BlizzCon 2014 – Diablo III: What’s Next Panel Transcript

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Panel Q&A

Martens: I believe we have time for questions.

Mosqueira: Right. Questions. I think we have one mic over there and I think that’s it.

Question 1: Years and years ago and a much earlier BlizzCon — I think after Diablo III was released– I asked Jay Wilson whether or not he had any plans for Uber-Diablo; and at the time he said “Well, you guys have got Inferno, and so maybe after that” and now you have invented so much other stuff. Uber Diablo. What would you say?

Martens: I think we have spoken about it “Uber Diablo” before, and we haven’t built one yet. But certainly it has been on our minds. Thus far, we have focused on brand new monsters and some of the other Uber fights; but we have talked about it, I mean, we are not associating those with any patch or making any promises; but yes it is a good idea. Hopefully, Diablo has enough space that an Uber version would feel fresh now. So good idea. Thank you.

Question 2: I just want to say thank you for such a great game that you guys done so far, and for actually listen to the community. Maybe you will go over this tomorrow, but my question is: (???) like an orange color can we like actually change it ourselves to red or pink if we wanted to for kicks and giggles?

Martens: This is a applying to legendary items?

Question 2: To any item.

Martens: So the question is “Can we change like the drop color of the items or something like that?” To be honest we have no current plans to do anything like that we hadn’t actually heard that request before; but certainly we can discuss it. Thank you.

Question 3: Hi, how are you guys doing? My question is when the season ends and all our previous everything of Season 1 rolls into the previous season or basically existing characters. How is that going to work for your items and stash rolling into your let’s say your previous characters we had before?

Mosqueira: So how the season’s work and the items work with seasons in the end?

Cheng: Yea, so just a recap so that everyone knows at the end of Season 1 we want to make sure that any work that you have done for Season 1 rolls into what we call a man economy.

So like you said, all your gold will carry over, your paragon experience will all carry over, all you characters will come over. Your items will actually be a mail to you, there’s a custom UI that our engineers have been working on.

We couldn’t merge it into your existing stash so in the same way if you guys have ever purchased like a collectors’ edition of Reaper of Souls or you know sometimes you get the wings or the various things?

That way the pet of Warlords of Draenor– so the items from Season 2 and Season 1 will be sent to you that way as well. Oh, and your blood shards will carry over as well.

Question 4: Hello, this question could be as controversial as the Real-Money Auction House. So get ready for it. I’m wondering, one problem that a lot of people always have in Diablo is things like stash space, character space and stuff like that.

Is there any possibility that we might get something similar to the Blizzard store in WoW, like the in-game micro-transactions, where we can buy stash space, and character space, potential Transmog type thing, and stuff like that?

Mosqueira: So are we going to have a store where you guys can buy more stash space? No, that’s something that— who doesn’t want more stash space right? Everybody, right?

This is something that– Not specifically the store aspect of it, but that’s something that comes up and we always sorta discussing and talking about it, and we know everybody wants more and if we give you more, you want more; and you want more; and then eventually all the Internet will be your items, and then people will be upset at us.

So yea, it’s something that we are thinking about and you know it’s something we want to try to address. So… wait out.

Question 4: Thanks again, I appreciate it.

Question 5: Hey guys, so you guys talked about changing level layouts and all that. Right now, there is an issue where people fish for a certain rift layouts and certain mob types. Do you guys think that what you are doing is enough to stop people from fishing those Greater Rifts to get those higher rift levels?

Cheng: Yea, I think (sorry, did you want to repeat the question? Alright.) So the question is about the rift layout and whether the mob distribution and people are fishing for them. So what we are trying to do (like I said) is to allow randomness to make things replayable; but we are looking– we know that some monsters just stand there waiting for you to kill them.

You know, like zombies can be used as an example: “Oh, sweet! I got a nice little zombie distribution.” That’s going to be good right? And I thought sarcastic because: “Yea, we are going to clear this super fast, and I am going to get tons of progress.”

So we have, in terms of in the office, we use the term like paper cut monsters is what we call them. Yea, these monsters are cut generally damaging or not. Then there’s the monsters that actually cause you to react to the way that they are behaving.

We have large tanky hitpoint monsters and we are trying to make sure that you are not getting the same population of monsters every time; but you are getting a fair mix. So that the swing of how successful you are is not so dependent on the monsters that are rolled. So that’s another access to look at.

Martens: I did want to add one thing to that. The Monster team is spending some time working on the new monsters we showed you, they are spending some time adjusting some of the more irritating monsters to fight, some of the Act IV and V ones are exhausting to fight.

And so while they are worth lots of experience in the Rift, and so some times you can avoid them and take too much time so I think some of that is going to happen in 2.1.2 and some will happen in future patches. We’ll make some of the monsters more equitable in that way as well so.

Some of you are really excited over there, thank you.

Question 6: When you guys showed the Ruins of Sescheron, I got really excited and I was wondering if you were going to explore other territories that were spoken of, but were never visited in-game like: Ureh, Scosglen, Xiansai, Skovos. That kinda thing.

Martens: We have no further announcements to make at this time.

(Audience laughs)

Question 7: Hey, I have been a Diablo fan from the very beginning and first off I would like to say, Josh, you guys have really done a great job of bringing the game back to its roots as far as gameplay is concerned. There’s one aspect, one major part of the Diablo experience, and I know you know it’s missing is: I want to be able to trade. The account-bound system, are we going to re-visit it? Is there something going to happen where I can at least get new people in the game and say you can have my old stuff?

Mosqueira: First, I want to say thank you for really, it’s the team as a whole we really got behind all these changes, right? So I might be the guy who sometimes does all the talking, but really I’m standing on the shoulder of giants and there are these guys and the blood, sweat and tears really allowed us to make the transition.

So on trading: it’s just a really high level and we’ll talk a little bit more about this tomorrow at the “Evolving Reaper of Souls” panel. We understand that there’s a social dynamic to trading like an utilitarian dynamic to it.

But trading also like at a fundamental level also has a potential to wreck the reward loop just like the auction house did because if a friend gives you a really high powered item, it’s… essentially what the friend just did is to remove the option of you getting upgrades for an x number of hours to going forward so I think right now we are pretty happy with the self ecosystem that we’ve created with loop 2.0.

So I think for now the plan is you know to keep the status quo and see how it keeps revolving. Thanks you.

Ebbert: I guess what I will add to that also is there are types of trading we might like to see in the future. Like we saw on console– player gifts or the nemesis system. Ways of interacting with your friends, and ways to keep the reward loop intact, and keep the core experience intact. So you might see things like that in the future.

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