Appealing to tradition, or the belief thereof, does not automatically make a system better. I don’t care if you point to PoE, Secret World, or whatever, I’m saying that myself and others do not believe that restrictive skill point systems magically lead to a better experience and better players. You just find out who either has more time on their hands or trusts Google results.
So, yes, continue to be a condescending jerk asserting anyone that disagrees must have their hands held when I can at least affirm I’m not asking for that. I still expect effort to go in. What I don’t expect is it to just mean nothing when suddenly presented with an unexpected hurdle.
So, sure, bark that it’s “easy” to look ahead and just “know” what will work. Can’t say I recall D2 showing what skills do at level 20 when checking them in-game at level 1. Or how full synergies may interact. That’s something you had to look up independently, and you couldn’t just assume “does more damage” or “costs less MP” since skill growth was by no means uniform and may have even faced diminishing returns. So, yeah, I’ll pass on the whole snobbish gatekeeping that someone has to bomb a build and completely start over like some treat as a twisted rite of passage that must be honored or pretend they never had to because they’re just oh-so-smart experts of the genre. Hell, the fact some skills were just one-point wonders (and not just pre-reqs) or had a “don’t level past x” point just further affirms my disdain of this process. Improving a skill should never actually be a bad move, which is a ball PoE certainly drops, too.
Pretty much. People like to claim that no respeccing makes your decisions matter, but in reality they just want to see other players fail so they can believe that they’re some kind of gaming gods.
Most of these people won’t accept a “hardcore” option with no respeccing because then they’ll have less people to lord it over on.
The only way for the skill point system to have true integrity is to have no respecs. Like really think about it, you choose to unlearn something to learn something else. That makes no sense. So the first opposition to respec is to maintain some sort of integrity in this regard.
If you create a character of a chosen class and you can reroll that character to every single different combination available in that class, the character is committed to nothing and has no integrity. The second opposition to respec is not so much the fact stated above but the effect it has on the replayability of the game.
So while I can’t justify why our characters should be limited in their acquisition of knowledge, I can justify that in the structure of most RPG’s, the ability to freely respec is a poor design choice.
It’s not exactly a secret people didn’t want them back in day because they didn’t want to invalidate prior efforts. It’s also well documented that people hated the concept of exclusive rewards, ranging from gear to stash tabs. Nonetheless, it still got shoved down our throats and non-seasonal players, to this day, are still treated as an afterthought and a personal contributing factor to why I don’t play as much as I could.
I’d posit seasons hurt the game by forcing positive updates into 3-4 month gaps. They further give Blizzard an excuse to be lazy with new content because some people buy into the whole “FrEsH sTaRt!” propaganda. However you force people to restart, it’s not really New Things™. If you want to keep people long term, you have to keep updating the game. That’s the secret. I’m sorry if I spoiled it.
Oh really? Based on what? There are plenty of great RPGs out there that allow you to respec freely.
Every time you guys want to justify no respeccing you bring out the “feels” argument, which is basically a load of BS. Not only that, but it’s hypocritical because most of you guys are convinced that you’re smarter than everyone else, so you won’t make mistakes, so these penalties only apply to others.
On the other hand, no respeccing has actual factual flaws, the biggest one being that it limits creativity and experimentation since you’re forced to level up a new character from scratch to try out different builds.
On the rest of my post that you chose not to quote.
I did not and never have attempted to justify no respecs but rather opposition to free respecs and support for respecs with significant effort required to encourage reroll when changes to the character are drastic.
Just a silly assumption you stirred up. I think it a positive thing that some players might make more or different mistakes requiring different actions.
Not that I support no respecs but they would not limit creativity, they would just require more thought and planning.
Ah but creativity is the act of creating, not necessarily succeeding. Being able to instantly test everything in the game trivializes it.
I stated what I believe to be facts not feelings. Your attempt to refute them by applying the “feels” tag is pathetic.
Ideally I’d prefer people such you simply just go play other genres. But if there was to be an option created it should be “Sandbox “ mode for “you guys “.
If you were to look up Secret World Legends you would see that originally it was launched as The Secret World a levelless classless game where in time all characters could learn all skills. To learn at the time, IIRC 535 skills that is way more skills than any class in any game will ever have.
Now as Secret World Legends it has levels. But you can in time still learn all skills and get all buffs from passive skill points spent on weapons. That is close to what you would be looking for a system where you can be anything you want to be at anytime. All you have to do is change your weapons and maybe move your anima around using the Anima Allocation system. Talismans, Signets, and Glyphs are your gear in the game.
You don’t need google research with that game. Nor do you need it with PoE. After you learn the basics of any game you can make a good build to handle whatever task that you want to handle. The only difference in PoE is that you cannot be anything you want at any time you want.
What now game devs are suppose to be more than human beings. Now they need to be perfect gods, interesting.
So it is daddy devs please make sure that I have guaranteed success, or at the least very little failures. And when I do fail help me make it where I can correct it in a just a click of a few buttons.
You are making it out like planning is some herculean task that takes the strength of many Incredible Hulks combined. When it isn’t all that bad. How do we achieve goals that we set out for ourselves. Do we have someone there that can guide us so well that we don’t need to think about what we are doing or make plans to be able to achieve said goal. No, no one holds our hands and yet we make those plans and achieve the goals we want to achieve. The same is true in games. We need to make plans to achieve the goals we want to achieve in games.
Since we can make plans to achieves goals then we shouldn’t be inconvenienced by making plans as to what builds we want to play. It shouldn’t be well just slap anything you want together and it will be fine. Even if it does fall on its face all you have to do is press a few buttons and bam all changed and ready to go again
Why would someone do something that they say they hate doing. A person playing seasons has to re level, which is like re-rolling a character. If it is to try out a different build than the last time they played then they are doing what they are suppose to hate doing. That is like saying you hate eating cake, but you go to a birthday party and eat cake anyway. What do you think that others would say knowing you told them you hate eating cake. Wouldn’t they say that there is something wrong there.
I have said before there is no agenda. Failure is how we learn some of the things that we learn in life. Wanting guaranteed success no matter what you do in a game is not achievable even with or without skill trees. To do that would mean that the devs of any game would have to design the game in a way that players would be able to trivialize the content no matter what they do. It would be like an eternal normal difficulty with the gear that we have today. I am sure I know how much worse it would be with a complete lack of challenge.
Don’t you realize that most of the best players of any game were new players at one time. So in games like D2, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Etc… they have made bad builds themselves. But when they learned the basics then it was easy for them to make builds.
I know you don’t want to have to learn much about a game. Have it so simple that all you do is just have the AI tell you it is an upgrade instead of actually looking at it and thinking about it.
So three to four months isn’t short enough. Okay then make it where they have to pump out brand new classes and acts every day. Now is that fast enough for you. This should help you figure out that there should be reasonable expectations to what a dev team can and cannot do.
[quote=“Saidosha-1136, post:101, topic:1763”]
I’m saying that myself and others do not believe that restrictive skill point systems magically lead to a better experience and better players.
[/quote]What is a restrictive skill point system? Would a system where you can remove up to three skill points for an initially small but escalating gold cost, and unlearn an entire skill with a rare consumable (implying you can respec completely very rarely) be restrictive? It allows you to experiment with a skill while leveling, allows you to completely refund something that just isn’t working well at end game, allows you to min-max at end game for an increasing cost, while to a certain extent makes you committed to a particular build.
[quote=“Gilthas-1277, post:104, topic:1763”]
Pretty much. People like to claim that no respeccing makes your decisions matter, but in reality they just want to see other players fail so they can believe that they’re some kind of gaming gods.
[/quote]I’m not arguing for NO respec. I don’t care for seeing other players fail. The idea is that YOU (me) can fail… not utterly fail but enough to make succeeding feel really good.
It There is no secret agenda like I said before. They want to steer Diablo away from almost guaranteed success to where you can make mistakes. More than just making mistakes playing the build. Heck they want to be able to make some mistakes themselves.
In Path of Exile it is a given that regardless of how good you think you are or how experienced you are. You will mess up your first build or first few builds. I ought to know it happened to me. Even though I thought I learned what I needed by playing other people’s builds but it didn’t work that way for me at all.
There are even those that love to laugh at their own mistakes. There are plenty of good players in PoE that have laughed at their own screw ups like ZiggyD. Yet you want it to be a game where it is almost guaranteed successes. That would be a game void of any challenge at all.
I have learned a lot about PoE by playing characters that I never got into mapping. Time consuming, yes, but here is a news flash. Video games are a time sink anyways. Look for it to take a very short time by having leveling to be fast as the flash. Then having where you hardly even have to think about what you want to do in the game.
D2 and PoE has Hardcore with limited ways of respecing and some here love both games.
Agreed it there can be a sandbox mode where they can have their continual experimental sandbox game and let us have the game that we want. Where we can even laugh at our own goofy mistakes.
This is just meaningless semantics. Respeccing doesn’t trivialize it, it makes it easier to test.
But they aren’t facts, they’re just your feelings. I don’t need to be prevented from being to respec my character to feel that my decisions matter. I just need to see if the build is working.
I feel like you’re brushing up on the core issue here in this thread : Time Sink
Your narrative seems to be more or less “time sink is bad”, but this is probably the core issue on why various opinions in this thread are never going to see eye to eye and argue in circles…because truth be told…a lot of people don’t feel that narrative is true. I, for one, ENJOY time sink…and I know I’m not alone, nor are my motivations out of pride. I don’t care about being the best in the slightest, but I do care about of the enjoyment of the “journey” sort of speak from character progression.
What matters more to me is not “is time sink bad?” It’s “is this time sink spent in a meaningful way?”
If I quickly rated the competition off my question :
D2 : Yes and No(for its time…not now really…a lot of out of date features make it more tedious than its worth…I usually just play the mods for it these days)
D3 : No(or only for a few days…but I moved on to a point where I need new content…not meta shakeups)
PoE : Yes, but more on that later.
Other arpgs : depends on the content updates(if there are any or not)…other arpgs generally mean “single player” so the goals/sinks of that game are just beating the game more or less.
Complexity/depth - This is the issue which I might get a lot of D2/PoE fans mad at me for…but I think I’d probably agree with you on this. Complexity is ultimately unnecessary in ARPGs…and it’s an arbitrarily “will” the devs impose on their players. It’s fun for me sure…but you’re ultimately wasting a lot of time that can be better spent actually grinding the game but instead you need a lot of pre planning. It’s not a good plan for a AAA company if they’re trying to appease several crowds at once(and more than the “hardcore” crowd).
TLDR; quit the complexity argument…it’s an unnecessary waste of TIME for the player…and turns off more players than it encourages.
Progression - This needs to be much more gradual in a theoretical D4, and it’s why I vouch for 3 things more or less. Character Progression(aka leveling and eventually “breakpoint” levels at like 30/60/90…which are arbitrary numbers for the record… where you get build defining passive similar the Major Keystones in Path of Exile…this will basically encourage players to prioritize different stats on gear to customize their build). Skill Progression - similar to WoW: Legion weapons or Last Epoch where leveling a skill is on its own xp bar(or monsters killed. The last one is gear…where I think they should bring back official tier gear…but at the same time don’t make it unnecessarily complex like D2/PoE and just automatically make a higher tier be better(sort of like in retail WoW where ilvl basically wins now over anything else).
Progression (continued) - I went slightly off on a tangent there, but ultimately you need to be progressing those 3 things(and customizing them), and the progression unlike D3 needs to be much, much…more gradual. In D3 it’s like you go from point A-X in the first 3 days(a fun 3 days sure)…but Y-Z is as endless as much as it’s unfun. I want A-Z to transition a lot more linearly…so even if you put less time in the game…you’re still having fun progressing(and you feel like the work you’re putting in is gratifying).
TLDR; Have seperate progression systems for leveling, gear, and skills…and make sure it’s gradual. This way the TIME I spend will have more meaning(regardless if I’m ahead or behind the curve).
Punishment/Restrictions(aka the ongoing debate of this thread) - This is something I think should just be a middleground. All the skills should be available by default for you to fiddle around with while leveling early game(to both learn about them and find out what you like most)…but by the time you reach mid to end game…you should start locking yourself into certain skillsets/passives/gear setups. Ultimately though, I feel like it should punish you by wasting your time in some format to fix it(instead of being able to instantly swap over). With skills…I think it should be straight up a time waster(aka grind xp with the new skill you want). With passives, I think it should indirectly waste your time by costing whatever currency exists in the game which could’ve better spent on other things(like crafting/trading…w/e the sink is supposed to be). I feel like gear is relatively fine as is…you’re already spending your time grinding/storing gear for the occasion.
TLDR; Find a middleground for punishment(more punishing than D3, but way less than PoE/D2)…that way both crowds can hopefully suffer equally. TIME punishments are necessary in my opinion…but I do see why it requires delicate tuning.
Ultimately, I think D4 should strive to capture that feeling in the first 2-3 days of our time spent in new D3 seasons, and maintain that feeling instead over weeks to a month(or even multiple months if they’re crazy). That doesn’t necessarily mean “then make the loot rare as hell like Vanilla”. That’s not an answer either. The problem is time, and they need to make it a balance to it. While I don’t expect their answer be a perfect medium…it needs to be something that at least caters to both crowds(more than D3 did anyways).
Or at least that’s what I choose to believe can happen(maybe that’s naive…I dunno).
There is an entire subgenre of games hinged on this very idea, and plenty of people DO want what you absentmindedly wonder about, so lets see if we can explain to you why that is the case…
unarguably, even Diablo 1 drew inspiration from this pedigree of game…
A whole pile of games blanketed in death, hardship, and rampant complication and streaks of commitment here and there…
So… why do you think these types of games in this horrible category so far removed from the pillars of comfort and safety attract any players at all…?
EVERYTHING in my post addressed your stupid question… you asked why we don’t want your description of hardship, and I explained to you…there is a whole bloody sub-genre of games, partly responsible for the germination of this entire franchise, built upon that very idea; hardcore, where no respeccing and other strains of commitment appear quite frequently. This is not a foreign concept.
Here let me quote it again…
You ask why us guys don’t want hardcore with no respecs. I answered:
We are well past your prodding about who wants hardship…its heavily wanted, and has been so, for years by many people…
The assumption that I or anyone doesn’t want “hardcore with no respec” is a dumb one, when it is a foundation of a whole sub-genre.