[Classic] The Shared Stash

alright thats my bad, thought it was LOD only. Carry on.

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It happens, most people just play LoD, Classic and legacyD2servers are unfortunately used interchangeably and that makes it confusing.

I played d2classic this last season, and made a point to mention the lack of shared stash in many, many public games, with dozens, maybe hundreds, of players.

Every. Single. Player. Every one, wanted the shared stash. I did not hear from one Classic player on d2East that wanted no shared stash.

Please Blizzard, reconsider.

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You are absolutely correct, here.

In Blizzard’s official advertising, they need to immediately discontinue their use of the shared stash, or at least add a large text excluding Classic mode.

What a mess.

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Just decided to refund my PC copy for now. The news about classic QoL is disappointing and we still have no news about cow king penalty, switch version, and Dclone etc. I’ll just keep my xbox copy for now until we get all the details. Don’t see a reason for two copies if they’re not going to give enough QoL. I’ll just mess around on console then.

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I don’t know where or who you’ve been reading, but all the purists I’ve read and I believe you’ve filed me under that category; were 100% okay with the QoL changes outlined or suggested in the deepdive videos put out months ago.

Your comment seems to heavily suggest that the individuals that didn’t want the “Charm Stash” or “ploot” etc. in any remastered version also didn’t want the “shared stash” to be accessible to classic D2R players.

I’ve never read a single “purist” say that anywhere. All the purists knew that shared stash was on the green list from the start, if they were against this, why would they be posting here after preordering?

Your comment makes zero sense. Smfh.

Edit: This seems like a silly choice by Blizzard. Why would shared stash be okay for me but not for thee?

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They really should have just announced the game as a remake, with LoD only. Too many people fighting over remake vs remaster, character models, what QoL should be, classic vs expac, balancing (which they fully admit to being flawed), legacy mode vs new graphics and how it affects resolutions during play (or still owning a toaster that only plays D2), etc.

My thoughts on how devs are perceiving this: Classic remains a pure remaster, untouched beyond the controller support and auto gold pickup (to support controller use on console). “Same classic gameplay you know and love.” While they mentioned item linking in chat and searching previous difficulties for public games, who knows if this is a thing for classic mode. The idea is classic mode stays as true to the original dev teams vision as possible (outside of graphics including character models), while LoD they can take a bit more license to add more quality of life stuff.

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Except this is a huge problem because of game states. If game states (like in every other single Blizzard game on Bnet2.0) are not able to remain open but empty (as is quite probable) they have just made self-muling impossible. They then sell the game on consoles? that’s gotta be the biggest troll ever.

If this ^^^^ is true, they are making a massive gameplay mechanic change, one which will cause Classic to become clunky, annoying, and unsatisfying to play.

What the absolute hell were they thinking. It’s like they’ve never played this game in their lives.

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The original vision of this mechanic was to offer meaningful choices of what to store and what to trash or trade. Muling was a player generated mechanic, not an actual intended developer choice. Remember meaningful choice discussions? Another one of those circular discussions within the community. Now do I agree with not adding shared stash, especially after the interview you mentioned? No, just playing devil’s advocate on what the devs might be thinking.

I disagree. They could have made items account bound, they chose not to. Allowing free trade was a developer choice, one that includes storage.

Now, 20 years later, they’re basically creating a system where your items might as well be character bound if you play on console. What a joke. and what a joke team if this shabby idea makes it to launch.

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How common was the concept of “account bound” in the 1999-early 2000s? D1, D2, and Septera Core are the only PC games I played of that time (outside of attempting UO Ragnarok and failing at a friends). As for free trade, has nothing really to do with stash size. Free trade, is just that, free trade. Your stash gets full, you attempt to trade what you feel is valuable. You have a set piece that doesn’t suit your character, you trade it for something you can use. You were not meant to hoard it on another character. I wish I kept the original D2 player’s guide from back in the day, but I remember a blurb in it on this very thing in the guide.

I never really bothered to pay attention to Brevik or the original dev team much outside of stuff I seen on webpages (and the guide) either then or throughout the years. However, I had looked at his twitter since D2R was announced, and he does maintain the storage space miser idea.

Console still has trade. One of the ploot arguments is find friends to play with if you don’t want ninja looted. Same concept holds true for muling on pc or on console.

Now again, do I agree with the position of not having shared stash on classic, no. But muling was not an intended design, it was a player designed mechanic to get around the limited space mechanic (really, cheating in a sense).

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Interestingly, the potential impact to gameplay in LoD with charms and shared stash is much higher than classic and shared stash.

Granted it’s not huge at all, but it’s noticeable.

I’m not sure if it’s a coding issue, server client issue or what, from an outline of QoL improvements it makes very little sense.

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Perhaps not common, but character/account bound loot was absolutely a thing as far back as 1995, a game I still play from that year has it.

I think the idea that using other characters as storage is “cheating” is pretty absurd, it’s been a mainstay in rpgs since (at least) the early 90s.

I’m with Geezer on this, from a coding and design perspective if they didn’t want items to be account bound, but character bound, it really is almost as simple as adding a character string to the code.

They are obviously fine with this.

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Or were, anyways. Why after all this time make it so difficult to mule safely, but only for a fraction of the population? Did they get the coding done for LoD, and want an extra day weekend? “hey guys, Classic will be fine without the QoL, let’s just tell them it’s cuz we think they’re such good hardcore players and appeal to their ego so we don’t have to do the coding, HarrHarrHarr” it’s a joke.

I personally haven’t played Classic since LoD came out, but I assumed Classic players preferred Classic mostly due to the reduced item set; absence of of absurd sorb, charms, and godly runewords. Guess they don’t care too much for sin or dudu. Never did I imagine they played it because they liked having a smaller stash. Since D2 supports unlimited mules in both modes and bnet gameserver was altered to provide instant private muling games in both modes it seems bizarre not to give Classic a shared stash as well. LoD’s stash size was even increased, maybe just poke fun at classic a little and make their shared stash tiny. This is kinda nuts. If game instances won’t persist AND they get no shared stash - ouch!

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I did IRC Roleplaying and hosting in the late 90’s through 2009, in games not unlike D&D in nature, which Diablo has inspirations from (except with an always open tavern setting for times when campaigns not hosted). And it was definitely at least exploitation if not cheating to gear up your alts from your main (even if it was ultimately allowed, as D2 did with muling). The idea of muling is immersion breaking (even if we all do it), but is exploitation of an intended game design.

Did you mean unintended? because I agree with you, here. Everything is exploiting game design. Everything we do to make runs more efficient, MF runs, those are all “exploitation”

Are players meant to run NM baal 400 times to find good gear before traversing Hell? I have no idea, but it’s absolutely exploiting the system. What isn’t?

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Efficiency =/= Exploitation =/= Cheating

Debatable…pretty much every game has unintended mechanics, the arguments for efficiency often blend into arguments about exploiting bugs, unintended mechanincs…D2 is rife with them.

Agreed here…

No. The space limitation was INTENDED. Limited space has value, meaningful decisions attached, encourages trade. Muling devalues this. Shared stash devalues this real estate more, and even moreso with extended stash and shared.


David Brevik
@davidbrevik

¡

Apr 13

Well, a few things: 1) We didn’t think of it. 2) The whole idea behind the design was space vs. power. That was the tradeoff. That was the point. I like how it balances that. In the end, there are few items you want to pick up anyhow. Plus I’m a big anti-inventory-space designer.


David Brevik
@davidbrevik

¡

Feb 19

Not a surprise and the right decision. It cuts down on item-mules and shared stash is a natural (helps servers), but you know how I feel about this… I’m a grumpy-old-storage-space-miser! Young kids and their need to collect everything these days!

The limited space was by design. Muling got around this. It exploited the fact that items were not bound to character or account (which would have eliminated free trade anyways). Self muling exploited the servers and how they handled games. Muling in general is an exploitation to get around an intended game design of storage space being limited, exploiting is generally “cheating.”

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