Scenario 1: (Current Loot System)
8 Players kill Mephsito, 6 items drop. Depending on how fast you can click, you can end up with one or two items, or none. Among your group, at least 3 people are getting something.
Scenario 2: Personal loot MMO style
8 Players kill Mephisto, 6 items drop. One person can roll the lucky dice and get several items. Maybe just get a basic role and get one item. There’s even a chance 6 of the 8 players get one item each. Either way, we’re running an MMO mechanic in an ARPG that is famous for its genre defining loot system and it would fundamentally change the way the game works and its pacing and would ultimately be very unconducive towards the social aspect.
Scenario 3: Personal Loot Guaranteed Drop per potential drop pool of items
8 Players kill Mephisto. 6 items drop. 6 players get 1 item. 2 don’t get anything at all.
Scenario 4: Personal Loot Tables
8 Players kill Mephisto. 6 items drop. All players get 6 items.
Scenarios 2, 3 and 4 just do not work for Diablo 2. Especially scenario 4 as it requires a total rebalance of the game’s itemization system that currently does not have balancing to begin with. Botting and duping did Scenario 4 to a T and made a lot of items lose any potential value they had.
Ploot conversation again. MDK22: Sighs as part of his soul dies inside.
Me (FFA) and MicroRNA (Ploot) have debated this out in multiple locations. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. I would rather they not touch it because balancing will be an absolute nightmare, it will also not be the same D2 experience as others, player fatigue, computer optimizations, reaction time, etc. If they implement it there would also be ways of detecting pick it much easier with FFA because they store the character files on the bnet servers. This is gleamed by the your characters never expire.
We both make extremely good points as well as other people. I suggest people look for them and see the viewpoints there as well as here.
See, there I can agree on. If they cannot combat cheating, by all means, strike it up for personal loot - but that’s suggesting that modern day gaming code can be cracked that easily on advanced anti-cheat systems employed by the world’s largest gaming company. I don’t particularly support most motives that Blizzard employs for their games, but their security systems in place ever since WoW: Wrath have been top notch.
I am not try to converse. I am just pointing out information that many of us already know. Between the Blizzcon reveal, deep dive, streamer interviews, media interviews, 2 Blizzard surveys, twitter, etc… there is alot of D2R info out there and also quite limited on key points/inconsistencies, too.
As long as it’s constructive criticism and feedback, be it personal opinion or factual, it’s all welcome, so I wouldn’t fret too much about how much the issue has been brought to the forefront of this battle over Personal Loot. The more noise that is generated, the more likely something will be done by the devs.
I did not mean to direct it negatively towards you if you felt that way I am sorry it was not my intention. If anything you have opened my eyes to some aspects I didn’t see which is awesome. You and I have debated it heavily and covered many aspects of it as well as many others that I just don’t want the thread to go too far off the rails or the other people’s viewpoints to be lost. We are not the only ones.
when i get to the end game i indeed play solo, which is a by product of not being able to pick anything up yes and as you mentioned i indeed dont use a cube and just use my charms, having this change would mean i wont have to worry as much about it
You know what, I’m not even going to elaborate on anything other than saying one thing:
Having several different accounts full of mules that I had to constantly log in and out of and dig through for trading was super uncomfortable & inconvenient.
Any new implementations to the game that allow me to stack consumables and keep my trade hoard more central for access is certainly welcome by me.
Well Merlin and Gandalf belong to different fictional universes for which the rules can be arbitrarily changed with every new iteration of said characters, so not sure this is a valid comparison.
Anyway, I tend to agree more with Geezer on this one. When WoW went to unlimited free respecs and the ability to change specs on the fly, it took something away from that game. Our characters were no longer “characters,” they were mobile weapons platforms that could change their loadouts at will to suit a given situation. That to me is a subtraction, a fourth wall breaker. I realize not everyone thinks of their characters as having an identity, but many do. Immersion is a thing, and it makes games more fun to play for a lot of players.
With that said, I don’t think there should be no ability to respec, I just think we should have to work for it. An architect can go back to school to become a chef if they want, but they can’t push a button and turn their ability to build a restaurant into the talent needed to win that restaurant a Michelin star.
I agree with the idea that characters in D2 should not be able to freely respec. My point relates to costs and immersion. There are subtle respecs and more dramatic respecs.
For example, a players keeps the exact same skills but just want to shift a few skill points around, should that be costly?
If a player wants to shift from a duel elemental build to solely a singe element, should that be costly since the player already knows how to use that element already?
If a player want to shift from a fire to a lightning build, should that be costly? Much of the build is the same (defense/teleport), but it is just the offensive skills that change.
In your example, you used the analogy of an architect becoming a restaurant owner. These are quite different. In my two examples above, one is more like an architect choosing different tile floors in the bathroom or deciding to specialize more on brutalist architecture versus modern designs. A respect is not making a sorceress into an amazon.
This is not like your architect/restaurant example. There are not switching professions.
Yes, because changing elements is a game breaking factor in terms of difficulty. What would happen is that everyone would change their spec based on the area they are trying to clear. That would eliminate the need for immunities, and heavily reduce difficulty. If people did have access to unlimited respecs without costs, then the next step would probably be to ask to remove immunities as a QoL. Because respeccing to beat immunities would be too tedious and immunities would serve no purpose other than having to respecc all the time.
You already have 3 free chances to respecc, if you manage to screw up all those chances you still have the possibility to respecc for a cost. It has worked for so many years, it’s a great system, so why would anyone change it, i don’t get it.
I haven’t read the whole topic because its all about respecs, I doubt we will change from the current 3 free and unlimited with token. I wanted to touch on gem/rune stacking.
With shared stash the “decision” on whether to pick up is already gone. A huge portion of my shared tab will be gem/rune storage to unload on mules as it fills up. I will not need to make decisions on that whatsoever. Stacking just makes it so I don’t need quite as many mules, gems/runes can all go on one mule along with other items.
I’m even happy to have them ONLY stack within the stash so you have to decide if you want to pick them up as they take quite a bit of room in your bag, but not a ton in your stash
I halfway agree with that statement. The decision is still there, but it will be easier for you to choose to pick up gems since you will have an easier time to mule and some more storage space. As long as there is limited storage, you will always have to choose what to store and what not to store.
And we don’t know yet, or atleast i don’t know, how many characters we are allowed to have on one account, so how many mules or how much storage you will have for each account is still uncertain. Therefore, you still have to choose how many mules of gems and runes you would like to have, instead of playable characters, or mules with other items. Stacking just means there will be no limit or no reason not to pick them up.
It’s more of a “give him a finger, and he takes the whole arm” kinda situation. “We already get more stash space, why not give us unlimited space for gems and runes.”
Ok that’s a fair point. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be a orthopedic surgeon wanting to become a neurosurgeon. They are both surgeons (with the same basic skills) but their roles are not interchangeable at will. The orthopedist is going back to school to make this change.
Leaving aside for the moment the role play and immersion aspects since those cannot be easily quantified, the short answer to your question is yes. It should be costly because it has very real gameplay implications, which is likely the reason it is the way it is.
As others have pointed out, different farming areas in hell difficulty have different immunities. Being able to easily switch based on the area you want to farm that day would dramatically alter gameplay, hell difficulty in particular.
The existing respec system (three free with a gated ability to earn more) fits with the current design of the game. Just leave it be. Designing and coding and balancing a “subtle vs dramatic” respec system would be complicated and not a value added use of dev time.
First, I did not say that respecs should be free but simply reduced costs. As of now, players use cookie cutter builds , team up, other tactics, or simply skip monsters with an immunity that they can not deal with easily.
Therefore, you can make a case that free respecs could be game changing (which by the way I never said to begin with. I said reduced costs.), but “game breaking” seems to be hyperbole to me.
Are you planning on playing D2R exclusively with a screen aspect ratio of 4:3?
If not, some may claim that this is game breaking since:
You can see and kill monsters that previously were off screen before they pose a threat to you.
You can teleport further to get out of trouble (depending on the map of course).
Therefore, one can even claim (I think it is not a big deal) that 16:9, 21:9, and 32:9 are game breaking in comparison to the old 4:3 aspect ratio.
Don’t really see higher aspect ratio as a game breaking change. I do feel being able to teleport further is a very bad change, and i don’t think that will be there on launch.
That said, i would much rather keep 4:3 ratio on the remaster, rather then free respecs. But do not mistake my statement by saying that i do not want 16:9 or better aspect ratio.
Many of the changes adopted or could be adopted change the game. In some respects, which are which are in the eye of the beholder. For example, Blizzard in their survey listed a dedicated charm inventory as a QoL feature. You disagree. That is fine. My point is that even the simplest of changes (e.g., graphics updates) impacts the game.
My idea is that the core gameplay are features shared by hardcore/softcore, ladder/non-ladder, and single/multiplayer games. Even within this, I support multiple changes for various reasons that can impact gameplay but are not catastrophic changs that other perceive.