Not every player, since some just do not enjoy that anyway. It is neither about being elite or entitled, it is about appealing to the whole of your core crowd from casuals to min/maxers first instead of trying to desperately reach and design for those who are not a fan of your kind of game anyway and then lose what that genre is about.
Same that many now think ARPG is a game about endgame with loot and some story and likely a fantasy setting. that is it. So even if someone decides to make an ARPG it will likely be bad if you remember what ARPG was about and will let you down until realize even if the letters are right on the box, you are not the target of the game anyway anymore.
Are you really arguing that people have less time than they did in 2000? Last I checked, it still takes roughly 24 hours for the earth to rotate its axis.
Anyway; not true.
People dedicate at much time, or probably more on average, to games than they did in 2000. For better or worse.
And why would casuals do that?
Are you once again trying to equate casual with lazy or dumb?
It is not elitism, at all.
If anything you claiming you want to help people who dont need help is offensive, and seems more like elitism. Some kind of savior syndrom?
Failing in a game is not a bad thing. It is positive. One of the most central aspects of a game. Without failure you canât have success. Without struggle you canât have learning and progress.
This also isnât about accessibility. I am all in favor of increasing accessibility for people who for various reasons might need it. Color blind modes, sound cues, color cues etc. All that is good.
Backward logic. Guides are popular because some people will pick the easy path when it is offered to them. That doesnât mean they needed it. They might have enjoyed it more without the easy path.
And not just that; you outright want to take away the option to pick the less easy path. Gaining nothing at all. The easy path will already be there, since we cant get rid of internet guides.
Simply not true. The entire genre of adventure/puzzle games are centered around solving puzzles by rotating, and toying with things until they fit.
Many people enjoy tinkering with stuff, in games, to try out different solutions. Rather than having the âcorrectâ answer served on a platter.
Likewise false.
But again, no Diablo game requires complex math.
You want that. Stop projecting.
I can only wish it would be more about evil destroying the hero/making the hero struggle. Blizzards idea of the player character always feeling overpowered has done irreparable harm to the genre imo.
I am saying the same - donât let anyone behind, be it a casual or a min/maxer. Thatâs why we need simplified Math and complex min/maxing.
Itâs more, but on more games too meaning people try hard a single game less.
Success has a different value for different player groups. While it might be a failure for some elitist to drop out of top 100, it would be a great success for some casual player to be there.
Learning is a natural byproduct of the game environment when the game is properly designed. It has nothing to do with struggle.
The main reason why aRPGs fail to reach bigger audience is not that these have some high skill cap, itâs that their Math rules are too complicated and people get bored while learning the basics.
If you put two slot machines in a casino - one with some known symbols and other with some alien symbols - as long as these have the same ROI more people will play the non-alien version simply because they would gain more information while playing.
Itâs the same with Diablo games - the more complicated it is for the player to get into the game the less heâll play. We arenât 2000 anymore when players were try harding simply because there werenât any good games to switch into. The gaming industry nowadays is on top with tons of games out there.
Video game sales statistics show that gaming industry revenue dwarfs all other entertainment industries combined. For instance, the global box office revenue in 2018 amounted to $41.7 billion, while the gaming market generated $151.2 billion.
DI complete failure is a very good illustration how competitive the gaming market is. People simply wonât waste time with outdated systems in D4. Thatâs why itâs crucial, extremely important, the Math rules of an aRPG to be simplified and easy to learn.
From what we saw from D4 until now that is not the case - it steps on top of flawed D3 Math already starting with the same mistakes, but pretending to be a next generation product. Its new paragon version is completely out of touch too - unnecessary complicated and tedious.
I wrote many times in the past that the main driving factor for aRPG players is the action - that constant rolling slot machine fueled with monster kills that allows us to upgrade our fantasy characters.
Complex Math on the other side is an action killer - the player spends tons of time to figure out whether A or B is better.
World map traversing is another action killer that is expect to hit hard in D4.
Bounties and static objective quests are another action killer.
Yet the formula is so simple and so well known to every aRPG fan - endless procedural dungeons and good loot hunt. That is all. You donât need complex Math for good min/maxing to exist. You donât need outdated action killers like unnecessary complicated systems bloating the game. You just need a proper itemization and enough build options.
It seems to me all the feedback through the years didnât make much difference in D4. While the game is exceptional in its visual aspect, in its gameplay core - itâs an outdated product that screams for outside help.
You want to turn Diablo into something that is over focus grouped and has no real soul or doesnât appeal to hardcore gamers.
Tarkov, Dota 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Apex Legends.
These are some of the most popular games in gaming and also the hardest (they all appear in the top most watched games on Twitch). Tarkov, Dota 2 and League donât care about complex math problems. In fact working out builds etc is a lot of the fun in these games, and part of what makes them so good.
Diablo 3 was cursed for being so casual. Diablo 4 should not repeat the mistakes of the past and instead appeal to this VERY large playerbase of people that like hard games.
No we really donât. We need to leave casual players behind and let them cry about it.
If you donât have haters you donât have anyone who truly loves your art either.
Haters are just fans that donât realise it yet. Youâll get used to it.
D4 can be hard to master without complex Math, thatâs the thing.
Look at this itemization created by me for example: http://rankings.byethost33.com/game.php
Its Math is very simplified welcoming every player group, but you have complex min/maxing that could entertain the hardcore gamers.
Also, instead of looking at 4305805873498792384 damage numbers, players look at ranks 1-50. Every Math value has a rank making it extremely easy for the player to know where he is lacking or where to push more. Just for a few seconds observing another character in the game you can compare it with your, because Math values are replaced by rank values.
Iâd love for him to provide an exame of the âcomplex mathsâ he thinks is in any Diablo game. Because adding numbers and simple % multiplication isnât hard and stuff learned in elementary school.
Maybe in his future there is no math so adding +1 to damage is considered hard.
Plenty of people seem to focus solely on Fortnite, Minecraft, LoL, CoD, FIFA etc.
On this very forum we have plenty of people who have expressed that they pretty much only play Diablo.
Okay.
The game still need to allow for failure. And it should allow for that pretty much from the first minute.
In a game without struggle you donât need to learn. You can just face roll through.
âŚ
D3 did not fail to reach bigger audience!
Even though it is harder to get into a a game than a movie. Maybe your thesis is wrong?
You are being delusional.
Indeed.
Your argument, as bad as it is, continues to rest on a false premise. D3 and D4 do not require complex math.
So you admit you are trolling?
You want to âsimplifyâ the already simple math of the game by adding specialized affixes against each individual enemy type in the game, drastically increasing the amount of numbers and stats to keep track of?
Do you genuinely believe that ranks are easier to understand than values. An abstract concept such as rankings are easier to understand than the actual numbers?!
The difference between rank 3 and 7 tells you more than the difference between 100 dmg and 200 dmg?
Seriously.
Indeed.
To be fair, given the trend of education, especially in US, his aversion to math makes it seem more likely he is from the future after all.
gain or acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) by study, experience, or being taught
Struggle/failure is not required, but these are existing when the Math is complex.
It failed pretty epic.
Yes, way easier since you can orient yourself regarding any two stats when comparing, not just damage.
Why hating, instead of learning?
What the regular D3/D4 Math supports is the inability of the player to easily deduce a characterâs power and/or compare individual stats with one another. Itâs unnecessary complicated since that complication doesnât serve for more complex min/maxing. It simply makes it tedious for the player to interact with the game leading to unnecessary struggling and quitting of a lot of player base portion due to that.
If a new player canât easily compare individual stats, heâd have serious troubles with comparing and choosing items with that leading to eventually the player getting bored.
Imagine you are in a Chinese supermarket looking for some Spaghetti, but due to all packs being in a language not known to you, you canât compare the packs and choose the one you need, ending with picking randomly. The same happens with a player that isnât familiar with the complex Math and the equations behind it.
Now, imagine if the Spaghetti packs have simple numbers for thickness on them like R10, R12, R15 and you know from a friend that the pack you are after has to have R12 on it - BINGO! You now can get the Spaghetti you want! You go home, cook these and next time you can even try to get another R since you already have experience with R12.
Great, you are back to dishonest quoting.
Yes, D3 is a bad game.
It still didnât fail to reach an audience. As far as we know it is one of t e best selling games of all time.
Those two are not the same.
A game without struggle/failure canât really be considered a game.
There is no comparison. Rank 3 vs. rank 7 are meaningless. They tell the players pretty much nothing about how the two compares.
You are replacing a simple, understandable system with something incomprehensible. Right after spending countless posts arguing against obscure systems.
R12 has no meaning. Might as well be a different language.
No, that is exactly what your rank system does. It makes it outright impossible to deduce a characters power.
You are adding complexity for the sake of complexity. To something that was not complex in the first place.
Dear lord.
Your solution to an incomprehensible rating system is that you need to have a friend tell you what you are aiming for.
There is absolutely no way you donât see how absurd this is.
Struggle/failure should come at later stages of the game, not while the player is learning the basics.
7 > 3, easy and simple.
Yes, based on your requirement since you have no experience with it (just as I wrote you above that 7 > 3 and this is what matters). A friend (or tutorial/almanac if you want) however canât tell you what to pick in the other example since he doesnât know Chinese too.
If you decide to pick by experience in both examples youâd again end up without knowledge in first one since you canât compare Chinese symbols and when the package changes a little youâd be in the dark again.
Itâs not absurd, itâs super logical, simple, easy and fun.
Elden ring is only hard if you only play AAA games. Run-of-the-mill 2D Metromania games are on average harder than games like Elden ring, where dodge is not useful, and you need crazy timing of jumps, slides & whatnot.
Anyway, there is certainly a market for hard games. But you know what, NOT every game needs to be hard! NOT everyone that ply arpg wants a dark soul game.
Failure is the greatest motivator for learning the basics. No need to hold back.
Early game should of course be simpler, introducing more and more gameplay elements as you lvl up.
But the struggling and challenge should exist more or less from lvl 1.
It tells nothing about what they mean. How much better is rank 7 vs 3?
If it is instead 200 vs 100 dmg, everyone can directly see what is better and by how much.
I am all for games being more obscure. This is just unnecessary though.
Just donât write your affixes in Chinese then⌠which is what your rankings represent. Incomprehensible terms the players canât relate to.
Indeed.
That is really the point. Harder games are on the rise again thankfully. Souls and Elden Ring are only really hard when compared to the nonsense Ubisoft and other AAA devs make.
Agreed. But Souls isnât hard, so not a good example imo. Being on the same difficulty as Elden Ring would be very fine.
It doesnât need to be on the level of many rogue-lites/likes etc.
In my view Diablo should be a relatively easy game. Just not as easy as a âmodernâ Ubisoft game. The difficulty Elden Ring represents would be very decent to aim for. Still easy enough that everyone can keep up, but also not designed as a joke that assumes players are idiots.
Also note, difficulty is way more than combat timings etc. Diablo should not be full of pixel perfect parries etc, that many metroidvanias and roguelites have. Just like Elden Ring doesnât really have those (not required at least).
The difficulty is more about not holding the players hands, having clear fail states, and letting players figure out the game on their own.
Souls is such a good example of this design.
It isnât about being hard, it is about actually respecting the difficulty that is in the game. Respecting the players enough to let them overcome it.
You can always calculate the difference in number of hits by using the formula, just as youâd need to do with the 200 vs. 100 damage which also tells you nothing extra, but youâd know that if you understood aRPG Math.
Itâs easier terms and you are alone here wanting a more complicated Math for the sake of it. Actually, I have no idea whether you want it, you just defend it for some reason. And you do it pretty bad.
All this talk about math and Iâm sitting here remembering when I was about 6 years old and I beat a game called Dark Sun Shattered Lands, a game based on AD&D 1e.
Just to be clear I understood almost nothing about how 1e rules worked at the time. I wouldnât know really anything about early D&D rulesets until I was in my 20s playing Baldurâs Gate for the first time.
I can remember several games where that sort of thing happened.
The reality is that a casual player isnât going to care about the numbers a whole lot and they arenât going to be chased off by âcomplex mathâ. Theyâre going to do what 6 year old me did:
Try out a few things, and just keep using the thing that worked best for them so long as it keeps working.
and old school D&D is significantly more complex than any Diablo game. Itâs not going to scare anybody off just because the game doesnât assume every new player is a complete idiot.
But you would certainly understand stuff like a +3 breastplate was better than a +1 breastplate or that a longsword would do more damage than a dagger. You could tell, from which items had bigger numbers, which was better without needing to understand the intricacies of THAC0.
Exactly. And then quit when it stops working due to monsters getting stronger and you not being able to upgrade.
Current generation of gamers wonât try hard like in the past since the choice of games is x100. If you canât succeed being a hero in 1 game that isnât a problem - you still have hundreds others to choose from.
âDo whatever Mathâ in the game isnât productive design. The Math should be simplified and easy to understand since itâs the foundation of fun in aRPGs.
We can apply the opposite approach - complicating Math on purpose - and youâll see that at certain stages many of the current fans will simply drop out.
You see where I am going with this? If 1 is most simple and 10 is most hard in Math terms, we need the lowest number that effectively allows us to have complex min/maxing. If itâs say 3 with 3 cutting off 10 year olds and below then thatâs the price the other player base have to pay for the complex min/maxing. But if itâs 3 and we do 5, because âwhy notâ, thatâs simply stupid.
Well Iâm not suggesting I didnât understand basic math at the time, but I didnât understand the majority of the rules of AD&D 1e and I still didnât after I had played the game.
Though THAC0 would mess things up a bit because a smaller number is better under that system.
I was still able to upgrade, and it kept working for me until the end of the game.
Hell even in Baldurâs Gate on my first playthrough, simply being a fighter and using the best equipment I could find was enough to carry me through all but 2 fights in the game. I probably could have even carried my way through those last 2 fights if I wasnât picky about party members dying(which you can revive them anyway).
My point is that despite Dark Sun being based on a much more complex system than ANY Diablo game I didnât try hard the game and I didnât even really understand like 90% of it.
If you present a casual gamer with a complex problem, theyâre more than likely going to find a simple solution and not really understand why what they did worked, just that it worked.
This idea that casual players will flee at the first sign of struggle is whatâs led us to the incredibly generic and soulless Ubisoft sandbox games which still didnât sell as well as Elden Ring which for all its faults at the very least trusts that the player can figure a few things out without having their hand held.
You vastly underestimate how good kids are at figuring stuff out when it comes to things like video games.
but either way this is a RPG and the complexity should be high enough to allow for interesting and deep character building. The RPG playerbase is used to putting in more theorycrafting as a whole.
It doesnât work always like that sadly. Iâve watched tons of people struggling with D3/PoE and quitting. And I donât blame them. Both games are very newcomer unfriendly.
Great, then they wonât mind a simplified Math as long as they can theorycraft.
Speaking of theorycrafting btw, whatâs the game youâve (those few still reading this thread) done it most in? I think thatâs WC3 for me. From Diablos - D2.
I think more complex math is fine.
But I dont want more complex math in A-RPGs.
Also dont want less complex math in A-RPGs. Since there already is zero complex math, so it cant be reduced any further.
But I sure dont want dumbed down mechanics and itemization, in some misguided attempt to reduce complex math that isnât there in the first place.
Not sure the person who keeps saying math is too difficult should attempt to be condescending about knowing math
200 vs 100 dmg doesnât tell you anything extra?
It literally tells you that 200 is twice as much as 100. SeriouslyâŚ
And your answer to âdonât have mathâ is to add a formula
Btw, you could easily add some tiers to the item rolls, if that makes you happy. It seems pointless, considering the affix ranges are already shown. But hey, just for you, items could be like:
Axe:
100 dmg (Rank S)
90 dmg (Rank A)
80 dmg (Rank B)
70 dmg (Rank C)
60 dmg (Rank D)
50 dmg (Rank E).
Now you have nonsensical ranks, and the people who are not afraid of basic numbers, also have the more useful information. Win/win.
In settings, people can choose between seeing 1) actual numbers, 2) useless rankings, and 3) both.
Perfection!
Indeed.
And I am definitely all for helping people with that.
As silly as I think the green arrows in D3 can be, I would never argue that they should be removed. It is okay that they exist, to make comparisons easier.
Although, as said previously, the dmg calculations REALLY should be done for each of your skills, instead of just one dmg number. That would be way more useful.
Complex math
You are either being condescending toward younger players, or projecting. Or both.
Either way, it is kinda annoying. They are likely way better at math than you are.
You canât possibly think that is a good argument?
Problem is
Diablo 3 is more like at 2, where it might need to be at 5 to efficiently have complex min/maxing.
As said earlier, your argument continues to rely on a claim that Diablo 3 requires complex math to play. Which is just not the case.
The numbers are there to give people MORE information. To make things LESS obscure and complex. Taking away (hiding) the numbers does not make things easier. Quite the opposite.
IF you want to reduce Complexity & Depth, you have to actually reduce Complexity & Depth. Pretending that numbers arenât there, does not achieve anything, other than increasing the complexity, by obscuring the data.
Less data is always bad, especially in this genre.
Hell, I have never played D&D outside of video games, and I still dont really understand those systems in any intricate way. Nor do you need to. It of course helps if you do understand them. But, even earlier D&D versions donât, afaik, rely on any complicated math. It just relies on lots and lots of more or less illogical rules, data tables etc.
Youâd need a lot of alphabets for D4 if you split by 10 damage, but I prefer numbers from 1-50 or percents. Give me such metrics in options so I donât have to deal with absurd numbers and I can quickly decide between items. It would be perfect indeed.
You seem to be misinformed again. There are multiple highly upvoted threads on reddit with players not wanting big numbers.
Of course it does. Looking at precise number instead of the power of the roll when rolls are balanced with one another is a waste of time.
More information is required in specific cases only. 99.9% of players wonât do better with more information bloating their screen. Some guy posted a picture in this thread as an example of outdated design with more information⌠Oh, wait⌠It was you.
I donât keep links of these. Just watch on Twitch/YT some new player trying D3/PoE. Itâs hilarious and sad at the same time. And these players are streamers so way above average level. I donât want to imagine what the really casual players go through. It would be like real hell.
So even if someone decides to make an ARPG it will likely be bad if you remember what ARPG was about and will let you down until realize even if the letters are right on the box, you are not the target of the game anyway anymore. 
