5 Infernal Things Diablo III Should Have Done Differently

We're a few weeks into Diablo now, and despite fun, addictive, arcade-style gameplay, there are quite a few things that could have been done differently to make the game much more enjoyable.

1) We figured you might have taken the day off work.  Go outside.

After more than a decade of waiting, Blizzard released Diablo III, intended to be another jewel in the crown of the company.  Of course, on launch day, and for a few days afterward, players weren't actually allowed to play.  Some took the day off work in order to play, only to find that they actually couldn't.  Instead of telling you when the servers would be up, or letting you queue for an eventual entry, though, you had to keep logging in to find these wonderful love notes written by Blizzard's development team.  Don't worry!  We understand that you want us to go outside and enjoy the beautiful day, and not play the game you've spent the last ten years making.

2) This armor.

I've downsized the image pretty significantly.  Rest assured, the full-size picture is horrible and invokes many Sanity checks as untold realities, all impossible in scope, pray upon the edges of your consciousness, waiting for you to sleep to invade your dreams.  Pray that I do not decide to link the full image.  As many fantasies as I may have about wearing a bejeweled starfish on my face while prancing around in a lime green dress with kneepads on my shoulders and purple tights on my arms, it's not particularly heroic (or even thematic) to have in a game about fallen angels abandoning the heavens to fight hordes of demons.  Blizzard, you tricked us into thinking you were done making our eyes bleed after we finished the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft.  Oh, how naive I was.  There are now things that have been seen that cannot possibly be un-seen.  Fhtagn!  Ia!  Ia!

3) Yo Dawg I Herd U Liek Spam...

At launch, there was no General chat to leave.  There was a blissful lack of spam, gold advertisements, and players asking about Mankrik's Wife.  This, apparently, was not the game Blizzard intended for you.  They decided to add the wonderful touch of World of Warcraft to the game, making sure you automatically joined their new, wonderful general chat features.  Suddenly, we're back to playing the Blizzard game we've come to expect, filled with trolls, gold spammers, and people talking about each other's dead mothers.  As an added perk, even if you leave the game-wide general chat, you automatically rejoin each time you log back in!  This once and for all proves that Barrens chat is the Hotel California of the internet.

4)I can tell which item is useless!
 Just like every MMO, Diablo has different qualities of items, revealed by how colorful they are.  Grey is complete trash and has no value, while white items are only next to worthless.  White items are pretty much relegated to the junk heap unless you plan on running to town in a few minutes.  The catch, however, comes in when you see a tome or a gem, which are also labeled in white.  Both items have their use, but they look just like all the other billion items that just exploded out of the enemy mob.  They're very easy to overlook.


5) Crafting?  Totally useful. 

Look at the item pictured.  It's got quite a lot of Dexterity -- completely useful for Monks and Demon Hunters, right?  The catch?  It's not actually usable by either class.  It's usable by the Barbarian, who has little use for 91 Dexterity.  Item generation is entirely random in this game, meaning that there are a lot of swords with bonus spell damage floating around, and a lot of voodoo dolls that boost your power with a bow.  Not only is the quantity of bonus randomly determined, but the type is random.  Crafting is no stranger to this -- random bonuses to random stats make the crafting system quite a gamble -- and considering it costs more money than buying an end-game armor set off the auction house just to level up to possibly use formulas that might generate something usable for more gold than it's worth, crafting is completely and totally worthless.  I suppose this is the status quo for MMOs.