Game News Blizzard Scraps Planned Diablo 3 PvP Mode

[taxalot]

Blizzard doesn't need Vivendi anymore to sell their stuff. If their publisher lets them down, they are probably rich enough to go full digital distribution and be fine with it.

In fact, this is probably what they secretly want. Vivendi must be punctioning a fair amount of their money.

 

[thexspr]

Vivendi is not and never was their publisher, it's more of their owner.

 

[DraQ]

Reasonably fast vs. slowly and painfully, which is better and why?

We are not talking about dirty bombs or bathing in the exhaust of nuclear slat water rocket - even reasonably fast will be slowly and painfully here.

 

[Rake]

Vivendi is not a game company. They own many media/music/game/ companies.Activision Blizzard is the fourth bigger they own, but comparable with orher industries the game biz IS unstable/risky whatever

 

[Larendav]

For us it comes to a few issues, one of which is depth. Simply fighting each other with no other objectives or choices to make gets old relatively quickly.

Diablo III.... Depth.


Hey Blizzard, here's an idea. Why don't you, I don't know, ask the community if they think the same thing about PvP.

 

[J1M]

I'm not sure what proportion of Activision Blizzard's revenue is WoW derived, but I would assume it is high. If Vivendi believes that 1) WoW will consistently lose subscribers (which is reasonable) and 2) that the MMO market is saturated enough that no single game can achieve the insane market share of WoW in the future (which is also reasonable), then the market will get significantly more uncertain for Activision Blizzard. They will lose the consistent predictable revenue of WoW and be forced to replace it with either an as yet unidentified subscription based product or the far more unreliable revenue gained from sales.

It seems pretty safe to assume that in a sale of Activision Blizzard, the price Vivendi could get would be driven higher by a large subscriber base than even consistently high sales generating comparable revenue. Since its more likely that this value would decrease over time as the subscriber base shrinks, if the potential money lost through this decrease in acquisition price is greater than the expected revenue, then a sale of the company could make sense even if Vivendi thinks it will be consistently profitable.

While this is a solid analysis it ignores the fact that outside of Blizzard, most of Vivendi's holdings are shitty and whenever they look to sell Blizzard it is due to looking for a way to cover losses in another department. They then quickly realize they don't know how to value the company they want to sell and while they are trying to figure that out the quarterly report they were trying to fluff happens and the world doesn't end so they forget about selling it for another 9 months.

 

[Metro]

For us it comes to a few issues, one of which is depth. Simply fighting each other with no other objectives or choices to make gets old relatively quickly.

Diablo III.... Depth.

Priceless. Good ol' Blizzard. Because grinding the same monsters again and again for digital gear that adds +10 more to some random stat is a 'deeper' experience than PvP without any 'objectives.' Not surprising, though. This is the WoW mindset. The PvP system wasn't implemented until several months (possibly a year) after initial release. When it was people just PvP'ed for fun in large battles in set place throughout the world. Then they introduced battlegrounds and arenas and now no one will PvP unless given some incentive like honor points or gear. People don't even PvP in the battlegrounds they just 'farm' honor.

 

[Kirtai]

This is the WoW mindset. The PvP system wasn't implemented until several months (possibly a year) after initial release. When it was people just PvP'ed for fun in large battles in set place throughout the world. Then they introduced battlegrounds and arenas and now no one will PvP unless given some incentive like honor points or gear. People don't even PvP in the battlegrounds they just 'farm' honor.

The PvP system was obviously a crude hack even back then and they clearly had no idea what they were doing or how people would respond to it.

 

[Metro]

Oh it definitely wasn't implemented with much thought but at least people played for the sake of fun. You really don't need to 'justify' the existence of PvP in Diablo so long as people would enjoy it. Of course, that's not what Blizzard is looking at. They want to find ways it'll keep people playing, make some microtransactional profit off of it, pro gamer tournaments, etc. So if Blizzard doesn't have those ducks in a row they won't bother developing it.

 

[Kirtai]

Oh yeah, I agree it was fun, I just meant that Blizzard have been really poor at predicting how people would react to things like that. They seemed totally unprepared for people grouping up to stomp the other factions towns just for the fun of it.

It's a pity they seem to be anti-fun though, as though anything done just for fun tarnishes their professional gaming image.

 

[Brayko]

Ooh boy the butthurt from this must have been class A entertainment.