And what is the problem with that? Let the people choose where they want to play. Chaos or Baal were never a problem, the problem was that there was no other option for xp. With TZ you have plenty of options and could choose the zone that fits your build the best.
Is lvl 85 pits special? Different builds do better in different 85 areas. People are still going to play pits b/c they like how fairly easy it is to find. People who run cows are going to run cows. Now though they wouldn’t be penalized for pick a certain build and an area that build isn’t good in suddenly becomes TZ’d. I think there was a lot of variety in places people magic found before TZ, though TZ does add a few more options to the mix.
Pits are special because the Elites can drop any item in the game. TZs made them less special, but they still have a place for when a crappy TZ is up. If everything was TZ’d all the time, pits would become 100% obsoleted and pointless. They’d be no different from any other normal area in the game.
Granted, improving TZs would further decrease the value of Pits, but up the value of other zones. Going so far as to have “omni-TZ mode” would just take us back to the (IMO) bad old days of endless bot… er, I mean boss farming.
Like I said before, that’s a valid argument, but is akin to replacing TZs with a different game mode instead of improving TZs. Personally, I like the TZ concept with areas changing because it makes the world feel more alive. It urges you to think and play outside the box a little bit instead of becoming a living bot. If you went Omni-TZ, I’m afraid it would just slowly turn back into boss runs all day every day.
What? The pit is a TZ tho? Why would you not farm it? How would it be obsolete? If the entire map was TZ, people would just farm where they like or where their character excels at. Pit falls into that scenario for a lot of people.
Any disqualification you find for not improving general gameplay that has to do with bots is unproductive. Just cuz something might benefit a bot as well as a regular player doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. You can go yell at them on twitter for forgetting the past 5 ban waves, but if the sole argument against it was that bots would do well, then we should probably just do it anyway.
The problem with that is that people don’t need to, because the zones aren’t equal. Why would I fight doll/souls infested zones that are 1/10th the reward of a fun group zone like chaos?
People rather log off than play crap zones or farm non tz zones
I think a lot of people forget they’re allowed to still do baal runs or farm level 85 areas. They see sewers and totally forget what they were doing for the past 20 years and get mad about it.
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People ran baal because it was the only choice they had. But why would anybody run 10 hours of baalruns when he can get the same amount of xp in 1h tz baal/chaos/tomb?
I don’t have the time to grind for hours every day anymore and I don’t want to. I rather play something else when there is no good tz in my limited gaming time
You’re missing the point of what I’m saying. Of course you could still farm pits, but if everything is TZ’d, pits would be absolutely no different than any other game zone. The only reason to run a pit instead of say Arcane Sanctuary or Flayer Jungle would be familiarity or habit.
That’s not my argument. I don’t really care about it benefiting bots. I care about human beings behaving like bots.
Depends on what you like doing in game right? If you like PvP you don’t care about baal runs or TZ. If you want to find items and that is your thing you can farm better areas than a weak TZ when one pops up. If you’re searching for good XP and you suddenly run into a weak TZ due to lack of good mobs you can still go run baal.
It was like when they introduced sunders, and every players stayed as a cold sorc for their entire run. It was easy, no real gear required and did very well, but they could have got more XP if they switched to a light or nova sorc because they were still faster. People get stuck in the one path mentality, and don’t realize they have options.
If a TZ isn’t good you can do something else.
But if you like running pit or your character does well in it then you can? Meanwhile someone else might hate the pit and want to run chaos. There would still be variety in the game if the entire map was a TZ. There was variety before TZ’s existed too, just not in the XP game. Some people ran keys, some ran act bosses, some ran cows, some ran lvl85 areas, some ran pindle/shenk/eldrich/trav.
Not gonna lie there are a ton of people who enjoy playing the game like that. They like to grind out items 24/7 while min/maxing the efficiency of their runs. There are people out there that since D2R has launched they’ve spent 95% of their time doing trav runs. Why not let them play wherever whenever at their maximum potential, and they they decide to take a hit by farming in an area their character isn’t the greatest at then that would be their choice, rather than a random generator deciding what zone is good all of a sudden?
And that’s why I quit the game over a decade ago and didn’t come back until recently.
Look, my point here was to try and improve the current TZ system, which I basically like. I think my OP accomplishes that goal. If you want to talk about throwing the entire system out and replacing it with something else, more power to you, but that’s not something I’m currently interested in.
Aside from that, the chances of anything being done AT ALL is slim-to-none, but I think condensing the TZ list down has a much better chance (0.001%) of getting done than doing what you’re talking about (0.00000001%).
I would argue that all of the options are just as likely to be done, be it condensing, making all TZ’s active 24/7, or making the entire map TZ’d. You are right though there is almost no chance anything gets done.
I like playing in TZ’s I still think they’re awful for the game list and playerbase. So many dividing factors in the game and they decided to add another. NL/Ladder/Softcore/Hardcore/NA/EU/Asia/SP, now we get to add TZ into the mix meaning people are less likely to find each other especially when the chat channels are trash.
Overall it is great that now XP can be gained in many different places, but TZ are weak for organized leveling unless you have a team working to feed XP. Baal and Chaos runs made it easy because they’re fairly straight forward. But in any unorganized TZ, you have 8 players teleporting in 8 different directions clearing everything or maybe just the unique mobs, then we’re back to spamming TZ new games every 45 seconds. Condensed might solve that though, but I still see no reason to limit it.
You are talking about it like we all would have all day to play the game and it’s just a minor inconvenience. You know that a normal baalrun with baal kill at 98 is ~50k, while only the TZ throne without baal is up to 600k.
Reality is that you can go for a week without seeing any of the good zones, because they spawn in a time where you are either sleeping, at work or just having some quality time with your family. And when you finally decide you just gonna grind baal for some peanut XP, you won’t find a lot of folks joining, because they are all playing something else because the zone sucks and it’s not worth to log in.
We never had that issue before TZs, as baalruns were the go to for xp and always full.
If by alive you mean “log in, TZ sucks, log out” then sure.
Sadly TZ’s managed in a few weeks to do what LoD didn’t in 20 years. Burn me out on D2.
When I know I can make more progress in an hour in TZ Tombs/Chaos/Flayer than I can in 4 hours in most of the other TZs… I just end up playing for that hour lol. Meanwhile for those 4 hours I get caught up playing other games… and eventually just start not paying attention to what the current TZ is.
It’s a very “feels bad” mechanic. D2 was always that game I was happy to log in at 1:26am and play for 3 hours. Or 2:45pm and play for 10. Not so much anymore. Just feels bad to be tied to some arbitrary schedule… and one you can’t even plan ahead for at that.
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Isn’t the solution to rework those areas a little in order to make them more relevant for TZs, and when it’s not possible (for example because it needs to be less dense for the campaign playthrough) just remove them from the list?
Or are they actually already rather close in terms of efficiency, and players are just not willing to do stuff that isn’t the 5% most efficient or that isn’t as efficient for their specific build?
And in order to avoid having to remake a game every 5 minutes, have the TZ be fixed at game start, and let an extra TZ be added every time a significant proportion of the current TZ is completed.
They already got the feedback which zones and how to improve them, but they just don’t care and are probably not capable of the change.
We are currently talking about at least 3-10+ times the XP/hour. So no, not only 5%.
Grouping in CS TZ is about 20+ million xp on lvl 98 per hour. Soloing a mediocre zone like far oasis tz in a p8 game is about 7 million xp, if you are lucky and have a baalrun with tz96 active that let you solo the TZ. A crap zone like Den of Evil or tristram is even less xp than far oasis.
Even “good” gear farming TZs like travincal or cows, suck for xp. Pit is mediocre due to wasted time to get there.
In my opinion, there are 2 options.
- Make everything terrorized and let people choose freely
- make the whole act terrorized and rotate 1-5 hourly
This would allow split games, group games and would reduce the pain of random zones. You could plan ahead when your zones are active.
XP is XP. You can decide what you want to do in game, but there are other options. Baal run or play a weak TZ or don’t play that’s all good. But there are ways to get XP if a TZ is bad or unmanageable for your character. Sorry but people did baal runs for 20 years and got to 99, so a little off brand baal runnings nowadays won’t kill you by comparison to what it used to be.
Except with TZs there ARE no Baal runs depending on where you are in the country. Servers are regional.
All TZ’s are terrible for grouping. They’ve hurt the game is some pretty crappy ways.
Not to mention, a lot of us older folks just straight up don’t like being told how to play.
It’s not killing anybody (except baalruns or diabaalruns), but it’s a very bad design and makes you feel like wasting your time when you are not running a good zone. If you can’t understand this, then there is no use in discussing this anymore.
I have no doubt that finding a baal run is much harder nowadays. But surely there has to be some right when a truly awful TZ pops up? It is hard to organize w/o a discord, but I’m sure it is doable. I know the split MF games I used to be a part of on discord are still going strong.
Agreed on TZ being terrible for the game. They split the game list and are awful for group XP. Nice to have the variety, but the throne room organized everything much better than a TZ ever could.
Will have to disagree with you on the last one. Nobody is telling you what to play. Even if you only like 4 of the TZ or even if you only like baal runs you can make it to 99 by the end of ladder. Your character can farm lvl85 areas that are not TZ’d and do just fine finding items.
I agree that TZ’s were an awful addition and I called out the exact reasons we’re seeing right now that is the case. But regardless you feel like you’re wasting time in what? There is still an option for good XP on the board in every TZ. Might not be as easy or cool or have as much XP as another TZ, but regardless the XP is good. The farming in TZ can be matched in many places so that really doesn’t matter. If you cannot understand that you’re trapping yourself thats okay. If your augment is that you can only farm during the very best of XP out of all the options in the TZ list and you’re limiting yourself because something else is worse. Then I really hope that all of your gear is perfect stat because we can’t take a 140defense shako, needs to be 141 right?
normally i agree with you lately, but this… TZ is what? 3-5x faster than regular farming. you cannot say that when the TZ switches to something else that’s not very good, whether it be blood moor or trist… compared to tal rasha / baal / nihl TZ… you gotta be kidding.
you can not farm for like 3 hours hit a good TZ and make up all the xp you could’ve made it you played for 3 WHOLE HOURS instead of 1 tz. the difference is immense and bad TZs are cancer.
in between sunder, tz mosaic. i’m lvl 79 this ladder. don’t think i’m playing the next one etc. game is ruined imo.
and yes you’ll say something like “well nothing is stopping you from playing like you used to” where i would rebuttle - but when you realize how inefficient that is, you quit. anyone with a brain, will stop.