D3's 2.5 PTR backlash continues to amaze me

Seriously, I haven't seen press coverage like this of a Blizzard game, any Blizzard game, since D3's Error37-laden launch. It's amazeballs.

Today's gem comes from MMO Examiner:

The Diablo community are always one to voice their opinions, and a recent thread in particular has certainly got tails up on the official forums. Players have been called upon to sum up in one sentence the single worst thing about Diablo III.

This as expected prompted a number of diverse responses. There isn’t much of a recurrent theme, though a few players did point out their disdain for RNG (Random Number Generator), with users such as Zeddicuus stating: ” RNG on my gear for the quality of the gear that just RNG’d is getting a bit much.” For those unfamiliar, RNG in a nutshell is that stats on dropped items in Diablo III are randomly generated from a list of possible stats for that corresponding weapon/armor slot.

Others are quick to point out what has been a criticism ever since the content revealed at Blizzcon 2016, in that there is little to enjoy from re-releasing previous features. Province’s biggest problem is “Re-worked existing crap instead of new content.” Others go on to point out a lack of trading, no advanced skill tree system and a lack of creative freedom for players during the game.

The lack of robust RPG elements has been a sore point since the game launched without them, and then failed to add them in the Reaper of Souls expansion, and the game's over-dependence on items (and thus RNG) is a direct result of that. Any sufficient deep dive into D3's official forum will turn up thousands of posts on these subject, going all the was back to the pre-launch beta.

So, none of this new. Today is, however, the first time I've seen an item pop up in a Google News search that actually acknowledges these long-standing issues. You'd almost think that Blizzard had jumped the shark, or something.

GG, Blizzard. GG.

Yes, I'm still banging on about D3's latest PTR...

I can't help it. I'm finding the reaction Blizzard's latest D3 PTR to be rather fascinating.

The next take? Paul Tassi's, at Forbes.

Blizzard just rolled out the patch notes for 2.5.0 for Diablo 3, and while they are adding a few welcome features to the game, they show just how dry the well is starting to run as well.

Positive changes include new tabs for materials to free up stash space, a quasi-buff to bounty rewards, and a new “loadout” armory system where players can save not just gear, but skills, socketed gems and even Kanai Cube powers to be able to switch easily between builds.

[...]

But the one addition in the patch that’s managing to roll a lot of eyes in the yes-we’re-still-playing-Diablo community is the addition of Primal Ancient Legendary weapons.

Right now, there current system in place has Legendary/set weapons/armor that drop with special properties and increased stats over “normal” items. For a while now, there has been a chance for each of those items to drop as an “Ancient” variant, which has increased stat ranges in categories like Strength, Vitality, Intelligence, Resist All and so on.

Now, Primal Ancient Legendary Weapons will be even more rare, and have a chance to drop with even better stats than those.

Why is this bad? More powerful gear is fun right?

Yes and no. The problem is that this puts yet another insane level of RNG into the game as a way of artificially extending playtime without actually adding anything new or valuable. The concept of an “Ancient Ancient,” or a Primal Ancient, is the definition of pure power creep.

[...]

This may not be a big deal, but it’s emblematic of Blizzard sort of throwing in the towel when it comes to supporting Diablo 3 in what are apparently the last stages of its life. The Darkening of Tristam event was very underwhelming, and now the answer to “now what?” is just creating yet another god tier of items that push power creep up to new heights, and make players feel like the builds they’ve perfected so far are now trash.

What can I say? I agree with all of this.

I did take issue with one thing that Tassi wrote in his article, though, when he described the Armory as "something every game in this genre desperately needs." D3 definitely needed an Armory, because D3 doesn't have characters in the way that most RPGs have characters. Instead, D3 has loadouts, which means that switching around your equipped items changes your entire build. 

Games with robust RPG elements don't work this way. Path of Exile, for example, has a passive skill tree that profoundly affects the way your character plays, and which simply cannot be respec'ed in a few seconds with a couple of button clicks. PoE has characters, and encourages players to make more than one character in order to experiment with different builds and various game mechanics, all of which would render an Armory system like D3's useless. 

By saying that every game of this genre desperately needs an Armory-like system, Tassi is either saying (a) that Diablo III isn't an ARPG, or (b) that he knows very little about ARPGs, and needs to play some Path of Exile, stat. Or Torchlight II, or Grim Dawn, or Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem... or, really any real ARPG.

Go on, Paul. Give it a go. You're bored with D3, anyway.