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It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

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Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#691

Post by SapporoChris »

vhgyu75e6u wrote: post #680
jiggawatts wrote: post #664

What upsets me is that in exchange for that money you’re treated to a low quality game. You can just feel the disdain for the user/victim at every step. While launching the game for the first time: 1) No sound! 2) Forced subtitles. 3) Visible tearing in the video because of a lack of vsync. 4) Two tracking and notification permission prompts, including one that lies to you: “Your game is better if we can target ads”.…

I found most of your complains either false or non issue: 1. Ok, maybe a bug. 2. Given that is a mobile game and most people will no have the volume up, it is ok to have subtitles. Not to mention that games that start with subtitles are more accessible and the majority of players actually don't mind them and find them useful. 3. Fair, but given that this is a mobile game, V-sync can be a problem for lower end devices…

Perhaps permission was not asked because permission was previously granted.

Example: every time I use Google maps it asks me to turn on location tracking, many people never encounter this because they leave location tracking on.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#692

Post by discardable_dan »

pwthornton wrote: post #638
lekevicius wrote: post #199

It's even more frustrating, because the game is good . I really enjoyed playing the first 30 levels or so. Good story, good controls, very satisfying gameplay. If I could pay $60 and just have a "classic" Diablo on my phone, I might. But I won't spend a cent on consumable in-app purchases. It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds…

It's a pretty great Diablo experience on an iPad with a controller. It is sad that you can't just pay a decent amount of money to get a classic experience. Maybe people will discover a path where you could pay a reasonable sum of money to get a fairly normal grinding experience with Diablo. I'm not opposed to in-app purchases, but I'm not a gambler, and I don't support gambling business models. I saw some reviews and…

Honestly, the gameplay looks like a slightly-polished Diablo 3. It isn't that exciting to me. What's more-interesting to me, though, is your comment about people discovering a path to get a normal experience. Diablo 3 was reworked a year after release to move to that model, and honestly it's a very fun game. They dropped the auction house stuff, tuned gear drops to help you find your own kit, and added rifts and bounty stuff. It's still a very fun weekend experience. I think you're right about mobile pricing. That said, with Apple's recent campaign promising to replace computers with iPads, it's possible we are in for a shift.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#693

Post by discardable_dan »

sjtindell wrote: post #651
makecheck wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proper up-front never occurred because Apple refuses to implement a simple free-trial-period mechanism. And it is impossible to filter store searches in a way that tells you which apps would behave roughly in that way (therefore anything with IAP I just assume must be a gambling/gem-bags/garbage model).

Really no video game lets you do a free trial. To me the start of all this was Google. Google completely changed the way we interact with services and technology. It’s amazing and completely “free”.

Demos are on the way back. A lot of indie games on Steam feature them.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#694

Post by Bud »

bobnamob wrote: post #64
lozenge wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese proverb “rags to rags in three generations” says that family wealth does not last for three generations. The first generation makes the money, the second spends it and the third sees none of the wealth.

That phenomenon probably has more to do with wealth being spread increasingly thin across ever-larger generations

No part of this is even close to correct. No, wealth is not being evenly spread, it's becoming more and more concentrated. And no, generations are not getting "ever-larger", either; birth rates are down.

Even the "probably" is wrong. :)

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#695

Post by jiggawatts »

vhgyu75e6u wrote: post #680
jiggawatts wrote: post #664

What upsets me is that in exchange for that money you’re treated to a low quality game. You can just feel the disdain for the user/victim at every step. While launching the game for the first time: 1) No sound! 2) Forced subtitles. 3) Visible tearing in the video because of a lack of vsync. 4) Two tracking and notification permission prompts, including one that lies to you: “Your game is better if we can target ads”.…

I found most of your complains either false or non issue: 1. Ok, maybe a bug. 2. Given that is a mobile game and most people will no have the volume up, it is ok to have subtitles. Not to mention that games that start with subtitles are more accessible and the majority of players actually don't mind them and find them useful. 3. Fair, but given that this is a mobile game, V-sync can be a problem for lower end devices…

5. The hell you talking about?

The game literally removes the controls while you're being told how they work. They vanish. You can't do anything but sit there patiently while a game character lectures you about how a joystick works.

What next? "To use a key on your keyboard, apply sufficient downwards pressure that you hear a 'click'. Do this now!"

It's patronising to a level that I feel insulted and leave the game immediately.

Compare to the height of the PC game era -- which Blizzard games used to be the epitome of -- you get "dropped" into the game and you learn through discovery instead of an unskippable presentation.

The intro of Half Life is a classic example of how to do this well. This is the opposite of that.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#696

Post by Beldin »

qball wrote: post #682
fatbird wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids aren't allowed to play real world slot machines either, are they?

The last time I went to Dave & Busters, they didn't seem to have an entrance policy. People don't seem to have a problem with this even though a minority of their games are ultimately slot machines (the simplest of which is the "time the light" game, but the coin stackers count as this as well given that they're literally right out of real casinos). Interestingly, the fact that D&B lets you combine winnings with cash…

> if the tokens have "no value",

But if you can exchange tokens for prizes, clearly the tokens do have value. 1 token = piece of bubble gum, 10 tokens = keychain, 5000 tokens = fluffy unicorn. Etc.

Basically, I don't see why the fig leaf would work in the first place...

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#697

Post by Beldin »

localhost wrote: post #641
csa wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it’s all SaaS where you have to pay monthly and choose from different pricing tiers or ala carte feature options to ‘win’ in a business sense. While some businesses abuse SaaS pricing (e.g., MS office for very basic uses, acrobat pro for basic uses, etc.), I think the SaaS pricing model has aligned the interests of developers and consumers (esp. smaller devs and smaller consumers) in a way that has allowed a wi…

Office web apps are free with OneDrive and 5GB storage. $20/yr for 100GB. Office 365 personal is $70/yr. What would you rather see instead? Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

One time $70 for standalone, no phoning home version of Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#698

Post by nickjj »

lcw wrote: post #688
nickjj wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just get this vibe that people don't think through their stance these days. They just want what they want, and use ethics to support their point when they don't really have a consistent sense of morality to speak of. I thought it through and my stance is I do think there's a very big difference between p2w and cosmetic only cash shops from a moral stand point in the context of Diablo Immortal and PoE. I never fel…

These are all valid reasons to dislike p2w games. I do think that some of the p2w aspects are more complex/confusing than in previous games, but for instance losing paid for content because of time constraints isn't a novel idea. That's literally what a battle pass is. PoE has Vault Pass. You have to log in and play to receive those awards. You pay for the opportunity to get them and there is a time constraint if you…

> It's about how you feel, and that is the problem today.

An opinion is often based on feel. For context I've put in thousands of hours into D2 back in the day, not nearly as much into D3 and quite a lot into PoE but no where near as much as D2. With Diablo Immortal I haven't seen this type of backlash over a cash shop and how it ties into core game mechanics in my life of gaming.

I also can't speak for PoE's finances or how they remain in business. I'm sure there's whales out there but I don't consider that my business, so you are right in that their actions don't affect me. If someone wants to pay $50 for a cosmetic skin and the game makes it available then so be it, for me personally that immediately gets classified as optional so it doesn't affect my experience playing the game. I never get the urge to buy those things because I see others having it. I also don't make assumptions about why they bought it (to support the game, they have addiction problems, etc.) because that's not my battle and there's nothing I can do about that in the end anyways.

My philosophy has been to apply a pretty basic set of rules in that if a game does what I think are predatory things then I don't play it, buy it or contribute to its parent company's profits. If I like a game and it feels reasonable to me in how its priced (1 time purchase, cosmetic cash shop, etc.) then I will happily support it. Everyone's rules here are different.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#699

Post by BlueTemplar »

RektBoy wrote: post #201

Game is coded horribly, nearly no server-side checks on gameplay actions. What I found so far.. speedhack, insta-ability spam, immortality(hehe). Looking for force-invite into party and drop exploit. So far nothing. Pouring more hours into this, let's see on twitch ;-)

AFAIK it's very rare for games to implement checks like these. Only the most competitive, most popular ones tend to.

Also the always online DRM requirement has been creeping up, since having the game servers mandatorily under the full control of the company makes some of these mitigations easier.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#700

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

gambiting wrote: post #54

The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game? As a different example - I'm sure it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to max out your characters and gear in Genshin Impact, but I've played very enjoyable 100h+ and it's perfectly fine even if you don't have the max ascended characters and gear, I have a feeling those are there basically for the wales to spend money on but aren't necessar…

If you're interested in PvP, you must pay in order to be competitive. Whales will simply have 50% more health and damage than you. So if PvP is your jam, you're shit out of luck if you don't also want to pay a ton of money to succeed at it.

The whole feature is effectively walled off to f2pers.

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