Are you still playing Diablo 3?

A lot of people have been asking this question. Diablo 3 was meant to be Blizzard's big smash of a game for this year, the third instalment of an incredibly successful series. It was meant to be a game that would be constantly replayable, and have people happily prowling its dungeons for years. And yet, it's becoming more and more obvious that, somewhere along the ten year development road, Blizzard messed up. The number of people still playing Diablo 3 is nowhere near the number of sales it had, and I think I can pick out at least a few reasons why.

Number one: no offline mode. I mentioned this in my previous Diablo post, about how you must be online to play the game at all, no other option. I was not the only one irritated by this. A lot of other people complained, and it proved to be a huge downfall for both Blizzard and the players (particularly as being required to be online to play was not advertised before hand, as far as I'm aware). I think I know why they've done it this way - to facilitate the Auction House - but it sure sucks. My opinion? You should have been able to play offline whenever you like, but the moment you try to connect to the Auction House to buy / sell things, THEN require the internet to upload your character info to their servers. Would that have been so difficult? Really?

Number two: difficulty. The difference in difficulty between normal mode and nightmare is apparently incredibly vast. A lot of cynics out there think the reason for this is to encourage people to spend money in the Auction House for better gear. I, unfortunately, also believe this. There is absolutely no reason to make a portion of the game so difficult that any equipment you find in that section is too weak for you to survive through it, unless you intend to make money off of people by making them buy better gear with real money. If this was not the intention, why not make the difficulty of the levels in line with the gear you get from those same levels? I've not yet gotten past normal mode, but already I'm dreading it.

Number three: the patches. The focus of this game used to be on finding the coolest items you can. That was always the joy I had, in finding something unique, or the last piece of that armour set, or a weapon that makes all the enemies turn into blood splatters the minute you walk into the dungeon. However, there have been patches to this game that have, effectively, pushed the game away from that idea. Patch 1.0.3 is the worst offender. A great deal of the numbers that handled when, what kind, and how much loot is dropped have been reduced, making it far more difficult to acquire items of worth unless you spend hours and hours of time in the hope of picking up ONE good weapon or armour piece. In addition, things in the game environment which used to drop items (such as barrels and other destructible objects) no longer drop them at all, and in fact will rarely even drop gold. The direct result of this? I no longer bother to destroy the hundreds of barrels / urns / various other destructible things in the environment. I walk right past them, because I know there's nothing of value in them. They have effectively become unnecessary clutter. And why has that been done, one might ask? Give you one guess.

I can't help but notice a theme here. Every problem I have with this game so far has been directly connected to Blizzard's insistence on including that bloody Auction House. It feels like they are sacrificing good game content in the hopes of scraping money out of the bottom of their players' barrels. Oh wait, except barrels don't have anything in them any more, do they?

So here's my plan. I'm going to continue to play my current character until I finish the normal difficulty. (We won't even get into the long rant about how I had to scratch my level 36 monk and start over because they also killed attack speed by 50% in a single patch, and my monk could no longer hit things fast enough to kill them before being killed herself.) Once I've beaten the game on normal, it's going to get put away. I refuse to spend my money in the Auction House. I refuse to so much as look at it, because I see it as a waste of time, money, and resources. Perhaps I'm being stubborn here. Or perhaps Blizzard will realise how badly they messed up when their players get tired of everything they loved about this series being stripped away.