Personal Loot and PvP: Understand D2's psychology

Diablo II: Resurrected General Discussion
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Many people who are used to modern games aren’t used to a game like Diablo II and this has shown itself in lots of requests for changes that go against the grain of how Diablo II and Battle.net function. And its not enough to just point this out in response to one or two suggestions, its the whole philosophy of how the game was designed.

Humans have a natural drive to compete, to test themselves and others, to assert themselves and create social orders and clash with each other. That’s the evolutionary purpose of games and play, and its not even unique to humans, other animals do it. We naturally seek recreation that is a mixture of competitive and low stakes, because it builds our skills needed for survival without risking serious harm. Those same lessons apply to modern game development. A proper developer gives players the space to set their own rules and allow emergent gameplay from systems that don’t overly restrict players or their conduct or try to artificially control their interpersonal interactions, but gives some safeguards so players can’t abuse each other in one-sided fashion, always allowing safety valves. Diablo II was a prime example of that. Players could compete for drops, hostile each other, swear at one another, etc. You make drops bound-to-player and what does cooperation even mean? Its like you’re playing different games side by side instead of the same game, no trust, no appreciation for sharing, no competition. It was at its best when a team that was cooperating for quests saw “stones of jordan sold to merchants” and would hostile each other and camp out spots to fight over a dclone spawn to grab the anni. Yet, it gave tools to players to prevent obnoxious abuse- if a player spammed, you can squelch them. If they griefed you in quests, you could hostile them and kill them. If they tried to PK you, they had to wait in town with fair warning and no TPs.

Modern games have trended in a terrible direction, against basic human interaction. We’ve got examples as severe as something like Magic Arena, where your only ability to communicate with other players is through a select few emotes and you have no ability to interact with each other in any meaningful way. The more walls that developers put up between players, the more layers of safety foam and bumper lanes- the less people are able to express themselves, enjoy themselves and create emergent gameplay and communities. Its like having overly protective helicopter parents trying to micromanage children while they play Cowboys and Indians. Rather than give your players a limited set of tools to guard themselves and trust them to create their own standards of conduct, developers have become overbearing authorities that rigorously separate the children and tell them how they’re allowed to have fun.

Diablo II belongs to an old order of free-for-all, lawless online interaction without GMs breathing down your neck, without bans for saying naughty words or anyone to run and tattle to. And guess what? It worked. For 20 years, players have enjoyed it, far more than the sterile lifeless artificial social media-emulating online games we have now.

So lets put the kibosh on all these foolish suggestions to casualize the game, to take away its rough edges and coddle players to never have a negative experience from someone else. Players can compete or cooperate for loot, they can hostile each other if they get ticked off, they can troll one another or even scam with confidence tricks, they can have meltdowns when they lose, they can get mad or they can make friends . That’s how the world works. That’s why humans play games in the first place, that’s the learning experience.

This game wasn’t made in the era of the casual, don’t make it now.

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Seriously… it’s so sad this much attention to new mechanics is being given to Diablo 2. It’s an old game, sheeesh louishe. Why can it not remain an old game? The entire draw of this project was that we could play an oldschool, badass computer game with beautiful graphics.

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The diablo series has always been casual.

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I agree, well said honestly.

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In Diablo I, players couldn’t even shoot spells near each other because friendly fire was always on.

In Diablo II, a PKer could join your game, hunt you down, kill you and camp on your corpse and NK you and mock you as you tried to get your body

In Diablo III, you can’t PK but you can right click people’s names and report them to the internet police.

Diablo was not originally a casual series, it became one with Diablo III. And Diablo II shouldn’t be infected with that mistake. In the words of Max Schaefer;

To answer the original question: Do we “encourage” people to PK? Not really. We encourage people to party up, both for strategic and server-efficiency reasons. Other than that, it’s pretty much up to you all to decide what to do. Obviously, we’ve set up and elaborate world of monsters, quests, items, and plot(…) but there is almost no effort given to “encourage” PKing, other than not preventing it.
Although I do not want to enter a prolonged debate about PKing (I’ve done so already for over five years), I will address just a few things.

  1. The entire game is set up to kill your player. Every monster, boss, and trap has as it’s only goal the death of your player. The addition of the occaisional anti-social player only adds to the feeling of tension and fear that makes the rewards of success that much better. Remember this: the world of Diablo II is not a safe, warm place. It is a place of great evil, and even greater good.
  2. In Diablo 1, the cheating and hacking rendered PKing a disproportionately annoying addition to the game, for example the Town-Kill or the Auto-Kill. This is not the case in D2, where the avoidance of PKs is a relatively trivial matter. Other posters have listed all of the ways in which we have made PKing all the more difficult.
  3. Even with a PK switch, there are abundant ways that anti-social people can ruin your game. Believe me, there are far worse things to do than declare hostile and try to attack another player. Without this option, the “jerks” will not go away.
  4. A story about heroes and conquests needs villians. Hordes of identical monsters do not fulfill this requirement in my opinion. Part of what makes the Diablo II community great is the great variety of personalities and styles. The last thing we want is to force people into some idealized regimen of “proper” role-playing. Rather, we sought to make a game where people create their own fantasies and adventures.
    and finally,
  5. Diablo II and the expansion are the games that we at Blizzard want to play. That is our formula for success. Companies that design games based on focus groups, marketing opinions, and even fan input do not succeed. Although hearing the opinions of others are valuable to us, every design decision must pass the test of whether or not WE would want it in the game. In many cases, we’ve changed our minds after hearing compelling arguments. But we’ve decided that PKing is part of the Diablo universe. We are well aware that this does not please everyone. However, you are right: we are not apologetic about it. Not at all. Sure, we could implement a PK switch. It’s a trivial coding task. But we wouldn’t be being true to ourselves, and our goals as gamemakers.
    We are proud of what we’ve made in the Diablo universe, and the overwhelming success and support of our customers vindicates our core decisions from a business standpoint as well. Sure we’ve made mistakes, after all, we’re just gamers who are fortunate enough to have built a successful game company. We spend each day doing what we love to do: make and play fun computer games. The sales and success are nice, but they are secondary to our goal of making the games that we want to play.
    Max Schaefer
    Vice President and co-founder, Blizzard North
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It’s all interesting, but this series was spawned from people being confused about dice rolls and ‘thacos’.

I love the series, but from day 1 it’s been approachable by casual gamers. Sure we’re dedicated to it, but that’s just a bonus for us.

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Ahh yes… Good ol Schaefer… Blizzard isn’t the same without him and the originals. Definitely an echo of what Blizzard stood for back when.

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I have a feeling Schaefer was the brains behind the goodness of D1/D2 to be honest, that’s why I take brevik’s opinions with a grain of salt (jk they were all great).

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Agreed completely. I can’t believe this is the same team working on the game anymore. It seems like D4 devs are coming in and trying to call the shots.

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This is one of the best posts I’ve seen on this forum. You’ve put into words what many of us think. Thank you.

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Great post. I totally agree.

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Sometimes, and more often than not, it’s the things most jarring about a game in contrast to the mainstream that set it apart as a masterpiece.

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Some things got refined by modern games, and playing some older games can be jarring. Not just graphics, but interface and streamlining tedious parts and skipping cutscenes and whatnot. But for every two steps forward, a step back. An older player picking up a new game can be jarring for how impersonal and anti-social gaming has become, often and quite ironically in the name of stamping out “anti-social behavior”. They just don’t let people socialize at all.

Diablo II and Warcraft III were the cutoff points before World of Warcraft started leading us down this road. The current era of games is the most oppressive that has ever existed.