Upvoted. I want to thank you for articulating the pro-PVP perspective better than I ever could. It sounds like you enjoyed the D2 PVP scene. A couple of thoughts.
You don’t seem concerned with PVP being fair. You like the inherent unfairness of ganks or hitting weak players, or appearing weak specifically to bait others and kill them. “Thrill of the hunt” is a vital and enjoyable part of the experience, yes?
Personally, I come from a martial arts background where you have fairness: same level of experience (same belt rank), similar W/L ratios, same weight class, same rules, and a referee calling shots. A fair fight is much more fun to compete in. At the pro level, promoters do the same when setting prize fights. A fair fight that lasts a few rounds is a lot more fun to watch and bet on than a rising star matched against an out-of-shape has-been who’s knocked around for a minute or two and KO’d in the first round.
I think more players would try PVP if they thought it was fair. Griefing and ganking are very common complaints.
On balancing PVP and PVE, you’ve made an interesting point. Blizzard always balances for relative parity at end-game. That can be used as a crutch to create the fairness I think PVP needs. If each class is equally powerful at max level, then they walk into PVP also equally powered. There are a TON of assumptions here, but it could be viable for end-game PVP specifically to be properly balanced if they keep the majority of the PVE game tied up in the leveling experience. It would have to be much more like D2’s leveling system with a capped max level and robust diminishing returns. D3’s system where the entire game is played at max level and players gain multiple orders of magnitude of power at max level cannot accommodate this idea.
This is a big motive for writing this. I really dislike that kind of behavior, and it has dominated my PVP experience in the Diablo universe. I do not want to see that return in D4. My hope is to spur discussion leading to a better path.
This is a very valid concern. I don’t necessarily agree. If you create a King of the Hill scenario, PVP players will fight for control over the zone. Yes, you’ll get ganked the second you cross into the zone, but that encourages team play and an organized attack, which could be a lot of fun. I remember fondly having server-wide melees between Southshore and Tarran Mill in Vanilla WoW with battles of hundreds of players that went on for hours. If we could get that experience in D4, I think it would be well worth it.
No, but they are highly successful. They have huge player bases and retain them. They’re providing an experience that people like. Activi$ion pays attention to such things as $ources of in$piration. (Yes, I am very cynical of them since they trashed the Blizzard I used to like a lot more.) If the D4 team can learn some of the lessons of those game types and bring something close enough to D4, they could build a similar faithful player base of their own which is critical for the long-term health of the game.
Yes, I noted that in my potential solutions in the OP. The issue that is that it is extremely demanding on the developers to maintain balance for both PVP and PVE at the same time. They’re carrying two parallel systems, meaning twice the updates, twice the potential bugs every patch, twice the testing, etc. It can be done, but the money to support it has to be there.
In all my experience participating in pvp I have found one common denominator. PVP is not fair, the winner is the one that most effectively utilized advantage. Hardware superiority, latency, ease of execution, innate reaction time/capacity or ability.
I’m not against a means to ‘level the disparity’ in a tournament style arrangement. I think such has great potential, provided that the gameplay of each archetype has the necessary options to perform and outperform. In other words, more than just who clicks faster, but who clicks more accurately, times their attacks and or mitigation/defenses, things that enable the demonstration of why the ‘more skilled player won’ the match.
Let’s hope that the elimination of ganking by griefers does indeed help alleviate the complaining and gets others to try engaging in a battle of wits against a witty opponent, and not some artificial intelligence.
They first need to understand how imperative it is to achieve balance to begin with before they can even hope to apply the same concept to PVP. If my enemy seeking arrow does the same amount of damage as the meteor that has a delay and requires an enormous amount of predictive execution, it is quite obvious that ability which requires less actual skill will be the superior playstyle in terms of winning any sort of competitive encounter. The auto attack would become the meta and the go-to for any serious type of matchup. Whereas the only time one would see the meteor even used in such a matchup would be through unofficial skirmish. As impressive as it may be to best the auto attack with the aimed attack, the probability of failure outweighs the risk of success.
Hard level cap is the way to go. I do believe they have learned that lesson, although toying with the idea of indefinite progression through any means or more specifically through itemization I would caution against. Kill the infinite grind, which includes unreachable goals to finding the next better version of the same item.
Compiling all the pieces to the puzzle of prerequisite satisfaction however, that sounds a bit more compelling than: “Beat higher level key dungeon, get improved stats of BiS item”
Please just…leave the genre as it is
Just because some games are hyped, doesn’t mean that completely different genres have to change their games to work like that o.o
Do you also want age of empires and trackmania and monster hunter to play like fortnite or league of legends?
Blizzard already has HotS
They don’t need an other one
Diablo is diablo
I hear what you’re saying. I really do. For the most part, I don’t PVP much at all in RPGs I play. Part of the point of starting this thread is to hear voices saying what you’re saying, while also inviting the other side to have their say. I think this is good feedback for the D4 team. They need to hear how strongly people feel about these things.
But PVP is part of Diablo. It was in D1 and 2, and people feel strongly that it should make a comeback in D4. It’s also included in other games in the ARPG genre. POE is cited commonly. People like taking their characters against other players. They offer more challenge than the AI. As long as it is entirely optional, and you’re never forced to play it, what do you have to lose if other players get a feature they want too?
I think a large part of the resistance to PVP is people’s negative experiences with griefing, ganking, camping, and other toxic behaviors. If we could get rid of those things by making PVP opt-in only, would that be an adequate compromise?
I really support pvp
But in an rpg way
There can be events: tvt, ctf, lms, dm, etc.
And ofc. open world classic pvp for the real thrill
But not a moba or BR game mode o.o
pvp in RPGs has to include the possibility of pk and bullying
It’s part of the fun for a lot of people and if you don’t like that, you should have the possibility to play a friendly event or single player or coop
Well said. For those who want to slay humans to bask in your superiority, play the designed game for real PVP experience. There are many amazing PVP games out there nowadays, and some of them are free and not play to win.
Fear of what? Against players? I rather face players in the real PVP games that have actually tracked your performance and match you with equal level players instead of trying to snipe and grief someone weaker than you.
Here are my Heroes of the Storm profile career before I quit last year: https://i.imgur.com/qqGZruU.png
How about you? Do you have anything to share about your PVP career with us?
PvP is not only about glory & domination, there is comradery too to be found in friendly competition.
Many games with a prominent PvE have great PvP. In many cases the PvP mode takes “center-stage” (despite sometimes being an after-thought) as PvP has inherent longevity compared to PvE. Why should D4 be different? Because tradition? That’s weak.
[quote=“Kilometer-11340, post:49, topic:17496”]
Fear of what? Against players? I rather face players in the real PVP games that have actually tracked your performance and match you with equal level players instead of trying to snipe and grief someone weaker than you.[/quote]
This is just one possible implementation of D4 PvP. For similar reasoning they removed attribute-allocation (and character-building in general) from D3, because of D2’s particular implementation. So implement it better then? Because I think the appeal of “+ skill point on level-up” is self-evident enough to warrant the time & attention needed to make it better, rather than make it disappear. Ditto for PvP.
Agreed, odd-forbid that D4 attempts to trail-blaze in any capacity.
You could always have a standard-issue equipment set for each class, at least in a place where it would make sense, like an organized arena where you are sparring to entertain a crowd. Otherwise you can enter “no man’s land” with your well-earned gear, knowing full-well the risk.
And so what if it doesn’t beat LoL or Fortnite. 99% of dedicated PvP games don’t do that either. In any case, if D4 maintains this defeatist attitude, abandoning a whole idea based on a previous implementation of it, that is sure to happen. So might as well try, because if devs are truly stoked for D4 PvP, they will not have time-management issues to make it happen.
It is not about a defeatist attitude, it is a concern that the resources can be used on making better PVE content over the content that only played by minorities.
the question is, what people wanna play in general
a game can be more than just a tool to do something
it can become your living room and you wanna do as much as possible there
some 5 stars hotel might have better beds than mine
but i prefer to sleep at home
and so, i would prefer to play pvp in a good arpg that i enjoy, rather than playing wow or fortnite
Good for you but it still don’t change that you are minority. There are a good reason why those top PVP games have bigger playerbase than your “fictional ARPG with PVP” and unlike you, they are majority.
The one who are out of argument is you because you can’t dispute on why those real PVP games have bigger following and playerbase than ARPG despite that it has PVP mode as well.
thats not even an argument lol xD
pvp is a popular gameplay due to psychological facts and BRs and MOBAs are popular genres to play pvp in
would you tell small mmorpgs to stop having pvp now?
would you tell RTS games to stop having pvp?
just because there are more 9 year olds that play fortnite?
how weak is that?
FF14 is not a small MMORPG though in case you are wondering.
Saying how you like to sleep a home or like to play PVP in arpg is not an argument at all. It is just your opinion.
Huh? How clueless can you be? Real-time Strategy game’s main meat is always focusing on PVP. It is not that hard to figure it out. Go to Twitch, click SC2 and you will be seeing a lot of video of players beating other players, and if you got to click D2, D3, or PoE and you will be seeing a lot of video of players killing monsters.
Also, SC2 has 200k views in 2018. https://i.imgur.com/vLXUHys.png
and it was the number 8 most-watched game. https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-games-twitch/
i love how you are throwing around numbers all day, not getting the point
you cant tell people to stop playing pvp in a specific genre or game just because there are more successful implementations of pvp
