Just how long should players expect a game to remain fresh and exciting? Do publishers have to treat all AAA games as services that keep us constantly entertained for years or even decades? Have MMOs trained us to feel entitled to games that never actually end? These are the questions that have been circling my head after reading Blizzard's response to player complaints about the lack of compelling "endgame" content in Diablo III.

In a massive thread on the official Blizzard forums, user Slicktorine leads things off by saying that after putting 350 hours into Diablo III, he's starting to get bored. Seriously. After putting in enough time to easily beat the game on all four difficulty levels with all five character classes, traverse every corner of the map both with and without friends, and most likely master the one-death-and-you're-done Hardcore mode, Diablo III is finally starting to lose its luster for him. Apparently, Slicktorine and many others commenting on the thread were expecting better than a six-cent-per-hour return on their $60 investment in the game.

To be fair, the thread contains some legitimate complaints about how Diablo III's endgame compares to that of Diablo II. The relative scarcity of interesting, unique item drops in the game's last act, along with the level 60 progression cap, makes farming for items and experience after the game is done a little pointless. Then again, this kind of farming was always a somewhat pointless way to satisfy the "look at the numbers go up" itch and make an already completed game just a little easier to complete. I'm more sympathetic to the demands for some sort of super-challenging endgame dungeon full of elite enemies, even though I think Hardcore mode should already provide a significant enough challenge for most players.

It's not the specific complaints that get to me, though, so much as the sense players seem to feel that the game owes them more than it has already given. "I played this game nonstop for the first month, and in the last two weeks I've played once," writes one angry commenter, who apparently believes a month of nonstop play was not enough to expect from the game. Another complains that "right now at 500+ hours played, the Time+reward is crap unless you use the AH to buy ALL YOUR GEAR." I'm sorry, but expecting a game to remain just as rewarding after playing for over 500 hours is a bit much. Even timeless games like chess and poker start to get a little less interesting after investing that much time and attention. I understand that you never want the thrill of clicking on enemies and getting cool new items for your guy to end, but there are other experiences out there to enjoy...

They're working on it

Blizzard, to its credit, seems to be a bit more sympathetic to these kinds of complaints than I am. In a surprisingly forthright reply on the thread, Community Manager Bashiok admits that simply farming new items from enemies is "just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game." Bashiok also admits the development team expected the item hunt to keep players engaged for much longer than it has.

But he also notes, "Honestly, Diablo III is not World of Warcraft. We aren't going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months." The comparison to World of Warcraft is an interesting one, and one that I think gets to the expectations some people had for Diablo III. Former Blizzard employee and current CEO of Torchlight developer Runic Games Max Schaefer has said that Diablo III was originally being developed as an MMO, or "the Diablo version of World of Warcraft," as he put it.

Even though you can play through Diablo III just fine on your own, features like consistent characters stored on Blizzard servers and centrally controlled auction houses do make the game feel a little bit more like an MMO than a standard single-player RPG. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn't extend to the content, which is much more discrete than the constantly changing and expanding worlds of most massively multiplayer games.

But World of Warcraft players invest a monthly fee into the creation of that constant new content. For Diablo III, the continuing revenue stream is a little less direct, coming through players selling items in the real-money auction house. If Blizzard wants players to keep selling those items, it has to invest in creating new content that keeps players interested in collecting them.

And that's just what the company is doing. Bashiok says he hopes further tweaks and gameplay changes in an upcoming update, as well as a long-awaited player-vs-player mode, will "get [players] excited about playing" again. But he admits that these changes are "not going to be a real end-game solution." For that, the development team has ideas for a "progression system" that will keep the game compelling for much longer, but the release of such a "massive feature" is "a ways out."

As Bashiok notes, "there needs to be something else that keeps people engaged, and we know it's not there right now." Creating that "something else" would be in the interests of both Blizzard and Diablo III players, for sure. But that doesn't mean you can't be content with the vast amount of satisfying gameplay and content you can get out of Diablo III as it currently exists. As one commenter succinctly puts it, "They released a game that is fun or a month+ and is worth $60. So, take a break dumb kids, until they release new content."