I remember the endless complaints about how hard Diablo 3 was at launch. I therefore find it hard to believe you were able to accumulate enough ingame gold to buy gear 'within a few days' that allowed you to handle 'most everything', except by buying gold. In games like Diablo, buying ingame items or currency is roughly analogous to shooting yourself in the foot with a cannon, because you effectively remove the end-game for yourself.
I wish people like you would stop judging the game by its version 1.0.0, rather than the 1.0.8 we're at now. People are no longer penalized longer and longer for dying and playing in groups is now actively rewarded.
I would quite seriously invite you to give the game a second try. Diablo 3 is by no means a perfect game (for example, public game discovery is still abysmal, and ingame communication is practically non-existent), but it has improved a lot since it came out, in many small but significant ways. I fully expect that the expansion will further improve the game, as indeed it did for Diablo 2.
In 2 days, I was in Inferno. That was not the intention of the game designers. I never bought ingame currency, but I know the laws of supply and demand and dealt with the game accordingly. If you're telling me that I should've just pretended the AH didn't exist, I would say that you're telling me not to play D3.
I wish people like you would stop telling me how to feel. I don't think you have some superposition that lets you judge me and I wish you'd separate me from my opinions. I am a person, I have opinions, but when you say "people like me" you lump me into a general audience and I don't think that's ok. I don't speak for anyone other than myself.
I would quite seriously invite you to consider that I invested a lot of time into D3 and played through a number of updates. I know exactly what I wanted out of a D3 experience and I can tell you in excruciating detail how it failed; this isn't the time or place for that.
The fact is, it took almost a decade for the game to come out, why the fuck did it have to ship as an unplayable pile of crap?
Sorry, I'm not trying to be offensive, but you're asking for patience when, as a consumer, I've been basically told that my investment in the game isn't enough for Blizzard: they need to make money off of my invested hours as well. I'm happy that Blizzard is improving the game but I'm not willing to give them any more of my time after what I view as a waste of my time.
It's true Diablo games improve over time, but wow was D3 a steaming pile of garbage when it launched. I mean if they had just implemented D2 with new graphics and content, it would've been glorious.
Anyways, I'm sorry to rant, but the crux of my point is that you can't attack me personally for my opinions and expect to have a good discussion. I concede the point that Blizzard might be getting better, but it also doesn't matter, for me.
Diablo 3 wasn't hard at launch. It was so trivially easy that the first run through the game was considered the 'tutorial level' - the entire game was considered tutorial.
I played at a friend's place and was utterly bored by how easy that first run-through was. I don't understand complaints of difficulty, though admittedly I abandoned the entire mindspace of D3 just because it was so mindbogglingly easy. Why would I play the entire game on 'super-easy' just to play it again on 'normal'?
No, because to get to that level of difficulty, you have to run through the game on 'stupid dumb easy' first.
I don't really understand complaints of difficulty when you've already experienced the game several times, and then when you pick the 'really, this is crazily hard' setting, it's too hard.
Yeah, the first three difficulties were really easy. Inferno was like a wall that you run into the first time you try it. I remember kicking Diablo's ass in Hell difficulty and then replaying Act 1 but in Inferno. Came across the first zombie in New Tristram and promptly died in two hits.
Does that make the game "good"? That they created an impossible gear wall in Inferno Act 2 that only certain classes could get past? The game creators admitted to never even playing the game on inferno difficulty pre launch. It's just more of the same.
Well, this game is super dumb and easy... let just crank the last 3 acts by 2000% to make up for it.
I haven't played since 1.02 (?), in which I was mopping the floor with standard mobs in Inferno Act 1, but couldn't kill any special mobs at all (in my memory they all seemed to have molten, arcane, fire-chains and vortex modifiers)
yup, that was the main point of frustration with Inferno.
white mobs were easy to deal with but Elite packs had disgusting affixes.
And then after grinding Act 1 (remember Butcher runs? lol) for about a month, you finally gear up enough to be able to easily kill Act 1 Elite packs.
Then you get to Act 2 and find yourself getting one-shotted by those stupid wasps (and we're not talking about Elite variety, these were just the regular wasps).
I wish people like you would stop judging the game by its version 1.0.0, rather than the 1.0.8 we're at now. People are no longer penalized longer and longer for dying and playing in groups is now actively rewarded.
I would quite seriously invite you to give the game a second try. Diablo 3 is by no means a perfect game (for example, public game discovery is still abysmal, and ingame communication is practically non-existent), but it has improved a lot since it came out, in many small but significant ways. I fully expect that the expansion will further improve the game, as indeed it did for Diablo 2.