Diablo III

Actually, botting on the Diablo 2 realms (online-only) was pretty much what everyone did at the endgame. Also one of the reasons I lost interest in it long ago. There were also (are also?) plenty of bots in WoW that do trivial content to farm gold to sell. I assume they're still there, I haven't played WoW in a couple of years.

How item farming in D2 worked: best items drop from final boss, who was most easily accessible by programming a bot with hacked gear (for the initated, Blessed Hammer paladins with.. whatever duped runeword armor that granted the teleport spell) to skip all the content between the nearest waypoint and the boss. Stand in the set spot guaranteed to hit the boss. Loot. Repeat.

D3: the best item drops are not (immediately) found on the final boss, or any specific creature at any specific location. Once a character reaches level 60 (the level cap), Every rare spawn (It's been a long time since Diablo 1 for me, but I do remember the occasional named boss monster wandering around the dungeons, right? If not, rare spawns are tougher versions of regular monsters with special abilities, that spawn with random abilities in random locations) will apply to the character/party a buff called "nephalem valor" that increases your chances to find more gold/better items on each subsequent kill. This buff stacks with each rare kill you make, and is completely purged by: death, changing any currently selected skill, leaving the current game.

Also, there are no infinitely available, zero-cooldown movement skills available in D3. On top of that, the random abilities of rare-spawned creatures are specifically designed to take advantage of particular evasive tactics (there's one type that causes monsters to build walls around you and them, to prevent you from running away. Another type automatically teleports to you if you leave the screen. Another aggressively targets ranged characters with AoE nukes.) These rare monsters also tend to spawn more often in areas that are randomly available in secret areas/side paths that change at random from game to game.

So to bot-farm the top gear in D3, we'll need a bot that can clear randomly accessible areas with no quick-escape skills, that can't bypass unfavorable encounters, that can alter tactics on the fly while still managing the resource mechanics of the farming class, that is guaranteed to never lose the valor buff. After all that, since item drops are person-specific now, it would still be less efficient than 3 or 4 players working together on the same content at the same speed. Can it be done? Probably. Will it be easier or more efficent than running a Baal-bot 24-7? No.

For what it's worth, not all areas have access to an RMAH, and those that do can only access the RMAH for the region that their copy of the game is licensed to run from. You are free to switch gameplay regions and use their in-game-currency AH all you like, but there's no access to RMAH functionality of anything other than your native currency region without certifiable proof of residence in the target currency region (tl;dr: China farmers can only sell to China, as it were). The rest is just facilitated trading with a fancier interface and a lot less "Wug? Wuw? ty" to sift through.

Well, that was long.

Edit: @ Daynab
Blizz has been running the Diablo 2 realm servers for 12 years with zero additional financial support aside from box sales. That's got to count for something, even if only a bit of goodwill. (WoW hasn't been running that long, so it wasn't always available to cover the costs.)

 

I won't fault them for putting it in. And its better if players are going to do it anyways, that they have quality assurance that they aren't getting ripped off.

Personally, I always played diablo 1/2 solo or with a few friends. I never really played it with randoms, due to the sheer amount of rampant cheating/duped items. So I never really got into trading or any of that. If/when I get a better internet provider to support playing the new diablo, I'll likely keep to that trend.

As for if diablo can be defined as an MMO who cares! How you classify a game doesn't change the content, and either you like a game's content or you don't - just splitting hairs debating over what genre/classification it is.

 

Yeah I'm actually pretty wary of the whole 'buy a character on the AH!' thing that might eventually be put in. That said, I might actually make some money off of this game in that case =P

I also agree that even the player driven cash auction house would be a terrible idea in a lot of games. I just don't happen to think Diablo will be ruined by it (at least in the absence of botting).

As far as botting goes... I hope Blizz is MUCH more agressive on botting in D3 than in WoW. I get the whole "we study bots and ban in waves" mentality makes more sense from a numbers perspective, but when you have a bot taking all of your herb nodes in a zone for three (24 hour) days straight, it kinda ruins the point of player satisfaction. That said, Blizzard DOES ban bots in WoW and D2. They understand that as a business it works better to please your mass customer base than to try and skim a few extra bucks off of bots farming items into the economy (which might even be bad for them making money as if it drives the price down too much, people won't sell them and blizz won't make their $1 fee off of the auctions).

 

The big difference is that with D3 the bots make blizzard money, so there is less incentive for them to as agressivly kill them off as it is for WoW and D2 where they earn nothing from those sales. I'd hope blizzard skill tries to kill them still however.

That said, it's likely a bigger advantage for blizzard to simply list gear themselves in the auction house directly and given they can simply just create instances of items as they see fit, which in more cases will outstrip anything the botters can provide themselves. Whether they will do that outside of special events is yet to be seen.

This is a bit disapointing to hear. Personaly I liked D2 because it gave far more choice than D1 (the skills added a bit more variety).
Though I tended to make builds with very specific designs, using some 1-3 skills to build a concept around (even if it made the game harder untill that point, though it was usualy worth it). The synergy bonus that came later in D2 annoyed me a bit given that it made higher stage builds less about struggling through and earning stripes (thus being more powerfull for it) once you got to the skill you wanted (and in some instances you got more power spending points on a lesser skill than the skill itself, which always seemed a bit counter intuative to me).

 

Yes, this makes sense in the business perspective.
The player is reported for botting? Let's delete him. Oh wait, he has 37 auctions running so let's wait until those items are bought and then we can finally ban him lest people say we don't ban them.

Actually I like D1 more because of the atmosphere, D2 was just "run and gun". But I actually liked the synnergies - for example Necromancer's bone spells enhance other related bone spells which actually makes sense. The more you focus into something, the more powerful you become in it. That way even item adding a few points to some of your skills may enhance the power of other skills you actually use because of the synnergies, therefore you don't have to grind until you find either +all skills, +all skill levels or +certain skill items to get stronger.

 

So I'm nearly through my normal play-through of D3 (basically level 1-30) co-oping with a friend, so I figured I would weigh back in on this topic if anyone was interested.

Lag has been basically a non-issue even though my net isn't fantastic. There have only been a few, very brief times when I was lagging, and it tended to effect my partner as well (who lives in a different state). Server stability is fixed as of now, so no more crashing or major downtimes.

The massive amount of skills you can choose from are fantastic... however, speaking strictly as a Witchdoctor, there are a few you get either too early or that are too powerful which tend to dominate your 'normal' killing skill options. This may honestly be an issue effected by how difficult the game is on normal. In other words, you can play without them fine, but if you coop you might not get to do much as everything will be dead before you get a chance.

Loot and the incentive to search everywhere has been awesome. The only real problem is that +x-x damage dominates every other stat (even your 'main damage stat') by so much that it provides more overal damage from a level 7 item with it to a level 22 item without it, etc. Everything else works fine. Luckily it really only appears on rings and amulets.

As I mentioned above, D3 is too easy for the majority of the enemies. Mainly this has to do with them not having enough health. During Act II and Act III there are some mobs that will kill you if you are careless or unlucky, and I did encounter one very, very nasty pack of champions with a waller affix that ate me - my partner had to run away (the first time you see it you'll go "psssh that isn't scary at all!" and then later on you'll get trapped with nowhere to go while 30 mobs, a champion pack and an elite all swarm over you).

However, besides normal being too easy for us, the gameplay is absolutely fantastic. This includes both skill use and management as well as map design and the plethora of random sides areas and random events that can spawn within an area, not to mention the good main story/level design.

 

I tried the open beta and for the most part wasn't impressed much. I loved D1 and played that thing for thousands of hours. When D2 came out, I purchased it at it's full price which at the time was around $50 US and played it for thousands of hours. I even got the expansion pack at full price when it came out. Diablo 2 and it's expansion pack were the only games that I have ever done this on. With D3, I'm like meh. The always on connection for single player is just too nuts for my liking. Also, I had modded D2 and not being able to mod D3 means there is less fun in the game. Unless Blizzard gives a true single player game, I don't see much fun in this for me. The only other thing that might convince me to buy it is for the hackers/crackers to make it a real single player game without having to go onto the net to play. I would likely buy it then and then crack it. Until then, this game is just going to be a big miss for me.

The D3 game just didn't seem to give me much oomph. The character I had the most fun with was the monk. Since I tend to play ranged/sorcerer characters most, this says something about the game to me. Even if Blizzard/crackers make a true single player game out of it, I might still give it a miss. Just thought I would throw my $0.02 in the ring.

 

Don't want to advertise but if you don't like D3 but like the others, you could try Path of Exile. It's still in closed beta, but it's almost in open and they have various stress test weekends.

 

Or Grim Dawn.

 

Grim Dawn looks excellent.

Path of Exile I'm not sure about. The graphics seem a little off to me but if the gameplay is good, I will probably play that as well. Graphics have some affect on how well I like a game, but since I play roguelikes and such it is not an overriding factor as to whether or not I will like a game.

 

Well the gameplay is good. It's a bit more hardcore than others currently. Weekend events are fun though, especially cutthroat (zone instances open to everyone, pvp with everyone not in party, items (besides skill gems) dropped on death). More build variety than any other ARPG (likely); have you seen the passive skill tree? http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/

 

I get a mixed of love and hate feelings with D3.

*The dialogues are terrible and the story is predictable. (Wow Belial, you're totally the Lord of Lies, such a cunning masterplan... )

*Only 4 skills at a time ? It gets really annoying. I understand its about strategy and choices, but the character could be a lot more fun to play than that without this limitation.

*The loot is boring: everything has been so over balanced that no, you re not going to find that awesome unique. I find myself playing without being excited about what's going to drop from even a boss. Yellow items are crap 80% of the time.

*The game unlocks way too slowly: When you start there's barely 10 types of magic items seriously. Always the same effect dropping. Makes it feel like an amateur game that's been developped in 6 months with no inspiration. I sound like im bitching but I find that insane that you have to go through THE WHOLE GAME and restart to actually start hoping to find set items and legendary stuff ??? Even gems you wont get before act 2 ! The game is so limited in the beginning it feels empty.
- it does get better afterward, but it takes too much time to get there-

* I'm tired of fluorescent green and I wish WoW never existed. I got that rare armor for my guy which had kindof a butterfly design at the back and was PINK. Yup, that's totally the diablo universe for you.
Not even talking of Maghda's design with butterfly wings and f***** medieval high heels ?! good lord... And I'm supposed to consider her a bad guy ?

Anyway, my rant is over and I'm still playing it; but looking forward to Path of Exile.

( I know I said a mixed feeling of love and hate but I just gave the hate part )

 

My own little review:

I've played through to Act IV on Normal with a friend in coop.
We've had one or two little issues in 10ish hours of playing - not bad, but not fantastic.
I'm playing a tank/support/healing focused monk, while my friend is playing a glass cannon Demon Hunter build.

The 'linear tree' mentality is crap. Ignore it - its not a linear tree, the game throws options at you at a rate that you can barely figure out what you like most. I swap skills on my monk constantly to just keep up with whether we need more damage, healing, CC or anything. Builds are no longer defined - you can do whatever you like, but once you hit 60, you have the potential to be whatever the hell you like within your class - tanky monk, DPS monk, support monk, heal monk - anything. Similarly, the deal with the auction house doesn't concern me. The RWMTH just means you'd rather spend money to skip a few hours and get yourself able to deal with Inferno without grinding for gear.

 

I also really like the gear flow - I play with friends, so we share gear "is this better than what you have?" "No, salvage it" and so on.

 

I'm not sure if this is a typo or if you just haven't leveled far enough, but you actually get six skills and three passives. Not to belabor the point but for comparison, how many skills could you really effectively use in D2?

That is what dye is for.

 

Eleven, plus one movement skill.
It was a little bit crazy at times, but that's where half of the fun comes from.

 

True that, 6. ( I dont count passives). But 1 is pretty much a regular attack so I didnt add it but forgot the right click.

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-21-diablo-3-accounts-hacked-gold-and-items-stolen

http://www.examiner.com/article/accounts-on-diablo-3-hacked

At first, the trainwreck of a release, now this. GG, Blizzard. You wanted the always online so badly that now you can enjoy the backlash.
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