Diablo III Catch-All

Hypatian wrote:

I'm sad to say that money is never not involved any more.

I meant specifically the auction house. Like an in game to out of game economy conversion "money." No ones gonna try to steal, I dunno, my Deus Ex data. this on the other hand... Break into my account, sell off my stuff some how? Hmm.

Atomicvideohead wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

I'm sad to say that money is never not involved any more.

I meant specifically the auction house. Like an in game to out of game economy conversion "money." No ones gonna try to steal, I dunno, my Deus Ex data. this on the other hand... Break into my account, sell off my stuff some how? Hmm.

This is why they're making it so easy to set up the authenticator. If you have that, then your account can't be hacked unless they also steal your FOB or your smartphone.

Another interesting thing about the authenticator and D3 is that when I would quit out and log back in a while later, I didn't have to re-authenticate. Kudos on making it easier!

ahrezmendi wrote:
Atomicvideohead wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

I'm sad to say that money is never not involved any more.

I meant specifically the auction house. Like an in game to out of game economy conversion "money." No ones gonna try to steal, I dunno, my Deus Ex data. this on the other hand... Break into my account, sell off my stuff some how? Hmm.

This is why they're making it so easy to set up the authenticator. If you have that, then your account can't be hacked unless they also steal your FOB or your smartphone.

I get that. It just bums me out, man. Dis heartening. Guess I'll have to get on getting mine set up.

Atomicvideohead wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

I'm sad to say that money is never not involved any more.

I meant specifically the auction house. Like an in game to out of game economy conversion "money." No ones gonna try to steal, I dunno, my Deus Ex data. this on the other hand... Break into my account, sell off my stuff some how? Hmm.

Doesn't the real money auction house just convert to Blizzard FunBux if you decide to cash out?

Back in Diablo II people could've just as easily hacked your realms account dumped all your gear to a mule and made their money on eBay. The authenticators just make a lot of sense even if there wasn't a Blizzard run auction house. It's good practice and as last year demonstrated gaming companies don't exactly put customer security high on the priority list :\

shoptroll wrote:
Atomicvideohead wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

I'm sad to say that money is never not involved any more.

I meant specifically the auction house. Like an in game to out of game economy conversion "money." No ones gonna try to steal, I dunno, my Deus Ex data. this on the other hand... Break into my account, sell off my stuff some how? Hmm.

Doesn't the real money auction house just convert to Blizzard FunBux? Back in Diablo II people could've just as easily hacked your realms account dumped all your gear to a mule and made their money on eBay. The authenticators just make a lot of sense even if there wasn't a Blizzard run auction house. It's good practice and as last year demonstrated gaming companies don't exactly put customer security high on the priority list :

I thought it went both ways -- fun bucks and real bucks.

Toddland wrote:

Another interesting thing about the authenticator and D3 is that when I would quit out and log back in a while later, I didn't have to re-authenticate. Kudos on making it easier!

Yes, this is something they started about a year ago. When you authenticate from a specific IP, you don't have to again until that IP changes. It started in WoW.

NSMike wrote:
Toddland wrote:

Another interesting thing about the authenticator and D3 is that when I would quit out and log back in a while later, I didn't have to re-authenticate. Kudos on making it easier!

Yes, this is something they started about a year ago. When you authenticate from a specific IP, you don't have to again until that IP changes. It started in WoW.

There's a setting in your account where you can choose to authenticate every time.

But what if they break into my house, my router, and then go to all that effort to sell my WoW account?

I really like how you can set it to only require authentication to change account settings. Lets me decide if I want to deal with entering a code to log into the game every time, or just protect my account management.

Apparantly my WoW account got hacked too. I never play the thing, but I've gone through the steps to reclaim it, and am adding an authenticator.

Atomicvideohead wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

I'm sad to say that money is never not involved any more.

I meant specifically the auction house. Like an in game to out of game economy conversion "money." No ones gonna try to steal, I dunno, my Deus Ex data. this on the other hand... Break into my account, sell off my stuff some how? Hmm.

Yeah—the thing I meant to be saying is that the Real-Money Auction House doesn't matter. As long as there's a persistent economy of some sort, in-game stuff and time is worth real money—whether or not the game supports that directly. It's been that way for years.

I don't know if I'm going to bother reclaiming my WoW account. Just seems like all that would accomplish is making it available to steal again. Maybe I will after my authenticator shows up.

I got an authenticator when my account was hacked. Sold all my stuff and mined like crazy. I got it back before they could offload their spoils. I gave the stacks of stuff away to the gwj guild and got my stuff back. That's right. GWJ directly profited from Gold Farming.

Played all the classes in the last week. And I find myself, unfortunately, feeling mostly disappointed.

Overall, it just feels too much the same. Which should be good, since I loved D and D2. But nothing about this iteration grabbed me particularly. I remember that while playing the first few levels of D2, I thought that game hadn't evolved at all graphically since the first. Obviously, i was wrong, as I found out in Acts 2 and onward. But I was definitely thinking the same thing about D3. Sure its 3D, but the environment didn't look any better than Titan Quest. And the whole thing reminded me more of Torchlight than Diablo.

I'm sure I'll be playing through the entire game when it releases. But I'm not in such a hurry for it anymore.

Then again, I haven't tried multiplayer.

The Grenn, Bill_Lewis, Fedora McQuaid, Nimcosi multiplayer was just too much fun.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/ruwuL.jpg)

So 30 versus 25 with 5 rune variations each, and 15 down the bottom. Whichever way you slice it, I'll try to remember that the next time someone brings up "more/less is better".

Jakobedlam wrote:

Then again, I haven't tried multiplayer.

You can play Diablo by yourself? Isn't that a little like [provocative solo sex act] after you get married?

A small complaint is the lack of having the option to select armor or weapons that appeal to you and having the ability to apply the stats from a different weapon/armor to it. Adds a lot more flavor and variety imo.

Scratched, I don't think that is fair. A truer breakdown would be:

Diablo 2 sorceress has 26 skills and 4 passives.
Diablo 3 wizard has 25 skills, each with 5 rune variations, and 15 passives.

Also, in Diablo 2 you can slot 2 skills and the option to have any amount of those 4 passives.
Whereas, in Diablo 3, you can slot 6 skills and 3 of the 15 passives at a time.

There weren't 30 choices in D2. You had 1 or 2 active and the rest you pumped into synergies.

Michael Zenke wrote:
Jakobedlam wrote:

Then again, I haven't tried multiplayer.

You can play Diablo by yourself? Isn't that a little like [provocative solo sex act] after you get married?

So lots of single player with some mp mixed in on the weekends?

Grenn wrote:

There weren't 30 choices in D2. You had 1 or 2 active and the rest you pumped into synergies.

To be fair to Diablo 2, synergies only entered the picture very very late in Diablo 2s lifetime. Synergies were a disaster of an idea in my opinion - basically telling people where to spend their points. Not how Diablo 2 worked when it was at its best though.

fangblackbone wrote:

Also, in Diablo 2 you can slot 2 skills and the option to have any amount of those 4 passives.
Whereas, in Diablo 3, you can slot 6 skills and 3 of the 15 passives at a time.

To be fair to D2 (again), you could slot more than 2 skills, because you could use hotkeys to switch between them on the fly. You could place a few hydras, pop mana shield, spam frozen orb and then teleport as needed, if that was your thing. In D3, even if there are hotkeys to switch between what spells you have active, changing skills actually gives you a cooldown so you can't use the new skill for a certain amount of time. So you have to be a little more careful about what you pick, because you can't just switch out of it into something else to use at a second's notice.

At least, not yet. They've significantly reduced that cooldown time at least once in the beta already.

Shadout wrote:
Grenn wrote:

There weren't 30 choices in D2. You had 1 or 2 active and the rest you pumped into synergies.

To be fair to Diablo 2, synergies only entered the picture very very late in Diablo 2s lifetime. Synergies were a disaster of an idea in my opinion - basically telling people where to spend their points. Not how Diablo 2 worked when it was at its best though.

That wasn't the issue. The real problem was that most skills were either useless or rendered obsolete by later skills. Firebolt? Prayer? Bash? You could use them but why? This is why synergies were added. The later skill balancing was a great boon to the game.

Keldar wrote:

To be fair to D2 (again), you could slot more than 2 skills, because you could use hotkeys to switch between them on the fly.

This is one reason I like MedianXL. You have many skills and each one has a specific use. I had to go into the Diablo 2 options and bind QWERT-ASDFG-ZXCV and F1-F4 to separate skill buttons. Its a lot less complicated than it sounds. Some sets are used for buffing summoning and the "active" combat skills are placed within easy reach.

Tamren wrote:
Shadout wrote:
Grenn wrote:

There weren't 30 choices in D2. You had 1 or 2 active and the rest you pumped into synergies.

To be fair to Diablo 2, synergies only entered the picture very very late in Diablo 2s lifetime. Synergies were a disaster of an idea in my opinion - basically telling people where to spend their points. Not how Diablo 2 worked when it was at its best though.

That wasn't the issue. The real problem was that most skills were either useless or rendered obsolete by later skills. Firebolt? Prayer? Bash? You could use them but why? This is why synergies were added. The later skill balancing was a great boon to the game.

They tried fixing one issue by making another. And didn't really fix the first issue anyway.

You still went for the few good skills, now you were just forced to spend the rest of your points in those skills which buffed the good skill at the end (limiting the amount of good skills you could pick).

Diablo 2s skill trees surely were quite terrible when you think about it, synergies just made them worse as I see it.

Has this been posted yet? Hope it adds to the difficulty conversation.

I like what he had to say about co-op play.

That it's fun but not required, or that it's not required but still fun?