"Diablo 3 is a beta", Blizzard "deserves" backlash - GYP

[Tatsu]

Those footnote costs would include replacing dated/broken hardware as well as up-keep. The cost of buying more servers would be tiny anyway. This was the release of one of the most anticipated games of the decade. One of the highest selling PC games of all time and Blizzard chose to skimp on hardware?

I've seen smaller companies double their number of servers for beta events when population demand called for it. When Rifts servers filled up at launch they brought more online within hours to let people play. When SWTOR servers became overloaded at launch, Bioware increased population caps to allow for more people to play. Blizzard undoubtedly had the resources to accomodate much more of the launch demand than they bothered to, but instead they said tough shit and let people wait in queues for hours or advised people to wait days to play.

I suppose my point is this (the optimist in me): Blizzard had the resources and ability to blow peoples expectations out of the water with Diablo 3 launch. They had the oppertunity to show the rest of industry how the big boys do their business. It would have cost them (an $18,000,000,000 company) next to nothing to show everyone else what is possible when you put in some effort and make a solid attempt at raising the bar. Instead, they went with middle of the road mediocrity and skimped in every place they knew they could get away with.

Even if they did spend the $ and really go balls to wall on their hardware for launch and after a while it was mostly unused due to dwindling demand it would still be money well spent. It's PR. It's showing all thier players that they'll pull out the stops because they can, because they want to produce something great and do their best to support it. Instead we get the impression that Blizzard only care about making $ and not good games with good support and good communities. Not everyone can be Valve . Next big Blizzard game to launch will have people remembering how shit the D3 launch was instead of how good this one might be.

There will be a reply to this post with someone defending Blizzard's launch approach by telling me I was expecting too much and that I'm and entitled 12 year old brat. Some people are happy with below average.

I think Blizzard just under estimated the interest in the game. Diablo 2 sold one million copies in two weeks. It took it over a year to sell 4 million copies. Diablo 3 sold 3.5 million copies in 24 hours and over 6 million in one week. So there was a huge jump in the popularity of the game. SWOTR topped out at least than 2 million people online. Rift has maxed out at 600k players. So even compared to those MMOs Diablo 3 launch has dwarfed both. Could Blizzard have done better? Of course. Hind sight is 20/20 though. Did they respond in as quick a manner as the could? I think so considering the numbers.

[Rife]

So we agree. Someone over at Blizzard should stop funneling money into media advertising and instead spend it on hardware upgrades. New type of marketing your customers actually appreciate. Seems like common sense to me; though probably not for Blizzard's higher ups. MMO's after all are played for community and nothing expands a community like players being impressed and pulling their mates into it.

Too bad it'll never happen. That would be some awesome shit though. We need some ballsy company to come along and shake shit up from an advertising/dealing with your community stand-point.

[Coldkil]

LOL 33 pages. Just throwing my opinion into the discussion.

Imho, the biggest flaw of the game is the "end goal". Now i'm taking D2 as comparison - it's not like "in old days i farmed 6 year for a Grandfather (i've done it)" or "that required skill, not like now". It won't be D2 > D3.

What is the role of farming in the game? In D2 it was something more than "now i can kill Baal", it was agrind made only for getting better and better gear you needed to do if you want to max you character, but wasn't required to "finish" the game(leveling to 99 happened much after completing the game). In D3 it has become something that one must do otherwise he cannot progress through the story. Obviously when you kill Diablo inferno you could farm again to obtain better gear, but i'll talk about this later.

Given this fact, as many have said, gear is the only artificial barrier that slows our progress in D3. Blizzard wanted it to last very long, or at least longer than it is now. But why this is happening? Because of the AH and the easiness of item trading. Yes, you could trade also in D2, but it was more of a hassle (no AH or trading interface, you needed to drop items on the ground).
There are millions of players on D3 - it's more than probable that one drope an awesome item just only not good for his class so, it goes straight to AH where one in a few moments can buy it.

So if gear should be time consuming and "hard" to get, why the need for AH? It just cuts away all the farming.

The very deep problem of the game it's not the gameplay or the AH, but the two things combined. The gameplay forces you to spend a lot of time to search for good gear, while AH battles against it and lets you to get a fill set of very good gear (many time more than enough to finish the game) in a very little time. Anyone can see that these two won't go well together in the long run.

In D2, as said, people who wanted to just finish the game just played until they killed the last boss and maybe rolled some alts; who liked farming and searched BiS items to make their char awesome could continue to farm.

Now people farm act1 because it lets a more efficient farming - so i can find more things to sells to AH and get gold and buy better items for my char so i can farm faster. That's what is wrong wth the game and it has nothing to do with reaching Diablo Inferno unfortunately.