As both a scientist and avid Diablo 2 player, this blog post is laughable in its superficiality and its claims.
TL;DR: Diablo 3 was WoWified: broke itemization and skill builds, and thus replayability.
In D3, finding a rare item is "ID, does it have those stats? Yes: keep, No: salvage". Brainless.
In D2, finding a rare item is "ID, weird combination of stats, but I don't think anyone wants this so I'll throw it away, go to d2jsp and find some absurdly rich player wanting that ridiculous combination and kicking yourself for vendoring it".
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Background: thousands of hours manually farming and botting Diablo 2 since vanilla release, equivalent time spent trading/on d2jsp (most of this will refer to 1.09 since that is most fresh in my mind). Also lvl 60 demon hunter in Diablo 3 Inferno Act 3.
Please don't argue that D2 was just as broken on release. The D3 team had YEARS of experience to look back on.
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1) D2 was all about plowing through monsters. If you were underleveled or undergeared, bosses should be somewhat difficult. If you were reasonably prepared, bosses should be fairly easy. If you even had decent gear, bosses should be a joke.
D3, on the other hand, treats everything like a WoW raid. Hours of grinding to prepare for a fight, min-maxing forcing everyone into a single class or build (energy armor wizard or PMS demon hunter?), and even then, the fights are difficult( vs champions/elites).
Why is this important? Because D2 was so "easy", many many skill builds were viable. Wanted to roll a melee sorc? Go ahead. Fishymancer ( = pet wd in d3)? Works. Throwing barb? Surprisingly strong. Thorns + fire aura pally? Too good.
The proliferation of crazy builds is important, as it makes a MUCH larger proportion of items valuable. This will tie in with the next point.
--
2) D3 itemization is broken. First, there are very, very few item stats that are important. Weapon DPS, main stat, vitality, resist all. Maybe atk speed, crit, crit dmg, move speed. Everything else is garbage. Health globe radius, seriously?
What made many D2 builds viable was the much larger variety of item effects, as well as lack of dependence on stats. Life tap wands made smiters useful, enigma was good for everyone, infinity runeward allowed lightning sorcs and javazons to fight lightning immune, etc.
--
3) Rare items. The above 2 problems, when taken together, kill the D3 end-game. D2 was all about making a MF build, getting some money, then making a bunch of crazy characters, either min-maxing MF or PVP or Baal runs or something, but there was a ton of variety in what you could do. End game economy revolved around rare items.
In D3, finding a rare item is "ID, does it have those stats? Yes: keep, No: salvage". Brainless.
In D2, finding a rare item is "ID, weird combination of stats, but I don't think anyone wants this so I'll throw it away, go to d2jsp and find some absurdly rich player wanting that ridiculous combination and kicking yourself for vendoring it". This means that botting was difficult, because the really big $$ items are ones you wouldn't even recognize, and stash size was a limitation.
--
Anyways, that's why I stopped playing D3. I really don't think they can fix these problems without very large patches, which seems unlikely coming from actiblizzard.
I'm kind of sad that this was downvoted. I thought on hacker news downvotes were used for factually incorrect or trolling posts, and I don't think this post is either.
Can I get an explanation for the downvotes at least?
I read the post and am not sure why people downvoted. I have sneaking suspicion that because snarky, trolling posts are universally disallowed, people resort to snarky downvoting. Not the best solution, but I guess people need an outlet. I upvoted you to counter a little.
Anyway, this is more of a personal question. I was wondering if you've actually looked deeper into the personal question of why loot drops, etc, even constitute a reward. This is not blackberry juice! It is manipulation of RAM that affects the display. I play D3, and the closest I've come to understand is that it's the challenge of maintaining forward progress against increasing resistance. In which case the OP is correct - one waits for resistance to grow too high, go the AH, buy new gear.
The other option, of course, is to adopt/discover a new strategy (which can then drive your gear choices, of course). But really my question (which is still a bit perplexing) is why I want to maintain forward progress going through content that I've already seen.
I think the reason is a combination of different aspects, with varying proportions of each for different people.
I would agree that one of those aspects is surmounting obstacles.
For me, and I would argue for the majority of hardcore Diablo players, the main aspect is market manipulation. It feels GOOD to buy cheap and sell, or find some inefficiency in the market and exploit and profit.
Diablo is essentially the free market at its best and worst, and I find it amazingly addicting to go from rags to riches, and the power that comes with that. If you are rich enough, you can essentially create a niche market by yourself.
There was this insanely rich guy on d2jsp that offered large amounts of currency for the most ridiculously bad items. This "make people do stuff for me" power is even apparent at lower levels of the heirarchy. I remember finally reaching "middle-class" status and going into trade games and offering somewhat valuable items to new players in exchange for them doing inane things like bringing me tedious (unnecessary) quest items, or answering trivia.
Other aspects are pride in skill builds (I want to try this ridiculous skill build and show it's viable), showing off items ( through faster PvE, more wins in PvP, etc )... many more probably.
Status is such an interesting, and compelling, enticement for behavior. Even entirely synthetic status, like D3, has it's advocates. In that case, we can say that the dopamine spikes occur during status events.
Perhaps that's D3's real problem - the dearth of status events. Perhaps PvP will sove that problem for ActiBlizzard.
(Personally, I don't think I'm motivated by status events. I'm more motivated by puzzle solving, and although D3 has some puzzles, particularly in the meta-game, they aren't particularly compelling to me.)
Firstly, you can't use a term like status and then apply it across the entire D3 player base. The edge cases here are complete player types which make a sizeable portion of the player base.
I think that status correctly summarizes the incentive that the grand parent post describes. And from what I know about gamers I think he's onto something. It may be a more local status; e.g. within a close network of friends, but status is potent.
If you do not want to apply it across the player base, fine. But one must provide an alternative, perhaps some partition across the base according to motivation. I'd be interested to see that from you.
1. I don't see any results. Even the supplamentary link [http://www.nickyee.com/cpb-supp.html] doesn't break down, say, top responses as fractions.
2. In the list of MMORPGs WoW is not listed. That seems strange, casting doubt on this study.
3. The word "status" is the 5th word in table 1.
It's great that there are multiple motivations, but I'd like to see which motivations are most prominent in the sample. That is, are 80% motivated by achievement, 50% by social, and 40% immersion? (And note that in this case, the percentages don't need to add to 100).
It's an old sampling, and even with or without wow it makes no difference.
As I have said elsewhere you can go to the dwarf fortress forums and you will find status to be a far lesser motivator than doing cool stuff.
Gaming is studied pretty extensively nowadays, I pulled the first result you get for video games plus motivation. A few further google searches will help illuminate this further for you.
I'm wondering why some pixel changes constitute a reward, and others don't. To wit, the pixels that represent your bank balance are far more impactful, and yet people don't get addicted to watching those pixels.
Well that seems like you are mixing having fun with making fully rational decisions.
From a more scientific position - games like d3 and wow use multiple skinnarian reinforcement mechanism to keep people engaged. Regular schedule reinforcement comes from the xp bar which was made huge so that your regular growth on that is visible. Then variable reinforcement comes from random drops. Getting a shiny new blade is fun because it's useful and makes killing things satisfying. Hence it has value.
There was a really old article (bbc I think) where the op Ed explained one other really important aspect of why games can suck people in : they provide huge fat pipes of data perfectly tuned for the brain to consume.
So that's another reason games and their rewards are so addictive, they are immediate feedback and information in a way the brain craves.
In the end there is no deeper reason. You could ask why people like playing any game with no monetary reward and a luck/loot component. It's just fun.
Status matters only to some sub section of gamers.
Quite a bit more just want to blow stuff up. You should see the corpses of CS players caused by griefers back in the day for example.
Others, such as dwarf fortress or minecraft forums where creating stuff is the key thing and status is secondary or irrelevant.
Similarly during wow, my more hardcore friends soon tired of the base game and meta gamed the auction house instead. At the same time a larger portion didn't care at all for that.
But my theory is that while you provide some good information both your format and tone are not really in line with people here.
I took no offense coming from a hacking perspective, as it's normal to be fairly caustic. But this is merely called hacker news, it's mostly for startups related to the tech industry.
I only come here for the occasional papers and such, but little programmatically is learned. I even asked for employment advice at one point and it was probably the slowest and least visited ASK HN that day, despite some person of "i need handout" quality having a very popular one the same day.
Haha, I can understand that the intersection of hardcore Diablo 2 players and startup enthusiasts is small ( I'm well aware games are fun, but are a completely unproductive use of time :) ).
I guess this really isn't the proper place to discuss this topic, as the longevity of Diablo 2 can only really be understood by players who contribute to that longevity, ie put in many, many hours.
"Because D2 was so "easy", many many skill builds were viable."
Well said. Tweaking and experimenting, rather than constantly and tediously fighting for your life (which is rendered all the more pointless when you realize one amazing piece of gear can fix it for you).
D3 is even worse than that. I was having so much trouble with A2 inferno that I went and bought fantastic gear from A4 inferno on the AH.
Normal mobs still pretty much 4-shot me. I have to kite EVERYTHING. I'm pretty sure I could have the best gear possible in the game and still die in less than 10 hits, less for elites/champions.
TL;DR: Diablo 3 was WoWified: broke itemization and skill builds, and thus replayability.
In D3, finding a rare item is "ID, does it have those stats? Yes: keep, No: salvage". Brainless.
In D2, finding a rare item is "ID, weird combination of stats, but I don't think anyone wants this so I'll throw it away, go to d2jsp and find some absurdly rich player wanting that ridiculous combination and kicking yourself for vendoring it".
--
Background: thousands of hours manually farming and botting Diablo 2 since vanilla release, equivalent time spent trading/on d2jsp (most of this will refer to 1.09 since that is most fresh in my mind). Also lvl 60 demon hunter in Diablo 3 Inferno Act 3.
Please don't argue that D2 was just as broken on release. The D3 team had YEARS of experience to look back on.
--
1) D2 was all about plowing through monsters. If you were underleveled or undergeared, bosses should be somewhat difficult. If you were reasonably prepared, bosses should be fairly easy. If you even had decent gear, bosses should be a joke.
D3, on the other hand, treats everything like a WoW raid. Hours of grinding to prepare for a fight, min-maxing forcing everyone into a single class or build (energy armor wizard or PMS demon hunter?), and even then, the fights are difficult( vs champions/elites).
Why is this important? Because D2 was so "easy", many many skill builds were viable. Wanted to roll a melee sorc? Go ahead. Fishymancer ( = pet wd in d3)? Works. Throwing barb? Surprisingly strong. Thorns + fire aura pally? Too good.
The proliferation of crazy builds is important, as it makes a MUCH larger proportion of items valuable. This will tie in with the next point.
--
2) D3 itemization is broken. First, there are very, very few item stats that are important. Weapon DPS, main stat, vitality, resist all. Maybe atk speed, crit, crit dmg, move speed. Everything else is garbage. Health globe radius, seriously?
What made many D2 builds viable was the much larger variety of item effects, as well as lack of dependence on stats. Life tap wands made smiters useful, enigma was good for everyone, infinity runeward allowed lightning sorcs and javazons to fight lightning immune, etc.
--
3) Rare items. The above 2 problems, when taken together, kill the D3 end-game. D2 was all about making a MF build, getting some money, then making a bunch of crazy characters, either min-maxing MF or PVP or Baal runs or something, but there was a ton of variety in what you could do. End game economy revolved around rare items.
In D3, finding a rare item is "ID, does it have those stats? Yes: keep, No: salvage". Brainless.
In D2, finding a rare item is "ID, weird combination of stats, but I don't think anyone wants this so I'll throw it away, go to d2jsp and find some absurdly rich player wanting that ridiculous combination and kicking yourself for vendoring it". This means that botting was difficult, because the really big $$ items are ones you wouldn't even recognize, and stash size was a limitation.
--
Anyways, that's why I stopped playing D3. I really don't think they can fix these problems without very large patches, which seems unlikely coming from actiblizzard.