Poll of the Day > Games these days man...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Wanted to play Diablo 3 again and timed it well with a new season. Played for 2 days or so and already have two characters geared to casually get through GR100 in TWO DAYs. I 'member back in the day on Diablo 2 two days of playing MAY get you a character with a sorta nice weapon and maybe MAYBE a body armor worth using.

Kids these days have it too easy.

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Are you still giving money to Star Citizen?

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I enjoy grindy gameplay myself. Big part of what I enjoyed about Ragnarok Online.

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Sarcasthma posted...

Are you still giving money to Star Citizen?

Look man, I am sorry you qre too poor to enjoy the things you like. But you should just stop with this. Get a better job if you are so unhappy with your life.

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I'm so poor I can't even afford GameFAQs Gold...

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That's mostly Diablo 3's power creep, which is a consequence of trying to keep it interesting season after season (since merely making it to the same point you achieved a year ago isn't as interesting as pushing further). I'm sure you can reach a point where going any further requires some more serious grinding.

That said, the nature of D3's itemization is that you pretty quickly get the legendaries you need to enable a build (which are basically mandatory if you want to be able to farm at a quasi-decent rate), then spend the rest of the season farming for different rolls that will provide incremental upgrades, which isn't the most engaging paradigm. Being locked out of a build being viable because a build-enabling legendary won't drop isn't much fun, so going too far in the other direction isn't ideal, but making it too easy means you stop getting meaningful gear drops a little too quickly. I think the magnitude of most set bonuses is just too great, since it simply isn't possible to balance a game around a 50,000% increase to a skill's damage without having that skill be largely worthless without that boost.

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idk maybe people just dont want to grind for days and days to maybe accomplish something anymore. im old enough to remember that and it was not better

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Whats the pet this time? Ive been wanting the Chinese dragon-looking one. I know they put it up twice at least.

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While I understand the logic of designers making things easier for players to catch up in games where new endgame content is being added and the game generally revolves around that increasing endgame, it kinda feels like you need some grind. Particularly because the early grind can help build an emotional investment which is a benefit when you have a repetitive endgame.

Personally, though, I prefer things like the old Gauntlet games (which have a more casual hack&slash element) and was kinda annoyed when Gauntlet 2014 took things a little in that other direction. (That and my ideal for the Gauntlet series is the arcade-style of Legends and Dark Legacy.)

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I dunno part of it might be nostalgia

you could get high level in diablo II crazy fast if you knew what you were doing

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TheWitchMorgana posted...

idk maybe people just dont want to grind for days and days to maybe accomplish something anymore. im old enough to remember that and it was not better

What I never got were the WoW players that got outright angry about lowering the level requirement for mounts from 40 to 30 and making them more affordable. I played Vanilla from launch. Walking everywhere pre-mount was not a fun time. It was not challenging, it did not take skill, it did not feel like an accomplishment, it was just tedious. I'm all for delaying gratification here and there so that reaching milestones feels meaningful, but being upset that some unnecessary tedium was eliminated was just baffling.

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Kinda how I feel about the QoL improvements in MHW

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adjl posted...

What I never got were the WoW players that got outright angry about lowering the level requirement for mounts from 40 to 30 and making them more affordable. I played Vanilla from launch. Walking everywhere pre-mount was not a fun time. It was not challenging, it did not take skill, it did not feel like an accomplishment, it was just tedious. I'm all for delaying gratification here and there so that reaching milestones feels meaningful, but being upset that some unnecessary tedium was eliminated was just baffling.

how soon we forget that WoW was the game that had to spend years shedding its rep as the game that made peoples lives fall apart because they got addicted to it

these things were not designed to be more challenging they were designed to keep you playing for as long as possible

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TheWitchMorgana posted...

how soon we forget that WoW was the game that had to spend years shedding its rep as the game that made peoples lives fall apart because they got addicted to it

these things were not designed to be more challenging they were designed to keep you playing for as long as possible

Pretty much. The line between tedium and challenge can be pretty thin sometimes (the aforementioned example of Monster Hunter's QoL changes struggled with that line in that some "QoL" improvements actually made the game easier instead of just less tedious), but the number of people that completely conflate them is just silly.

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Sarcasthma posted...

I'm so poor I can't even afford GameFAQs Gold...

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hypnox posted...

Kids these days have it too easy.

I miss selling items for real money... that was a hella novel concept that catered to my set of skills

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Farming items in the game back when the RL money Auction House was still out was incredibly hard. Drop rates were pretty damn low, and finding anything of real note took an extreme amount of time.

Monopoman posted...

Farming items in the game back when the RL money Auction House was still out was incredibly hard. Drop rates were pretty damn low, and finding anything of real note took an extreme amount of time.

you're right, that's the appeal - that it was hard

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That's not hard, though, so much as it is slow. Difficult things require skills to complete, not just time investment. Certainly, the ARPG genre fundamentally relies on loot being at least somewhat random to offer replay value and a sense of gradual, meaningful progression, but when you go for too long without a meaningful upgrade, it stops being an enjoyable experience (even more so when the game is very transparently encouraging you to spend money on it to get those upgrades and make it more enjoyable).

As it happens, current state of D3 has actually shifted to the other extreme: you can get all of the build-enabling legendaries almost immediately, but then you no longer have meaningful upgrades to look forward to aside from pretty minor stat boosts (which add up across all gear pieces, especially when you're looking at Primal Ancient stuff, but they don't significantly change the gameplay experience). Personally, my interest in any given season (that I decide to pick up the game) only really lasts until I've tried out all of the builds I want to try, which takes some time because I've got to farm a complete set of key legendaries for each one, but it wanes pretty quickly after that because I'm not that interested in the GR pushing meta.

That said, D3's given me a solid couple hundred hours of gameplay. Even coming to the party quite late (I got it on Switch), I enjoyed working through the campaign and doing most of my first round of leveling that way. Subsequent characters have levelled much, much faster, thanks to how much better Adventure Mode is for levelling (to say nothing of stuff like Gem of Ease expediting it further after the first character in a season), and it's nice to be able to rush that instead of having to complete the full slog to 70 every time, but the experience of levelling suboptimally was still enjoyable. It's not a bad game, it just doesn't have a lot of metagame longevity.

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It took me like 2 months to get 36/40 challenges in Path of Exile Solo Self Found for the current league. Lot of fun, but also a lot of frustration. I think that people have just gotten better at video games (while I've remained mainly the same).

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Yeah, I think something in the middle is the best make items rare but not as rare as in Diablo 2 or something. Where you could play the game legit for years of 3-4 hours a day minimum and see a handful of very good items in that time.

Shit most of these games only survived on the item front because of duping, if Diablo 2 never had duping bugs those super good items would be like 20-30 times rarer.