DarkThoughts

The D3 issue wasn’t that it was “grindy”, it was that they tailored & balanced the entire thing around the real money auction house. They fully expected you to waste money there to gear your character to make it through the game (namely the last difficulty where a lot of enemies could just oneshot you from out of screen).

They actively nerfed xp to make things take much longer and at the same time the end game is very repetitive and even more grind.

And then expect you to reach level 100 for the season, as well as do 2 additional level ~100 challenges to get the entire season rewards.

I’m also not sure if I would say the game was good before the higher levels. It was okay, but there were a lot of weak points already showing, like the skill system or the story. The only good thing were the graphics, but even they are weirdly low quality at times, while eating all your vram like candy - regardless of the settings or available vram.

The only other one I know is from Warframe, which is free but still pretty bad for a number of reasons. I think throwing the rewards into the regular reward pool sounds good, but I’m not familiar with the game so I can’t really judge how this actually plays out. In WF they throw the old rewards into a special store that uses currency earned through the battlepass, so you still have to play it and let it dictate your game if you want to buy them. In the case of WF though this whole system came on top of already existing tactics to keep you in the game & playing certain content, like the relic rotations for example. It was like the last drop that eventually made me quit. So it’s hard to judge from the outside when I don’t know the game, but in general I find such mechanisms terrible. It’s sort of like dark patterns but adapted for video games and inherently predatory.

Agreed.
My first experience was in Warframe, and that one was at least free, but it still gave you timed rewards (FOMO) and dictated when and what to play, which I absolutely hated. Relics already kinda did this shit too, making the game even more of a chore. In Diablo however you even have to pay for it on top of all that. And what do we got for this “live service” bullshit? Half baked and still rare as fuck updates and even worse seasons that I care even less about (which also just serve the same purpose of baiting you into the game through FOMO pressure). I haven’t touched the game for like 2 months already and deeply regret giving into my FOMO of buying it, but it is hard for a franchise that I’ve followed for such a long time.

It’s been many years since I emulated the SNES with either Snes9x or ZSNES but I’m pretty sure they both had different rendering filters to make the screen more blurry. Whether you like that more or less is of course up to you, hence why it is good to have it as an option, but it of course won’t help you if you’re hooking up an actual SNES to a modern TV.

There’s a difference between “made in China” and “made by China”. But keep supporting your oppressive regimes and see where that gets you.

Chinese, no thanks.