Tales of the Aggronaut

Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had an excellent weekend. Ours was a bit of a weird one, combined with the fact that we are dealing with an early heatwave. This morning it was over 80 degrees at 5:30 when I first woke up. That is entirely too hot for human beings, and that has been a trend the last few years of getting our heat spikes considerably earlier than normal. One of the side projects I have been doing over the last few days is editing our old episodes to package them up into a YouTube format. One of the things you maybe need to know about me is that I have every single episode we have ever recorded, as well as a number of side projects sitting on network-attached storage. That means I can crack open the original files, apply some tweaks to them and then paste them into something resembling a more modern structure before exporting and creating a video out of it.

One of the strangest things about going back and listening to myself from eight years ago is generally how much happier I sound. Like it might not be noticeable to anyone else, but for me it is jarring. Truth be told I am happy enough but I am not really experiencing much joy in my life at the moment. I mean on some level 2014 seems like a simpler time, when things were not quite as fraught as they are today. In 2014 we had yet to deal with GamerGate or the fallout that caused so many voices to be silenced and blogs to be shuttered as a result of folks “noping” out of gaming. We had yet to deal with the great unmasking brought on by the Trumpian area, and folks with fringe beliefs felt completely justified to bring them up in every public forum. The episodes that I have been listening to are from April of 2014, and at that point, Eric Garner had not been murdered and the sequence of events that lead to mass protests around the country regarding Police brutality had not been started. On the gaming front, Sony Online Entertainment had not been sold yet, and as a result Landmark and Everquest Next were still things we were looking forward to. I was still looking forward to the Nightmare Tide expansion in Rift, and they had yet to be sold to Gamigo. We were in the middle of Mists of Pandaria and anxiously awaiting the announcement of the next expansion that would be the Warlords of Draenor. So that means we had yet to live through the great drop-off of players in World of Warcraft and the back-to-back stinkers that were Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. I personally was in the middle of being extremely happy about the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and looking forward to the launch of Destiny which happened in September of that year.

I was still regularly hanging out with friends on a nightly basis and was even streaming pretty regularly. This is prior to the westward migration of a good chunk of my friend group, which has put a two-hour gap between us making it very hard to organize things. I am generally going to sleep as they are coming online. I miss doing things with people and my great recharge moment had been Diablo 3 for the longest time. This is also before we found out how generally fucked up the situation with Blizzard was and their employees, which ultimately made me not want to touch anything published by them. This was also a time before the Pandemic and me not leaving the house all week long other than a trip to pick up donuts from a drive-through on Saturday and Sunday. As much as I enjoy working from home,I do have to admit that it only furthers the self-imposed isolation that I find myself in. It also feels like the big moments of synergy that bring everyone together in one place… are getting fewer and further between. Even the most recent launch of Endwalker felt like a deeply fractured experience, as I rarely happened to overlap timewise with other people. I think during the entirety of that expansion leveling process I ran a single dungeon with a friend. I can’t blame my present isolation on anyone but myself to be honest. I could go out and make new friend groups that are more compatible with my timezone, but that just feels so freaking hard. When you have had a regular group that just happened effortlessly… it is so damned hard to put the effort to find that again elsewhere. I know I have people that I can reach out to, and do things with… but none of the groups that I am in the orbit of seeming quite the same. I mean… it is hard to replace a group that I have recorded almost four hundred podcast episodes, and the natural rapport we all have.

In the current malaise that I find myself in… last night I caved. I have been avoiding all Blizzard products, or at least until the release of Diablo Immortal. I used that as an experiment so that I would be able to talk about its gross monetization scheme from personal experience. Instead, all that it really did was make me miss Diablo 3 even more. This game is such an emotional experience for me, and I had last played it in April of 2021… and then found myself missing it almost every day since then. I’ve scoured so many other games looking for methadone for this game and never quite finding anything that really fits in the same way. I found myself crawling into a bubble that was the seasonal game in Diablo 3, and pretty much completely forgetting everything else existed. I didn’t even partake of the nightly Tequatl ritual in Guild Wars 2.

I love Diablo and I think that is why the whole Diablo Immortal fiasco has been so crushing. I spent so many years anxiously waiting for news on Diablo 4, and yesterday also brought us a brand new trailer as part of the Microsoft show… which I will talk about at a later time. I think the announcement, the longing, and this realization that I used to be a happier person is ultimately what lead me to spend my night leveling a seasonal character. I feel like I failed on some level because I had been trying to avoid anything Blizzard related for so long. However, I also think that this self-imposed activism didn’t really make me happy… instead just made me miserable. I am not happy with the state of the world right now. I am not happy with the state of my isolation. I am not sure what I can really do about either, but depriving myself of things that were bringing me joy doesn’t make it better either. I use video games as an escape from the world, and since 2014… more and more of the world has seeped into that experience. Twitter used to be my happy place where I talked about games with other excited gamers… but now I flinch preparing myself for more news of the next shooting, or next corporate malfeasance. I am tired and hollow… and on some level, I wish I could pop back to 2014 when I seemed to be so much happier. I know that is not a thing that can ever happen, and I also have no clue how to claw back some of that joy. Last night, however… playing Diablo 3 again for the first time in over a year brought me some measure of that joy back. The post A Happier Me appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends. Confession time… I have continued to play Diablo Immortal in spite of how I currently feel about Blizzard and this game’s monetization scheme. In part, the game actually has its fun moments, and in part, I wanted to see just how deep and twisted this rabbit hole gets. There is quite a bit of sensationalism flying around about this game… some of which were mischaracterized or misquoted. I figured the only way I would find out for certain was to push through and as a result, I have been spending a few hours a day over the last several days working through the game’s systems. As of last night before I went to bed I had just dinged 56 which puts me a stone’s throw away from the level cap of 60 and the beginning of the paragon system. I cannot comment about the true end game, but I do feel like I have a wealth of knowledge now about how the day-to-day functionality of this game works, since the key criticism from the monetization apologists has been that those folks reviewing the game have not really played all of the game.

I will say that the game does get considerably more enjoyable as more systems open up. One of my key complaints was that the class structure did not really feel very much like Diablo, in that there was the little interplay between abilities. This changes as you introduce Legendary Gear and Legendary Gems, which combined give you the specialization structure that Runes provided in Diablo 3. I am using a specific set of gear that gives me traits associated with the abilities that I use, which in turn is reinforced by the legendary gems that I have managed to acquire on the “free” track. I am functional but a good chunk of this game is going to be grinding repetitive content in search of the right piece of gear for the right slot/ Given the anemic drops that occur from general content runs as seen above, it takes a lot of time before you see anything that is not immediately scrapped.

You can however pay your way to the dopamine hits that we are used to from running literally any content in Diablo 3. A maxed-out Elder Rift requires you to spend 10 Legendary Crests, which costs roughly $25 in real-world currency. Paul Tassi released a video that shows the difference in feel between a “Free” run and a “Paid” run and it is significant. The truth is nothing I have been able to complete so far has given me the almost seizure-inducing cavalcade of loot that I am expecting from a Diablo game. What you do get a lot of even at 56 is white and blue trash drops, which are effectively useless. If you watch any farming videos you will notice folks not even bothering to pick up half of the loot because it has no value at all even from a materials standpoint. If it is not yellow or higher it is not worth even a moment of your time.

The one thing that I have noticed however in my time playing is that there are three distinct tiers of players in this game, which provide a sort of financial-based caste system. Before I dive into this I think it is important that we set some guidelines for costs. Everything in Diablo Immortal drives you towards the $24.99 pack of Orbs, because that allows you to purchase a 10 pack of Eternal Legendary Crests and that also allows you to run a maxed-out Elder Rift. As such I am going to set this pack as our baseline and then calculate the costs of everything else in the game from that point. Since Diablo Immortal does the thing that every mobile game does… and tries to divorce your understanding from the actual dollar amount I am going to bring that back in focus. There are two currencies that matter for cash transactions, Eternal Orbs and Platnium and each of these has a real-world conversion cost.

• Eternal Orbs cost 1.6 cents each
• Platinum cost .16 cents each

These numbers will come into focus later on in this discussion, but for now, let me talk to you about the three castes of players in Diablo Immortal.

Free to Play – The Poor

I feel like it is important to understand that I have not spent a single dime on Diablo Immortal and I do not plan on doing so. The monetization scheme with this game is truly egregious as you will see as I dive into this discussion. That said normally speaking I am a player that does not think twice about microtransactions. If you have a cool outfit on the cash shop, or a quality of life item… like the boss summon stone thing from GW2… I am going to snap that puppy up and swipe my credit card. Mobile games and Gacha games, in particular, are just a bit too greedy to ensnare me in their web. I’ve spent a truly staggering amount of money over the years on Magic the Gathering packs because they are only $3-$5 at a time. It is a low enough amount of money for me to feel like I am not really spending much of anything… until you realize that you bought 300 at that price. Gacha games love to make you spend $20 and $40 at a time… which considering my age still feels like “real money”. As a free player, the system that is hardest for you to engage in is that of the Legendary Gem. I have a full set of 6 legendary gems, all but one are “One Star” gems. This means they are the weakest gems that you can possibly get, and most of what someone might see when running a rift with the “free” quality of crests. As a free player, I received one Legendary Quest for the first time I ran an Elder Rift, and unlocked that system… which I think rewards the same predictable Legendary Gem to every player that runs it. After that, I will be able to unlock a grand total of two Legendary Crests per month. One is purchased from the Hilt vendor, and one is unlocked at rank 20 on the free path of the Battle Pass. That means it is highly unlikely I will ever see a gem drop that is higher than two stars because I will be spending almost all of my time running Rare Crest rifts which are capped at a maximum of two-star gems.

If I complete the daily activity rewards track by getting 120 battle points, the final chest will reward me 300 platinum, which can in theory be used to purchase items on the in-game auction house. Every transaction between players uses platinum as an exchange currency. So if you go back to the conversion rate I have a possibility of earning roughly 50 cents worth of platinum each day that I can then put towards buying Legendary Gems that folks are selling on the marketplace. We will dive further into this as I talk about the other Financial Castes, but for now, know that the Auction House exists and uses platinum. One of the talking points that has been used to deflect this truly evil monetization scheme is that the free players are given platinum, that they can in theory save up to buy gems.

Bargain Spenders – The Middle Class

Diablo Immortal has more unique ways to spend money than I am honestly used to from mobile monetization. It keeps popping up special offers, that are discounted in order to entice you to take a bite. For the Bargain Spender path, I am going to theorize that this is a player who has purchased everything that is presented as a “massive savings” and is not actively engaged with purchasing Eternal Orbs directly. This starts with the Boon of Plenty which is a “buff” that gives you a login reward each day, but you also have to keep logging in each day in order to qualify for the bigger rewards like Legendary Gems. For this privilege of being chained to daily rewards you are asked to spend $10 and can stack it for up to 90 days worth of use. On top of that, there are two different battlepass paid tracks and something that opens later called the prodigy’s path which gives you “rewards” as you level up. Here is a quick rundown of each of these “bonus” purchases and the cost associated with them.

• Empowered Battle Pass – $4.99
• Collectors Edition Empowered Battle Pass – $14.99
• Boon of Plenty – $9.99
• Prodigy’s Path – $19.99
• Beginner’s Pack – $.99
• Mad King’s Breach Trove – $.99
• Forgotten Tower Trove – $1.99
• Tomb of Fahir Trove – $4.99
• Destruction’s End Trove – $6.99
• Kikuras Rapids Trove – $9.99
• Cavern of Echoes Trove – $19.99

Essentially each time I complete a dungeon I am offered a trove as my “reward” for completing that dungeon. I believe that I have one more dungeon left in the game, the Pit of Anguish and at the end of that, I will very likely be offered another trove. Notice how each trove goes up in price as a way of psychologically priming you for that $25 Legendary Crest pack in the future. So remember that on the free track I had the potential of getting 3 Legendary Crests in my first month. As this hypothetical “Bargain” gamer that has purchased everything that has been offered to them, it would have cost $95.89, and at my current level, I would have received the following.

• 3 Legendary Crests from the Battlepass
• 5 Legendary Crests from the Prodigy’s Path
• 7 potential Legendary Crests from Boon of Plenty
  • pending you logged in every day for 30 days
• 24 Legendary Crests from all of the Troves

This would give you a grand total of 39 Legendary Crests and enough Eternal Orbs to purchase 23 more, giving you access to 46 Legendary Gems and quite possibly some of those being higher than the 2 stars you can get for free. At this point, you are probably thinking “Hey! You could sell some of those gems on the Auction House to earn the platinum to get the gems you really need!”. NOPE! That is not a thing you can do… or at least not a thing you can do for 39 of the 62 gems you just got access to, which leads us to the upper class of Diablo Immortal and the next discussion group.

The Whales – The Wealthy or Addicts Going Bankrupt

So we know that a “10 Pull” Elder Rift costs $25 or 10 Legendary Crests. However, what is not well explained in the game is that there are two classifications of Legendary Crests. There are the ones that the game doles out to you for “free” through the bargain packs and two a month for just playing the game, and then there are the REAL Legendary Crests called Eternal Legendary Crests that are only available from the cash shop for Eternal Orbs. There is no difference in the appearance of a Legendary Crest and an Eternal Legendary Crest, but mechanically they function very differently. Anything you get with the Legendary Crest for “the poors” is bound to your character, meaning it cannot be sold on the in-game Auction House.

So when you go and look at the Auction House, every single gem that you see over 2 Stars is being placed there by someone who has whaled hard on this game in order to get it. Remember when I said that you could early 300 platinum per day if you worked really hard and did all of your daily activities? Blood-Soaked Jade is one of the gems I would need for the build I am working towards, and currently, it is being sold for 276,000 Platinum and is only available in a maximum with 4 Stars filled out. If we convert that to real money, that single gem would cost you $44,160. If I wanted to save up platinum in order to purchase that as a free player it would take me 921 days of completing dailies or just a little over two and a half years. That is expecting that prices stay stable… when in truth over time they are likely to increase not go down in price given that the ONLY people feeding into this auction house system are the whales. Once the whales move on to the next game, the market is going to dry up, and very quickly there will be no gems over 2 stars available for purchase. This entire house of cards is entirely unsustainable in its current state. I cannot imagine a future where this monetization scheme stands for long, and where the game is actually successful. It is my personal opinion that Blizzard is trying to extract as much money as possible while this game is new and hot before they eventually have to reconcile the reality of the situation. The problem there however is that by the time we reach that point, the damage to Diablo as a brand will already be done. This entire experiment has given me serious fucking pause about what Diablo 4 is going to look like.

It Is Actually a Fun Game

The truth is that I could not have gone this far in this little experiment were it not for the fact that the game is actually pretty fun. Once you factor in the Legendary Gear and Gems, the builds that you can create are extremely satisfying. I would go so far as to say were it not for the extremely evil monetization, that this would be a highly praised sequel to Diablo 3, and very worthy of the Diablo name. However, the sheer evil greed that has been exhibited here is causing the opposite effect, and making players question what the hell happened to Blizzard. I’ve said it before… Genshin Impact has its share of predatory monetization, but this game makes it look like the most benevolent experience out there in comparison.

So there you go. I have put in the work. I have nearly reached the end game, and I can say without a doubt that the experience while enjoyable… there is no truly viable path forward for the free player. If you don’t want to take my word for it, I present to you the experience of Ranxxanterax, one of the most seasoned Diablo 3 YouTubers out there, who has essentially broken this system wide open and maxed things out since launch. He talks about reaching a point where he can only do a few things each day to actually progress his free characters. I have this feeling that given a few more days of playtime, I would be arriving at the same shore. I’ve not even gotten into the “Server Paragon” system which is designed to speed up lagging players and grind to a halt the highest progressed. Ultimately unless there are some serious fucking changes in Diablo Immortal, I expect this to be yet another flash in the pan that the zeitgeist talks about for a month or two and then moves on to greener pastures. The damage this stunt will have caused to the Diablo brand and Blizzard as a company however will likely be unrepairable. The post Diablo Immortal Caste System appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.