You don’t have to agree with me, you can counter argue what I said, but do not make false statements!
It’s not 1/4 effort playing in group, because mobs scale with number of players. The only “easier” comes from group synergy and buff.
The extra monster Hp is the balance between MP and SP. If you do not work as a team, the end result is same between solo and MP or worse.
If there are 4 players, mobs takes 4x times the damage to kill. The loot did not increase 4x. as claim, it stay as if playing solo. Each mobs takes more time to kill, but you have more players to divide the damage, so Time to Kill is smiliar! The claim is only valid if it takes 1/4 time to kill, which it did not.
The efficiency comes from team synergies which is NOT a fix value, it depends how well a team compose to benefit as team.
How do you balance something not fixed!
If you add donor loot penalty, then some play MP will get less loot /xp than solo, some get more. Also how much should the penalty be?
My take is there shouldn’t be penalty, and the efficiency of a group is the only advantages you play as group. This encourages efficient play. Also as I mentioned many time, teamwork should be more efficient.
Also I play mostly SOLO, So the idea I want to boost MP to get 4x loot or xp ( which themselves are false Info) are false!
Technically the loot is up to 4x because it’s dropping a solo player’s equivalent worth of gear for each player in the group and there are up to 4 players in the group.
This gear can also be shared with other people who were there, so it’s not like it’s a case of “well you’re only stuck with what you personally got”.
I suppose if you wanted to be fair, you could disable loot sharing entirely. Granted I don’t think it’s a better idea than simply boosting solo player’s drop rates a little bit to compensate, but you could do it.
Set the follower that solo players get up so that they can synergize with it, and make it so that a solo player who is synergizing with a follower well can run dungeons just about as fast as a 4 person group that is synergizing with each other.
Essentially balance both play styles around higher end play in this case. That way the solution to getting gear faster is simply always “get better at the game”.
Technically you could also just design classes in the game to not really synergize with other players. Again I’m not a fan of that compared to simply just buffing things for solo players to make it more viable, but if for some weird reason you’ve decided that just buffing solo players isn’t an option there are a lot of “organic” ways of doing it.
Which it doesn’t even need to be equal. Even if solo play was like 90% as efficient as group play, I imagine most players wouldn’t care.
Only if they are less skilled or using worse builds (resulting in the lower team synergy). Which was how it should be, right. Worse skill, worse performance.
If a team plays badly together they should definitely perform worse than a team playing well together. Likewise for a solo player.
Well, it also depends on how the team synergy is designed.
If a game has group buffs, the power of said group buffs are easy to take into account. They are part of the players power. If 4 players perform at 120% each, because of group buffs (so not even because of teamwork or anything, merely from having buffs that applies to the group), you have a clear balancing target to adjust around.
Speaking of group buffs, the best and easiest way to adress this, is simply not to have group buffs in a game. A players buffs should work for themselves/their summons and nobody else. Each player should bring their own build, instead of being carried by other players builds.
With the added benefit of making solo vs group balancing endlessly easier.
Then groups can still have some benefits, like
loot sharing within the group, that should remain, if an item drops while a group of players is present at the kill, that item should be bound to all of them (for 2 hours or whatever)
Some benefit of teamwork. After getting rid of group buffs and such, there still is the benefit of people working together, like a tanky sorceress standing between an angry skeleton and a weak barbarian or something. Players using their brains to, well, work together. Some of that can offer a benefit in groups, rewarding skillful play.
(however, if the power of teamwork is immense, that is of course part of what should be addressed in game balancing, like give monsters better AI so they will not just mindlessly attack the tanky sorc for example).
Agreed. Keep the loot sharing in groups.
That is a fine benefit for playing together.
Indeed. Like a group can gain some power from teamwork, a solo player should be able to get some power from synergizing with a follower, allowing for yet another balancing instrument.
Definitely. Solo should never be better than MP (when comparing same skill/gear etc.). They should be equal, or as close as possible.
They are still better off than being inefficient. There seem to be no issue there.
If they play badly, they should perform worse. If they play badly solo they would also perform worse, so it is not like they would be better off playing solo in this scenario.
What’s misleading is you not including all of my post where I specifically acknowledge and address the part of “well you’re only stuck with what you personally got”.
Which still results in the players getting more loot than they otherwise would have as a solo player. Not even faster clears, but more loot per run given the exact same difficulty because the other players can feed you gear they don’t need.
Playing better, regardless of if you are solo or in a group, will still always result in faster and cleaner dungeon runs. Nothing I’ve said suggests that people shouldn’t be rewarded for playing efficiently.
As for group vs solo, the idea is that people will simply play whichever they enjoy more because they’ll designed to be close in terms of gear progression rather than solo players getting the middle finger and solo being the one that has no point to playing.
A mediocre group barely using any teamwork shouldn’t still gear faster than a good solo player who is synergizing with their merc properly.
You can have deep skill trees, just they won’t budge away from their original plan by the budget and designing that kind of thing is not an easy feat. Also yes, it would increase the memory and change the ratio that data centers charge you annually. Companies don’t really take that risk with their limited resources.
There are more than one element to consider, not just servers catching up fire because some developer decided to make the game “better” by increasing its data traffic by 80% unintentionally in the process.
You can make solo play viable, but you can not foresee if that would have a negative impact on the server performance at the long run. They don’t even promote classes that would weight heavily on data traffic such as massed area damage and damage over time queuing information and slowing down synchronization.
What makes you think that promoting solo play wouldn’t impact them on a wide scale at all? Server has to watch 400 individual sessions if all 400 players play solo, but developers prefer that server watch for 20 individiual sessions only if they group up for 20 players each. Doesn’t make sense in the least? I bet it doesn’t because, you know, Blizzard is a multi million dollar company and has to solve the “issue” because it’s your favorite game and they can not spare budget on other franchises.
Sure… Also your money you bought retail copies of the game is plenty enough and it’s piled “somewhere” by Blizzard and not went into bank accounts of high chairs years ago already. Right? I’ll give a hint; “no”.
Video games run a budget, companies have limited budget and cut corners whenever they can. It’s not a hard to grasp concept. Even if you gave them near billions of dollars from retail sales that money won’t go into server costs, they already planned that in a done deal with annual budget plans or a 5 year budget plan. Sometimes estimated server costs are all included years ago before hand.
You can say that I have no idea how Blizzard works, which is absolutely true and you can stay optimistic too, but their silence and lack of movement tells me that they make long lasting deals.
Heaven forbids playing in group and players helping one another giving gears they do not need. It’s obviously advantages for playing in group. That’s one of the point. In D3, often I play with friends to help them gear up by passing them gears. Obviously this should be taboo. It’s too good!!!
But screw it, let’s remove this small advantage call helping one another.
People helping one another , play as team, having friends shouldn’t do better than people that do not want to do so….
The entitlement is demand people playing together shouldn’t be allow to improve over playing solo. Advantages that are natural, like passing of gears, like synergy of group play.
This is not how equality works.
Solo vs solo should be fair , like no p2w
Solo vs group cannot be same outcome, as efficiency and teamwork play parts!
As opposed to the entitlement that you want to demand groups having something over other players.
Enemies dropping a different instance of loot for each player isn’t natural.
Natural is what D&D came up with all those decades ago: The XP is what it is and it’s split amongst all party members(meaning more players = less XP) and the loot is what it is. There is no personal loot. There is only what your group splits up amongst each other.
but when I suggest that I’m the bad guy who is entitled and wants group play to be garbage.
When in reality that’s exactly what you seem to want for solo play, despite your insistence that that’s what you play.
Not wanting forced artificial Barrier is not same as avocado for something to be worse!!!
That has nothing to do with me playing solo or group.
You keep putting the nonsense of D&D complete ignore D&D does not scale base of amount of players.
If HP of mobs does not scale , then sure divide the loot, I made this a whole ago in this thread which you ignore. If Hp scale , then Loot should scale as well.
It was taken from Maxroll which is not Blizzard entity. I am sure they checked the fact by testing themselves before publishing it.
Because teamwork and synergy.
If there is 10 monsters chasing solo player, a solo player would have spend 5 seconds running and 5 seconds attacking and meanwhile in group play, 10 monsters will be chasing 1 player while the remaining 3 players will DPS the monsters straight for 10 seconds. I haven’t even included buff, and debuff from the group.
That alone already made group killing faster than solo despite of the monster HP increment because of minimum dps loss per second.
Because it balance itself like a balance equation.
Looking at 4 players team (ignore team synergy)
A)!No hp scaling, mobs dies 4x faster, so rightfully xp and loot should be scale 1/4 per player.
You can kill 4x monsters in same time as a solo players. Time to kill is 1/4, loot is 1/4, hence loot is 1:1 with solo
Loot over time = loot quantity/ kill time
Loot over time = 1/4 / 1/4 = 1 *
same as solo
B) Hp scaling, mobs died speed is base on scaling. For simplicity say mobs scale 4x for 4 players, mobs will take similar amount of time to kill as solo. Amount of Loot per player is similar to solo as time to kill is similar. Sound fair?
Loot over time =( 4/4)/ 1=1*
Same as solo
The only advantages are natural group synergy and loot sharing in both cases over solo.
The difference being the formal, MP will be too easy and basically a walk over. And people will complain too fast!!!
Which is why I think B is better, but again, I am okay with A.
That assumption is not the issue here. Your imaginary tech-limitations affecting that budget is the issue
They sure did that in D3, despite your claim that a company would never do such a thing?
Come on… Running 20 sessions can be have a way higher resource load than running 400 sessions…
This is the issue with your imaginary tech issues.
And you talk about strawmen, lol.
Yeah, this is exactly how it should be done. And yes, much better than alternative A.
If a group of 4 players, at skill lvl X kills monsters in a certain time, they should end up with the same average rewards (XP, items etc.) as a solo player at skill lvl X, also killing the monsters in that same time.
Without an exception companies always cut the corners and plan their budget. That’s how you build up your brand; not by burning dollars at the fireplace because you can.
They don’t promote the use of lag inducing classes at all. Especially in groups they’re inconvenient to have around and they’re always a step behind of intended benchmark of performance. Hence, their mass use is not promoted as you imagined them to be.
It could have when you hit it how much of a burden the classes inside choke the data traffic. However, 20 channels of data stream is still way lower than 400. That’s not imagination.
I cant even begin to describe how wrong a view of business strategy this is…
Modern big corporation strategy is, unfortunately, to burn money like hell, in an attempt to gain market share, before you start to figure out how to make money (some of them never figure that part out).
So you are countering your own argument of funneling people into groups?
Anyway, you cant claim with a straight face that Area Damage is not promoted in D3.
Not that it is going to stop you.
That is not how anything works…
How much is happening within those 20 channels matters way more.
Separating players into more and more sub-instances is MMO server design 101.
