This thread was inspired when I read this thread written by BMPK: This game is getting really toxic without /players 8 - General Discussion - Diablo 2 Resurrected Forums (blizzard.com)
The purpose of this thread is to really highlight some problems we have going on in D2r concerning unnecessary toxicity that doesn’t even involve the hostile feature, how and why it is happening, and to stir discussion about it as to catch the dev’s attention on the matter. Maybe someone in that office will care.
I’ll use a bulleted list of cause & effect, to explain what’s happening here:
- In 20+ years of playing D2original, I never even once had a problem filling a Hell Chaos game series or a Hell Baal game series. This is because everyone on USEast as example, could see everyone’s games to join. It was easy & casual to log in for an hour here or there and tag some efficient XP runs. If you wanted to follow that game series and MF other areas, you could do that as well. Due to the ease & convenience of seeing all of these game series games on the join list, people just went there for XP and MF and nowhere else. This funneled all the XPing & MFing into a small bracket of games, leaving the rest of the join list full of actual games where people were actually playing the game, save a handful of trade games you may see.
- In 20+ years of playing D2original, I never once had a problem with community organization in-game with the chat UI and friend’s list functions. It used to be easy to communicate via chat & contacts lists. If you really didn’t want to use d2jsp, you could go to the easily accessible trade chats and see what everyone was trading. This kept traders in the trade chats and out of games, so the game join list wasn’t 90% full of “Trading Ist 4 WF”. You would see mostly Chaos & Baal & Starting Act 12345 & Duel games. ← And that is the way it should be.
- D2r releases, whether you agree with it or not, heavy aggression vs. bots for bans is laid down. This eliminates public bot Chaos and bot Baal games. Humans playing by hand do not have the patience of the bots and their ratio of time spent solidly running Baal games with no interruption is like 1/100th of what a bot can do. Needless to say, this eliminates much of the casual public Chaos/Baal scene.
- D2r releases, they isolate us into small local servers where we can only see a very small fraction of games that are created. IE: There are 50,000 games currently created on the American server but where you are, you only get to see 20 of them on your list. This again eliminates even more potential end-game Chaos & Baal runs that a player could potentially find to follow. It also makes for less people to see YOUR Chaos or Baal game that you make, who could potentially join to fill to follow. It is often with this server segregation that you can make a Chaos or Baal game let’s say, and quite seriously no one joins even over the course of 5 or 6 or more runs.
- D2r releases and they completely botch the chat & contacts UI communication functions. Yes, somehow the 20+ year old version of Diablo 2 running on ancient software & hardware had far far superior community communication functions than the new Diablo 2. The D2r communication functions are stuck in this not beta but rather an alpha like game state, as if the coding wasn’t just buggy but also simply incomplete and was never finished. This has resulted in a two critical problems: 1) No easily accessible trade channels. Now not only do we only get 20 games to see in our join list out of the 50,000 games on our server, but 90% of the games we see are “Ist 4 WF” games, making it harder to find important games to join, which also makes it harder for other people to find our games that we create. 2) There are no more dedicated channels with listed purpose. So now no one goes anywhere with any real reason to talk or organize anything. They stay silent in the chats because half the time it’s throwing players all over the place and they don’t even know what the hell chat they are even in. In D2original you could join a dedicated Chaos or Baal channel ran by an actual guild of players who had created moderator bots that would tell you what games were being ran and what # they were on so you could follow them easily, even after taking an hour break and coming back. Furthermore, there were channels for every game related thing, and discussion was happening in those channels. The difference here is that D2original chat UI was like a good forum where many discussion threads were happening that were labeled correctly to draw people into the right places to create cohesive discussions & communication, whereas D2r is like a forum that has no labeled purpose where all the threads are named “forum discussion #4”. You don’t even get to choose what discussion thread it throws you into and no one really knows what is even being talked about in those discussions so they are not interested to say anything at all. This is the difference between D2original chats and D2r chats. Well organized vs. completely unorganized. This largely has contributed to the complete dissolution of any in-game platform for organized trading, chaos, baal, dueling, or anything else for that matter. Now we are forced to use d2jsp like or Discord communities for even the simplest tasks. And even though I largely support d2jsp and Discord, I shouldn’t have to use tools like this all of the time for simple things like finding an actual Baal game to follow, because in-game communication and game join UI is botched that badly. This is inconvenient and unnecessary when the 20+ year old version of the game had all right the first time around.
- The aforementioned problems have led to the kinds of toxicity that BMPK was pointing out. What is happening now in D2r is this nasty gross cycle of: [I need to make a trade but there are no good trade chats] so [I look for trade in join list but can’t find it because I can only see 20 games] so [I make my own trade game and sit in it] which is cluttering up the game join list so people in my local server can’t see any other games, and then [People who are looking to Chaos or Baal can only see 20 games on their list and they are all trade games] so [They make their own Chaos or Baal game but rarely does anyone ever see it because join lists are full of trade games] so [Players get tired of running solo or duo Chaos & Baal and begin aiming at joining literally any game they see at all in the join list that has 3 or more players] which results in [High level players crashing games and killing all the objectives as quickly as they can, which prevents progress of the other players in those games, forcing those players to frequently have to make new games nearly on average just 5 minutes into the game they’ve just created] it makes this effect where [Players are starting to become REALLY aggravated about this and they are being toxic about everything] this in turn [Causes the high levels to be toxic to those players] and even in turn [Causes multiple high levels who join to compete for XP/Drops, to get really competitive about XPing/MFing, cutting each other off, not cooperating at all, even PKing each other and the people who are just trying walk the game for quest progression, because they cannot find solid 8 player games to join because the join lists are way too small and they are full of nearly all trade games].
- Ultimately what is happening in D2r is that not only is XP & MFing in the end-game becoming too competitive in the wrong aspects for all of the wrong reasons, but also pvm game creation in general is way way too competitive for all of the wrong reasons. Pvm is becoming pvp, very seriously, even without clicking that hostile button. Right now for the first time in 20+ years of playing Diablo 2, I am finding it mandatory to use d2jsp to formulate Hell Chaos or Hell Baal runs, where I have to summon forth the effort required to post a thread and maintain communication through while performing a game series to keep players joining, which I find incredibly obnoxious compared to the ease of finding 8 player Chaos or Baal games in D2original. Again, this is because I can never find Chaos or Baal games in my local join list and when I do, they are bait games, where some MFer is looking to run Andy/Meph/Pindle before people realize what’s going on and leave. And when I make my own games without d2jsp, apparently no one sees them in their list and I end up solo all night. This is all due to botched in-game UI communication and isolated local servers, all of this cause & effect I’ve mentioned.
DO NOT mistake what I am saying here. I am not complaining about players hostiling each other or PKing or anything of the sort. Most people know I am a pvp guy, I enjoy these surprises honestly. I am also not complaining about the idea that “It’s a public game and people can do what they want.” I get it. We all do.
What I am complaining about is overly competitive game hunting due to botched in-game communication features and isolated severs, that sends a message to everyone that encourages them to be overly competitive & toxic to each other rather than cooperative, over simple pvm that was once easy & convenient to perform for the past 20+ years in D2original. It’s beginning to make simple pvm in D2r feel full of angst & loss, rather than that old D2original feeling of gain & luck when it was easy to find, join, and follow the games you were looking for. ← This is a bad feel for the game and the dev team really needs to be focusing on fixing this first and foremost before anything else, as it is foundational for the general vibe of the game experience.
A lot of people probably have a lot of different kinds of suggestions on how to fix these issues, and that’s great. I didn’t make this thread to state some specific suggestion but rather to stir discussion on a complex topic that is definitely effecting the game experience in very negative ways. Not enough people are talking about this. Maybe they haven’t noticed for themselves yet.
But regardless, there are a few things that need to be noted before further discussion:
- These problems were born from botched in-game communication UI and local server isolation.
- People should not have to summon forth the sheer effort to schedule time to get involved in a community such as d2jsp or a Discord, to perform simple tasks in-game. Our in-game communication UI & join list functions should be at least as good as D2original. D2r is supposed to be an upgrade, not a downgrade.
- As noted by BMPK in the thread link, people are competing over any & all games that have multiple players, because games are hard to find nowadays. Whether you agree with him or not that /players 8 should be added for online multiplay, just be aware that this is a piece to the puzzle, players competing & being toxic over higher player count games.
Speaking for myself, I’d just like to see the in-game communication UI updated so that it is as good as D2original, and to see server isolation removed so that we can all see each other’s games again. I think this would be a good place to start, for fixing these problems.
