When you say "many think b3 is where demigod became fun" it makes me worry that there aren't going to be many major changes in the future.. Quite a few things in the game play, rather than simple numbers moving for balance, lacks.
While I'm somewhat confident that more than half the items being useless and rehashes of other items might be fixed in a patch at or near launch day. Other things, however, worry me, like what every happened to there being "a lot more skills"? What happened to there being skills where your weapons damage effects them, as well as armor? Those are two great things which would of added to the gameplay which haven't been implemented, when the code is going gold.
I don't really care about chatting and friends. I've been playing games for over 10 years, back when those weren't even concepts, but the games where awesome.