Diablo 3 - News Roundup

Lorehound has a new article about Diablo 3's auction house shutdown, and why it’s happening.

Blizzard announced earlier this week that both the real money and gold auction houses for Diablo 3 would be shutting down soon, and the reactions have been mostly positive. Despite the groundbreaking features of the auction house, its negative effects on the game outweighed the benefits. Specifically, it made obtaining items useful for you pretty impossible and necessitated its use in order to play at any meaningful level.

But why? What about WoW and its auction house and microtransactions? What about Hearthstone; isn’t it also “pay-to-win”? I think the design flaw in Diablo 3’s auction house came down to not managing the following concepts correctly: “gameplay first” and “economy as gameplay”.

PC Gamer has Senior Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng making a case for slower combat.

In the dark depths of Blizzard’s forums, the Senior Technical Game Designer of Diablo III, Wyatt Cheng, suspended his soul-reaping rampage to answer few questions players had regarding Diablo III’s soon-to-be slower combat. His main point: A combat system emphasizing shallow health pools and high DPS is toxic to strategy.

“A health pool that quickly goes from full to nearly empty implies that there’s not a lot of room for variance in incoming damage,” Cheng wrote in his lengthy forum post. “When incoming damage is that high, a 15% increase in monster damage would result in death. This leads to comments like ‘As soon as I turn up the Monster Power I get 1-shot.’ I’d like to see a game where a clever player can handle a higher Monster Power by reducing incoming damage through good play.”

And for last Games.on.net says sorry pc gamers the console version is what Diablo 3 was meant to be.

I’ve spent three days playing this game now, on the couch, on my Xbox 360, and I’ve come to the following conclusion: this is the game I wanted to play. This is the game I wanted last year, the game I can switch off and enjoy like I used to when I shared a LAN with my younger brother and we hammered Diablo 2 for 100 hours a week instead of doing homework. This game is closer to Diablo than the original Diablo 3 on PC was, and the bitter irony of it all is that it took a completely different gaming environment — one derided by obnoxious PC elitists who look down on console games as simplistic — to pull it off. No, really.