Blizzard paves road to Hell with bribery and double-talk

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Sadly, I have to admit that I was foolish enough to pre-order Diablo 3 a couple years ago, so it's possible that others exist who are even more gullible than me.  But it's hard to imagine the experience being anything but a splash of DRM-laden cold water that's un-dodgeable because of latency issues.  How could anyone not have learned the lesson by now?

Speaking as an outsider, it's hard for me to say whether professional game critics are as gullible as they appear, or if they're simply forced to march in lockstep with the industry consensus for the sake of their careers.  I'm trying as hard as I can not to be cynical about this, but neither of the aforementioned options readily affords the luxury of optimism -  one must look elsewhere altogether for that.

Take this interview from a couple weeks back.  A couple weeks ago, PC Gamer climbed to the top of Bullshit Mountain to have a chat with Kevin Martens, Blizzard's current lead content designer for Diablo 3, and came back with a tablet on which were carved The Ten Juicy Sound Bites of Our Lord And Master, Blizzard Entertainment.  The media has been uncritically serving this up as evidence that Loot 2.0 and Reaper of Souls is about to make right all that had been wrong.

Let's give this interview the analysis it deserves.

PC Gamer: Diablo III obviously took kind of a beating out of the gate back at launch. How did you feel about that? 

Martens: Well "bad" is the short answer. We felt terrible about the connection issue stuff. I know people that sent their families out of town on vacation so that they could sit down and play the game, and they couldn't connect. So that stuff was terrible and I think we've spent an incredible amount of time ensuring that kind of stuff doesn't happen again. We took that very seriously and certainly feel bad about that.

Clearly not bad enough.  More on this later.

I think we did eight major patches on the game. We did many months of support, we added new content, we did big tuning passes. Like anything, best laid plans meeting 15 million people usually means that you're going to learn a few things... or a lot of things in this case. That's what I think I like about expansion development. It's kind of our second at-bat and we know a lot of things about what's actually fun about the game. And we don't have to fight against player instincts or make guesses. We can do what people do; we can see what people like to do, we can read on the forums, and we can interact with them at BlizzCon and other events, and we can make a game that closely matches what people want out of a Diablo game.

 The boldfaced parts are either blatant lies, or at best clever misdirections.  They CAN read on the forums and make a game that closely matches what people want out of a Diablo game, but they emphatically choose not to.  They pay their moderators to treat criticism on the forums the way a toddler treats mechanized and padded pressure plates in a game of whack-a-mole.  Their policy is to tune out all criticism until their approval rating makes George W. Bush look like Moose Tracks ice cream and then gratuitously pat themselves on the back for capitulating just in time for the press conference for their upcoming overpriced DLC.

PC Gamer: Do you guys continue to stand by the decision to require an internet connection to play Diablo III? Is there any chance at all of that changing in the future? 

Martens: Yes, we stand by it. Diablo III is a co-op game from the ground up, so having the social stuff be there at your fingertips whenever you want it is integral to the experience.

Christ, Marty, you walked right into that one.  It was literally the last thing you said, mate!  What happened to the line about pulling your head out of your goddamned ass and paying attention to what people want?  To the imaginary person who's reading this and is actually taking this douche at face value: it's the DRM, stupid.  (A secondary concern is that the game was originally built around the RMAH, and it would probably take a lot of work to enable offline play, but that's just jumping back one link in the causal chain.  It's the DRM, stupid.)

This is one of the most pathetically transparent sophist douchebag moves I have seen in some time.  How many ways are you inconsistent with your stated motive?  Let me count the ways:

1.  The PC game is playable in single-player.  They could have forced you to wait for four-man queues, but that would piss people the fuck off and make people hate the game even more.  Martens just wants them to be forced into a situation where the option to co-op is slightly more readily at their fingertips, but he stops short of going the whole way?  Not bloodly likely.
2.  Followers are only enabled in single-player.  They went to a lot of fucking trouble to implement a system specifically designed for a game mode they're going out of their way not to support.  The consistent thing would be to remove them from the game.
3.  Console users aren't forced to play online anytime they fail to assemble a four-man local team.

I guess it's better to piss on me and tell me it's raining than to actually hook up a firehose to the local sewer and fill the skies with piss for the sake of consistency.  Or not - I don't know; it's a toss-up because I won't be playing the game anyway when alternatives exist that are actually fun.

You want to know what online co-op is like?  Well, if you're in a popular grind area like the start of Act 3, it's almost fun, but it's not like you really have a team half the time.  If you go to any other place in the game, you wait forever and maybe get one guy to join.  A Demon Hunter a few levels higher than you with tons of movement speed and fully decked out with level-appropriate gear from the auction house.  He runs way ahead of you and blasts the mobs to pieces, and it takes you a while just to kill the 2-3 survivors from each pack.  He's a whole map ahead of you in no time.  Then he gets to the boss and drops a portal and he's like, "u coming?", and... are you having fun yet?  I would think not, but Blizzard thinks that I subconsciously prefer this to single-player - so much that I'll tolerate ping and server downtime for it.

Do you know the only time I had fun in online multiplayer more often than not with a Diablo game?  The motherfucking cow level.  You could usually find a game to join on Battlenet to commemorate someone's latest playthrough of Normal difficulty.  The level had delivered the simple shoot-em-up bliss of facing a huge, fast horde of stupid melee-range enemies.  If you were at the appropriate level or below, you were in mortal danger, and it was a blast watching people teleport in, run for their lives, and scramble to get to their previous corpse to get their gear back.

With Diablo 3, Blizzard took an absolute fan-favorite feature out of the game and in its place erected a big gaudy monument to their own hubris and contempt for their fan base in the form of the giant rainbow-colored "fuck you" sign known as Whimsyshire.  The way you get to Whimsyshire is by replaying the same 5 maps 80 fucking times each until rare component items drop, and then you grind Whimsyshire by your fucking self a hundred times or so hoping that the motherfucking rainbow sword drops before you die of the monotony.

It appears that they're putting the cow level in Reaper of Souls, but that's a slap in the face, really. Hopefully they add it to the base game, because it's pretty damned close to being the least they could do.  My list of demands remains unchanged.

PC Gamer: Not too long ago, Blizzard announced that it was shutting down the auction house. Is it fair to characterize it as a failure at this point? 

Martens: It did what it was intended to do in one way, which was to make trading a safe place to happen without trading scams and other ripoffs. However, it had a very bad unintended consequence of making trading the best way to get items in the game. The fact is that the most fun way for the vast majority of people is to kill monsters and take gears from their cold, dead claws. Trading became very easy. The auction house lowered the barrier of entry so much that it became the best way to get items, and ultimately players will do whatever is smartest. They will find the golden path and do what is most efficient.
You should play the game to get gear to kill the monsters. You shouldn't get gear to kill monsters because you will get bored too quickly. It stole people's reward curve is essentially what it did; it made it very easy for them to do it. So trading isn't a bad way to get items, but if it negates playing the game, then we've made a huge mistake. And we did, which is why we're shutting down the auction house.

WOO WOOOOOO!!! Here comes the clue train, last stop: you!   Zero bonus points.

Blizzard didn't invent the RMAH because they wanted the game to be more fun.  They invented it because some Blizzard executive was butthurt that someone somewhere was making money off of Diablo 2 and it wasn't him.  Since Blizzard's horrible RMAH-centric game balance totally broke the economy of the game and the spirits of most of the people who played it, they're finally removing it - but they're also all but removing in-game trading from the game altogether by "soulbinding" anything that's of any value whatsoever.  Yep, they're taking their ball and going home.

I don't know about you guys, but I never had a Diablo 2 game ruined because someone, somewhere was trading haX3d l007.  Maybe if you're some basement dweller who grinds in D2 not because it's fun but because you think it's something to brag about, you shed tears over that, but us healthy-minded people?  Not so much.  Leave the super-hardcore Libertarian mode for special ladder events with periodic resets or something and let the rest of us awkwardly attempt to trade for set items or whatever.  Most of us just wanted you to make gear drops not perpetually be 5-10 levels obsolete all game every game because Blizzard was more worried about the deflation of gold in the auction house than all else.

PC Gamer: Sounds like the majority of your efforts since launch have been based around responding to fan feedback. 

Martens: Yeah. And the auction house decision didn't come easy. It's not like the day we realized it was a mistake was when we could shut it down. A lot of things had to come together for us to get to that point. And honestly, what the console build did with their loot system... what we have now we call "Loot 2.0," what they did I would call "Loot 1.5." They had no auction house inherently, more because they couldn't than anything else.
So it's been a learning process for us as well. And finally as the loot stuff came together; as the enchanting system was dialed in; as our new legendaries were coming online, we realized that we could get rid of the auction house and get rid of that reward curve problem without causing new problems of people going back to trade scams or people feeling like they couldn't have any fun gear. Now we can give it away like candy, along with all of these ways that people can upgrade it, and all these crazy powers. And you can get it the way you're supposed to, which is by killing a monster and taking it from them.

Whatever you say, Oprah.  You know what else you could do?  Make a proper fucking Diablo 2 successor.  But sure, free candy.

PC Gamer: What else have you learned since the launch of Diablo III? 

Martens: I think the randomness thing. We should have made everything random from the start. So the reason we didn't have random exterior zones was because we wanted the game to have more of that real RPG feel; that the world was real and had a sense of place. And like the loot problem, until Loot 2.0 was really dialing in, it was hard for us to figure out what to do with the auction house; it was the same with the randomness. Until the other aspects that made the game more RPG and more connected to the world were dialed in... you know, we've gotten better at storytelling since Diablo III; the world map that comes with Adventure Mode makes Sanctuary feel a lot more real just because you have a map of it, if nothing else, and that's a relatively simple solution to the problem. All of that made us comfortable with introducing randomized exterior zones as well.

I seriously doubt that they've gotten better at it.  The whole premise of Adventure Mode is that they let you opt out of having every NPC in the game from Azmodan to Zoltan Koole chew your fucking ear off.  You're charging $40 to turn off your obnoxious and shitty content?  Christ, give me a fucking break.  Maybe I should uninstall the game now before they come up with a way to charge for that, too...

Paolilli: Yeah, and that's actually one of my favorite things that we've done. With the map you have that sense of place, whereas before I think the environments looked great, but you didn't really have that sense of how everything is connected. And I think the map and the ability to go anywhere and do anything helps. 

Martens: Dynamic Difficulty is another great example of that. We had our old-school linear difficulty that was inherited from the past, where you had to play through normal, nightmare, and so on. Dynamic Difficulty, which we made for Adventure Mode, allowed us to break that dichotomy for the game as well because otherwise we would have had to have a version of a monster for every possible level. So if you played Act II, we would have to have a Level 31, 32, 33... all the way up to 70 version of every monster for it to be fun. The overall Dynamic Difficulty system removed that burden and let us focus on a grander vision for our gameplay.

Dynamic Difficulty is a great example of how Blizzard Entertainment sucks balls.  It's what lots of people hated about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and they're implementing it across the board for Diablo 3 with no opt-out why?  Because balancing the game twice would be hard. Well, they're kind of right, in that they can't even be bothered to balance the game once, Waller Vortex Frozen Mortar Desecrator, WTFBBQGLBTQLOLOL.

Here's the current state of game balance:  Playing on Normal is like playing Torchlight 1 on Easy.  Playing on Master, the highest difficulty available before level 60, feels like having good gear and being a little overleveled in Nightmare in Diablo 2.  You know what's harder than that?  Skipping side-quests and taking on challenges before you're properly leveled in any Diablo game at any time in history before this goddamned patch.  And you have to hit the level cap before you can have any challenge.  Just go ahead replace the playable characters by the cast of The Golden Girls, because at Blizzard, life begins at 60.

(Or 70, after the expansion.  But fuck that.)

PC Gamer: On that note, it seems like Adventure Mode is kind of the main selling point of Reaper of Souls. Is that fair to say?Martens: Yeah, I would say that's it. I would call Adventure Mode the primary feature of the expansion. That said, I think Act V is our best act, so we did take everything we learned there. And you do have to kill Malthael once with one character before Adventure Mode is unlocked. But knowing that you don't have to play story mode over and over again allows people to relax and just enjoy Act V for what it is; and they may or may not come back to it after that, but they don't have to. It doesn't feel as onerous to sit through those things. 

PC Gamer: There have been some fans on the internet who have expressed concern that Reaper of Souls may be a bit pricey for the content that it delivers. What are you feelings on that? 

Martens: I don't know about pricing as such, but I would say that the Adventure Mode changes the game pretty much completely. It's totally different. And it's not like a linear thing anymore. You don't just kill Malthael anymore and the game is done. And I think that was a little too much the case, unfortunately, in Diablo III. That's not the case anymore. When you kill Malthael, now you're finally starting Reaper of Souls. As good as Act V is, once you get into Adventure Mode and you see the promise of everything random that Diablo does; that makes replayability the point of the game. It's not linear anymore so you're experience is different everytime you come in.

I already addressed this, see: $40, getting Azmodan to shut the fuck up.  It's nice that they've finally woken up and smelled the spunkgargleweewee, though.  I think.

PC Gamer: Are you happy with the state of PVP as it is right now?Martens: Well, [Brawling Mode] is okay, and it can be really fun if you've got two people of similar level. PVP is still something we talk about a lot. [Former Diablo III director] Jay Wilson wrote a long blog post a couple Decembers or Januarys ago explaining why what we tried didn't work out. And that stuff is still the case. 

Mostly IDGAF because I came for the PvE, but PvP will probably have game-wide consequences, which I'll get to later.

PC Gamer: What would you say to the players who felt turned off by Diablo III at launch and gave up? 

Martens: It's crazy awesome now (laughs). You're going to get the keys to the Ferrari. I use the car metaphor deliberately. If you had a Corolla before and you're watching people swing by in their Lamborghini all the time; well, everyone gets a Lamborghini now. Everyone gets a shot at it now. Legendaries are dropping now from Level 10 onward, and we have put code in to ensure that everyone gets some legendaries, and a chance at the wacky powers as well.

So the promise of what Diablo can give you, everyone gets a taste of it. And there's still lots to earn for the people who put in the time; they're still going to get better things and more things. But everybody gets some of it. Our game director called that philosophy "endgame for everybody," and he didn't mean that you have to get to Level 70 to start earning Paragon Points to get the endgame. He wanted to take that stuff and move it earlier in the game so people wouldn't have to put in hundreds of hours. However, if you put in hundreds of hours, you still get more. 

Paolilli: Yeah, we've done a lot of work to make sure that no matter how much time you put in, whether you're having a short play session or going for a lot longer that you're going to get rewarded for that amount of time. We want to give that sense of infinite possibility where the more time you put in the more you will get, but you don't have to play like an endgame player would in order to get rewarded.

 Jesus, you're thick.  Slap them with DRM with one hand, and 2-second pings with the other, and with your third hand, slap them with the RMAH game balance.  And then turn around and bribe everyone with free Lambourghinis and a pre-launch 50% experience buff.  And while you're at it, pick a random number between 2 and 12, and multiply your damage by that number.

Handing out Lamborghinis?  You need to get the fuck out of California, dude.  What kind of mouthbreather plays Diablo 3 wanting to rack up five Legendaries before the end of Act 1?  It would be one thing if this were just the pendulum swinging a bit too far after they removed the RMAH, and even then, that's the sort of thing that should get sorted out in Beta.  But this goes way beyond all that.  This is just an old-fashioned transparent bribe, and it would take a delusional nitwit to expect this state of affairs to persist for long.

I predict that a few months after Reaper of Souls comes out, they're going to wring their hands and nerf the crap out of everything as a part of their "PvP balance" patch.  They might also make a hat tip to some l33t g4m3rz who get butthurt that "casual" players are able to obtain the same gear as they are.

Diablo 2 didn't thrust guaranteed legendaries in your face.  That's because it didn't have to, because Diablo 2 was a goddamned good game that was worth playing.  You didn't want to play the endgame at level one because you were in it for the fucking journey.  You got to the endgame when you were damned well built up for it, and not a moment sooner.  The skills you opted into at level 6 anticipated what you were going to do at 18 and at 30, and you were hungry for that next multiple of 6.  You weren't finding yourself sighing and groaning every time you gained a level because LOLOL YOU JUST GAINED A COUPLE RUNES AND NOW THESE TWO SKILLS ARE BETTER THAN THE ONES YOU HAVE NOW, TIME TO RESPEC.

Yeah, Diablo 3 is so totally awesome now.  Try convincing your friends of that now, with your account at Paragon Level 50 and holding onto big fat wad of cash you're not allowed to share with them.  Deck yourself out in full gear and run around one-shotting everything with your character who's effectively 10 levels higher than they are.

No, Blizzard has no fucking clue what Diablo 2 fans liked about Diablo 2, and they don't give a rat's ass.  But they do know that everyone likes Ferraris!  So now they're injecting little hits of Level 70 power surges throughout the game in the form of Lamborghinis that go obsolete after an hour or so, just in time for the 2015 Lamborghini to drop.

Anyway... stay the fuck away from Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls.  Blizzard has to fail for the benefit of PC gaming as a whole.

This isn't a call for a boycott.  A boycott is when you don't buy a shampoo because they test it on dogs and that upsets you.  This is a simple case of not buying a turd sandwich with extra spunkgargleweewee because it's a goddamned turd sandwich with extra spunkgargleweewee, for fuck's sake.