Where once there was strength a weakness is found.
This is a quite common theme across the board.
- crypto
- the economy
- competitions
- conflict
- game theory
- political issues
- life in general
We often go into things thinking we have everything figured out and then reality hits us like a ton of bricks. Many a plan for the future has been vaporized in this way. Life is often littered with disappointment and broken dreams, but that's a very pessimistic way of looking at it. A much more glass-half-full type perspective might interpret the exact same outcome as an opportunity to learn and grow. As grandpappy said:
"It Builds Character."
It is very difficult to learn if everything goes right and we never lose. This makes sense because there's no reason to improve when everything is going our way. The problem with this can be one of scope. A big fish in a small pond stops growing. Throw them into an ocean and they may get eaten alive quite quickly thinking they can employ the same strategy of dominance within the new environment.
Applying this logic to my current hyperfocus (Diablo 4) is a trivial matter. I beat the game and now the novelty has lost its edge, and now I'm starting to notice every little detail that seems a bit off. Don't get me wrong the game is pretty awesome and fully within the spirit of the original series, but at the same time there are many issues that leave me scratching my head.
The most glaring issue is that there is no economy between players and there is no auction house. This honestly doesn't come as a surprise to me considering what a failure the previous game was and how they "fixed" it, but for me personally it's quite the disappointment. The coolest part of games like this are the economic systems that link players together. Without that it's going to get stale.
Imagine trying to solve the problem: "How are we going to stop this Sybil attack on our economy," but then ultimately what gets decided is that to fix the economy there will be no economy at all. Wow, what a copout. So innovative fellas! This is particularly enraging to me personally because I specifically told the developers of D3 that every single item needs to be BOE (bind on equip) in order for the economy to work. Without that the game will fail instantly to hyperinflation.
My buddy who worked there (and "stole" dozens of my ideas without giving me any credit whatsoever) told me "nah we don't want to go in that direction". I guess the direction they wanted to go in was complete systemic failure, because that's exactly what happened despite my hope that they'd figure something out.
This is why we can't have nice things.
So now we get nothing. There is no economy. Another reason why this is a suspect "solution" to the problem of bots/hyperinflation is because corporations like Blizzard are greedy and they've shown time and time again that they absolutely hate it when players make money off the games they build. Corporate policy is to view that outcome as if money is being siphoned directly away from the company... which it obviously isn't the case in many scenarios, but they treat it that way all the same. These people aren't serious about building real economies like crypto certainly will.
Another thing that's really starting to annoy me is how good the initial design of the decentralized node skill tree is but then how badly it was implemented. The idea is solid: create a ton of option with decentralized architecture and allow the player many options and builds to choose from. But the implementation is terrible... once you pick a certain path you're locked in to a very specific build... which is exactly the opposite of what they were going for... this system needs... so so much work, but I'm glad it exists because other people are going to copy it and make something much better out of it I'm sure.
Ice example
If I choose frostbolt as my opening "basic" skill... well then I'm pretty much locked in to picking frost for my core skill as well because of the inherent synergies granted. Also one of the core skills is amazing and one is bad... so if I pick frostbolt at level one I'm pretty much forced into picking ice shards for a core skill... then after that I'm also forced into taking frost nova as a defensive ability because again the synergies are so good that not picking these abilities would make my character totally worthless in combat.
This is very annoying because it's exactly the opposite of what Blizzard has reiterated. They said they want there to be a lot of options and that "players can play how they want". This is not the case... and it's quite obvious that the specific skills available are so comically imbalanced that it's going to end up just like every other cookie-cutter meta out there across the board. There are so many balancing issues that need to be addressed... luckily my favorite build (frost mage) just happened to be one of the best ones in the entire game so it's still kinda fun.
There's also only one fork.
A skill should fork and then fork again. This would create 4 distinct paths and make the game extremely customizable. Instead skills fork twice... but the first fork only has 1 option (kind of like the vast majority of Hive hardforks). It's so pointless it kind of makes me wonder who's idea that was... bad idea is bad.
The icing on that frost cake is that both options are often not even that great... or one will be significantly better than the other which once again creates that pseudo choice that isn't really a choice at all. You pick the one that actually does something.
In this case of frostbolt:
- One of the forks gives vulnerable (+20%) vs frozen enemies.
- One of the forks gives 4 mana vs frozen/chilled enemies.
On the surface when I first started playing this had the appearance of a good idea. Now I know better. There is no situation in the game in which you'd want your frostbolt to make frozen enemies vulnerable. When you pick a frost build and something freezes... it basically dies for free. Not only that the ability you have to pick for ice shards already makes targets vulnerable, and frost nova makes targets vulnerable as well... so the frostbolt ability is completely and utterly 100% pointless and redundant.
On top of that failure the +4 mana when hitting chilled enemies is also quite bad. The only time you run out of mana is when you're in an extended length fight. The vast majority of extended length fights are bosses. Well guess what? Bosses can't be chilled or frozen... so again in the exact scenario you'd want this ability it doesn't even work. I swear sometimes when I see stuff like this I'm like... "Did you even play the game you made?" This is a common theme across all tech trees. It's a cool design but it needs an absurd amount of work and balancing.
Conclusion
Beware of solutions that throw the baby out with the bathwater. Seeing a very well done WEB2 game is just another reminder for me that once WEB3 reaches its tipping point it's going to completely wash away all the WEB2 garbage out there. In fact, it is almost certain that when WEB3 is in full swing anything that was good about WEB2 will be taken and reforged into a WEB3 adaptation, and there's nothing that IP laws are really going to be able to do about, just like with file sharing and torrents. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube we can't put it back in.
At the end of the day we need more people working on these things. We need entire communities dedicated to their projects in a way that some code monkeys in a corporate office could never compete with in a million years. Passion projects combined with proper monetization are the future. I'm just a bit annoyed it's taking so long to get there.