The whacko gamers (such as those who early on made petitions to Blizzard about putting in too much color in Diablo 3) are trying to combine and hide their complaints with the more legitimate ones (e.g. loot hunt can get boring in Inferno).When I don’t like a game, I either ignore it or mock it. I don’t have passion for games I don’t like. The passionate hate is amazing to behold. These people really love their Diablo 3. It is like listening to a woman go on and on, for hours, about how she hates her lover and how awful he is. She’s still in love.Here is the most striking thing. The passionate hate didn’t start until patch 1.03. What did patch 1.03 do?
“It nerfed Inferno.”
Oh, but it didn’t. It actually made Inferno tougher. It made some of the white mobs easier. Bosses were buffed with enrage timers (Kripparian’s hardcore victory would have been impossible with the current enrage timers on some bosses.) And to those who don’t think that matters, just try Ghom.
Attack speed was nerfed. This was very significant as players were putting attack speed on all their equipment, and it all got halved.
Another significant change was the increase in repair costs. Before patch 1.03, you could die all the time and get your way through areas. While you can still do that now, you pay severely for it. Another big change is that elite mobs will refill their health shortly after you die. So you just can’t keep dying to them over and over and eventually whittle them down.
Frequently, I am seeing Forum Dwellers mention, “I finished Inferno before the nerfs of 1.03 and…” These players are red flags that much of the animation is about players’ egos. An objective look at the matter knows that 1.03 made it much tougher to go through Inferno with the increase of repair costs, nerf to attack speed, boss enrage timers, and only dealt with the white mobs since they were a little unfair to melee classes. But those people saying that aren’t being objective. They are revealing they played the game entirely for ego stimulation.
Aside from people not able to stroke their egos in Diablo 3 as they could in other games, the other animation is people who had the unrealistic expectation that Diablo 3 would perform the job a MMORPG would do. These people are very easy to detect when they complain how ‘awful’ the game is after 200, 300, or 400 hours played. “200 hours played? This game sucks!” So how many hours should they be allowed to play before the game gets boring? 2000? 20,000!? What is the acceptable number of hours a game should provide? They don’t say. They just go on. Sometimes, they’ll make an appeal to nostalgia and say how many hours they had with Diablo 2. But nostalgia is a lie. Far from being a game with no faults and only glory, there were many people who bought Diablo 2 and did not enjoy their time in it (I am one of them). But if I was a teenager with too much time on my hands, maybe I would enjoy doing Baal runs and playing ‘backroom deals’ with traders all day or leveling up multiple characters of the same class.
I know some real life examples of the two animations described above. I’ve told you about one guy who refuses to put any resistances on his barbarian but declares the game ‘sucks’ when he dies all the time in Act II Inferno. One guy said he was tired of the game so I said I’d play with him. I got them through the rest of Act II and into Act III Inferno. Act III is a step up in difficulty from Act II (obviously). While his character was barely geared enough for Act II, he was dying all the time in Act III. His response? “This game sucks!” hahahaha.
And I told you of a raider I know who quit WoW because he was certain that Diablo 3 would perform the same job that WoW did. I imagine he is extremely pissed off that Diablo 3 is not a MMORPG without a paid subscription.
You know something is up when no one had a complaint about the game (aside from server issues) until they got to the brick walls in Inferno (or made weaker with the 1.03 patch). It was only then that the passionate complaining erupted and never stopped.
I can’t wait until the armory pages come out. Then we will get to see how progressed or geared the Diablo 3 whiners are. I expect the ego ones to be stuck in Inferno somewhere while the ones demanding a MMO longevity to be done.
I’m an Old School Gamer. My formative years with gaming were arcade games that just got faster and faster and faster until you, inevitably, died as well as games that could be completed but were so absurdly hard that the game was given VALUE as to not being able to beat it easily. A ‘bad game’ then was a game that was ‘too easy’. For example, Kirby in Dreamland was seen as an easy game for children as well as the Capcom Disney games.
So with something like Inferno mode and the difficult to find drops are something I enjoy and see as added value to the game. I’d be very disappointed if the game had no challenge in it. Despite all the passionate complaining, there is one complaint you never hear: that Diablo 3 is too easy. You also never hear the difficulties of Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 compared. The reason why is because Diablo 3 with its Inferno mode is so much more difficult than Diablo 2.
I’m used to having shmup games, like R-type III, that I’ve never finished but swear I will one day. I don’t think these complainers have much experience with such games. Their insistence that you must use the Auction House to progress (or RMAH) tells us they expect to complete Diablo 3′s Inferno mode in the same timetable as they do with other games. And there are times where Diablo 3′s difficulty can be like a shmup shooter which is fun to me but probably shocking to them.
Ultimately, I don’t find Diablo 3 to be ‘difficult’ because like most RPGs, you can put in enough time to overgear your character to complete everything. Some of the shmups are difficult because no matter how much time you put in, you cannot overgear the content.
Anyway, while the whiners stay on the message forums whining, time for me to play more Diablo 3. There is a crossbow I have my eye on. :)
