No, we would not, but not just for the reasons related to cheating. I do agree the simplicity of the Paragon system does lend itself to botting because it is a mind numbing gain of power simply for time played. There is no skill factor, no sense of character building, no sense of accomplishment - just an annoying button I have to push to make it get off my screen.
I understand the desire to have Diablo 3 be a replayable, or infinitely playable game. As such players need to feel there is something to DO in the game. Everyone wants to feel they are gaining or accomplishing something. In D3 we gain levels, gain tiers of gear, gain Legendary gems, level the gems, augment the gear, and gain paragon levels. The only thing on that list that is not capped is Paragon. It is the last thing left to make a player feel there is something left to gain by spending time in game once they have everything else done.
That feeling that there is something left to gain, is an important thing. I see why it exists in game. I just think it is poorly implemented and would have gone about it differently. Figuring out something for players to keep going after, without resorting to blatant power creep, is not exactly easy.
I get what you’re saying, but let me try and explain why the part about “everyone wants to feel they are gaining something” is a bit problematic.
I’ll take D2 as an example. There you used to make characters, that were good at specific activities. Not every character or build was good for everything.
So, if I were to fully deck out a character, that didn’t mean there was nothing left to do. I could make another character, that is good at this other thing.
In D3 Vanilla every character could do everything. Re-specing on the fly also contributed to that.
This results into a person sticking to one character, maxing it out, then complaining, that “there is no content in the game”, when he is depriving himself out of content (because the characters and their various builds are themselves also content).
And the moment the devs start to cater to the “I wanna play this one character only” crowd, who wants to be able to always unlock something new on every play session, you end up with RoS and Paragon 2.0, or the absolutely horrible artifact power grind in World of WarCraft, that was introduced back in Legion.
Reaper of Souls is better than Vanilla D3 in the sense, that there is some choice. I build up a character (or rather a set) for speed like T16 bounties and Rifts and another for Greater Rifts, but is worse when it comes to the uncapped Paragon.
Let me put it like this. One of the appeals of a Diablo back in the day for me was, that you press “Save and Exit” and you can continue where you were the next time you start the game. So I get that.
But I also enjoyed playing games like Quake 3 or Counter Strike, where I didn’t unlock anything. I just played for the fun of it.
In a game like WoW, I didn’t unsubscribe after I had BiS gear till the next content patch came. I would enjoy playing with my gear. I would join a battle ground for the fun of it. My only reward was the feeling of outplaying the person on the other end.
So I’m starting to think, that in a game like Diablo4, the devs should also work on (aside from the character progression, itemization and whatnot) the basic enjoyment of the game. I do few speed rifts or bounty runs and I get bored easily. A lot of the D3 activities feel like a chore.
I’ve come to think, that the D4 being open world would be a very good change precisely for that reason.
They need to ban people regularly. Not in big ban-waves, it should also be 1 month suspension, and if caught again permanent.
The problem with Diablo 3 is the loot isn’t exciting once you hit a certain breakpoint - you’re pretty much looking for 1% here or 1% there, sometimes less.
There needs to be more options for loot, giving more build variety, much lower drop chance of each item, it should be very difficult to build towards a certain build - so no Kadala or Cube reforging/upgrading.
Play with what you get, the only time you should be nearing a “perfect build” is right near the pointy end of the season
No game-systems are going to be able to stop developers from creating a work around unless they completely destroy the user-experience in game. (adding some type of captcha).
All in all, game needs to be fun and rewarding. It should also reward people that can’t play as much. Escalating odds. Still not as lucrative if you’re playing 10+ hours per day, but people that can only manage 1-3 hours per day can still feel like they’re making good progress (paragon doesn’t feel good blizzard).
Well, as far as botting is concerned, cooldowns is a huge start. A lot of the botting that took place revolves around the ability to spam teleport.
I see heroes of the storm is introducing a ‘minions don’t grant experience once slain any longer, they now drop experience globes that must be collected’
That could help too. Although it might upset traditional gamers of the genre, but it beats playing a multiplayer game that is actually a single player game where the ‘players’ are actually just ai.
As long as there’s a competitive aspect reducing cheating is only possible via security. Shaming cheaters so that they’re not winners if they’re cheating. This is because they’re not cheating the wind their cheating so you can’t win. Conversations like this in the forms and people complaining about them is exactly what they want. So maybe if we left it up to blizzard to do the security part and we just didn’t talk about the cheating it might get better. It would get worse in the beginning for sure but once the attention goes away some of the reason to do it goes away as well.
This is unfortunately the reason most people cheat in my experiences since Quake 1’s first aimbots. People want to make it easier for themselves to be higher on the lists.
The second there is competition cheating is very likely to happen.
And yes one person is proved to cheat, it WILL become rampant. This is proven by one of the first people to be banned on a server I played on for cheating, and yes, this was in the forums, “why should I be banned, everyone cheats afterall.”
Just dont give permanent power imo. Give chests with loot/mats, give Magic find bonus, give temporary buffs, cosmetics etc. whatever. Not to mention the “bragging rights” are a strong motivator without any substantial rewards too.
But in the end, what should motivate people to play it good gameplay, not endless lvls or rewards.
As for cheating, you cant really prevent it from happening. I think the important part is to focus on catching those who do. Detection rather than prevention.
Then delete their account when caught.
So in season the botters win out because they get all their top notch gear early and the dedicated players get left behind because their isn’t enough time in a season to get all the good gear to compete against the botters that already have it
What’s the point of buying the game if you have completed it as soon as you log on and have everything you want
That is the biggest cheat of all
Oh come on they cheat to get number 1 position on the LB, that has everything to do with ego, they are number one, how they got there doesn’t matter, all that matters is they are first
I’d say make the punishments for cheating severe to discourage further cheating. If someone is caught actively cheating/abusing exploits, punishment should be swift, sure and completely indiscriminate. Everyone is punished equally, whether they are a famous streamer or a complete newbie. No favouritism.
Personally I’d say first offense is ban that account from accessing that game. Second offense is shutting down their entire battle.net account for 90 days from accessing any games they have. Third offense delete their battle.net account in its entirety.
If the punishments are severe, you can dissuade a lot of people from even attempting it.
Unfortunately, it is a tall order to completely get rid of cheating.
The problem here is user privacy. There is only so far that your software can go checking out just wtf is going on on the user’s pc, until you hit an illegal Mark or start triggering antivirus software needlessly.
Take d3 for example. The cheats that are a problem here are nearly impossible to detect reliably by Blizzard. And you can’t just go around banning anyone who plays too much or grinds without change in behavior. And even if you could - it isn’t a problem to tweak the botting software to deal with it.
The problem is that today bots can be very intelligent and almost indistinguishable from players. They don’t need to inject into the game code and instead can work through pattern analysis or sniffing the network packets.
You cant, but maybe a GM could write to people while playing, if they have shown “bot behaviour”, to see if they are able to respond. Or maybe trigger stuff in the game to see how people react.
It would be more costly vs. automated detection , and you obviously wont catch everyone. But if people could see that some got perma-banned from time to time, that would make less people cheat.
I don’t think cheating should be discouraged in D4. The game should be focused on how legitimate players play the game and balanced around them. Altering the game to “discourage” cheating would harm the legit players and probably not stop the cheaters anyway.
Some people will cheat just because they can… it doesn’t even need a reward. Anyone create a character on D2 with max stats and millions of health and just messed around? I know a few who did. Anyone edit items that make you immune to damage and have +100 to all skills and just slaughtered monsters on Hell diff? pretty sure I saw a few of those types as well. Cheating will happen just because it can happen, only useful way to limit it is make cheating harder to do.
Although I don’t like the infintie paragon level system or silly RNG based items (ie.e monster has 1% chance to spawn and 1% chance to drop essential item) as these are just mind numbing tasks that drag out the game for little reason.
hmm… if I had to do something to stop bots or the like, it would be to only allow you to have a single instance of an item in your inventory (like bounty cache or legendary) as the computer would then need to analyse the item to see whether to drop it and search for another, adding more complexity to the program. This would mean legit players would need to throw away a legendary item in order to search for it again though. I doubt many would like that idea.
In the long run, there is no chance to detect it unless you ban human and AI (lol?). If you follow the development of AI you will know that some time this decade it will become much easier for people to train and distribute their own neural nets (it’s nor hard now but I’m talking when people who don’t even know anything about AI are using it). It will become like college where your teacher looks at you and says “your only hurting yourself by cheating”. Only, with video games, the person really isn’t hurting them self (but they are putting garbage in the rankings of legit players). I’m not saying embrace it but it will become very hard to distinguish between real human players and AI.
Developers will be spending more and more money on anti cheating. There must be a better way but I don’t believe those people who want to load up a cheat program and check on their status in the morning or when they get home from work will go away.