orcishgamer: Back when we were competing for Grand Marshal that shit was not tolerated, with the advent of arenas maybe people care less about BGs, I really don't know. I do know being a part of the top end guilds on a server automatically gave you more credibility (yes, Blizzard really does show favoritism to them, progression guilds often got fucked up loot restored off of bosses, for example). A 3 day ban back then could put you back 3 weeks of progress for Grand Marshal/Warlord, btw, ultimate justice.

Sogi-Ya: heh, compare:

D3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=966PJgzUQfQ

Linage Eternal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYMgMxjK4c

grim dawn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfe0B_6AyhU&feature=related

Torchlight 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMx9hdMw1N8&feature=related

Summit: Already lost too much life playing Diablo 2. There are better games out there that won't ruin my social life. I'll pass

jefequeso: It's always been really interesting to me that there are many people who will decry WoW and Diablo and similar games, yet claim that the game stole massive amounts of their time.

redscores: They will buy of every genre that they liked before even though it looks horrible.

Diablo 3 looks pretty much like WoW now, the classes are pretty much wow classes (same stats, rage for the barbarian (warrior), energy for the rogue/monk (rogue and hunter) and of course mana for the sorceress.

Then additionally the ability of the barbarian... charge? WoW! exactly the same effect as the WoW charge (adds rage and stuns the enemy after charging)...

It is a carbon copy of WoW with Diablo Gameplay...

It is subclass game with a real money auction house that can be heavily abused by farmbots and awfully designed classes (seems to be the same mentality as wow...).

So yeah... hes just a sock puppet of the genre of a company that hasn't any identity anymore... starcraft becomes more and more C&C like, WoW becomes more and more "casualized" which fears away many customers (like me).

So yeah.... blind customers.

jefequeso: It's always been really interesting to me that there are many people who will decry WoW and Diablo and similar games, yet claim that the game stole massive amounts of their time.

Psyringe: It's actually not a contradiction if you consider how many games are designed nowadays. It's not necessary to make a _good_ game in order to have people sink massive amounts of their time into it. The key component for that is the reward system. If you design a reward system that constantly gives players rewards and that (even more importantly) constantly gives them the impression that the next reward is just dangling in front of them, then players will go through mind-numbing hours of senseless grinding just to get those rewards. Some never realize that the game isn't actually enjoyable any more and just employs some cheap psychological tricks to keep the players going - others do realize that, but need time until the insight sinks in. Those are the most likely to decry a game even though it stole a lot of their time.

LiquidOxygen80: I was already pretty excited about Torchlight 2 and Grim Dawn, but watching that Lineage Eternal video kinda made me wanna give it another go. I used to play the original Lineage back in the day, then kinda got out of MMOs all together.

LiquidOxygen80: I fully admit that I played both prior Diablos quite extensively. Single player. Offline. Eff Battle.net back then. Actually, eff Battle.net now. I'm not an anti-social gamer, but back then, the only type of people playing Diablo on b.net were primarily total assholes.

Lorfean: If you want to experience all the content an MMO has to offer, especially the big endgame dungeons/bosses, but also a lot of smaller "leveling" dungeons and even certain quests, you have no choice but to group with other people. That's the way MMO's are structured -- they force players into social interaction and cooperation and a large part of their content (including accessibility to endgame equipment) is build around that, and thus completely inaccessible to solo players.

Games like Diablo are basically single player games with a multiplayer component for those who prefer it. You can play the entire game by yourself, up to and including the most challenging dungeons and bosses on Inferno difficulty, and have access to all the equipment the game has to offer. Sure, Blizzard has added features that encourage social interaction, but it is not a requirement by any means.

orcishgamer: There's more and more MMOs every day that allow for solo play in all content, DDO springs to mind and as far as I know Wizard 101 allows solo play everywhere (nearly all MMOs geared towards kids do, in fact).

D3 has a bunch of stuff about it (forced common areas, online only, server side storage for characters, etc.) that aren't exclusively attributes of MMOs, but when taken together makes it look a whole lot more like a MMO than not. If you're only contention is that D3 cannot be a MMO because it allows single player for all content and group size is capped at 4, it's a weak one at best. Some MMOs allow for complete soloing (many more allow for 90% or more of their content to be soloed) and max party size is extremely arbitrary between MMOs, not all of them allow massive parties, some in fact are capped at relatively small party sizes.

jefequeso: It's always been really interesting to me that there are many people who will decry WoW and Diablo and similar games, yet claim that the game stole massive amounts of their time.

Lorfean: Look, I think you know very well what I am trying to say here -- when someone says "MMO" the image the comes to most people's minds is that of the "traditional" MMO: EverQuest 1/2, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes/Villains, Anarchy Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Aion, and more recently Rift, DC Universe Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic... Games in which you share the world with a *massive* amount of players, where social interaction and guild formation are encouraged, where grouping is required for high-end content, and so on. In my opinion Diablo simply does not fit that genre. At all. There is nothing Massively Multiplayer about D3's multiplayer component. It's a co-op mode of the single player campaign that allows you to play that exact campaign with up to three friends. That's it. D2's Battle.net mode stored your characters on Blizzard's servers too and required you to be online as well, does that make it a contender for the MMO genre? Hardly.

And for as far as I know D3 has no such thing as "forced common areas". If we agree on the definition of that term, that is -- to me, examples of forced common areas are the towns in Guild Wars and DDO; places where you are forced to share the zone you are in with other players, whether you like it or not, until you venture out into the instanced leveling zones where you can do your own thing. D3 has no such areas.

orcishgamer: No, I mean pretty much that, MMOs have evolved and gone in enough different directions that they no longer all fit into those narrow definitions. There really are MMOs that are patterned after fighting games (the Street Fighter and Soul Calibur kind) and all kinds of stuff.

Also, I've read that common areas in D3 actually will be rather large areas, a lot like Guild Wars.

Finally, no D2 wouldn't likely fit the category of MMO simply because single player play with no server connections was allowed.

I'll offer a different definition of MMO that clears this up a little better: Does the game require a server component, that is not part of the client, to play? Do you have, or can you get, a copy of this server application? If you answered Yes and No, respectively, then it very well may be a MMO, if you answered anything else it is probably not.