I’m not too concerned with other players or subtle differences. Yet I am human, and it can be hard to not to feel stung by rules that seem grossly and harshly punitive just because of my chosen playstyle.
It goes beyond that though. When differences are greatly magnified, you reach a point where one end or the other can not be what the game designers intended. Did the professional game designers behind this game believe that bounties should be a 3 minute activity, or a 15 minute activity? It can not be both.
Blizzard has admitted their own data tells them there is a large player segment that wants to play solo. I want to feel I am receiving their best efforts at a first-class experience targeting my large demographic, and not one that is a barely considered afterthought compared to a groups-first design mentality.
No that’s fair. I know I come off as snarky, and that was not my intention. I prefer to play solo as well, and would play off line if given the opportunity. I just find competition in these games a bit silly. Fine if you are doing PvP. But other than that it seems set up for cheaters and exploiters.
Just make sure it is not more efficient to level in a group, and the problem is solved.
They should not get reduced experience gain of course.
But you can balance monster HP to counter the higher efficiency in groups.
And of course, simply do not have a paragon system that offers power (cosmetic rewards or non-permanent power is fine; like you could get a “bounty chest” when lvling up)
That is a band-aid instead of trying to fix the problem.
Indeed. Solving the bounty discrepancy should be outright easy to do. Right now it just speaks of a broken game.
500 responses to this thread, some with very detailed and interesting ideas.
See, this is what I think the problem is with Diablo devs right now - they don’t actually care about what you say or how you feel - they aren’t building for your expectations, they are building for new markets and broader appeal.
Otherwise, I would expect to see what I see with Path of Exile - a strong developer engagement community with almost daily outreach, replies, interesting insights into the dev side, and thoughtful communication.
It’s like Blizzard doesn’t understand (or care) the value of engaging with the community on a game like this.
A new crafting system appeared already before 4.0.
D4 needs simple rules and advanced gameplay when the player desires it, but this should not be mandatory to enjoy the game in all of its gameplay aspects.
The aRPG genre as a whole needs to draw players from other genres to it and a simple to learn itemization together with great combat and good enough build diversity is the solution here. Once these are in place more items and content could be added without these leading to power creep. Sounds simple, right? Yet no one has done it.
If you take depth/complexity out of A-RPGs, what is the point anymore. Might as well just delete the genre.
While complexity for the sake of complexity is not a good thing and should not be a goal, you have to go pretty far to reach that point. PoE rarely seem complex for the sake of complexity tbh. It merely has a lot of moving parts. Which is good.
Only the season themes really seem to go into complexity for its own sake, but then, the whole concept of seasons every third month is kinda bad and should be removed (tbh, aim for at least 6+ month seasons. Give the game time to breath)
It should not be mandatory for playing the game no. Easy to learn, hard to master. You might be able to lvl up a character, even kill the end of campaign boss, without completely knowing what you are doing.
But beyond that, then yeah, getting into the depth of the game should definitely be encouraged.
I can’t count you the number of crafting systems this game went through until this day since I played it for a single Season.
My point is: One crafting system based on simple Math and known rules is enough.
Just as getting into the game as a new player. However, with the current D4 itemization that is not encouraged - it’s discouraged.
People have to understand that the “fresh blood” into any game is what’s keeping it alive. If you make the game complicated and thus not easily accessible for new players the game will slowly die. I hope no one that posts in this thread wants that to happen with D4.
Trying to improve your game is not complexity for the same of complexity. They might be struggling with finding a good crafting system. Something most A-RPGs seem to have struggled with.
Why? There is nothing complex about the D4 item system we have seen so far. Quite the contrary.
People also need to understand that most players are not stupid. You dont have to make a game brainless for people to jump in and play it.
A game should be accessible in the sense that it is easy to start the game and get going. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with expecting the player to grow with the game after that.
Actually, there is something wrong with not expecting that.
If you want to get new players into your game, and retain them, make a good game, not an easy game.
Respect your players intelligence.
tbf color was a huge part of D2 itemization. Crystal swords being a great example, or boots/hats like druid helms.
If you browse late ladder trading channels/forums you’ll find people specifying red/green/blue nado hats for their druid, or rare item collectors looking for the same in a sword.
I get that it’s not part of the weapons ability to do dmg but it’s def. part of itemization as long as there’s a character on screen to look at. Skins have done away with this though, and it’s a shame.
That’s not an accessible itemization for new players. If you want we can make a study about it by publishing tiered in strength/power items (from different aRPGs including D4) on forums where people never played such type of game to see how well they’ll cope with deducing the power of the items themselves.
A new player can orient way more easily himself between different stats like strength, intelligence, dexterity etc instead of what is the case atm. And the truth is we don’t need more than basic stats for a player to learn min/maxing. We can hide the more complex stats behind the basic ones and give the players who want to change these themselves the option to do it, but if you drop D4 with all of these stats we’ll end up with exactly what the devs want to avoid in first place: Players looking at online resources/solvers.
In HS 99,9% of the players do this: They copy/paste sub-optimal decks from the Internet since they can’t solve the game by themselves. And the reason for this is not that they are not clever enough, the reason is they haven’t been learned how to build and improve their decks. No one teaches you in HS that you have to monitor how well a card performs during your gameplay and constantly be contemplating its potential replacers depending on the match-ups you encounter. And because no one teaches you that those 99,9% of the players just copy/paste sub-optimal decks, and I don’t blame them. It’s the game creators that didn’t develop a game mode teaching the players how to build and evolve their decks.
The same would happen with D4 - the majority of new players won’t get how you min/max, but they would get it if they have to compare items like:
A: +10 to Strength B: +12 to Strength
Even a noob player would easily choose B in the above scenario. Then when he wants to be like the pro min/maxers spending points on what is hidden behind Strength manually, he would have the option to do it.
The point is: We need to start learning the new player from the most simple and basic step before continuing forward.
No one sane teaches you how to do 360 in snowboarding the first day, right?
How is it not accessible.
We could make such a study. It would turn out just fine.
Especially when you factor in the freaking green arrows telling people which item is better on a superficial level.
You can’t ever avoid that. Don’t bother trying.
Dont ruin the games for the many, just to avoid that the few might go look up a guide. No matter how easy you make a game, someone will go look up a guide anyway.
Great, so we just created a bad game in the attempt to make it accessible?
You do that quite easily, by only dropping white/blue items at the start of the game, with limited stats on them.
Exactly.
Once again, easy to learn, hard to master.
The solution is not to remove the 360s. Just ease people in with helpful green arrows, and gradually introducing affixes.
Quick question? Why is the ptr up? Did we have a new change? As of today I can play in ptr (I am European though, I don’t know if this makes any difference?)
Edit : lol forgive me I now realized that I posted on the wrong thread
What I have suggested isn’t removing it, it’s adding to it (but you know that already).
Even in that way a new player won’t be able to properly choose most of the time since for some stats the arrows aren’t effective.
How is it bad when it extends both the simplicity and complexity? A new player learns to min/max with the basic stats (str, dex, int etc). An experienced/dedicated player has bigger range of stats to min/max with as compared to current itemization way.
The stats you could get early game could simply be those where arrows are effective.
Because nothing is gained, just dumped down.
You get the same with the green arrows, without taking away affixes.
New players do not learn to min/max with this idea, since as you say, the min/maxing is hidden away. Probably just a worse learning experience overall.
That won’t help even if only white items are dropping in the whole game due to stats combos (chc, chd for example).
How is nothing gained when an AI could do the advanced min/maxing for the novice player? Then later when the player decides to, goes and reads what the “hidden part” is, he could start tweaking the numbers by himself (he would already know the basics of min/maxing and how his character reacts and gameplay changes due to switching the different basic stats).
It will introduce players to more stats over the first hours of the game.
If an AI could do that (which it realistically cant), then the same AI could apply the correct green arrows to the same items. Merging stats into a super stat is just an unnecessary complication in all of it.
The green arrows won’t help much besides saving time for calculation.
How is it a complication when the AI can weight your advanced stats towards crit when you equip a legendary item interacting with crit? The novice player wants to play with the big bad axe and the AI helps him with the stats. Where is the complication?
It can easily be programmed to help the (novice) players and be almost optimal. The player himself can watch how the AI weights the advanced stats and learn from it instead of going to external websites and solvers.
The same weights could the be used for the green arrows.
Heck, you could show the weights directly in the tooltip.
Like
+4% attack speed (0.3)
+2 Fireball skill (1.0)
+5% crit chance (0.8)
Green arrow!
Or
+4% attack speed (0.3)
+2 Frostbolt skill (0.0)
+5% crushing blow (0.2)
Red arrow!
The player would then know, crit is better than crushing blow for me right now.
Or that 2 fireball skill is better than 5% crit chance, though both are highly valuable for you.
(now, I dont think the tooltip should show this, but it could)
I like the direction the game is taking, i hope to see the runewords from D2 make a debut again and I love the fact that skill points and «+x to skills» is back. I also hope that the game will have a end point to monsters HP, the inflation of D3 is a big problem and forces the player to go for the absolute best build all the time. I imagine that having a certain «max HP» would make build diversity and balancing easier.
I really hope that the game is not focused mainly around cooldowns like D3 is. To me at least, the endless CD timing and waiting on CD is really booring… Hope we can see more options in gameplay this time around.
D2 did a lot of things right and i hope that blizz look at those aspects.