Izawwlgood wrote:For starters, you're looking at an incredibly small slice of the beta, that is, the 13th level gear grind. Judging the came on that alone is, frankly, pretty short sighted. I put the game down as soon as I got my interested classes to max level in the beta, because I have no interest in the gear grind; I even pointed out how ludicrous such a notion is.
Diablo is about the gear, but complaining that there's a grind for Gold level stuff, at level 13, is a bit silly; if the game was released in full right now, it'd take most people less than 30m to replace everything they currently have equipped. That the game itself has facilitated the trading of items via an AH, and the crafting of items via account sharing of crafter upgrades mean that while yes, the gear grind is present, it's not the sole feature of the game.
And, like all games, fixating on a singular portion of it and deciding it's a deal breaker is your bag; claiming you hate WoW because you don't like the gear grind is forgetting there were 84 levels before you got to that point, with plenty of interesting stuff to see and do.
It wasn't that the item was lv13 that bothered me, rather that the metagame and how guilds/hierarchies establish will rotate around the idea of efficiently grinding for the best set, and that your gear will be scrutinized, making you a victim of the game's RNG or forcing you to grind to overcome the RNG.
The 84 levels that came before 85 comprised a minuscule amount of the game experience, as they pretty much were designed from the viewpoint of propping you up for lv85 play. I played WoW since it was in beta. I've seen it all. It held its charm for a while, but that is gone with more modern titles that don't reward/affect performance base on time spent ding tedious activities but rather actually rewarding achievement. Moreover, the 1-84 is basically a single player RPG experience with all the restrictions of a MMO and none of the strengths of a single player storytelling design and combat gameplay. The multiplayer part only comes into shape at endgame.
It may seem to you that judging the game by this level seems hasty, but I simply don't care to gamble $60 on good faith. I've been through countless betas; and if there is something I have learned from them, is that I should not buy the game if I'm not entirely sold by whatever beta/demo showed me.
At best I'll wait for the youtube playthroughs of high level content before I decide whether the game is worth my investment.