For gaming it’s to do with events activated by the player when events in the coding change.
Oh, thank you. I can see a lot of potential for the procedural approach in the game itself (world and dungeons), but can’t see how this can be applied to the Paragon-Board. It would make the planning phase a real nightmare or a gamble (which is the same).
Best to just wait for the beta now.
Here are procedural paragon boards:
http://rankings.byethost33.com/reborn.php
Planning doesn’t change. The procedural boards are like huge blue/yellow items which you find and upgrade with time.
The procedural concept can be applied to all skills and items too so that each player account has its own meta to solve each new Season (my fireball will deal different damage than your fireball). Some of us here call this genre aRNG and preach that it is to dethrone aRPG in the future.
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This is really exiting. Hope Blizz would consider this for D4.
Oh yes, the muted D4 colors are so great.
In this context it means that the players power progression is not static, but “randomly” (well, procedurally) generated by the game.
Like, paragon boards not being static boards designed by Blizzard, but the tiles instead being placed randomly according to some algorithm.
Or skills being randomly generated; for you a Sorceress fireball might deal 100 dmg and cost 20 mana, for me it might deal 200 dmg and have a 5 sec cooldown, etc.
Indeed.
Procedural content can be great for dungeons etc. Hard to see how it could be good for characters. Everything would just be RNG with RNG on.
whenever you are stuck with something forever until you create a new character it should not be RNG
easy as that
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Hopefully paragon 100 takes as much effort at level 99 in D2.
The good thing is procedural and non-procedural systems can co-exist. The real issue with current D4 paragon boards is that it’s a flawed system due to factors I pointed out above. A non-procedural version has to be simplified to be adequate.
For example PoE skill tree is far better than current D4 paragon boards iteration, but also far from optimal for a non-procedural system. Instead of going the optimal way - a more simplistic approach, they went the other direction - more tedious way.
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So uh
The reason that procedural boards can be big and confusing and no procedural can’t is because people can’t look up a guide?
So ultimately you don’t want players to have an easier time understanding you just don’t want them to be able to bypass it?
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Yes. Players would need to learn to solve the procedural systems in place by themselves since copy/pasting won’t work. Just like when you cut off trading - players would need to find the items themselves. It becomes a meaningful game in which the players have to put the time to learn the system in order to be optimal. They can’t RMT or copy/paste ftw.
The non-procedural systems being simplistic is because:
- Such systems are good for new players to learn the basics of the game
- Those that don’t enjoy learning the system can still copy/paste it easily
The procedural systems being not simplistic is because:
- Such systems are good for dedicated players to put the time into
- Those that don’t enjoy learning the system won’t be optimal aka dedicated
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So why do you want to cater to one group and only one group in one of these, and then another group, and only that group, in the other
I mean, I know why, but nonetheless why?
Seems like you try to use players who don’t like to make their own builds, not because you care about them and want to help them, but only as roundabout excuse for advocating for a system that would ultimately not be in their interest. Nor in other players interest really.
A non-simplistic, non-procedural system means both those who like to learn the system and those who do not can get something out of it.
If you simplify it, it only caters to the last group.
Btw, the idea that you can’t copy a procedural build is hardly true
Especially not when you also want to simplify the math.
People would just make sites where you manually fill in your specific paragon boards and the guide tells you how to spend your points.
Similar to how in WoW you have sites/addons telling you the optimal gear and affixes based on not just a general guide, but the specific gear you are currently wearing.
Because different systems should cater to different player groups. That’s how you make players from different groups stay in your game. If you cut the systems for the dedicated players or blur these into a pile of mud, you aren’t helping neither the beginners nor the dedicaters. Remember D3 Challenge Rifts? A system aiming the competitive players, but designed for every group. A big fail.
Great. That costs time. With hundreds of paragon boards players that do it will fall behind. That’s the whole idea. Procedural systems raise the skill cap. Now, if you aim for a non-skilled game for kids, okay, then you can design it in any way you want.
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if an essential system of a game is not catered to a certain group they will simply not play the game
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Maybe with D4 is time to raise the bar. Procedural approach will force players to redistribure some of their resources (Resources = Clicking madly + Thinking deep and fast) on the Thinking Department. That would add an extra intellectual dimension/requirement to the game.
This is not elitism. Considering that POE for a long long time has eclipsed D3 in that direction and considering that they are preparing the launch of POE2, it’s time for Bliz to make them (and what’s important to Diablo community) a big surprise.
Somebody can dream on: they can implement (in the form of an option at the start of a new character) which approach the player like to take.
A game like that will be vaccinated against staleness.
We shouldn’t confuse depth with complexity.
The aim of a good System is to allow customization for optimal or prefer play style. Or fine tune where they want. Not inside complexity.
E.g if my char lack toughness, I know where to put points to improve it, if I lack attack speed, where I can put points, and I can decide the balance. It doesn’t need to be complicated , but it can involve thinking and decision Making.
But it is not different systems. You are talking about the paragon boards in both cases.
Not that you are right about different systems catering to different player groups either. If you design the skill system so group A likes it and group B hates it, but then design the paragon system so group A hates it and group B likes it… well, you designed a game that nobody will like. You tend to claim you want more people to play a game. That surely isn’t the way.
Completely agreed. Making it even weirder that this is exactly what you are arguing for when you say you want to simplify the paragon boards in the first scenario.
You literally just argued that it should be easier for people to copy builds. Now it is the opposite…
You are arguing/shooting in all directions, which makes it seem dishonest at best.
Your solution to increasing the skill cap is to lower the skill cap 
Yep. It should be raised significantly.
It won’t cause that though.
It will just mean some players are lucky and their characters get born with benefits, and other players are unlucky and get a useless character. All in the name of RNGesus.
Yeah, PoE is the role model to learn from here. Although the bar should be raised much higher than that too (PoE combat is mindless).
The game should not be dumbed down or simplified. Both character building and combat should be deeper and more tactical.
I agree you shouldn’t make things more complex for the sake of complexity, but in most cases depth also comes with some complexity. If you clinically remove complexity, depth will also be lost.
The paragon boards seem like they might have some decent amount of depth, but without being very complex. You have one point system, a flat board with 1 point per tile, and (hopefully) full view over which tiles do what (it would be bad if you had to unlock a tile to see what the next one does for example). That should be extremely simple for everyone to grasp.
The biggest complexity thing might be the socketed jewels. But the benefit of tying the boards into the loot system, which both adds depth to the tile choices, but more importantly adds content to the loot hunt, should easily outweigh the added complexity.
Now, by using procedural approach designers have no need to unleash complete chaos and total unlimited randomness. A dungeon when one has the some probability to encounters a simple undead 2000HP or a Lassal with ORDR 3000 and HP 25 000 000 is unviable.
Balance is crucial. A system that can drop a sword with +10 damage or a sword with + 850% more damage is bad, the same system that put you before the choice of opting between + 5% skill damage or +5% CD Reduction is balanced and intellectually challenging.
Like the salt: RNG should be used wisely.
Yeah. The difference between paragon boards and dungeons is that if you enter a procedurally generated dungeon where all the RNG is stacked against you, you can just go do a different dungeon.
If your character receives that same bad RNG, you can try rerolling I guess. So the consequences are just bigger.
You can have some balancing measures in procedural generated content of course, to remove the biggest outliers. But even with those gone, if my character (not my gear) is inherently 10% better than yours and there is nothing you could ever have done, or do, to change that, I doubt people will consider it to be a fun experience.
Procedurally generated content will never be balanced or fair. If you limit it so much that it is, it no longer procedural.
Correct: that is valid for PvP where a leveled playing field is non-negotiable. But life itself has the RNG component inside. A guy goes safely down the stairs, another one on the same stairs has the misfortune to step over a banana peel and end up (in the best of cases) with a broken …leg.