Originally posted by Mephster

Game was already tested even before NA/EU players got their hands on D3 beta. It was all about stress testing. The sad part is that whoever tested it before us did a poor job.

They have said internal testers had access to the whole game the entire period. They were not cut off when it went to closed as far as I have read about their testing methods. I also know that the game had a complete overhaul less than a year ago. The game has changed a lot, and still needs testing.

For people who think I am hating on the game sure you can stay in your little solitude bubble, but for those who understand basics I just hope for the sake of the game they release a roadmap to the public on how they plan to develop and change the game for the better now that it is out to the public in a format that can truly be tested and not so closed off as the beta.

Originally posted by Maelwydd

Do you reckon he does this with his girlfriend......"I win!"

Stupid question.... :)

I will be honest about something along those lines back when "First!" was a fairly big meme for first posts and having no relavence to the subject at hand. Lets just say I finished first and yelled "FIRST!" and the response back was a bottle of hand lotion being thrown at me as she stormed out of the room. It took her weeks to get over that comment. I never thanked her for the lotion.

I don't think I would ever suggest yelling "I Win!"

Originally posted by Beegs

Ive not mentioned alpha.

You should send one of these rambles to Blizzard via email and I have no doubt that they will make sure any future releases are only considered out of beta once its given your stamp of approval.

 

Problem being is that as a company Blizzard used to be very good at releasing a finished product and beta testing their games very intensively in order to make sure the quality is there. Yes there have been issues in the past, but this one just happens to be the biggest snafu of Blizzard history to date. Now is it Blizzards fault? Who knows for all we know Activi$ion may really have put the axe to the stone in forcing a release. I am blaming the development for their cocky attitude towards beta.

Am I saying they need my stamp of approval? No, fuck gimmie a break with that bullshit comment. I am saying for a Blizzard product they messed up royally, and pointing out a very obvious flaw in their development that people seem to be missing when complaining about the game. The game is beta therefor wait a few months and shit will be fixed. You act as if I am telling Blizzard to take a squat and piss off.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

LOL .. failed? Try FASTEST selling PC games. 6.3M in a week.

a couple million of that was the WoW annual subscription, but it doesn't take away from the remaining few million. I would also like to see the numbers from Blizzard on how many people filed for a refund from their online store (what % of online purchases were refunded).

Originally posted by Beegs

The notion that the rest of the content was untested is absurd.

So no, I will not "get real here" and "admit" what we are playing is a beta test in any shape nor form. In any sense.

Internal beta testing by the couple hundred Blizzard employees is not going to find much of anything useful as compared to the millions of things the millions of people who beta tested the lvl 13 beta. Yes it was always 13 even if you were in the first wave of beta testers. That wasn't just the open beta stress test weekends they did towards the end. So we are not playin the alpha as you have mislabeled your response, but we are indeed playing the mass closed beta purchased on the 15th.

Edit: misclicked for another thread.

I understand that they did not want to ruin the story for anyone, but lets get real here and admit what we are playing right now is basically beta in its truest sense. Blizzard had some grand idea that they were so infallable that level 13 and 50% of act 1 was plenty to test the game. I do hope whoever decided on that one is fired because that is one of the biggest issues Blizzard is dealing with at the moment.  They should have said look we know the story will get out there but this stuff needs tested, and instead they said no we're too good and only need to stress test the servers and BAM you get the clusterfuck that is the current Diablo 3 game. Classes broken, imbalanced, and sometimes just overpowered. Inferno being scaled improperly to classes and making it impossible for some classes to progress at all. Item drops far to rare in a very item heavy game forcing people to the auction house where people who exploited flaws in the system have already taken hold. This stuff is all manageable within a beta so you can fix it when you wipe for release. Unfortunately we're at release and we're playing the beta. That is just something that irritates me so much is how a company can be so arrogant as to do something like this. I hope at least one company learns from this huge blunder, and to remember no matter how big you are or how good your games were in the past it does not mean you are infallable and will automatically create sustainable gold.

If that's the case then Blacksmithing shouldn't have been such shit. It is an absolute troll of an addition to the game and sucks a fat one so to say. Blizzard just royally messed up when it came to the blacksmith implementation.

Short answer: Yes

Long answer; Yes, due to the fact that Bashiok has stated that the item drop rate is specifically manipulated to force people to go to the auction house. Stuff is far more rarer then in diablo 2 due to accomidate the use of the auction house, and overall things in return become a lot more difficult to actually find on your own. This is something I find unfortunate, and think this idea is what screwed the pooch so to say. Part of what made Diablo 2 so fun was at least having a reasonable possibility of finding items on your own where now they have pretty much said they are forcing people to participate in the AH system (Which is fine as the RMAH is an income for Blizzard). I however think they approached it in the wrong way. Hopefully they fix some of the issues with bosses essentially not mattering and it being all about the unique mobs as well as that is rather frustrating to see little value placed on bosses.

Originally posted by Xiaoki

According to the latest financial report from Activision Blizzard WoW has "approximately 10.2 million subscribers as of 3/31/2012".

http://investor.activision.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=672062

Don't think they will be going free to play any time soon.

Now commence with the "90% are Chinese gold farmers" responses.

It's not 90% chinese gold farmers however Blizzards deal with China does put them in a unique situation where every Chinese account ever created is counted as active and can never go inactive. Last time someone tallied it the total Chinese accounts tallied around 5 million, and my guess is it has increased. Now don't get me wrong 10million is impressive, but when you take that into account there are other games that are similiar to WoW in numbers for specific areas of the world. Though possibly not overall.

2 weeks... rofl you're beyond late with that. There were posts from the EU forums over a week ago claiming the exact same thing with people telling him he wasn't. Nice that you have choices to play depending on who they nerf, but you're not a world first there buddy.

battle.net is down. Look up @BlizzardCS on Twitter for updates.

Originally posted by RKameL

Originally posted by Purutzil

Very satisfying to me. The over-all environment was rather engaging and entertaining for a dungeon diver like me to find great pleasure out of playing. As a fan of Diablo 2 I was disapointed with the dumbing down of the mechanics, but in the end it wasn't that huge of an 'ick' factor to me. I'd say putting pros/cons

 

Pros:

1.)  Fun Dungeon Crawling Combat

2.) Interesting story development (gives a more action feel in many sections)

3.) Random events provide extra challenge while normally partying.

Cons:

1.) Ending is a bit... lackluster. Felt like it should of done more.

2.) A bit to far dumbed down, itemization as of now seems a bit iffy making pure stat items generally best

3.) Relatively short. Under 12 hours of gameplay going straight through from start to end. 

 

If you enjoy dungeon crawlers and those old style click away games, you probably will enjoy this more then you expect even with them taking a lot of the rpg elements into the casual level. 

Thats not good.. That was too dam fast :s

He didn't beat the game. He beat normal mode which is the easiest of the 4 modes in 12 hours. Yeah grats on getting 25% of the game done, and the easiest part to boot. Yes people will be quick about it, but in no way is 12 hours the game.

Originally posted by Lobotomist

This is what concerns me about Diablo 3 AH system.

If same character can freely choose to use RMAH or GoldAH , whenever he chooses.

Than any above average item will be placed on RMAH - because , let say person had a very good drop and he have a chance to earn some money , why wouldn't he?

 

This will make Gold AH pretty pointless - cause no good items will be there.

 

Welcome to economics 101. You clearly have not played these style of video games before and I am here to give you a fine look into the inner workings of what concerns you with this concept. First off if you are worried that gold will have no value then sure that is a legitamate issue, but with good gold sinks and a need to buy resources you may find that gold has a higher purpose than in previous hackem slashem games like the Diablo franchise of old. You may also think hey these good items aren't being sold for gold what gives? Well the reason they aren't being sold for gold may indeed be the fact that they are more valuable than the absolute max gold sellout option available, and therefor the reason for putting it on the gold AH is negated. I also will bring to the matter that people are not going to trade down their items on Diablo 3 for lesser items and more than likely there will be a fair trade system set as with Diablo 2 as the market demand raises and decreases with their supply. I am sure some good items will indeed make it onto the gold AH, and not everyone will be using the real currency AH although in Diablo 3 I am sure that people who never planned on using the real currency AH will use it as a resource such as they use gold and may never cash out that investment or item they originally sold to get them into the market. Now what does all this mean to someone who looks to be all around not in favor of the real currency AH? It means that it will should be seemlessly mapped into the economy of Diablo 3 as it is a starting feature in the game and people will find themselves using it as easily as the gold AH, and you're right the high end items may stay on the real currency AH due to the previous statement about gold I have made. In no way is the gold AH worthless unless Blizzard fails to create wanted gold sinks within the game. If there are no gold sinks then yes you are right people will not use it, but that is not a short coming of the AH and more a short coming of the game itself. To just say because you won't find item A on the gold AH and will only find item B there does not negate the use of the gold AH at all. I hope that clears it up for ya.

TL;DR No, the gold AH is not pointless. Basic understanding however is required to know why.

Originally posted by Piiritus

Originally posted by Grotar89

One by one TOR fanboys drop like flies, further proof that SW TOR is failing hard, thank god we have GW2 coming.

TOR failiure is actually good for MMOs ppl will realize they cant make bad WoW clones...

A GW2 fanboi rubbing his hands together. A few months to wait until we start seeing posts like this about GW2. I suggest you to save your vitriol until then because all trends indicate that GW2 will be trolled very hard.

Yeah, that's what I saw it as. I think GW2 is kind of a garbage game from what I have seen thus far, and have had no interest in playing it. Now don't get me wrong I haven't played SWTOR in about a month, but I must say GW2 isn't even on my radar as a decent game to waste my money on. Hopefully something comes along for those who have been dissappointed by SWTOR, but there is nothing at the moment I can look forward too that fits into the MMo style I would want to play.

Originally posted by happytklz

So, enjoy your games, enjoy the virtual accomplishments. But consider that perhaps, just perhaps, you're wasting time that you can't get back, to profit people who don't care about you one tiny little bit. 

All games are a complete waste of time. I haven't played WoW in almost 2 years now, and have only played it for maybe 4 total (All vanilla and most of WotLK till I got Heroic 25m LK down and the game was over and not worth it anymore to me). Games are a fun escape from reality, and really draw you in to time spent that more than likely could have been spent doing something productive. I write in my spare time, but I also play video games still (just not of the MMo variety as often). When you think your accomplishments in a game mean something then you are playing the game for the wrong reason. You need to play a game for enjoyment and all around satisfaction of time spent. Do not play games thinking you are doing anything of any importance and you enjoy playing them again.

Don't get to down on people as it is something everyone does and honestly that serves no purpose. People trolling games is the same thing as playing the game (not saying you are trolling, but there comes a fine line when critisicm becomes harassment).

Goodluck OP in your future endevours in how you use your time.

Originally posted by Lobotomist

• No server browser ( just auto connect to random game)

I know you stated it's a minor problem, but at least in the early Betas you could still connect up with a friend and create private games or join eachothers open games. I know that this isn't the same as looking for "LLD 10-19" games or "Trades R US" etc... but I think the Auction house and the arena system will prevent the need for those 2 necessities in the search, and we can still group with friends as I said. I have no clue how the stress test went as I have logged in to the beta for a few months, but it isn't that bad.

However the dumbing down of the no stat choices has been pissing people off from the start.

Originally posted by Bardus

Actually it has happen before but in a much larger scale. NGE for SWG and yep they had to do some refunds for it.

They did not refund subs though. They only refunded people who bought Trials of Obi-Wan expansion if they were no longer interested in the expansion or content. Companies don't refund game time though due to the clause of "gameplay may change during play"

It has to do with their sports franchising exclusivity license more than likely.