From battle net forum. Long but very true.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5596255698?page=1

ofis cant see

I don’t posts things on forums. But today I will. I’ve been a customer of blizzard since warcraft 2: Tides of darkness.

Diablo 3 is not made for those who played diablo 2 and LOD. For the original purchasers who played this game that makes up of the original 1 million buyers on its inception and a total of 4 million worldwide lifetime wise. This game D3 sold more than 7 million on its inception. That’s 3 million more alone on the opening day versus the whole life span of D2. Of those 4 million people let’s say only 10% were long time loyal fans of the game, somewhere of about 400,000 people worldwide were the ones who remember D2 with fondness and with hopes and prayers they wished the next installment would come and be everything D2 was but more. Now that 400,000 is only 3.6% of the population who purchased the game (so far D3 has like 11 million sales). So can you see where I’m getting at? The game was not tailored to be the next chapter of the best hack and slash of its time, it’s a different game. Why is that you may ask? I’ll elaborate. Starting with the design. The original D2 team is no longer there, they have asked the designers at wow to design this game. This is akin to a production company wanting another Stars wars movie but instead of George Lucas they hire Tim burton to design it. Can you imagine what this would do? That is what happened here. Not bad, but very different from what you expected as a fan and consumer.

I’m not a wow basher, been a loyal fan for almost as long as the wow franchise has been around. I don’t spend my day QQing on forums or fanboying. But wow is a different animal, always changing, always enticing more nontraditional players to take a crack at the gaming world. Wow has its purpose and has been the cash cow for the company for nearly a decade. I don’t need to be at the meeting when they wanted to recap D2 in terms of a company. The reality is this: gameplay aside, the game lost money due to pirated copies worldwide. It also lost money in item sale black market websites. Diablo 2 may have had acclaim for the game but from a business standpoint it lost them potentially years of money. Want to design a complicated item drop system and skill system? That takes too many man hours of development, versus; say a simplified system of focusing on just one/two attributes to increase. Like wow. Diablo 2 was probably viewed internally as an overdesigned cost ineffective game that lost them money because so many illegal copies were circulated. Point in fact that’s why game is on their servers. You got to pay to play.

My experience on D3 has been mixed, and frankly a lot of the criticisms in the forum of this game are deserved. The wow development team took something that was not of their creation, and almost begrudgingly made it from the looks of it. They applied wow loot drop mechanics reducing drop qualities so you would have to find items in the auction house, the real money global auction houses. The quests were simple, easy to follow, and step by step so even a child could understand what they needed to do. In other words they introduced the simplicity of wow to the diablo universe. The D2 vets took this as a slap in the face. As opposed of increasing the complexity and challenge they dumbed it down so even a nontraditional gamer could understand and play the game. When I see my character head bob and gesture in the human wow character way there is a part of me that abhors it. This should have not been done this way. I say the wow developers begrudgingly designed it because it wasn’t their baby, although they did take all the good ideas that made d2 great and apply it to wow, the latter result feels more like a cut and paste of design philosophies that never meshed correctly.

Why else would they kill the iconic Deckard Cain to a nobody subordinate in such a cheaply made manner design wise? They didn’t care who he was in the franchise. To the developers Cain is just a name and some computer pixels, and they can get rid of it if they wanted to and they chose this lackluster exit. Why else would diablo look like the mother queen of the alien saga only with red skin? The first time I saw him I said “Diablo has boobs? The fear and excitement was almost instantly lost when during the fight I kept thinking “this is the alien queen, where is diablo?” Would the original design team that made diablo the franchise that paved the way for the wow game to have dedicated fans of the company be upset if they made diablo so efeminated? Slap in the face to the original developers and the fan base who wanted a real diablo end boss fight. The fight itself was bland, with so much promise they left the quests and fights short and longing. And whimseyshire, officially told to be a joke and the cow level replacement, feels like an insult as well. “Oh you came to fight the devil and demons, well thanks for the money here go kill some pink teddy bears, fu” The NES design to whimseyshire only further makes me feel like the developers where mocking everything about the franchise.

So for the fanboys and vets alike who are going to troll endlessly because you skimmed the comments to find something to fire back at (see the problem, most people don’t like to read anymore) I’m not bashing diablo 3 but I’d like to point out some items that make me think we weren’t given a great product.

• In LOD there was item swapping so you can go from dps to more protective tank like. This concept was added to wow because it was convenient. It is not existent in this game for whatever reason when logic dictates you continue to add the good elements to your new games, not revert to pre diablo 2 design.

• Itemization has been touched on in various threads. It’s geared/rigged for the auction house to play a major role in this game.
• Plot decisions were poor to mediocre. (Cain, Angels and demons, not enough explanation)
• The game quest system doesn’t allow you to just go out and kill without following the linear quests. This became annoying pretty fast.

• The auction house can’t be accessed on your player (wow does let you do this, what gives?)
• Legendries’- already covered and will be “tweaked” in the next patch
• Where is the low level armor set items? This was a huge let down. I miss Sigons Armor for example.
• Where are the charms? Runeword socketed armors, crafting armor, rejuvenation potions, jewels? So many items are not there it reduces the variety and narrows it down to having only 2 main attributes to all your gear.
• Our mercenaries in D2 could do a little of the monotonous grunt work when we had a second to afk. These new followers are more simplified; less damage doing…they couldn’t save your life and kill something at all….in hardcore this would be appreciated during lag spikes, a follower that can fight for 10 seconds while you get a chance to get back in the game.

• Whoever designed the affix to “increase gold radius pickup by x yards” should turn in their resume…this is worthless to a player. Instead of rehashing smart designs like “increases your min/max weapon damage per level” which would allow you to progress through until you found a more viable weapon in this wasteland of useless drops i.e. a bow with strength, we’re stuck with this worthless affix popping up on like 50% of item drops.

• You can only have four in group when there are 5 classes….did someone drop the ball on this numerical enigma? As a LOD player I have brothers, sisters, and cousins who played on our lan connections and we were 8 players. We had a ball. Now…not so much. Let down.

• Are classes rigged so that every attribute except the one they need drops constantly? Is this a way to bring people to the RMAH? I swear my barb only drops demon hunter friendly gear, and my sister who’s a DH only gets witch doctor gear. It almost feels like there was actual tampering with the “random” drop system.

• The blacksmith is useless- but will be fixed in the next patch

• The maps are not randomized; I almost have them memorized after 60 hours of gameplay redoing quests. This was a cheap let down.

So blizzard wanted to generate further income on this game by the RMAH. I wish they just spent a little more development on this game, the potential sequels to come, and earn the money through selling expansions (through hard work), as opposed to trying to find whales that will drop serious cash to claim they are the best D3 players on the planet. And there will be, from facebook free to play games it has been shown that people will spend real money to climb their way to the top. Even if they didn’t earn it in game.

So as a LOD veteran and wow subscriber I tell my fellow veterans “sorry guys this game wasn’t designed with you or me in mind, it was designed for a more larger general public, and the challenges you wished for are made by the gimmicky inferno level, which will require you spend serious money on for gear. Welcome to D3, a new world of simplified gaming.

Just to further show everyone this game was not made by the original development team, had all these inferno gimmicky champions been provided to the original team they would have said I imagine something along the lines of “ah this is garbage.” The necromancer for example could blow through inferno by just doing two skills…..Revive a few champions and Iron Madien. Then these ridiculous champions would get the arcane/vortex/desecrator/teleport flipped on them and the necro would just do that all day and own inferno. Checkmate. Original designers 1, new designers nill. The paladin would just convert a demon and put thorns on them. Cakewalk. Etc etc.

So to the fellow veterans of the diablo franchise I say, deal with it my pained friends. It’s not going to change significantly. This is the new world order, where the RMAH is what matters in this game. Not the quests, not the drops, not the sets, legendries’, not the skills of a player, just the level of the item matters. We already paid for the game, honestly they could just leave it like this and move on to the next project and the majority wouldn’t even know of the issues that are brought up in these forums. They will jump to pandaria and become a panda monk (so who came up with a monk class in two different games owned by the same company, is anyone even trying anymore?) and forget about the game that didn’t live up to expectations of a few diehard fans. We diehard fans will die hard.

Ok tear me to pieces now....

Edit: Update. Many good replies have been left with insightful commentaries that are worth reading. Keep in mind this was written before RMAH came out and the Op has added more comments throughout the thread.

mafaka 3 pages ady!
so wuts nu?
i played WoT last nite and owning em nubs!!! yahoooooo!

p/s: got noob bought my Andariel @ AUS90! lololl wut was he thinking!?

After reading the post (yes I did spend time to read), I can say it is parallel to what BF3 experienced when the game released last year.

Things changed, either the developers had their own ideas of "fun" or the older staff had gone elsewhere, and it all comes down to this conclusion : This is not the game they used to know or play.

in short yes you can say so

i sometimes wonder when i see related debates on this be it childish or matured, is there rly a point in them spending time talking about it when somehow on the 1st mth itself they should expect a shitstorm in it? idk man

-diehard fans die hard-

lul

Okay, have some down time in the office and wanted to share my thoughts on a particular aspect of Diablo 3. The overall 'feel' of the Acts.

Act 1 is by far and away the best Act. The environment, the game feel of it is great. I have a feeling that when the Act was designed, the people doing it really told themselves "Let's do the best we can!". And it really translates into the game. You travel from dark plains to tomb dungeons to highlands, top marks.

Act 2. For some reason, maybe because we can only look at so much sand at a time, it feels long. But it's okay, at this stage it feels lke the developers patted themselves on the back for Act 1 and thought "This game is gonna be epic" and continued to give us good content with hours of potential gameplay.

Act 3 - 4. This feels rushed. This feels half a**ed. It feels as if Jay went down to the development office and :

Jay : How's the progress guys?
Dev : It's been great! We are starting to work on Act 3 now.
Jay : What??! We promised the customers the game would be ready in 6 months!
Dev : But...it's a lot of work.
Jay : I don't care, get it out in 5 months time. Oh, and to that Development Hell dungeon idea of yours, it's ok on the condition you make me the boss in that dungeon.