Yep, I’m done with Blizzard. Diablo IV is a mess, and they’re pulling this shit?
If people buy it they will keep selling it
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Path of Exile 2 is looking pretty cool.
I’ve been having fun with Last Epoch as well.
I’m pretty lukewarm on PoE.
PoE might be free but their cosmetics are just as predatorily priced. $60 for an armor and accessory set is pretty bad. Their default armor has the trend of being fully which incentizes shop purchases. Add week at forcing you to login to see other people each time to advertise their mtx.
Not too mention you can include the stash tabs are nearly being required as a base cost.
I hope the sequel is good but overall I wouldn’t rate them much better in terms of practices.
It’s a bit of a gray area, but at the end of the day PoE is totally free. There’s 0 p2w, and all game features are available to a free account.
GGG finances themselves purely from MTX sales, so yeah, they want to expose you to other players’ skins in town, trades, and party play to hopefully get you to buy some. You still don’t have to though.
The gray area comes in with the stash tabs. I think default free account comes with 4, and you really want at least 10 or so to play comfortably. You need to spend 20 bucks to get the most useful stash tabs for your account, and it’s a 1 time spend that applies to all leagues available forever.
So, maybe not exactly free unless you’re willing to deal with the pain of mule accounts like we did back in the D1 days. But also pretty dang’yo ethical when compared to D4 tactics of charging AAA price for the game, then gouging you on MTX as well.
So overall I agree with you and I will probably be playing PoE2 at least through the campaign. But there are 2 things:
There’s 0 p2w, and all game features are available to a free account. You need to spend 20 bucks to get the most useful stash tabs for your account, and it’s a 1 time spend that applies to all leagues available forever.
For just the premium stash bundle, sure. That effectively makes it possible to play the game as not as Solo Self Found. What I mean is: to effectively get to the higher map tiers (at least when I played a few years ago) trading was more or less mandatory. You could effectively do minimal trading with what the few free tabs allowed but storing useful gear and enough space to trade was difficult. Though I went and looked and if you wanted all of the unique tabs plus the $20 premium bundle for loot, you’re looking at 815 points or $85 (with 35 points left over). So between $20-80 for the game’s base price to get the full experience.
But the main problem I have with their store is the cosmetic prices. I used to play a lot and for a while started spending money at the store for cosmetics. I’m probably $150-200 into their shop. But you get so little for your money there. As I said: a single armor set plus portrait, a spell effect, cape, etc that all match is $60 and those change every 3 months. That’s an entire full priced game for a single flashy set of gear. I might actually still be spending money on that game if those prices were more reasonable.
And then there’s the Loot boxes which are preying on people’s gambling urge. Overall I’m not a fan and wouldn’t spend money there.
There’s a lot of truth to this, and I don’t necessarily disagree.
I think to play effectively with fewer tabs, you just have to be a lot more choosy about what you put up for sale on the tabs you can dedicate to being public/searchable. With limited tabs it doesn’t make sense to try selling all those 1-5c items, you just have to vendor them and wait for that big drop which is worth the space. You also need to be willing to sell those big drops for less, to move them quickly and create stash space. This idea of stash space pressure is an intentional design choice by them, but admittedly it is a questionable one.
Ultimately I think this ends up being a better experience for the player, because less time trading means more time enjoying maps. But it’s difficult for newer players to approach the game this way, so that is a significant hurdle. As a seasoned vet with more stash tabs than I know what to do with, I find myself using lots of them in first two weeks of a league, and then ultimately using very few after that.
I’m pretty excited for poe2, it looks just as good as D4 graphically (which has always been a Poe shortcoming), and it will almost certainly have much more replayability.
The game is free…if they want to monetize it in a way that does not affect the f2p experience, who cares?
I do agree with your point about the stash tabs basically being price of entry to really play the game, assuming you want to delve into endgame… still tho, they go on sale often and you really only need a few of the special tabs unless you are really blasting, and in that scenario you can easily make the argument that a power poe gamer gets their moneys worth of enjoyment each league and really wants to support the game financially.
Last Epoch is definitely on my list to grab on release. I tried original PoE and my only issue is with the currency system. I get that it’s unique and I can see how it would be cool, but I don’t want to barter useful stuff for other stuff and be hit with analysis paralysis every transaction. Give me straight up currency that’s has no use except to buy stuff.
The currency in PoE makes more sense if you view is purely as currency, and the fact that it can be used for crafting as secondary. Realistically, unless you have hundreds of hours in the game, thats how you should use it.
In other MMOs you would make money by farming iron ore, trading that ore for gold, and buying things with gold. OR you could craft something with the ore. In PoE, you farm, get a divine orb, and then can use the orb to craft, or it just is the currency. No gold conversion required.
There really isnt that much bartering to be done on the currency end. the market has some pretty set prices. 1 divine is 125 chaos. View them as gold and silver, and never use them for crafting and suddenly the economy is basically like any other game.
The actual trade mechanics on the other hand. The game director has said he actively wants it to be a miserable experience. Its literally a game for masochists who find fun in the struggle.
Titan Quest is on sale for Playstation. $6 which matches its all time low.
A comment I made in an thread earlier that belongs here. Diablo isn’t the only game in town. After being a dedicated Diablo fan since LOD, I’m done.
Grim dawn is one of the best arpgs I’ve played and it’s made by the people who made titan quest.
I highly recommend it.
I regret buying this hot pile of shit incomplete game
Just remember this when Diablo 6 “looks good” and “they’ve finally changed”. If people took a little more time to consider the historical value of what their abusive ex did instead of taking them back we’d not be in this situation.
What kills me is that the game WAS fun, and blizzard patched out everything that made it fun. Like they were scared people would get a taste of standards and want more.
Path of Exile is so much better.
PoE is a mess lol. They charge you for having the inventory space to store their 50,000 different kinds of currencies that are all just gigantic slot machines. And the whole way they set up trading is a disaster. I say this having played a lot of PoE and wishing they did it better every step of the way because it has so much promise.
My vote is Grim Dawn that game is a lot of fun
this is where I’m at, grim dawn is great.
D3 eventually got to a place where I actually liked it although it was too simplistic for most people.
I picked up D4 played the first season got bored before I even got it to end game content and gave up
POE had fun gameplay but is artificially cluttered and constantly balancing the fun away.
I’ve got high hopes for last epoch we’ll see.
The last straw for my latest PoE binge was I just got done setting up a pure aura bot. Couldn’t do any damage myself I was on support duty only it was a lot of fun for me (and helped reduce what I had to pay attention to because PoE is visually messy, fine for some people but fatigues my brain quickly). They nerfed the pants off that build multiple updates in a row. I just wanted to be the team morale officer but in the end the only sadness I couldn’t fix was the aura shaped hole in my heart
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Chaos gem? There are chaos orbs but those are quite common. Maybe exalted orbs? (Which got basically replaced by divine orbs a while back)
It doesn’t have a lot of room to take the high ground on microtransactions, though. Like half of the characters can’t wear pants without a paid cosmetic.
I wish there was a thread or mega post with how many dumb things Blizzard has done over the years
Wait… For $30 you get all five colors. That’s totally different. The title kind of implies they’re $30 each since it mentions the class restrictions. Maybe it just sounds that way to me. Language is so ambiguous.
And it’s basically only $20 but you are also forced to buy 1000 platinum at the same time. That’s real value! Diablo 4 players should be rejoining! This is an exciting offer!
This entire comment is a chasm of sar.
These games are so big that I don’t know why you’d even need Diablo 4. D2 and D3 are still lots of fun, as are Grim Dawn, PoE, Titan Quest, and I feel like there’s several more. I used to care about Blizzard’s stories, but that ended in the D2/WC3 era for me.
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I was planning on picking up d4 soon but fuck that guess I’ll skip it now
I’ve been very much enjoying D4. Especially since season 4. The town portals they’re talking about here are purely cosmetic, you don’t need them. No one needs them. They’re there for the whales who will buy them, they don’t expect the average player to buy them.
If you were going to play a game but now won’t because entirely cosmetic items that have no gameplay impact cost money, why did that stop you?
I would say their greed is hitting a new high
Sure makes me feel justified when I tell my friends I won’t buy Diablo 4. The last 5ish years have really told me all I need to know.
Oh, could this DLC finally be a reason to reinstall Diablo 4? Well done King-Activision-Blizzard-XBOX-Microsoft
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good thing my kids and i can’t play it. it’s not very Diablo in our eyes and terribly boring. we still play 3 from time to time but 4 is some other thing i guess. just not our cuppa. feel bad we liked the hype teaser video so long that when it came out we tried hard to like it but couldn’t.
I played it for a couple hours until i got to the first town and got bombarded by irrelevant sidequests and holiday special events and whatnot. AND THEN I left town and discovered its an open world where you can go wherever tf you want because monsters scale with your level which discourages you from progressing the main storyline. I shut it off and have no intention of going back.
At the very least i got it for free in the xbox holiday bundle sale and didnt directly buy the game
Don’t care, it’s a skin. I finished my season, didn’t pay, and can’t wait for the next one.
