Diablo: What fresh hell is this?

[sei]

a lot of y'all still don't get it

unique holders can use multiple malfeasance tokens on a single pain shard

so if you have 3 malfeasance tokens and 1 pain shard you can create three new shards

Tonight's helltide event is essentially a minting event for both wound imps and tortured gift chests

I thought the new itemization bullshit doesn't go in until season 1?

[sei]

in other news the drop rate for Harlequin's Quest was way too fucking high when they first let helltide chests drop uniques so now a lot of people have a ton of awesome helms and anyone who missed the gold rush can get fucked

it's a blizzard game kids; exploit early, exploit often

[atog]

A lot of this kind of shit is genuinely unintentionally exploitive, but I would not put it past any corp to seed in an overtuned reward or two on purpose, to feed the FOMO rush of early birds. As soon as there's enough buzz, the nerf patch comes along and removes or nerfs the honeypot because other unintended glitches lend these some plausibility.

This is nearly impossible to prove, but some game companies make such a habit of it every season that it's almost certainly deliberate. Early buzz about a giant loophole or currency printing glitcheroo fills up servers fast.

[Friday]

god, I'm so glad I don't give a shit about Diablo anymore.

And this is coming from a top 100 seasonal player and a top 500 non-seasonal player in d3. For those who don't know what that means, it means I grinded the everliving fuck out of d3. I fucking loved these games but my god does it feel good to just not have to care about this horseshit anymore.

Same feeling when I quit WoW and Overwatch for good. The best part of Blizzard games, for me, is leaving them behind.

[Mongrel]

god, I'm so glad I don't give a shit about Diablo anymore.

And this is coming from a top 100 seasonal player and a top 500 non-seasonal player in d3. For those who don't know what that means, it means I grinded the everliving fuck out of d3. I fucking loved these games but my god does it feel good to just not have to care about this horseshit anymore.

Same feeling when I quit WoW and Overwatch for good. The best part of Blizzard games, for me, is leaving them behind.

Yeah, when I uninstalled Battle.net (IIRC it was after they'd censured the player from HK, but I already hadn't played in months by then) I was like "sweet. done with this dogshit."

Not once have I seriously missed playing OW, and I really hadn't played any other Blizz game in years.

[atog]

On another game server for a shitty clone of D2/D3:

<Fuck You GGG>: blizz is like that gf that cheats on you 38 times but u still pick up when she calls
<Basketball_Jones>: [Grinding Gear Games] is the drunken bf that beats you up every time you do literally anything outside of the kitchen, and throws a handful of nickels across the room for you to crawl around on hands and knees gathering them to buy yourself some tampons

[Thad]

Yeah, when I uninstalled Battle.net (IIRC it was after they'd censured the player from HK, but I already hadn't played in months by then) I was like "sweet. done with this dogshit."

Not once have I seriously missed playing OW, and I really hadn't played any other Blizz game in years.

The only thing on my battle.net account is Blizzard Arcade Collection.

Which is pretty great! They took the SNES version of Lost Vikings and added the extra levels from the Genesis version!

[Friday]

I said I would never give another dollar to Blizzard after the HK thing, and I won't. Everything after that (including the reveal of the Cosby room, Kotick leaving death threats on female employee answering machine, etc) would have also made me never give Blizzard another dollar, but at this point it's just overkill.

To be clear, I don't look down on anyone who continues to pay their sub to WoW or whatever. I'd prefer you to not, but I mean, everyone needs an escape, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, we live in a society, etc etc

A lot of my friends still play WoW (they've moved over to Classic at this point) and they keep trying to get me to play by offering to pay my sub. Which is not the ethical workaround they think it is as Blizzard will still be getting a dollar they wouldn't have otherwise.

I also don't blame people for shopping at WalMart, especially if they're poor and they can't afford otherwise (or in some rural cases, literally have no other options otherwise, as WalMart infamously destroys all other business in rural towns before itself closing down and leaving the town a dead husk) but I'm still not gonna shop there. Virtue signalling? Just doing it because it makes me feel better? Sure, if that's how you have to think of me so you yourself can "feel better" about your own choices then go right the fuck ahead. Then we can both be in the same boat made of bullshit, I guess. This is a tired fucking argument with no points to be made on either side. The "spice must flow" crowd don't give a shit about anything ethical or otherwise and talking to them is a waste of my fucking time.

[Friday]

The quadruple joke is if I actually took direct action, like, say, infiltrating and literally blowing up the servers that host WoW, thereby not "just doing it to virtue signal" those same people who talk shit about how my actions are meaningless and designed only to make me feel morally superior (they're not, again, it's a personal thing) would cry rivers of fucking tears and call me a terrorist. You cannot win in the realm of debate with the spice must flow crowd. And you don't need to.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I've played games by some companies with rotten and hostile practices and the industry as a whole is in a pretty terrible place, but I'm mostly sure that as bad as say, GGG is, they probably don't have roving rape gangs running around their offices.

[Z%rø]

I still play WoW classic but it's basically like bowling league raiding at this point. I show up, I hang out with a group of friends I've made over the last 3 years or so. We shoot the shit and kill some bosses. I'm dipping after WOTLK Classic - that's where the ride stops. (We have blood bowl leagues sometimes, so I'll hang out with them outside of WoW.)

With D4, I got it at a deep discount in a moment of weakness and it just plays like shit compared to 3.

D3 was so fluid, punchy, and felt good. Your character felt strong in the way the ability mechanics worked (even if number wasn't big), and everything felt great. D4 feels like you never stop being level 1 in D&D.

[sei]

I still play WoW classic but it's basically like bowling league raiding at this point. I show up, I hang out with a group of friends I've made over the last 3 years or so. We shoot the shit and kill some bosses.

I've been calling WoW raiding a knitting circle for gaming nerds for years.

In other news, I had fun playing TB rogue at D4's release and I'll probably play again at some point, but the patch notes surrounding season 1 didn't particularly excite me. Grim Dawn is supposed to be getting a big patch soon and PoE will have a new season, so I can probably entertain myself with one of those or Baldur's Gate III.

Also, TIL the forums don't support emoji.

[Mongrel]

It's the same in PoE where all we do is leave the client on so we can shitpost (and occasionally sell something).