DIABLO 3

[James]

Diablo 2 allowed you to play single player, multiplayer offline and supported other networks to join. If Blizzard servers are down you simply cant play Diablo 3.

[James]

http://www.imagocentre.com/images/100/barblol2_68.jpg

Aw ye, silly hoof boots

[Psychotic]

"wat" at those damn boots.

Diablo 2 allowed you to play single player, multiplayer offline and supported other networks to join. If Blizzard servers are down you simply cant play Diablo 3.

One problem I find with these systems is they have no contingency plan.

You screw over every player if your servers go down accidentally, or if you decide to shut them down forever. I don't see that happening but like Steam, it is a possibility, one that should be planned for, in my opinion.

It's probably not the biggest issue for me, though. At the moment the biggest issue is server maintenance and when WoW goes down, so does Battle.net, their websites and their forums alongside it. I find that just really, really bad networking.

I've never agreed with the way Blizzard does maintenance though, so probably best not to get into that.

[e] Oh yes, another caveat about having to be online. Queues! Fucking. Queues.

This makes me hate the goddamn system so much more and this is now becoming my most hated part of it.

[Mastakilla]

I'm sure if the server were to go down forever there'd be a patch so you don't have to be online

[Psychotic]

I'm sure if the server were to go down forever there'd be a patch so you don't have to be online

Just like Steam? Yeah, most likely.

Still slightly butthurt about server maintenance. Oh well, I'll just sleep through it, I guess.

[Kaiden]

If it's anything like Warcraft then they all go down at like 3am Tuesday, back about 10am GMT. Can live with that once a week, considering I don't even really play at those times anymore!

[James]

One: Don't expect Blizzard/Activision to enable offline capabilities if their official service goes down. Third party will eventually take over needs if this ever happens.

Two: Diablo 3 is severely crippled by this DRM whenever you aren't under much inconvenience by it or not. Fans of the Diablo series - D1 and the dungeon Crawler / roguelike genre known to be a single-player experience - should be entitled to a working offline experience. The DRM exists to promote their RMAH and that is it, it has got in the way of millions of players and I find that very unacceptable.

[Psychotic]

Yes, so do I.

The only excuses I've heard regarding the DRM is that it's to "prevent hacking of accounts/characters" and for the Auction Houses (both the gold one and the real money one), it's purpose is to "prevent gold/item sellers".

Neither of these are really justified, however. The DRM is designed to fix a problem that the developers have. They should be responsible for solving these issues, as opposed to alienating users with knee-jerk DRM.

• Prevents Hacking: Whilst this is true to an extent, a better fix would be allowing people to create singleplayer, offline characters and then disallow them from importing them. You should still be able to export multiplayer characters to play offline, but you couldn't import them. Sure, it's inconvenient, but so is having to always be online to play singleplayer modes, which is what I largely do.

• Prevents Gold/Item Selling: Somewhat true to an extent, what actually happens by allowing everyone to use the market is that items become rather worthless. Whilst it's likely the Diablo 3 economy will even out in the next few months, this won't stop the fact that many items will essentially become worthless when you can find them in large degrees on the AH.

I was under the impression that the item farm was one of the biggest aspects of these types of games. Getting to max level and gearing out your character is something people love to do, including myself. But the fact I can go on the AH and buy the best things I need kind of cheapens the deal.

The AH makes the loot grind less about loot, and more about money. Instead of farming a boss for that item with an awesome prefix, you'll just farm gold to buy the item you really want off the AH, instead.



Great series, recommend the other two, which can be found below:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8CBbeSAjVo
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G4lX-MKrgI

I find it really sad, in the end, because whilst I love the games, it's getting harder to overlook the flaws. Hell, any of the in-game flaws I could ignore, if I could actually play the game when I want to play it.

[James]

Code: Select all

General

   Players will now automatically join General chat when logging in

Classes

   Monk
   
      Active Skills
      
         Serenity
         
            Skill Rune - Tranquility
            
               Duration of immunity granted to nearby allies from crowd control effects reduced from 2 seconds to 1 second
            
            
         
         
         Mantra of Healing (tooltips will be updated in a later patch)
         
            In addition to increasing Life regeneration for you and nearby allies while active, Mantra of Healing will now also shroud you and nearby allies with a mystical shield that absorbs damage for 3 seconds after activiation (up to a limited amount, based on level)
            Skill Rune - Boon of Protection
            
               Boon of Protection has been renamed Boon of Inspiration
               Mantra of Healing will now heal you when dealing damage to an enemy (heal amount will be based on hero level)
            
            
         
         
      
      
   
   

Bug Fixes

   General
   
      Players should no longer receive an "Error 14009" when logging in
      The "Select a Hero" menu will now also display the difficulty level for each character
      Several speed improvements have been made to the streaming downloader
   
   
   Achievements
   
      All players in a party should now receive "Till Death Do Us Part" even if they don’t have Haedrig Eamon as their active follower
   
   
   Acts
   
      Act IV
      
         Witch Doctors should no longer receive an error if they kill a Shadow Clone with a Damage-Over-Time (DoT) skill after it's launched a Firebomb but before it's reached its target
         
      
      
   
   
   Auction House
   
      The auction log in the Completed tab will now display a player's activity (bids, buyouts, sales, etc) in the proper order
      When placing a new bid over a previous bid on the same auction, players will now be provided with the correct warning message: "Raising your maximum bid on an Auction you are already winning raises your current bid to just above your previous maximum bid. Are you sure you want to continue?"
      Players will now receive an error message if they attempt to purchase an item after the 50 item limit has been reached in the Completed tab
      The "Physical Damage" Preferred Stats option for rings has been renamed to "Bonus Minimum Physical Damage"
      The "All Damage" Preferred Stats option for weapons and armor has been removed and replaced with bonuses of specific damage types
      Items which have been purchased from a vendor and equipped by the player can now be sold on the Auction House
      Listing items on the Auction House from a different character than the one currently selected should no longer cause item display issues
   
   
   Battle.net
   
      The public chat list will now sort alphabetically
   
   
   Skills
   
      Witch Doctor
      
         Spirit Vessel (Passive) no longer clears debuffs when using waypoints or changing equipment

[Psychotic]

Waiting on 1.0.3, the claimed gameplay patch.

[Professor Layton]

(´･ω･`) error 37 (´･ω･`)

[Kaiden]

Yeah been down since like 1pm for me. O well.

[James]

Use an authenticator.

06:42 - Surprise!: tinker
06:42 - Surprise!: za just got hacked
06:45 - Tinker: lol
06:45 - Tinker: fucking hell
06:45 - Surprise!: im sending a ticket for him atm
06:46 - Surprise!: make sure someone tells him pls
06:51 - Surprise!: http://www.imagocentre.com/images/100/looter_80.jpg
http://www.imagocentre.com/images/100/victim_81.jpg
06:52 - Surprise!: he needs to send the ticket
06:55 - Surprise!: junez#1447

[Psychotic]

You'd think the whole "Recent Players" thing would be a deterrent of some sort.

[Kaiden]

Maybe, never been hacked on Warcraft over like 4 years without one, don't plan to on D3 either - if I do it's their fault and they'll be fixing it.

[James]

Keyloggers and people preparing for RMAH.

[Kaiden]

Yeah but unless you go to dumb websites or go to dumb emails, and have no anti virus, the chances of getting a keylogger are pretty minuscule tbh, at least that's what I've found.

[James]

I trust Za never went to dodgy websites except stuff like what.CD. I wouldn't be too confident.

[Psychotic]

Authenticators are cheap for most people and are worth the cost. Mine cost like $30 USD though, much of that was shipping, and I still think it was worth it. Unfortunately, I lost mine when I left my folks house.

Having my account compromised once prompted me to get the authenticator as extra security, but I never for a minute thought it was Blizzard's fault or what-not, I also aren't fooled by the pathetic phishing scams I get in my email everyday, as I use a completely different email address for my Battle.net account that is only used on Battle.net and nothing else.

I don't believe authenticators are necessary, though. To this day I still don't know how my account got compromised, all I know is it happened even though I use an active and regularly updated firewall, virus scanner, and what have you but I still blame myself for the occurrence.

[James]

http://eu.battle.net/support/en/article ... ii-account

[Professor Layton]

WELCOME TO MY REALM OF ERROR

[Psychotic]

Item comparison tool:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... 4UHc#gid=0

The in-game "Stat Changes if Equipped" you see on items is rather vague, so this guy made the above spreadsheet as a more convenient way of comparing the base stats of one item to another.

[Aidan]

I trust Za never went to dodgy websites except stuff like what.CD. I wouldn't be too confident.

I had $25 scammed from me on a CD key website. Learn from my mistake everyone.

[James]

RIP Barb clothes.

[Psychotic]

All I got is "l2crop".

Got a monk through Normal, lovin' them so far.

[James]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiU-PxTl5u8[/youtube]

Been browsing the internet, turns out Barbarian is the most gear dependent class in the videogame and I'd have to farm a lot to survive act 2-4 inferno.

Fuck that.

[Professor Layton]

Doubled my vitality last night, 19k hp caused me to be one hitted by literally anything Got about 39k now, a lot better.

What are you gonna do james? level another character (seeing as you have many in nightmare) or just farm a lot?

[Psychotic]

@James: I tend to study the classes I play for end-game viability during my time playing them. I'll still level mine to 60 but the whole "gear dependant" thing worried me, which is largely why I made a monk (not a big fan of ranged).

Not sure how they're going to turn out but I'd rather not turn into a kite-machine like a wizard or demon hunter.

"Difficulty through gear" when it should be "difficulty through skill".

Another issue is the AH doesn't solve the issue, it just turns "item farming" into "gold farming". Farming of a different kind is still farming and whilst I do expect some farming in these types of games, the amount a barbarian looks like they need is just ridiculous.

[James]

11:49 - Surprise!: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/ ... 614?page=1 HAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAA
11:49 - Surprise!: ahgahhahahahHAHHAHAHAHA
11:49 - Surprise!: THEY JUST COMPLETELY IGNORE YOUR ARMOR AND RESISTANCES

What are you gonna do james? level another character (seeing as you have many in nightmare) or just farm a lot?

Decided after farming abit, I'm going to do a mix of abusing the AH (buy cheap sell big) and leveling another character, there's no point in my experience being ruined by being dependent on one class.

[Psychotic]

Decided after farming abit, I'm going to do a mix of abusing the AH (buy cheap sell big) and leveling another character, there's no point in my experience being ruined by being dependent on one class.

That's the spirit! I wish one of my mates would think the same but I think she's "given up" after levelling a wizard to 60, methinks.

Playing the AH was something I was thinking, sure would be easy now, before it dies down a bit after a few gameplay patches.

[e] Here's another useful tool: An Effective Health Pool calculator.

http://rubensayshi.github.com/d3-ehp-calculator