Never used the AH, this what not what bothered me most about D3..In the beginning loot was terrible though, in the end it was way too good..
It's cool to see the insights into development intentions, just wish it was when the game was in development rather than almost a decade after the damage was done
Ah so D3 was not tuned to require the AH, it was just not tuned at all.
"The accessibility of the AH bypassed the normal reward loop" - it makes more sense, having it said like this. I had (and still have) a ton of fun with Diablo III, both solo and with a small group of friends, and I only recall using the Auction House as a buyer once, for a very cheap and quite significant upgrade. Inferno was challenging, yes, and good gear was hard to come by, but I never felt "forced" into spending money in any way in order to have fun!
Yes for the game was not tune for the AH, but no amount of testing will help you if the dev / director vision for the game is bad. D3 inferno was just tuned stupidly hardcore, and even with more testing, if they didn't moved away from that mindset that lasted way after the game release, they would have just remove the few good farming spot on release and not months later like they did. If I remember, they removed the chocker when they removed Jay Wilson when he was rude toward D2 teams. As long as he was in place, the game was going to be bad (at least the Inferno tuning)
I liked how hard D3 was on launch and i liked the ah. It was fun and different.
I started playing hardcore exclusively as soon as I was able, which didn't even have RMAH as an option, so I was always a bit confused by all the people whining about how "required" and game ruining it was.
It's pretty funny to learn that one of the lead developers could not see the impact of AH, when even an average player (who is not a game developer) would immediately point out the obvious thing that will happen because the AH feature exists (plus the whole real money part). Saying that they have not intentionally designed D3 with AH in mind is pretty bad, because themselves added the AH as a feature, themselves decided to add the real money part of it and themselves were unable to see how it will impact the game, even though it was such an obviously easy thing to notice for everyone else.Same thing happens with WoW so often, year after year, they try to defend themselves with various excuses, but the reality is that the lead devs were just unable to see the obvious thing that almost every players can point out literally in the first day. This whole issue became more of a meme already, on how it takes several months (or even years) for devs to acknowledge something that for a normal player it was obvious day one (or often, even in the first hour of gameplay). Perhaps the developers are too focused on their own ideas/concepts and refuse to see the reality or the big picture. But it's kinda funny (and sad at the same time) because this excuse does not hold ground -- we have the community as a whole who traditionally has been pointing out loud and clear all these big issues really early. Except that the devs chose to ignore it. Year after year it feels as if the dev teams deliberately choose to ignore Reddit, fansites, Twitch and Youtube comments where the community always is voicing loud and clear most of the obvious issues - and then they proceed to release the game/patch, people get pissed off, the devs wonder what happened and it's just really late (many months or years later) that the devs acknowledge the issues.
the problem was the gear to do inferno only dropped from inferno so you'd need some kind of turbo cheese build like DH or CC witch doctor + dps class to even have a chance of doing inferno. and even then with all of the RNG in that game it still took a long time of farming inferno to get decent gear to do it without cheese.
Isn't this completely disregarding the fact that on Inferno only classes with immunities to cheese damage spikes (iirc, demon hunter and wizard) could even get through inferno to start?
I have no doubt he's telling the truth, but having played D3 at release, without the gold AH getting a remotely decent rare (forget sets and legendaries, they weren't really a thing at that point, just talking about rares here) that fit your class and desired abilities would be nigh-impossible. Countless hours farming indeed. That is perhaps an even stronger indictment of the extremely poor state D3 was in at release-- drops were so stingy that we all believed the game was plausibly tuned around the AH, because we couldn't imagine it being playable without it.
He says they didnt have the AH for internal testing like its a good thing. Maybe...they shouldve tested it with the rest of the game?
AH was not the problem. I say an AH akin to D3 was good. Its just that the whole itemization failed. And inferno at launch was a bit too brutal past act 1 (butcher).Put the D3 AH into D2R and it would make for a more enjoyable experience in my mind. Instead of endlessly posting on discords you can just post on the ah and see what happens.
You know, I would much rather have some information on Immortal...like...When the hell is it coming out.