With Terrorized Zones not applying to Offline Play, and by inference any items that drop only there being impossible to find offline, I suspect the call for an SSF Ladder would be stronger now. I believe this would be especially true if the ladder tracked “minutes played” rather than “minutes since ladder start”, because that would also create a ‘speedrun ladder’ (especially if the ladder could be filtered by “minutes to complete difficulty X”).
Access to a SSF Ladder Game Mode requires very few tweaks in the code: an extra clickable button on the character creation screen, disabling the Lobby button [and a cheat check server-side to prevent joining public games], removing access to the shared stash, and a different database search for the ladder list.
One of the main reasons for solo players wanting such a ladder online is to keep the element of competition (absent in offline play where character files are hackable) and to level the playing field in terms of community assistance. Yes, the speed runners will dominate the top of the leader boards, but that doesn’t mean people can’t set themselves new targets each season, particularly if the leader boards measured “minutes played” because a player can compete against their own time with different builds.
The desire to “beat your time” disappears when you have to track it manually in the absence of benchmarks set by players who are not elite speed runners, for instance, and a ladder reset could be motivation for many to “try again”. Also, an online ladder removes the temptation to get “just that one item” from the shared stash…
D2 has traditionally been a ‘set your own playstyle/goals’ kind of game, but the ‘first to rank 99’ ladder methodology is so arbitrary. Prior to Patch 2.5, reaching level 99 was basically impossible without a community behind you. SSF characters (especially with a timer) on 2.5 can now legitimately hit the level cap, but obviously the speed runners have a huge edge due to their knowledge of the game; and that’s fair enough! I’ll never be a top 100 player with my 20 hour/week schedule when other people can invest 75% of that per day. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to try speed running against my peers, and setting a target like “Okay, this season I reached Top 1000, next time I’m going for Top 900”. With a timer, I could even make multiple runs with the same build during a season to try beat my PB for the season.
The idea that people party up as the “main drawcard of D2” is totally false. Yes, 8 people might join the same game, but you’ll find one guy is speed-levelling a friend and the other 6 are solo-running “players 8” content in different areas. That’s not “partying up”; that’s P8 online, which is unfair on the people who play the game solo during the week and with irl friends only with casual characters on weekends.
SSF has a huge following in other games. I fail to see why it wouldn’t be as attractive for D2R.
the ssf ladder could rank everyone by level but when the level is the same the least amount of time played gets to the top.
that way you the “first 99” is Always open to any able to get to lvl 99 faster.
but I think “time played” should be account based and we should be allowed to use shared stach and you could at anypoint “reset” your SSF account to reset the time back to 0 ofc you lose all your characters ( or they all go to single player the NL of SSF)
whatever a SSF ladder of any kind would be welcome by a large % of the community. first 99 on SSF would be so much more meaning full, showing off the items / character to your friends would also be that much more impressive.
D2 is all about speed, the time that it takes you to do anything is very important. and ladder should reflect this idea.
a count of Number of monsters killed would be cool too tho.
The only issue I have with your time played idea, while I think kinda neat, is that someone could theoretically get some stupid low time played at the start of ladder, and then just sit at the top of the ladder beyond reproach, and people would realize halfway through 92, that they’re not going to meet the time, and have to start over. I would be stupid annoyed with that.
Whereas monster slayed, speed would still be king, and if you wanted to keep your spot, you’d have to maintain absurdly fast farming/kill speeds.
Sorting by time then xp seems most suitable to me.
If you’re using the shared stash then you’re just playing regular ladder without joining public games, which means every subsequent character is not ‘pure’ SSF. While I can see the attraction of doing that, the meta for ‘pure’ SSF characters is quite different from an ‘impure’ SSF where the first toon is always a sorceress or hammerdin.
like top 10 fastest HC SSF uber killers would be really something to be proud of, and no one can be like well you just jsp’ed a bunch of items and thats why your top10
i wouldnt mind either way i guess, but i would prefer account based time. just cuz in that end game its nice to be able to key farm with X character kill ubers with another character and magic find with yet another character.
no sharing items between characters add another level of difficulty, I don’t Hate it… but…
This is actually the point of ‘time played’. If someone gets ridiculously lucky, then ok, well done to them. In the current setup your entire season is busted, cos you’re never catching the quick guy, and you’re never catching anyone with a different class.
With ‘time played’, at least you can try again (or compete with a different class) cos you’re not penalised for starting the character in week 15 rather than week 1.
I get what you’re saying about ‘kill count’, and my only issue with that is you’d have to dedicate yourself to one build throughout the season to stay on top. This would be fine if the ladder reset every month, say. The problem with a short season is that the vast majority of players would struggle to finish Hell and get some meaningful time farming before the reset.
I fundamentally don’t agree that ladder should be based entirely around who got better XP clusters ONTOP of who got better item RNG. It’s too much. Some of it has to belong to perseverance and aptitude. Time played stacks RNG ontop of RNG, which is too much. Time played could also result in a No.1 ladder position that is insurmountable extremely early, and that is a horrible system for a 4-5 month ladder. It should require people to continuously kill demons.
I mean I suppose if you’re already buying all your gear on D2jsp, then the RNG aspect of gearing is minimized and maybe /played seems tenable. For the rest of the pack though, /played on SSF might be too much RNG to be fun imo (because you can’t trade).
I guess this is two ways of playing SSF: ‘pure’ [each character is an island] and some community-based word like ‘coven’ [your own characters can farm for one another, but no public games]. No reason why these can both be implemented with good SQL and a flag-based switch on whether the character can access a shared stash among ‘similarly defined’ characters.
This is a fair point that I didn’t seriously think about, tbh. Speedrun world records could be decided by something as simple as finding Bloodfist early enough, say, and I agree you wouldn’t want every season to be like that.
Does /kills favour the player who full clears content, or is it just dominated by the Tesladin with the highest frw running Normal cows? I suspect there are flaws with every tiebreaker system.
If it is, then just make solo dropped items tagged with account tag that got the drop. As long as the character has only items of one account tag, it can run SSF ladder. If at any point it has items of other tags or untagged items, it will be instantly transferred to normal ladder. Also, if the character gains any exp from any other character’s kills, transfer happens too.
This means you can enter multiplayer games, donate items, but you can’t earn any exp or receive any items. You can however equip other items that your other characters have gotten in solo play.
Yes, “Solo Self Found”, though the system I’m recommending is more ‘pure’ SSF or what used to be called ‘Live off the Land’ where a character can only use whatever it can find in loot or craft using said loot.
Player tags on items (what some games call ‘Soulbound’ or something similar) would require some kind of change of the loot drop code that flags every item a character collects as belonging to that character, and obviously this must carry through to the save game system and whatever server-side architecture exists that stores player data. Trivial as that may be, it is probably more effort than adding or removing some buttons from the interface and writing one or two SQL queries.
I’m just recommending a ‘quick and dirty’ system that Blizzard might want to try because it won’t take an experienced coder more than an hour or two to implement and they could get immediate feedback on how popular SSF would be in D2R and whether alternative rules or variants as discussed above would be viable. My concept can definitely be improved upon; it just seems like a good place to start.
Yes, this is true, every system has it’s flaws. Which is why I would NEVER have a composite ladder listing with every class. Each class would be separated.
Yea ssf means solo self found. Games like path of exile, last epoch and other arpgs have a ladder for solo players as well every league it just makes sense.
Its not meaningless. The ladder in trade league is completely meaningless this game is dominated by jsp, the top players can get whatever gear they want using stacks of fg they have been accumulated over the years.
Ssf ladder would at least give some of us a reason to try d2r again. I mean they decimated pvp and d2r has no endgame i feel ssf only way to go
