windows searches.
Disable Drive Indexing
1. Click Start
2. Click Computer*
3. Right Click your Hard Drive (typically C
and select Properties4. Select the General tab
5. Uncheck Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed...**
6. Click Apply
7. Select Apply changes to drive C:\ only
8. Click Ok, and then Ok again
9. Load up Diablo III and see if your performance has improved!
* = My Computer on Windows XP
** = Allow Indexing Service to index... on Windows XP
Turning off indexing to the "drive only" will still enable your Windows' searches to be quick. If you still have stuttering after this workaround, you may wish to experiment with turning it off to subfolders and files as well. Once you've turned indexing off for everything, the option will change to one that lets you re-enable it if need be.
In the meanwhile, I'll pass this information on to the devs so that hopefully more changes can be made on our end to reduce stuttering. Thank you!
