Since I can’t play the Alpha/Beta/release until I upgrade my comp, most probably in the next few weeks or so, I’d probably just write in a few suggestions now (kinda what the game is missing anyway. Those things are in ALL other games with a pvp mode, except Diablo!), so if people want to see some of these things implemented, just chime in and upvote and maybe we’ll get what we want lol. IMO, given that pvp is one of the biggest draws in the game (the weird part is that most of the active player base (talking about in the OG) are pvmers), I think it’s prolly time that pvp in this game got some degree of endorsement and support from the devs. This game has tons of PvP potential, and it probably does not take much to turn this into a game with pvp as a major aspect of it. Too much potential not being fulfilled. Imo it only takes a few simple QoL additions (NO BALANCE FIXES needed, but of course if you can be bothered to review the entire class balance system for both pvp+pvm then you could) to turn it into a mainstream pvp, my take here and I’ll try to simplify it as much as possible:
It’s not a pvp game and the only way to make pvps viable was to come up with a long list of rules that ppl had to remember and stick to on their own. I’d estimate that probably only 15-20% of the player base ever got started on pvp because nobody could be bothered to read those rules. Reading and enforcing the rules was probably the single largest barrier to joining pvps. In a good pvp game people should be able to jump in and play without having to adjust their gear or read any guidelines, otherwise most ppl wouldn’t get into pvps at all. The question is not about why don’t you read and stick to the GM guidelines, but more about what if you don’t? Most people don’t even though they know about it, which is why pvp never took off in the original game (it seems a lot but as a % of the total player base it was actually only a small percentage). I’d also mostly focus on team pvps in this post, because team pvps are already mostly auto-balancing, whereas if you tried to balance it for individual pvps you’re basically turning the game into a joke. It’s a team game anyway. Team pvps are really where it’s at. Only a few small kinks that you have to sort out and then you would already more or less get a fully-fledged pvp mode. Not trying to take anything away from the pvm game of course, because I know this game wasn’t even designed as a pvp game, but pvp is really another game altogether. I also won’t really analyse the game in any form other than the current game, because I wouldn’t know what it would be like with WSG fixed (I am also not looking forward to pvping w/ WSG fixed).
Aside from restrictions on gear (probably only needed for individual pvp. Team pvp would probably be balanced without gear restrictions) and skills (probably only a few that need to be banned. Some of those may be: thorns, iron maiden, leap, iron golem, summon revives/skeletons, bone wall, mind blast. To be discussed ofc. Just grey out those skills in a formal pvp game or something), the obvious rules that also have to be enforced would be the usual no jumping, no nking/townguarding, no leaving the blood moor, no extra team members/buff chars/third party hostiles, etc. Then there is also the rules that are used to weed out the things that are too troublesome to bring to every pvp round (some of them are also considered cheese tactics), and they are outlawed so that nobody uses them to gain an advantage. Casual players can’t be bothered to bring those to every game, but there would be some players that would go to all the extra effort to bring those to pvp games, ruining it for the majority of players. This is probably an exhaustive list of it (these should either be made available for free/at no hassle to everyone, or disabled completely in real pvp games):
-Rejuvenation pots - the current gm ruleset only allows mana potions in pvps, which is probably the ideal. Rejuvs are not allowed because they are troublesome to obtain and are not available at NPCs, and also because pvps would go on for too long if they were allowed, and they also favour 1-hit type chars such as hammerdins. Hypothetically speaking any setting would make for good games as long as it were applied to all chars across the board. For example if it were only mana pots allowed, or no pots allowed or only rejuvs allowed it should be fairly balanced. Health pots should strictly not be allowed because of uneven mileage from each char. For example maxed block/dodge chars as compared to vita chars. Course if rejuvs could be used, nobody would be using health pots. Antidotes and thawing pots probably should not be allowed because they are absorb items and are unnecessary nerfs against cold dmg/poison dmg users, but it’s just part of the game so it’s not that big of a deal if they were allowed. Under GM rules there were exceptions for energy shield sorcs and they couldn’t use any pots, but they probably don’t have to be nerfed over here because to begin with they were only OP under GM rules. Ideally for pvp all allowed pots should be FOC at NPCs, while non-allowed pots should be banned from use
-Skill charges on items - Mostly banned under GM rules but imo adds to the depth of the pvps. They are too troublesome to repair before every game, hence why they are not really used in pvps. They also allow for cheese tactics in individual pvps, but not so for team pvps because there aren’t really any broken tactics in team pvp. My take is that less item restrictions are preferable, but I’m fine either way whether skill charges were allowed or banned. Imo if allowed then it should be FOC for everyone to repair skill charges in pvp games, and if banned then the use of skill charges should be disallowed (greyed out) across the board. Banned skills should always be greyed out in formal pvp games, in any case
-Prebuffs - imo don’t allow. A formal pvp feature can enforce this by making sure you can’t cast anything in town, and the moment you step on the blood moor you can’t open your stash anymore for the rest of the match/round. Imo prebuffing should be limited to cube bo only (i.e. prebuff gear in cube and held in inventory), not prebuff at stash, otherwise some ppl may spend several minutes prebuffing b4 every game. The ideal would probably be no prebuffs at all, and the battle starts with both teams on opposite ends of the Blood Moor, so any prebuffs would be cast after the commencement of the round
-Mercenary - it costs you 50k gold every time you bring them back, and hence they are very inconvenient for pvps. They are also not a big part of strategy because they are usually very easy to get rid of. Ideally they should be either FOC to res for pvp games, or banned from use altogether for pvps. I think either is fine, but most pvpers would generally say it won’t bring anything good to pvp games
-Ethereal items without Indestructible/Self-repair modifiers - under current rules ethereal items without the indestructible mod or replenish quantity/self-repair mod are not allowed in pvp games, and this is because items such as fort, enigma, doom, beast or even cta offer some noticeable advantages when ethereal, but will have to be replaced every few hours of pvp. Considering it takes weeks/months to find the runes for any of those, it’s not a surprise nobody wants to have to get limited use items just to keep a level playing field, so I would consider making use of the current GM rule over here that says you are not allowed to use an ethereal item if it is not indestructible or does not have replenish quantity/self-repair. I said I wasn’t much for gear restrictions, but you have to make an exception here because it is just impractical to look for gear that can only be used for a few games. It is also not much of a restriction because it only requires you to find the indestructible/self-rep version of an item, or the non-eth copy of it, not barring the item altogether, and most people also don’t think about using ethereal breakable items on pvp chars to begin with. But even if it were not banned it probably wouldn’t break the game because it does not give that huge of an advantage and most people wouldn’t bother looking for eth breakable stuff just for this. Another scenario is that the cost of jahs/bers/los skyrockets, but the eth indestructible/self-repair items or non-eth items mostly fulfil the functions that any of the eth breakable items would have. I would recommend banning this, but it’s not strictly necessary for competitive pvps to take place, so it’s possible to have competitive pvps with zero gear restrictions imposed
Also a few other things to consider:
-Items with aura/CTC procs - Items like Bramble and Steel Carapace/Corpsemourn have Thorns aura and CTC Iron Maiden, which are banned skills in almost every serious pvp league, but over here items like Bramble/Steel Carapace/Corpsemourn don’t have much inherent use but using them only means that you can’t use Enigma or Fort etc, so I wouldn’t bother with banning those because keeping those on you only means that you have even more of a disadvantage anyway. There aren’t really any OP aura/CTC items atm (not OP for team pvp anyway), so I wouldn’t bother with any complicated restrictions on items. Course if there is another patch, then I don’t know
-Shrines/monsters - Imo could be part of the terrain, but they are excluded from serious pvp so that luck-based/external factors are eliminated as much as possible (the area is cleared of monsters prior to any matches), so imo those probably should not be kept around in any serious pvp game
-No overly defensive play - You can get rid of that problem by reducing arena size (or scale according to number of players per team) and/or setting time limits or shrinking/collapsing arena like what they use in some games to prevent stalemate or ultra defensive hit and run tactics/mass psn, etc
So if you really wanted to turn it into a fully-fledged pvp game it would actually be quite simple. The game should allow people to create regular games where you pvm or hostile each other (in some ways BMPK is more fun than regulated pvps, so I wouldn’t touch anything that goes on in regular games. You would have to also have formal pvps for pvps to have a chance of becoming mainstream, though), and then add a feature where you create pvp-only games, with all those things in the bolded paragraph added into the game and automatically enforced by the game itself, which I reckon isn’t a lot. A modder could probably add all of those in in a few hours. For pvps to be accessible to casual players, it must be something that you can jump in and play, and from the moment the game gives you the “Battle Start” message you should be able to do anything you want without worrying about being disqualified, because the game has already locked out the possibility of you making any moves that will get you disqualified, for example if the game prevents you from teleporting out of the Blood Moor during a round (i.e. anywhere outside of the Blood Moor becomes OOB, meaning you cannot go there even if you click on it), which in some leagues is an immediate disqualification. The only way to open up pvp to casuals is to make it so that there will not have to be any rules/restrictions that have to be memorised, because otherwise there would be a lot less people pvping (and in turn a lot less people trading. It is basically easiest to get the items you want with an active trading scene, and this is why the pvp scene should be made inclusive to the casual player, because an active game/active trading scene goes hand in hand with an active pvp scene). Just a single rule that has to be manually observed would ruin it. From the moment you see the “Battle Start” message it is anything goes and there is no such thing as having to remember not to do something that may get you “disqualified”. The bolded paragraph should have all the things that have to be coded into a dedicated pvp mode (just listed it from memory though, may have missed a few).
Re: balance in team and individual pvps, only team pvps are viable without much balancing measures. For individual pvp half the classes are not viable w/o gear restrictions, so it would just be a waste of your time because those would never be balanced. It turns out the balance and diversity in pvm/team pvm does translate into balance and diversity for team pvp, but it does not for individual pvps. Team pvp has a way of balancing itself out (like soccer/chess) and there is no real overpowered strategy or glaring flaw with most team compositions, but it’s just another story for individual pvps. No team can be hard countered by the other team, but with individual pvps there are very few builds that cannot actually be hard countered, and this is why only team pvps will fly, but individual pvps do not. Skill and preparation mostly determines the outcome in team pvp, while in individual pvp the outcome is mostly already determined by the matchup. You would have to impose all sorts of very specific gear/skill restrictions for individual pvp to become balanced, which would be very complicated. Imo this is a team game so team pvp is where it’s at anyway. To add, it is possible to actually balance out individual pvps without changing the current pvm game or the bmpks in regular games, because if a pvp-feature were to be implemented it would happen in a bubble separate from regular games, so it would be feasible to tweak skills (damage multipliers and breakpoints etc) on certain chars while they are in the pvp-mode, which will revert to normal stats when they join regular games, but I wouldn’t really bother with that because it would be too complicated to balance out individual pvp and it would just look like a modded version of the game if it were.
Imo what the pvp aspect of the game needs is some feature that allows people to search for formal challenges from the bnet lobby, like what Warcraft 3 uses, or maybe something less anonymous. Maybe also add pvp stats on characters like what WC3 has. IMO all it takes to get people started on pvp is to add a pvp stat to each of their characters, probably viewable from the bnet lobby or pvp channels or something like that. In the WC3 system players were generally matched against players of similar levels because the system would be able to estimate a player’s skill level after several games, so if the same rating system were to be used for pvp in D2, it should also account for character level/gear etc and also player skill, because the ratings are based on the outcomes of games. So if the same pvp matchmaking system were to be used for D2, it should be very inclusive of a lot of players including the casuals, because they would be matched up against teams/players with similar combined parameters of character levels/gear and player skill. This would incentivise players to trade for stuff to improve their chars, meaning an active economy ingame, which is something I would want to see because the realm that I played on in OG D2 did not have a real trading scene because it did not have a real pvp scene (for non-foreign language speakers anyway), and you could not actually get the stuff you wanted to use!
Best format should be First To 3 wins or First To 5 wins probably, upon matchmake all players are sent to a pvp-mode game with all the features added in like what was pointed out in the bolded paragraph to prevent foul play and all the skills that are redundant/should be excluded from pvps greyed out, with ready-made pvp arena. After all the rounds are up you are sent to the bnet lobby again, or maybe the game allows you to remain there to chat or show each other gear setups or w/e.
That’s prolly all it takes to turn D2 into a mainstream pvp game. Course I also made some mention of the over-nerfed subclass: bowazons Zons are the sore thumb of DII, buff zons:a core analysis1/3 - #10 by FajraKatviro-1941 . Buffing bowazons in some way should improve class balance in every way in pvp AND pvm.
There’s a few ways to make pvp REALLY popular, but it involves setting up a system that involves competitive mongering among players (I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s just difficult to set up correctly. But if set up right it would be absolutely massive!), and while these sorts of things are popular among current pvpers it’s not really something I would expect to fly in a remaster:
Pvp wagering. This is a thing among current players, but it’s only among people who love to gamble and compete. It is not likely a lot of people will get into wager pvping, unless it were not a zero-sum game. In a few MMOs I’ve played there is an exp bonus to the winner in addition to the winner getting the items or currency wagered by both parties (and those games were actually hugely popular BECAUSE of wager pvp), so it is not entirely a zero-sum game. If it were tweaked such that it were actually worth the time to win pvps for this type of thing, then it may actually get popular, for example very high level players would be item-rich but exp-hungry, while lower leveled players would just be looking for more items, so I reckon there would be a lot of wager pvps going on and a lot of ppl trying to gear up their chars, if the formula was tweaked correctly. Again, this is all hypothetical because like I said earlier only team pvps have potential, so unless individual pvps were made viable you can’t really tweak it a whole lot. I mentioned it on a post on jsp a few months ago, and I don’t feel like rewriting it so I will just copy/paste what I wrote over there: “Just to point out some of the potential of a formal pvp wager system: in formal wager pvp balance may not be an issue at all, because wager pvp is only about winning or losing and not about looking for balanced pvp at all. Competitive yes, but as for balance you never needed balance to make it competitive. Wager pvp would be FAR more competitive than any form of balanced pvp would be, especially wager pvp on ladder. That thing would turn into massive business if it was tweaked properly. You don’t even have to make it fun, although I guess it would be. People would be wager pvping as long as it advances them (acquiring gear and levels) faster than pvm will. Of course the ideal is a nice balanced pvp system, but if you’re talking about pvp between half-geared chars/teams on ladder, it won’t be balanced obviously but you would see tons and tons of people pvping anyway, because to begin with, pvp never needed balance to be fun anyway!”
Pvp tournaments w/ pot up for grabs. In contrast to wager pvping, this would be a guaranteed full-house at every tournament, because unlike wager pvp, you don’t have anything up for wager. You have nothing on the line, other than pvp stats/rankings (this is just tangential but this could also motivate ppl to put even more effort into gearing their chars, and that would mean more economy, which is going to be good for trading). This is also a thing in the OG, so again if this were actually implemented it would be HUGE, but I dunno whether I’d wanna put something this big into a remaster. If it actually gave ppl a way to gain high runes etc outside of pvm grinding I reckon it would be much welcome by the player base, though. The thing w/ handing out virtual goods as tournament prizes is that an infinite amount of it can be generated, unlike in community hosted tournaments where the tournament payouts would be finite because they came from sponsors. I would say a good ballpark would be around 1-5 high runes or the equivalent to each player from the winning team of each tournament (that’s the sort of thing like a ton of people would make time for every month/weekend to play, whatever they actually fancy their odds are…), and a good tournament format should probably be a monthly or bimonthly tournament on ladder/non-ladder/both or maybe once or twice a season, probably in a 64 team or 128 team elimination bracket where only chars of a sufficiently good pvp ranking can join. Or if you really want to make it fun just make the tournament format FFA or team FFA (e.g. 2v2v2v2). Unlike the current community hosted tournaments, which are extremely cumbersome to administer, this stuff could all be fully automated, i.e. it can just be scheduled to be run itself every month/week or whatever like clockwork, without even having to put any admins on it to monitor it. So large scale pvp tourneys could be held with absolutely no manual administration required, because the game itself already enforces the rules and umpires the game and registers the result, and hands out the tournament pots all automatically, just like a lot of online esports already do. Some of the problems with this may be lag due to geographical location, and this could probably be solved by dividing the rounds up: a series of rounds on a server close to your team’s location, and then another series of rounds on a server near the other team’s location. To also mention there really ought to be a pvp leaderboard on ladder as well, because the current leaderboards are mostly redundant because people don’t really consider leveling your char to be a very difficult achievement (unless it’s EXTREMELY fast).
Esport/spectator sport. Esport would be a long stretch but again since if there were a pvp mode it would just be in a bubble separate from regular games, so it can be tweaked until you get something that is esport viable, and I suppose it could look something like a cross between MTG and DOTA, but again esport would be a long stretch. The formula for esport isn’t THAT difficult, for example create pvp-oriented maps instead of Blood Moor, disable non pvp-oriented minimap, enable fog of war, make it so that teams will hunt each other like in most esports, and you can also expand the game format and expand maximum number of ppl in a game so that ppl can engage in team 8 vs 8 or enforce class quotas, for example you can’t use repeats of any class on any team, so you can use Paladin+Amazon+Druid+Necro but you cannot use for example all Pallys or all Zons on a team. It’s not really difficult to introduce something as an esport, but obviously you would have to get a lot of people started on pvping before you would be able to talk about that sort of thing. DOTA got esport with a huge revamp, so I reckon it’s not impossible.
Anyway I had to say my piece. Sorry if it’s late for changes, been hella busy in rl! But to conclude, even though it’s not designed as a pvp game, pvp in this game should in fact be MORE COMPETITIVE than pvps in dedicated pvp games, and these are the few necessary things to capitalize on that potential.