The Glade 4.0

This. Blizzard has never been shy about taking your money and saying "You'll pay us, and you'll like it! Now... take this lube and..." 25 dollars to run an automated scp script to transfer your character to another server? 20 bucks to change races?

No, this "offer" was a rather major revelation. This is obvious desperation from a company who has never been desperate before. I don't think it's Diablo they are worried about. Honestly, I think it's Star Wars.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I don't think Blizzard has been overly aggressive in terms of charging for services. For both Diablos and both Starcrafts it's been free to use Battle.net.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

They charge what people will pay. I can't fault any company for doing that. If you think it is ridiculous, blame the people that actually pay the prices, not Blizzard.

And of course Blizzard is going to be doing some things because the next generation of MMOs is coming out. You've got Star Wars, a hybrid PvE/PvP game right on the horizon that threatens to take a pretty good chunk of people. You've got Guild Wars 2, an almost 100% PvP based game that also threatens to take a sizable chunk from the WoW PvP base because Blizzard doesn't know **** about balancing PvP in WoW(which always struck me odd since they do such a fantastic job at balancing their RTS games). Will Star Wars and Guild Wars 2 defeat WoW? Of course not. But they are afraid they will be losing a lot of subscribers to both games and they are right to be afraid of it. I'm sure WoW will remain profitable after the dust has settled and they will likely still have more subscribers than the other MMOs(because honestly, over half of the subscription base for WoW comes from Asia and neither Guild Wars 2 or Star Wars: The Old Republic really appeal to the Asian MMO market). Time will tell, of course. If people have played WoW for this long based on what they have been getting(this is rapidly changing. I foresee less free content update patches and a more regular expansion release schedule in the future for WoW based on the very tiny amount of free updates Cataclysm saw), I see no reason why a lot of people would stop at this point.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

The only people who charge for matching services to match you with a peer-hosted server model, or 3rd party servers are X-Box Live. I can't think of a single other game/system that charges to NOT host the servers. You know why? Because running a matching service is a trivial thing with almost no overhead. Battle.net, nor anything like it, has ever had a big enough operating cost to justify charging for its use.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

A few updates on Diablo III:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/121/1216836p1.html

And to be fair, Microsoft only charges because it X-Box Live actually has some real overhead that other networks do not.

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http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/4574895 ... _2012#blog

No PvP at launch. This makes me happy. Now that they are pushing that back, they can get the important part of the game ready and ship it.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I have information that indicates Diablo III blows goat chunks even in the important part and that it's not made by the people who made the games.

Oh wait, there's no NDA for the beta ...

It sucks, and my experience indicates it's just a micro-transaction mill in the works.

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Pretty sure it's been public knowledge for a very long time that the folks who made the last two Diablos aren't with Blizzard anymore and haven't been for some time. They went off to make Hellgate London and Torchlight.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

They don't even have a release date yet?

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Holy shitsnacks!

See, this would be a positive thing for me (I didn't really like D1 or D2), but not enough to get me interested in D3.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Having actually played the beta, Diablo 3 has the same basic gameplay as Diablo 1 and 2. It is a bit different, but if you liked the gameplay in either of those games, this one won't be any different. That said, the writing and story telling is way better in Diablo 3 than it was before. So I don't see how it can be any worse than the other two.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

As long as the game stays true to it's Rogue/Nethack core by having randomized dungeons and loot tables, then I will likely be happy with it. Everything else, as Rogue veterans know, is just fluff.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

The Diablo 3 beta doesn't have an NDA, right?

If it was awesome (or, for that matter, terrible and buggy), I'd expect to be hearing way more about it than I am. It's not even a blip on the radar of gaming news.

As such, I'm sort of anticipating it being incredibly pedestrian and uninspiring while blithely going through the motions of being a Diablo sequel.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Because it's horrible, pedestrian, and nothing Torchlight has not already done better? I have beta access. It's like DOTA2: totally outclassed by someone else's previous endeavor.

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That is all I need to know. *Click*Click*Click*Click* as fast as you can, hit healing pot. No thanks.

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Raell Kromwell

As much as I enjoyed D1 and D2 in their time, I don't think I could be less interested in this game.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Actually, that's one of the biggest changes about Diablo 3; reduced reliance on healing pots, and less need to "click as fast as you can" hehe.

As many hours as I've wasted thanks to the beta, I'm thinking I'd best take some vacation time for the release.

I honestly wouldn't even call the beta a beta. It's more like a demo. You barely hit level 12 by the end of it. It's not even the whole first act.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Holy ****, it's the end of the world. Diablo III has a release date: May 15th. Of this year!

Interesting, they shelved PvP to release it. Not sure if want for this game. It might suck me in but if I'm in GW2 beta I doubt it.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

The success/failure of this game is going to be based on how well they can prevent cheating/exploiting. The action RPG thing has been done dozens of times, but AFAIK not a single one of them other than Diablo stores your character online. That's the draw with D3, even if you play single player only you can still compete with other people for the best loot. Other RPGs don't have that because anyone can just cheat to get whatever loot they want, at first with save scumming and later by just directly editing their characters. In D3, if you have a pimped out char it "means" something.

Assuming they don't totally cock it up like they did with D2's rampant cheating, nothing can compete with D3. Hardcore mode is a roguelike where death really is permanent, you can't just put the savegame in another directory and load it back up if you die like you can with roguelikes. You know that a level 99 hardcore character with all the best loot earned it and was played by a really good player.

People still found ways to cheat. Like item duplication, especially with Stone of Jordans (which is why they implemented the whole "Sell enough Stone of Jordans and Super Diablo spawns", as well as give all players a counter of how many SoJs are sold).

But yes, it is much harder to do so. And Blizzard was pretty good at staying on top of that. Even years after the game was released, as well as on a 100% free online network. Fairly impressive.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Well, I've played more complex flash games with better writing, support, and gameplay than Diablo 3. It's that bad ...

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I'll get it more for the completeness of my gaming collection than anything else. Still taking a week off for the launch... just in case.