Title. Not offline mode. Something online, with a ladder. Thank you.
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Would be entirely dominated by botters.
No need.
No point.
Give us worthwhile changes instead.
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By the same logic, we should get rid of all the existing ladders too.
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Why would botters waste time building characters to farm items they can’t trade?
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I dunno, maybe there is a market for botters to bot a character up to 99, capture the #1 spot for a SSF ladder season, then sell the account to some sucker with more money than braincells just so they can claim they are #1.
The ultimate level of pay to win?
Fair enough. It could be done!
But what is the point of an SSF ladder? The whole idea of SSF is to ignore the rest of the playerbase. If you want everyone to know how quickly you hit 99 or completed holy grail, record it and post the video somewhere.
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No. The point of SSF is to engage in competition without the social engineering of trading. Start with nothing and achieve greatness with nothing but your own effort. It’s a different sense of rewarding.
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A human player can smoke any bot in a race to level 99, its not even close.
No. SSF doesn’t have a meta, it doesn’t even have a ladder. SSF is a playstyle choice, playing the game in a purist way, which I completely participate in as well. You don’t need online to play SSF, and playing singleplayer or SSF on bnet are the exact same gameplay experience. Singleplayer offline probably has far less unexpected problems, like latency or disconnects.
I don’t think that’s what they’re talking about, but rather the concept of a SSF ladder as made popular by Path of Exile (which has an option to tag your character as solo self found, and take part in a separate leaderboard). It’s a similar idea as runescape’s ironman - it’s not about just the playstyle but having a way of showing off your achievements in that playstyle to other players by means of a leaderboard and having the playstyle enforced by the game itself as proof that you did it that way. Showing off to others is a cornerstone of multiplayer RPGs.
In the context of the early races to hell and lvl 99, botters don’t really soil the competition too much since they are slower than the players that are racing - though they eventually overtake them of course, by that point the race is already done
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True, there’s nothing lost by Blizzard implementing an SSF ladder, but I think the community can pretty easily make a better ladder than Blizzard, with various categories and whatever.
Having it integrated in the game itself is a crucial aspect of a leaderboard. A “community” ladder would only be possible if there was some sort of API that people could consume the data about the characters from to create the tables, and that would have to be provided by Blizzard anyway. Otherwise you can’t really populate it. This is not like speedrunning where hard evidence of the run like a video is usually enough to validate it, this is basically long-term tracking every character’s experience and whether or not they partied or traded ever.
It would be a hard sell, but 30+ hour speedruns exist, and some longer ones as well I think. It is very niche because who wants to validate what would be over 100 hours of gameplay footage to confirm that it’s not cheated? I just don’t see Blizzard doing it, and I would expect if they ever did, the SSF ladder would be all builds mushed into one ladder. I’m sure it could be filtered by class, but someone doing SSF zoo build being compared to Werewolf or Hurricane is going to result in huge gap between those druids on a ladder. Even if that zoo build was a phenomenal SSF run, it’ll be lost in the noise. I fail to see what it really adds to the SSF experience without a really sophisticated ladder that lets obscure SSF runs stand out.
I don’t think people want anything even remotely that complicated. Just a regular class-based ladder with a SSF switch, just like PoE would already make that crowd happy.
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But there’s still the “what does it actually accomplish” portion of my point that you’ve haven’t addressed. Ladders are for bragging rights, and when the bragging rights of doing an SSF, thrown items only run are completely lost in the noise of entire ladder mushed together, then they don’t matter anyway. Even the current ladder doesn’t express anything more significant than who got 99 first. An SSF ladder would be a mirror of the existing ladder, just with a bit more wait time to see the top 10. Both would be wholly disinteresting and only a reflection of what players did with the well known, extremely predictable meta builds in the game.
The success of D2’s appeal isn’t that hammerdins and lit sorcs exist, it’s that you can play anything else and still be successful. Really, any ladder that can’t communicate that isn’t relevant, and I am saying that the current ladder is completely mundane. The draw of playing ladder at all is ironically completely separate from the ladder. Players are drawn to playing ladder for the fresh start, which is immediately bogged down by botters and other exploiters, and/or ladder only items. The first player to hit 99 on anything is met with a resounding “neat”, if anyone noticed at all.
ssf doesn’t work, that’s why poe doesn’t have it… Oh
I guess reading doesn’t work either. I never said SSF “doesn’t work”, whatever you think that means; again, I wouldn’t know because I never said it. I asked “what is the point of the ladder”. Try thinking a bit and answer that question.
It’s the same as ironman in runescape. Runescape has all the same problems as D2 has with botters, rmt (even gold sold by the game itself in the case of runescape) and the like, and people still want to brag about being ironman players because the extra hurdles do make the achievement seem more legitimate. It doesn’t really have to be a super balanced e-sports competition, only a playthrough with game-imposed rather than self-imposed limitations that maybe made your character name appear in a different color or something as simple as that.
Whether or not you think that holds any value is completely subjective. Some people like to see a videogame acknowledge some achievement they did.
I agree, and I’m saying that the D2 ladder is too narrow a window to reflect this.