[D4] How much randomness is too much?

General Discussion
161

I have no problem calling casuals only the competent players that play a little. The incompetent will be noobs.

Noobs are more than casuals. And just as I want the best for any player group in D4, I want the best for noobs too. That includes well made tutorial, in-game bestiary with information and systems assisted by AI.

The idea is to make from noobs → casuals → regular → dedicated players. This then would serve for highest player participation in-game. Combine that with upcoming MS Metaverse and D4 will be a golden cow (and a cool game).

162

:+1:

Getting “noobs” into not being “noobs” should definitely be a goal. Teaching your game to the players. Doesn’t require a specific tutorial though. The game itself can be the tutorial. And usually is. But it needs to ease players in of course.

Not the rest though. Completely fine for a casual player to stay casual. Moving between casual and dedicated is not better or worse.
The game should just be playable casually, all the way from the start to the very end, completing all content.
Which does not mean the game should be easy, of course.

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This is absolutely needed so newcomers and noobs understand the idea of the game. There should be basic leveling assisted with AI (some follower for example talking stuff and answering questions while the player levels up) so that the player gets the basics properly.

Oh, no. A goal should be to make the game as good as possible so your players invest more time in it.

Games full of casuals die way more quickly.

Yes, and not only that. There should be AI that would complete it for the player while he is watching, listening what the AI is explaining and learning (if that’s the player’s desire).

Basically, every new/noob player should receive all the help he needs.

It should be very easy in the beginning (tutorial and first levels) with gradually increasing the pressure on the player over time.

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A noob is someone unfamiliar with a game. It doesnt mean stupid, nor unwilling to put effort into learning.
The game does not need to hold their hands.

Not a bad idea.
As long as it doesn’t become; now you need to do this, and now you need to do that. As in, handholding.
All relevant gameplay information should be accessible in-game for sure, no matter if it is in a Bestiary, a friendly follower, or just a few menu screens.

A good game does not mean you need to invest more time in it per day/week.
It might mean you keep coming back. But a casual player can do that just fine. 2 hours a week for years for example. Might take a year+ for them to do all content, if that is something they want to do, but it could be done.
There is no need to push them into playing more and more hours.

Stuff like Candy Crush seems to be doing reasonably fine with millions and millions playing it casually.
Not that Diablo should be Candy Crush :smiley: But it has some of the same qualities (I assume, never played CC, but it is a mobile game, so…) allowing for short sessions.

No. No no no no.
That is not a game.

And likewise no.
That is not how you teach people to play.
Teach a man to fish and all that.

Teach people the basics, and then throw them into the deep water. Learning by doing brings results.

Indeed.

165

I 80% agree.

I believe if there’s a significant portion of the playerbase who enjoys some particular more competitive aspect of it (leaderboard pushing, races, speedrunning, etc), while I agree the devs don’t need to and probably shouldn’t make the entire game geared towards them (as they will always be a minority), “throwing them some bread crumbs” once in a while doesn’t hurt the game imo. For example in wow raiding which you mentioned, I think there are a lot of things that could make the experience better for people who race for world first and that wouldn’t hurt the game for anyone else (maybe even improve it overall). Things such as reducing the barrier of entry for raiding/getting a character ready for raiding, getting rid of instance lock for individual characters and making it group-based instead, keeping food buffs after death, releasing the content simultaneously in NA and EU so the race is more fair, playtesting the raid decently to make sure it’s bs-free, etc. Those are improvements that recognize that the public for that kind of competition exists while not being something that impacts the experience of people who don’t care about that content negatively.

166

Exactly. Casuals just play less, less often, might not be as serious as some, or don’t care about everything the game has to offer. Nothing about being casual should signify they are bad or don’t like challenging content.

Same with “noob”, which just means new. They aren’t necessarily bad, just maybe don’t understand much about the game because they are new. I’ve played and beaten the souls games. Never have I spent much more than a few hours playing during a session. I would say I was a very casual player.

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167

Thanks for joining in! The part I quoted here is the dichotomy we’re struggling with. None of us really like the idea of legendaries raining from the sky. It feels wrong for the “best items in the game” to be very common like that. D3 ended up having to do that because those legendary affixes were the only way to make a viable build. You simply had to drop them enough to let players have them to make builds. They added in the huge randomness factors so you had to then chase 1000s of them for the godly version of it. I’ve heard plenty here saying they don’t mind good items being rare, but if they are, they simply can’t have the kind of randomness we see in the D3 legendaries. We need them to be reliably good.

You said you’re willing to wait and have patience for a godly item. Do you think that still works in a game with seasons that wipe your entire inventory clean and force a fresh restart every 3 months? For me, I’d be more than happy to have those “once-in-a-year” drops if the item power structure stayed in place long enough to actually enjoy the godly item, for example having a two-year wait for the next expansion. But since we’ll have a different structure constantly shuffling, rarity has to be limited to what you can reasonably find in that season’s play time.

I appreciate this point. Legendary hunting in D3 starts to feel a bit like a chop shop. Find the yellow item, cube it to make it legendary, hope the right one drops. 50-100 tries later, get something usable, take it to the Mystic to reroll the affixes on it a dozen or so times (maybe more), then add your socketables, take it back to the cube to augment it, then you can use it.

While I like the flexibility of being able to “fix” items that are close, and I really like the fantasy of a proper crafting system where you could make some of the best items in the game with enough time and resources invested, all of that could be fixed by simply making the drops higher quality so they don’t have to be fixed in the first place. I know it’s subjective.

Don’t agree here at all! I’m out of college. I have a job and responsibilities. I love playing games, but my time to do so is limited. When I do, I want a challenge. I also don’t want “challenge” to be defined as “spending an incredibly long time doing mindless, repetitive tasks”. That’s not a challenge, that’s a chore. Right now, D3’s speed farm game play isn’t a challenge. It’s just time-consuming busy work chasing rolls at an RNG slot machine that’s designed to make me keep losing so I’ll keep playing.

Defining how to create challenge in a game is a topic for another thread, but just assuming that because people don’t play many long hours that they don’t want challenge isn’t correct.

Yup!

Totally understand! That’s why I added the summary at the end of the original post. It’s in a Hide Details pull-out you’ll have to click. I’m hoping that’ll make the thread more accessible the longer this thing gets, and I’ll update it maybe a few more times if the thread’s discussion remains active and productive.

I don’t think it’s going to be an MMO. It’ll still be an ARPG, but with a big open world as well as instanced dungeons, and with some world bosses and towns were instead of talking in chat lobbies, we’ll do it in the game world itself.

This is a good way of putting it!

Or more simply, the option to turn off the tutorial mode.

4 Likes
168

Fix the season design instead of hurting the item hunt.
Completely optional seasons, and 6+ month length.

:100:

Pop-ups should be possible to turn-off for sure, but tutorials seamlessly integrated into a game can’t be turned off, and those are for the most part the best imo. Like introducing new enemy types one by one, each teaching you the challenge they offer, without the game directly telling you anything through popups or text. All A-RPGs basically do that.

169

I very much agree they should release new raids at the same time globally. Quite bad that they don’t, competition or no competition, since it means more information is out before everyone gets a chance to experience the raid. Ruining a bit of the experience new raids offer.
On a similar note, imo there should be no public testing of raids, as it very much spoil them.
But stuff like reducing entry for raiding etc. no matter if doing so is good or bad, would surely change the game. And removing instance locks outright makes the game and the world first competition worse imo, by allowing people to keep trying to beat the same bosses again and again, instead of it being a once per week thing per character. Also pressuring the competing guilds into even more unhealthy gameplay (creating alts to circumvent the lockout is bad enough).
These things should not be altered just so a handful of players can make money on twitch competitions among themselves.
Which is not to say some of them should not be changed for other reasons.

Likewise, D3 should not have its map diversity reduced, just so people can have silly leaderboard competitions among them.
They can have that competition all they want. But not to the detriment of the gameplay.

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Not only. Noob is someone stupid, slow learning etc…

On the contrary - the game need to teach the noobs how to play with holding everything first (AI in total control), hands only then (follower) until finally the noob evolves into a casual with playing by himself.

More like: “Here is the optimal way of doing this. Let me show you.” After the task is finished: “Now you can try yourself”. After the player does it, an evaluation will happen.

They will push themselves if the game is good enough. Mostly casual players in the game simply shows the game lacks something.

This is different. Mobile games are for noobs and casuals per se. We talk PC games.

Yes, that is the learning stage. It will be like an advanced tutorial for the slower learning players.

I’d say teach anyone how much he wants and then let him jump how deep he wants.

This option should exist of course. If anyone wants to discover the hot water by himself - let it be so.

171

No. It is not.

The game should never tell people how to play optimally. It should tell the game rules, and how stuff works/correlates. How to play well? That is for the player to figure out.

:partying_face:

Despite your claims that you dont consider casuals to be “bad players” anymore, you are not making it seem that way.

A tutorial should not play the game for you. It should tell you how to play yourself. Significant difference.

Nah, people learn by struggling. If you can always decide to fine-tune the difficulty, the risk is too high that you wont learn.
Fine-tuned difficulty is a blight imo. As is the case with D3s 150+ difficulty tiers.

The very best is when games have exactly 1 difficulty setting. Dark Souls and the like (I know, they have NG+, but that is not a freely adjustable difficulty setting).
That is of course really hard to pull off in A-RPGs due to the gear/character progression scaling, albeit not impossible. But at least keep it at relatively few difficulty tiers, with large jumps in between, to make them meaningful.
And during lvling; just have 1 single difficulty tier.

Imo don’t give people the option. Too many will pick the easy option, leading to low/slow learning.
Deep water all the way (after the introduction in early levels of course). It should not be punishing, that is not the purpose, but the sooner you stop holding players hands, the sooner they get the chance to learn.

172

I didn’t say to remove outright, just make them party-based instead of player based. Otherwise you have to make a bench and there’s a lot of stupid guild drama just to replace 1 member.

I’m biased towards FF14 though, which only locks the loot drops to the first clear of the week so you can’t farm it, but you can still join groups who want to clear the content.

Yes, and positively so, since people straight out give up on making alts because it’s too much of a hassle to do certain grinds all over again just to go back to raiding with your alt. It just locks people out of content behind arbitrary daily grinds.

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173

So now you want we call all new players noobs? And those that are stupid and slow learning?

“Noob” is generally accepted for a bad player, but I am okay calling these in any way as long as we talk about the same group of players.

Let’s use this:
A person lacking in skill or a high level who wishes nothing more than to be retarded and not cooperate with you. A noob comes from a newb, which is someone new to a game and wants to get better. A noob, however, does not.

Let’s call newbs the newcomers and noobs the bad players.

The game should tell everything the player. I think we already went through this agreeing players should stay IN-GAME aka not visiting 3rd party resources with guides and stuff.

This should be an option for those that want extra learning.

You can have one difficulty and yet different mobs and bosses. The player is to decide what to farm.

This achieves nothing (swimming or gaming). A tutorial is always needed and the player has to have the option to decide how much education he wants.

This equals more play time in the game which is good. Besides, some people enjoy the learning process (be it games or RL).

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no

noob comes from the term “newbie” which means new one

the term is being abused as an insult but it’s actually only describing people who are new to the game

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It’s less of an insult than stupid/retarded.

Bad players are big portions in games and as long as the game isn’t made to teach these how to become less bad that won’t happen from itself so these will either troll other players or leave the game. In both cases the game loses player base.

Bad/noob players should be helped via in-game tutorials and AI assisted NPCs/systems, just as new players who want to learn.

The player base is like the population of a country. One need to create better environment for all types of people in order the country to flourish. Not satisfying the demands of certain groups of people results in these seeking another country.

176

Cooperation and Competition may mesh at points, but what gets lost in the continued assumption people make about competition being mandatory is the notion that cooperation can’t exist without it.

If we follow the logic that world first raiders aren’t hurting anyone, we have to go back to my acknowledgment that they’re greedy and never satisfied. They want more raids as quickly as possible so they can keep doing the WF push for no other reason than bragging rights. We should all know that comes at the cost of resources that could go into other facets of the game. We should also know that not everyone can raid due scheduling conflicts, personal skill ceilings, handicaps, hardware limitations, social anxieties, and so on. This again circuits back to my notion that “content people can’t experience is not content worth developing.”

My conclusion is that competition in games where it is not required, whether it’s PvE or PvP, is actually hurting those games. I doubt the numbers of MMO populations being something like 5-15% clearing raid content when it’s current has changed much. That’s an 85-95% window of players who haven’t done the same. And sure, there are some that would never get to that point to try, but there are still enough who do hit max level, finish more basic dungeons, then realize “the real endgame” is cut off from them. Maybe not at first, but with enough exposure to the toxicity, elitism, raging, and other facets of the scene will make themselves known.

Given our mutual knowledge of XIV, you can’t just write, “Be nice!” in the rules and expect everyone to play along. People still troll. Unofficial communities arise to focus on harassing others or railing about how all the scrubs are ruining the game and that things could be saved if only Yoshi-P would listen to their neverending demands of exclusivity. I’d argue this happens because the game is still coded to allow it because that notion of competition (and exclusivity) exceeds the gravity of cooperative elements that are present. It’s not about “what’s good for the community” it’s “what’s good for me and my friends” in practice. In effect, we get tribalism because content was configured around the notion of 4/8/24-man groups and literally no other combos greater or smaller. Point out you want meaningful solo content or that you don’t want to put up with PUG chicanery and you’re blasted by those selfsame blowhards that want to control how others acquire things.

In general, I do feel like Diablo has crossed similar lines relative to group meta in D3 and virtually mandatory trading in D2 (SSF generally violating my 10 hour rule even someone wants to say it’s still possible to get things). So, it is again why I push for RNG mitigation what parity can be acquired between play styles. Playing solo should never be interpreted as the individual never wanting to be cooperative, either, as a trap people try to spring with the “massively multiplayer” part of MMO. It just means at that point in time, they want to be able to do their own thing to better themselves so when they do want to play with others, they will bring more to the table. Cooperation also exists in levels beyond partying, being in the same guild/clan/etc., or even chatting in a channel. That depth, however, relies on other features within the game itself.

“Games die if there’s no competition!” is the lie people who want it want us to believe is true. No, games die when content grows old, new content isn’t added, and/or it’s inaccessible. Service getting pulled has its moments, too, but that’s usually a direct result of the casuals being chased off by pandering too much to that 5-15%. So, while Diablo may not have the same varied content demands of an MMO, it still doesn’t mean you can just phone it in expecting what worked 10-20 years ago to work now. The only competition that matters in gaming is for our time between products, and obliging the wants of the masses does not mean the dumbed down garbage doomsaying our competitive cohorts just love to parrot when their position of self-assumed content overlords is threatened. And I get that some may have a hard time shaking that programming, especially when surrounded by others that still buy in. Gaming is still mired in elements of toxic masculinity, after all. Some may generalize the process as growing up or realizing that something is indeed just a game. The details will differ between games, after all. I’d say some also need to realize that hyper-focusing on competitions that do not matter in the digital sphere will distract us from those we should be focusing on in reality, but that’s a minefield of “Keep politics out of my gaming!” that I’m not in the mood to traverse today.

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:+1:
Yeah, one of the multiple reasons a SSF mode is not a solution for anything.

Well, also lots of advertisement money I assume.
:frowning:

Yeah, that very much counts as one difficulty, and is a good way to handle difficulty.

A game is not a country. For more or less obvious reasons.

Which, for games, is totally fine. A game can’t, and shouldn’t, try to be for everyone.

A moment ago you defined a noob as someone who dont want to learn (and as people have said you are mislabeling), so it is slightly confusing how “better” learning tools will help. If they are literally not trying to become better (which btw is also quite fine, it is their choice…)

You can teach new players how to play, and that should be the goal. Teach them the rules. How to play well? That literally is the game. Take that part away, and you removed the game from the game. Which seems like a really bad idea to do in general.

According to you?
It always seem to be a certain type of player that complains everyone else are bad.
Tbh, in MMOs/MP games in general. the worst players often seems to be people who are not necessarily bad at the game.

Btw, still curious about which games you consider hard.

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I can’t say I’ve seen the same money dropped in MMO chases as I’ve had in MOBAs/RTS. Not by a long shot. But the latter is also built with the competition as its core.

If anyone here could tell me what group was the first to clear Pandaemonium Savage here in XIV without googling, I’d be surprised. But that’s also kinda been my point. It doesn’t really matter.

179

I can’t speak for the entirety of XIV. In Cactuar, raiding is extremely accessible. I’m the biggest scrublord in games in general, and I’m clearing savage, already done with P1S and P2S. I’m not gonna say I’ve never seen anyone troll in that game but, funny enough, everytime I did see it, it was in low level duties, not in high level raids, especially not in savage. And if you don’t wanna clear savage, you still get all the other content of the game, including regular raids which are a cakewalk.

180

No idea how much money they make, but lots of people seem to watch the world first races in WoW on twitch. I assume that brings in decent money, albeit for a short time. Then they also have various sponsors paying them.
These things seem like businesses, as much, or more, than they are people having fun competing.
Which also tingles my Wrong-sensor.
They can exist for all I care, but the devs should not cater to it in ways that hurts the game for everyone else.