Q about D3...

[Goins2754]

Hey everyone,

First off, I hope general chat is the place for this question. I'm not intentionally posting in the wrong spot if the thread should be somewhere else. Second, I know TankSpot's more of a WoW site, but I really didn't know where else to ask as I'm not a big Diablo fan.

All of that said, I have a question about the Diablo series. Can someone explain to me how this game works as far as multiplayer? I mean, I played Diablo and just barely started DII. It's more of a single player adventure game. Right? Why would someone need an auction house or need to buy gear from other people? Don't you just play the game, beat it, then come back to WoW?

Thinking of making the switch,

Goins2754

[Durenas]

The Diablo series in general isn't heavily multiplayer focussed but you can play with your friends on servers. It's not an MMO, but it does have some multiplayer. There are also 'duels' which is apparently a feature in D3. The major reason(s) why they're introducing this system is 1: there are third party sites out there selling diablo 2 items(diablo 1 items too?) and those sites are unsupported, unreliable, and frankly, risky. Blizz wants to discourage people from using them, and they'd rather do that by providing a viable alternative. So they're making an official auction house for people to trade in. Sounds good to me. The number 2: reason, and this is my own speculation, they're basically using this as a 'test case' to see how well the system will work with real currency, and if it does well, they may add it to their other games(WoW). How they would implement it in WoW is totally speculative right now, but I imagine it could function similarly with very little in the way of alterations. BoE's sellable for real money? Check! BoP's tradeable for real currency? Nope! Can't sell them on the existing AH. Selling ingame gold for real money? Ah this is where it gets interesting. There are quite a few players now, sitting on gold-capped toons. Will they be able to turn that into real-world money? Who knows?

[Goins2754]

Thanks for explaining, but I still can't understand why someone would buy something with real money for something in a mainly single-player game. The way I'm envisioning it from your description is kinda like Gauntlet. I can play online with my friends or in single player; but mainly, it sounds just a game that you beat and you're done.

[PimpJuice4]

Don't you just play the game, beat it, then come back to WoW?

i hope not,maybe all the whiney kids who complain all the time about WoW will finally shut up and quit playing WoW and go whine about diablo 3

[Kazeyonoma]

Moved to Off topic (no worries).

on topic though:

the multiplayer aspect was grouping to play with friends, leveling faster in large kill mobs, increasing your item finding capabilities by having more players in the specific game you were in (more players increases the monster level in the game you're in which increases their drop chance/range as well as experience, but likewise their difficulty).

The AH is useful because there was no real system of selling items that you found in the game itself. If i was playing my sorceress for example, and i found a unique balrog skin, this was going to be worth a lot because it's one of the best items in the game, but as a sorc, i didn't need it, and unless i planned on leveling a paladin or barbarian myself, it was useless to me, and would take up inventory space, but of course, i don't want to just toss it since it's worth a lot to SOMEONE. so there were only a few ways to get something out of it. a) join games named trade xxxx, and try to offer it around spending LOTS of in game time just bartering it around to see if i can get anything useful for it, and because there's no centralized location of stuff, it's hard to determine the actual worth, (easily scammed into getting items way below their value); or I'd go to a site like d2jsp (legitimate safe site) and I'd make a post there, and ask people to give me their best offer, and hopefully someone wants it, and has something i want, and i know enough about pricing (can ask on the site itself) and make a fair trade, then arrange for a time for both of us to log on and make the trade. All of this while awesome and better than joining random games, was still difficult because of the innate time it took to search,post, find a buyer, and arrange a meeting time. Like i play in the dead of night, and i so do my friends, but the people who want to buy my item log off by 9pm my time cuz they're from the east coast. Now what?

Cash shop aside, the AH exists as a means to further grow the d3 economy much better than d2 did.

Also there's going to be legitimate pvp/arena/battlegrounds of some sort from what they released at blizzcon, so that's another aspect of group/multiplayer play that will take place.

Can you play it solo? of course, but there's fun in playing with other people as well. There is no real "beating the game" in diablo, sure you can beat baal on hell difficulty, but that's not really the end of the game, the game was about making the best fire sorc, or making the best dueling pally, and to do this you had to farm or trade for the best pieces of gear, so you could have something to show for your time/effort. Or make another char, and level THAT one, to see if you like that class better, or to make use of items you found with your other char. etc etc. Now with pvp there's even more reason to want to do this.

[Skyborn]

Diablo is all about playing with other people, imo. Its nearly impossible to smoothly solo things in Hell (unless you're super rich and have the perfect gear/build) due to all the immunes you run into.