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Blizzard Breaks For Independence As Kotick Plans $8.2 Billion Dollar Buyout
MojoKid writes "The CEO of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, announced this morning that he would lead an investor buyout of the company worth approximately $8.2 billion dollars. The move would free Blactivision (how has this moniker never caught on?) to become an independent publisher and free it from the clutches of Vivendi, the evil French entertainment conglomerate. Vivendi has reportedly been attempting to sell Activision Blizzard for years, due to an apparent hatred of actually turning a profit, given than the game developer owns some of the most popular franchises on Earth. Kotick has previously been known for his comments regarding exploiting game franchises and for gems like this: 'We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.'"
It's true that Researchers Implant False Memories in Mice but Activision has implanted Happy Memories in Gamers and erased all bad ones!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Like Hell they have, I was hoping TFA was about Blizzard finally breaking free from Kotick's money-grubbing, DLC-and-franchise-all-the-games!, clutches.
This may be the wrong crowd, but this exactly the kind of move that is to be expected of a CEO who's main job is making money for shareholders. It's not surprising at all, except the heavy bias of TFA.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Blactivision (how has this moniker never caught on?)
Because it's fucking stupid. It's fupid.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-25/vivendi-loses-956-million-verdict-to-liberty-media.html
I hate sigs.
'Blacktivision' sounds like a throwback reference to a racist mentality dating back centuries. Similar to how 'behind the eight-ball' and similar phrases have fallen out of favour. Get ready to downmod a hundred trolls.
As for Blizzard, perhaps if this works we can have a return to the heyday of RTS and WOW. Waitasec...
That exceeded the standard threshold for painfully aspergian jokes and obnoxious editorializing in an article write-up.
You have one job, Unkown Lamer, one job!
CoD...one track mind..sounds like a console gamer!
No no, I jest.
Blizzard itself has made a lot of great games, and I keep looking forward to their next sequel.
Starcraft, Starcraft 2. Amazing.
Heart of the swarm? Amazing.
World of Warcraft? I'm personally tired of it, yet, amazing.
Warcraft 1-2-3, great games.
Diablo 1/2, amazing. Enjoyed d3 but..eh.
They're not perfect, but their PC marketed games have done very well and have been good.
Why complain about good?
I thought his goal was to make games that weren't any fun to _play_. After a couple of hundred hours milling in WoW, I just gave up. Beautiful scenery, ok music, shitty combat system, horrible $160 annual fee for playing online plus $50 for new game options. No fucking thanks.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Blizzard's WOW numbers are tanking hard, Diablo 3 preorders where through the roof, but most people abandoned it after playing it once. Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm single player was pretty good, but perhaps a bit expensive for an expansion. They need to do something big if they want to stay relevant.
They need to take some risks.
I've been involved with Blizzard since the early days when they weren't so popular despite being so young. Before WoW, before Warcraft 3. I'm sure there were many people who can go back further, but ever since Starcraft, I've been more than a hardcore fan: I've been a modder. I've probably spent more time on b.net than a person does sleeping in the same time period.
It kills me to say this, but Blizzard took a turn for the worst ever since Activision acquired them. And oh yeah, that's the problem: Blizzard turns a profit and that's all they seem to care about these days: monetizing and milking the hell out of their franchises. At the expense of the games they're producing. It's a business strategy of money now and let's not worry about the later.
Well now later has come, and Diablo 3 is complete and utter crap, Starcraft 2 is borderline crap, WoW has turned into little more than a glorified cash cow, and their new big thing was a trading card game (whoo?). They were riding on their popularity and fan base, but now it's just... Ugh. They've shifted over the pro gaming scene, but us modders and level designers have been left in the dark (once again).
Not only is their EULA damn near totalitarian (they own everything you make with your editor, including characters, plots, etc... At least that's what it says), but the editor is a pile of crap that seems to have been coded by interns.
As for the actual game itself. Well, it's about three years old at this point and with a GTX Titan and a 4770K Haswell processor you'll still only be pulling around 30-40 FPS with max settings (1280x720, no AA/AS). That's freaking ridiculous and shows just how badly coded the game is.
I'm moving onto bigger and better things. This French company is quite smart to get rid of the sinking ship.
Call me when Blizzard breaks free of Kotick/Activision and actually starts making good games again.
Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW1ZDIXiuS4
All of it is old, that's my point. The only titles in that that were developed in the last ten years were Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 parts 1 and 2. Diablo 3 is not a good game and the auction house killed it, SC2 is alright but nothing outstanding, and heart of the swarm was straight up just a small expansion pack. More importantly, it's all derivative sequels - Blizzard hasn't put new ideas into a game in a very long time, and are content to milk old ones. That's why they have no growth prospects and no future.
Yikes, what did Activision Blizzard ever do to the OP? In breaking from the mega-corporate-ownership chain going from something like GE-???-Vivendi-Activision, Activision is now its own independent megacorporation not owned by a debt ridden parent that was demanding massive dividends to support its drug addiction. http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/25/activision-buys-back-majority-stake-from-vivendi-for-5-83-billion/ This is good news... If all posts were this venomous, all PS3 / XBONE / WiiU posts would sound like an expletive filled angry drunk rant by a person with turrets syndrome.
I think that the move to buyout the company also has do with Vivendi trying to force Activision to issue a $3 Billion dividend. Vivendi is a majority owner of Activision. Vivendi will get $2 Billion out of the deal, and if it works well enough, may force additional dividends in the future until Activision is rung dry and some or all of Vivendi's enormous debt is paid down. The buyout is a matter of survival for Activision.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/22/vivendi-activision-idUSL6N0FS0OQ20130722
towards private companies that are not publicly traded? Also how much of the "rent seeking" actions of Blizzard in the last 8 or 10 years is due to them being public or owned by a larger firm?
WOW may be losing subscribers, but it's still insanely profitable. Lst I heard was it dipped from $200m/mth to only $150m/mth.
Somehow I doubt they are hurting.
Not to mention all the other IP they have, including some no name game called Call of Duty that I heard is becoming popular.
This is good news, however may not end up being good.
Fact of the matter is, WOW started to go downhill after Activision bought Blizzard. Burning Crusades was an amazing expansion. Every expansion after BC has sucked because Activision\Vivendi screwed it up by fucking up the dev team that came out with BC.
Mists of Pandaria is such a failure it is sickening. Why? because the current dev leads are clueless.
WoW was initially released in the last 10 years, and I'd argue their expansions have been pretty good in adding new mechanics and content. I'd concede that WoW as a platform is no spring chicken.
Agreed as well on the D3 business. Requiring a persistent Internet connection, and having RMT, ensure that D2 is the last installment I'll buy. Feeling a bit burnt by Blizzard, so when I'm finally done with WoW I'm thinking it's the last title I'll play.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
I thought previous Slashdot comments had settled on "Actiblizzard" or "Actiblizz" for short. In any case, I won't use a nickname that brings ethnic tension into a discussion where it doesn't belong, especially considering the stereotypes already present in the Warcraft universe.
Although it should be pointed out that declining at all as opposed to growing drives down stock prices, which is much, much worse to some of these people.
That said, it is probably the signal to them to start working on something else (which they likely are already doing). Here's hoping that they can actually put something out that is at least as enjoyable. Diablo III was a bit of a misstep in a lot of ways, which is too bad.
Seconded. I was hoping Blizzard was going to dump Activision and go back to developing new IP instead of rehashing the same 3 ideas over and over again.
Place something witty here
Does Icahn know about the buyout already?
There is no light without darkness.
That's the point. The only post-merger game on that list is Diablo 3. All the rest were already complete or at least 14 months into development before Activision entered the picture.
You realize that according to the list you just posted, the only good game Blizzard has released in 9 years is Starcraft 2.. right?
And from what I've read, most SC2 players would agree that it's not as good as the first one. Most veteran WoW players would agree that WoW's done nothing but get worse since Vanilla or TBC at the latest.
It's not a good track record for Blizzard in recent history, and their latest "milestone" has been one of their worst.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
WOW may be losing subscribers, but it's still insanely profitable.
I wonder what's leading them to lose subscribers. If it's just fatigue, since the game is so old. One pattern I've noticed is as they've shortened the timeline between patches and expansions, players seem to quit more often. Once and expansion is announced, in game players (and I would assume subscriptions) drop. It seems like now it even happens in between patches. I assume it is because players feel whatever they earn will be worth less by the new patch/expansion. I wonder sometimes if they wouldn't be better served by not announcing patches so early, and having longer cycles between expansions.
Apparently we're getting the TL;DR of the TL;DR. The real truth is this:
Following the close of these two transactions, Vivendi will retain about 12% of Activision Blizzard and will no longer be the majority shareholder. [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2013/07/26/activision-buys-majority-vivendi-stock/2588675/]
This is only a partial buy-out. While they would lose the majority reign over A/B, they'd still have a 12% say in everything they do.
Working in development/management/sales/etc, yeah.
But working in QA for a video game is a *lot* more interesting than working in QA for Microsoft Word, for instance.
Down to 7.7 million at the end of the second quarter according to Eurogamer this morning.
What Diablo III? There were only two games released in that series, though I really wish they'd make a third sometime.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Someone should create a petition for Blizzard to make Diablo 3.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
This is the same mob who killed Sierra. And they nearly killed Ghostbusters: The Video Game. And not forgetting the bnetd lawsuits.
I refuse to purchase any of their product (not that it matters, all the games they make are crap anyway)
Blizz could turn it around, but you are right, they've accumulated corporate garbage in their structure and that is like the stuff that accumulates in the brain when someone develops Alzheimer's. It's hard to get rid of, and even if you still have the same abilities at the outset, it is eventually going to destroy you despite being a genius.
Best thing that could happen is that their creative team hooks up with a leaner business team and drops out of Blizzard. One should keep an eye on the people and the structure, and less on a name. Blizzard as a brand is just that, a name. With effort, they could get back the same creativity they had before, but then some of the top creative people would have to stop collecting their fat paychecks as big company execs and get back to making games.
It's not so much the game as the competition. They are getting better and better at taking pieces of the WoW market. WoW is still far ahead, and it simply can't appeal to everyone at the same time.
Wow can't play the "I've eared my gear though lots of gameplay" as well as it used too. With facebook games and the like abusing that angle for as much as it's worth the general public has wisened up to the continual formula that this proposes. So, for now they have to ease up on that approach and allow people to catch up, meaning they are primarily keeping players who like pve/pvp content for the pure challenge of it, and those that get a kick of controling the economy by buying and selling off the auction house.
Diablo 2 had much more replay value. On multiple occasions over the years I've gotten together with a friend or two to replay D2 just for the heck of it. I have absolutely zero motivation to do anything of the sort whatsoever for Diablo 3. Why is that?
Best thing that could happen is that their creative team hooks up with a leaner business team and drops out of Blizzard.
That's already happened, and not just once.
That's why Blizzard has done nothing but go downhill the last decade, why they haven't released anything actually new, and why even their rehashes range from not that good to utter shite.
The first time it happened was while WoW was still in development. Yes, even as good as it was, WoW could have been better. That first time around, the people who left started ArenaNet. And despite having significantly less development time, the first Guild Wars was more polished than WoW ever was. Not sure where the rest of the top devs they lost have gone.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
It's the content. Or lack of new content.
Much of the last two expansions have been rehashed content that has already been played. In fact, one of the expansions literally WAS content that had already been played, but that they refreshed up to current max level difficulty.
Players recognize when they are being given the same crap with a different spoon, and take their money elsewhere.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games"
Why would you want to take the fun out of making video games? Did he not get the memo that happy employees means better products, better team spirit, better morale in the office etc etc etc ?
Wow. They're losing subs even faster than I thought they would.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
500 hours?
It's fun until Inferno. Then it gets pain in the ass ridiculous. I'm saying this as someone who got a DH into act 4 inferno. That's when it becomes a deliberate grind and has no association with the fun of games like Diablo. The game is positively and entirely crap after that. it makes you realize how much the game is just "level up = win" even if the levels in inferno roughly translate to gear. Even D2 wasn't like that. There are fairly valid reasons for people to hate D3, and most of it is because it was designed with the intention of making it into a WOW-style grind, which is completely unacceptable. They have literally killed the franchise by having done this.
Their new MMORPG that they have been working on for years and doing massive hiring for, is entirely new IP.
What?! When was that? The mid 90s? And even their signature franchises (warcraft, diablo) are pretty derivative in their origins... it took several iterations of rehashing to make them more original!
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
You mean the one that they basically decided to start over from scratch a few months ago? http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/report-blizzard-to-overhaul-project-titan-launch-it-in-2016-at-the-earliest/
I found the exact opposite. I found diablo 3 to be the best only when you finally hit inferno. Granted, I played before they added the power levels, so it was constantly stuck on power level 4, and found the game to actually be fairly challenging. I finished inferno just before they added the power levels and I wouldn't change a thing, but there are a lot of really bad players in the game that simply don't know what they are doing, and I got tired of carrying them everywhere.
When they added the power levels (and alternate levels), I quickly got bored with it. Power level 10 was doable solo, but it just took too long to kill stuff, but I'm sure with the new gear that drops and the spawnable bosses it got a lot easier. The only whining I ever heard was either directly (or indirectly) by players who didn't know how to play, didn't want to learn, and it was just too hard. I can't count the number of times that someone would say ... is impossible to complete, and not only would I take them through it, but I would bring them and 2 other worthless players with me, they would die in 10 seconds, and I'd have to complete it solo with mobs (and bosses) designed for 4 players.
Dude, the ENTIRE game was balanced around the RMAH. Thats not gameplay, thats a slot machine.
Good-bye
Upon reflection, Lich King really was the high point of the game. Hardcores and casuals alike marching on Arthas.
Good-bye
WOW may be losing subscribers, but it's still insanely profitable. I wonder what's leading them to lose subscribers. If it's just fatigue, since the game is so old. One pattern I've noticed is as they've shortened the timeline between patches and expansions, players seem to quit more often. Once and expansion is announced, in game players (and I would assume subscriptions) drop. It seems like now it even happens in between patches. I assume it is because players feel whatever they earn will be worth less by the new patch/expansion. I wonder sometimes if they wouldn't be better served by not announcing patches so early, and having longer cycles between expansions.
It's just old. Some people have been playing WoW longer than an average marriage lasts.
WoW was great when the dungeons were relevant. Getting the paladin's epic mount was a pain in the ass once TBC came out and no one ran the required dungeons any more. Had to buy runs and work my ass off but I finally earned it. Then they made it a summon spell so now you get the horse at level 40 for free and it's speed scales with your riding rank. This killed all enthusiasm I had for the game and canceled my subscription same day. Shit that I worked hard for and earned was now just being handed out for free. Instead of fixing the dungeons and giving high level people a reason to go there other than just to help low levels they removed all reason for anyone to ever go to said dungeons.
All the work you had to do And a retelling of the events
And now today you get effectively both the slow and fast mount for free and all you have to do is buy training.
This is a good chunk of why WoW sucks today and why so many people leave with each patch.
It's a progression MMO. The timeline changes each time a new expansion comes out. Prior content becomes obselete much like any game on the market.
You mean the one that they basically decided to start over from scratch a few months ago? http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/report-blizzard-to-overhaul-project-titan-launch-it-in-2016-at-the-earliest/
I'm sure as most people have alluded to Titan was probably built around a subscription based game. Blizzard is re-working it on a F2P model. By the time Titan is released I would all subscription games will have converted to some form of F2P.
Aside from the game being too easy at the beginning, the end game "content" can be done at various difficulty levels... kind of like many other games. Heroic difficulty raids are hard enough that even after 3 1/2 months of the content being out, only 2% of players who actually seriously try that content have managed to clear it, and that is including the fact that you get better gear to make it easier as time goes on. The first players to defeat everything this current content took just under a month to do so (and not for lack of gear, but for lack of hours in a day).
>It's not so much the game as the competition
Eh, what competition? The same reason that I quit WoW (due to being dumbed down) has been copied by its competitors, which makes me utterly uninterested in playing them. I sometimes long for someone to do something along the lines of the original vision for Ultima Online. (Not how UO turned out, but the original vision.)
The only MMORPG I've enjoyed recently is The Secret World, which allows for a much more interesting customization of characters, and no monthlies.
Your playing a different MMO, one that appeals to what you want more. If there weren't alternatives, there would be a higher chance that you wouldn't quit, or if you did you would return.
The notion that griping about Diablo 3 is all due to the first week's disaster is truly myopic. I soldiered through that, as stupid as the whole Blizzard-caused situation was, and had a fine time for awhile in the game. It has its good points, but it also has its truly negative points.
On the plus side? I love the skill system, and combat in general is quite fun. The health orb system is kindof goofy, but I got used to it. The skills are generally well-thought-out.
On the negative side? The item system sucks. The items are uninspired and uninteresting, and for an item hunt game, that's a real killer. At higher levels you find the difficulty has been tuned so you need high-quality items from the auction house. Forget finding them yourself, you'll spend hours and hours grinding on the earlier stages trying to find gear to survive on later stages when a quick trip to the auction house is what you need. So instead you'll just grind for gold to spend on the AC and that's a far less interesting and rewarding way of getting items than most games have. The auction house hurt and seriously damaged the Diablo 3 endgame, and it's not just bitter bloggers saying that, that's an admission from the Diablo 3 lead developers themselves. It was an experiment that ultimately didn't pan out. It is, however, a response to combat a very real problem from Diablo 2 -- the black market.
I'd contrast the item system to D2's more-available sets and uniques (the real strength of the game) and crafted items. Items with character, not just "yet another blue/yellow item with randomly-generated stats that perfectly match the stats I need." Hunting for items was fun in Diablo2. In Diablo 3 you end up just selling most things for gold so you can afford the prices on the auction house.
D2's primitive quest system wasn't exactly great, but Diablo 3 goes overboard with its story-driven quest interface. It's too WoW-like, and I speak as someone who still spends most of his gaming time in World of Warcraft.
The skill system is fun, but having quick, easy respecs lets you try out everything about a class on one character. What need have I to create a second monk when I can do everything with my first monk? I'd contrast that to rolling new characters in Diablo 2 to try all the various different builds people managed to make work, but in D2 I did get really sick of seeing Act 1 Normal so much. I used a trainer program to get my new single-player characters to level 20 or so quickly so the real game can begin, but shit, you can't do that in D3 thanks to its ridonculous online-only requirement. So you have to play the lower levels on normal whenever you make a new character, but the designers killed the replay value anyway, so I guess that doesn't matter as much.
Diablo 3 has a lot of good stuff in it, so it's frustrating when some of the truly major flaws just make the game not-that-interesting. I'm hoping that these issues (especially the item problems) can be addressed in the expansion. Diablo2 went through a lot of changes in the 8+ years that Blizzard was actively retuning and fixing it, maybe Diablo3 will get the same.
Upon reflection, Lich King really was the high point of the game. Hardcores and casuals alike marching on Arthas.
I think Lich King dealt the game a blow that it never recovered from. For the first time, five-mans were -easy- (and boring). The initial raid was drop-dead easy (and had no hard mode). It set expectations in a lot of peoples' minds that everything should have been easy. Fortunately one of their worst raids (Naxx 10/25) they followed up with possibly their best (Ulduar). Cataclysm reintroduced challenging 5-man heroics (as it should have been all along) but halfway through the expansion Blizzard reversed course again and nerfed the 5-mans so they were easy, and introduced new five-mans that, once again, you had to sleep through for them to be challenging and it's been that way ever since. Fortunately, if you activated hard-modes raids were still difficult. There was challenge to be had, but only in raiding and pvp. The old world has all the challenge taken out of it so leveling a new character is sadly boring. 5-mans are super-easy. LFRs aren't too challenging, but they're not really supposed to be so that's fine.
But worst of all... during Lich King it was a -full year- from the release of the last major content patch until the release of the next expansion. That killed quite a few guilds.
My personal feeling? I miss the challenge of the 1-60 experience, and 5-man heroics, but despite that I think the game is the strongest now than it's been since BC, maybe even since vanilla. I think Mists really hit the right balance in giving you things to do at max level besides raiding.
Looks like Activision was almost bankrupt back in 1990:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/business/bobby-kotick-of-activision-drawing-praise-and-wrath.html
For whoever is interested in what kind of company Vivendi is: they started with water distribution monopoly in many France cities. That is a good cash cow, as if you cut expenses on water distribution infrastructure maintenance, it is not obvious before many years. And of course your customers have no choice and will accept your price.
All that money had to be invested somewhere, this is why Vivendi started purchasing many media companies, in France and abroad. Universal was one major Vinvendi acquisition.
Now time are changing, and a lot of french cities go back to water handled as a public service by public servants. Most of the time it is quite effective at cutting costs.
Diablo3 is actually a really fun game for the first 500 hours. It gets tedious, but that's the point of a treasure grinding game.
Or are you still butthurt over the initial user experience the first month after launch last year? Shit takes time to get figured out and some things, like server capacity, can only be figured out after launch.
There would have been no need to figure out lots of that stuf it they hadn't stuff D3 with that crappy DRM.
For most people Diablo3 only sucked because someone told them it sucked. And that person that told them it sucked? He got his opinion the same way. Everyone that bitched about Diablo3 did so only because they didn't understand what they bought.
Diablo3 is not a game that you will want to play forever, it is maybe a 30 hour game from start to finish and a complete grind fest after that, exactly the same as Diablo2. If you get bored of repetition then the game sucks pretty quick, but no more so than Diablo2. After grinding a few hundred hours, in my case over 700, the game gets old and genuinely better games like Skyrim, Fallout, or Starcraft2 reclaim their appeal.
Continuing to hate Diablo3 because the first month sucked and a bunch of bloggers called it crap is about the most pathetic excuse to avoid a game that I've ever heard. Go play it some time, it's actually a lot of fun if you give it a chance instead of prejudicially taking the word of others.
Diablo 3 is a "click to level up" game, no challenge or anything alike. The only difficult part is getting the really hard-to-get items, which is really a matter of time, unlike D2, where you actually had to know what you were doing.
Also, I can't LAN D3.
Yes, but DRM didn't appear in Blizzard games until after the merger. That is why I went from buying every Blizzard game at launch to not buying anything from them anymore. I refuse to be punished by a company for buying their product.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
No, since quitting WoW in 2007, I have played hardly any MMORPGs at all.
It has left a massively bitter taste in my mouth which has ruined the entire genre for me.
All the WoW clones and F2P crap do nothing to try to lure me back.
It was fun to play a few times, but the technique used to increase the difficulty levels didn't appeal much to me (add an extra 'feature' to the monsters per level) The 'one life' difficulty level idea struck me as interesting though. Occurs to me I probably left some dollar credits in that game, should try and sell em.
Driving down stock prices is not worse if you're looking to do a buyout.
Expansions are probably a bigger killer than patches. A patch, well, you can start playing the new raid content with existing gear. That's not possible with expansions. Major changes in class gameplay doesn't please people either.
You micro-nap thru LFR's as well? It's kind of alarming to me when I've done that and topped the healing charts.
The problem is the game offers no challenge so its easy to lose interest. Anyone can play a character without ever grouping, max their level, and have good gear. Then you can do random dungeons with LFR in which you just sit and are thrown in a group, run the dungeon, get some raid gear. Once you have decent raid gear you do LFR again for big time raids and just walk through them. Without any real effort you can see 98% of the games content.
With just a little effort, you can skip the heroic dungeon stage, and go straight from levelling to LFR. Do world bosses for a while, get the gear from that, make a bit of crafted epic. If you're a healer, there's no way I'd go thru heroic 5 man LFG. Its a totally thankless thing to do.
You should give Guild Wars 2 a try. It does many things differently (for the better), is not free to play, and yet is not a subscription either (you pay once).
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
D2 had replayability because it wasnt the same game every single time. the maps and onsters were randomly generated every single game, which believe it or not does a LOT to the replayability of the game.
the only random thing in D3 is items, and that's irrelevent because most of it stays on the ground anyway.
what is the point in "unidentified" items when there is no identification mechanic, or rather its been so reduced that you just right click to open you useless vendor trash? its like they included it just to have it.
in fact the entire game is extremely dumbed down and streamlined. no skill customizing or choosing. in D2, 1 point per level, spend it how you wish, and oh by the way, different skills interact in different ways. want a melee sorceress? you can do that. want a minion druid? you can do that. want a bow barbarian? you can do that.
in D3, you get predefined spells at certain points. the "customization" from runes is a lie. the spells are all generic clones of each other, and they largely break down into 4 categories: Direct Damage, DOT, AE, and CC. the customization is really just two things: what you want a spell to look like (graphical effect) and what button you want it on (1, 2, 3, or 4).
And that's jsut the game play side of things. the RMAH i could care less about, it takes far tol long a time investment (grind wise) to get anything remotely decent and worth selling (its a lottery basically), and you have to remember there are others who will spend far more time than you doing it, and, as is always the way with virtual items with no physical value or limt and infinite availibility, more than willing to undercut you however much is needed to make a "sale".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Its because new game in D2 = new maps/monsters.
In D3 new game = kill the same monsters after turning the same corners. no thought, no exploration. just beeline to the exit switch.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
next content patch (5.4) provides another desired emotional salve: finally getting to smack Garrosh upside the head.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
you mean the first tier of Lich King being Naxx? while ignoring the 3 tiers that followed it, 2 of which were vitally important lorewise and very ambitious and unique?
or are you disappointed that Dragon Soul used a lot of WotLK locations because it made sense lorewise? you say these things about small portions of the content, myopically ignoring the rest of the expansion, or the reasons for it. all i hear is a rehashed version of "vanilla was the best part of wow, everything after was dumb".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Interesting point, but dangerous if they are actually doing that on purpose. As much as we know business people get away with that stuff sometimes, if shareholders get a whiff that they are depressing their stock price, there will be hell to pay.
I tried it. Wasn't especially impressed with the lack of options in building a character. Combat was very repetitive.
Beautiful though.
Take that billions of dollars! You have no future!
How long did you try? I assume you got to play with traits, and noticed that different weapons conferred different skills to the various classes.
As well, the engineer might be up your alley as well as they can (as some of their skills) equip "kits" which give you whole other sets of skills.
I'm running around with a freaking flamethrower!
Another one to look at is the elementalist. The skills you have to work with change based on what element you have active, and what weapon(s) you have equipped.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...