With the dreaded 2.7.3 patch about to grace us with the displeasure of its existence, here’s what we all currently have to contend with. Before I do so, here’s the current patch notes.
3 maps have been added and 2 maps have been removed from the Greater Rift pool.
added: Fields of Misery, Desolate Sands and Briarthorn Cemetery
removed: Sewers of Caldeum, and Hidden Aqueducts
The probability of Greater Rift maps has been adjusted. [this is hardly the first time they’ve allegedly done this]
Personally I never had a problem with the Sewers maps, I often got decent elite placement, and they were never on my list of Grift Maps to remove. UNLIKE
Corvus (multiple variations which include the main Corvus map with Adria, as well as the ‘Passage to Corvus’)
Keep Depths (multiple variations which include the first 2 levels)
Realm of the Banished (multiple variations which include the Realmwalker level AND the Enchantress quest level)
Pandemonium (multiple variations which include both main levels)
Plague Tunnels (multiple variations)
Westmarch (too many dead ends, multiple variations include both Westmarch Commons & Heights)
Hell Rift (too tiny, provides a 15% progress overall at best, most noticeable when it’s the first level)
Yet all that trash still remains. So I did ~70 GR90’s in a row (and counting) with an average of 3 floors per GR, and these are my findings re: how many times each level appeared - as of Tuesday 13 April before 2.7.3.
Corvus - 15
Keeps - 22
Realm otB - 18
Pandemonium - 14
Act 1 Crypts - 7
Shrouded Moors - 9
Hell Rift - 14
Westmarch - 7
Plague Tunnels - 19
Arreat Crater - 4
Battlefields of Eternity - 9
Act 1 Caves - 5
Halls of Agony - 6
Tidal Cave - 11
Araneae - 2
Silver Spire - 9
Greyhollow/Eternal Woods - 10
Firstborn Temple - 8
Act 1 Cathedral - 7
Act 1 Tristram Road - 8
Act 2 Sirocco Caverns - 4
Act 2 Flooded Caves - 7
Act 2 Tombs (Crumbling Vault) - 8
Act 2 Sewers - 5
Act 2 Desert - 3
Ice Caves - 3
And counting…notice a disturbing pattern here? The biggest trash shows up most often. The fact that we still have to point this out years later is truly disgusting, and a confirmation that they don’t play their own game.
Look if they didn’t play their own game at all then they wouldn’t have made any changes. I am sure that you know that there was no way they would actually get rid of all bad maps and only have good ones in GRs for this season. It will actually take a few seasons to make it happen. I think they need to add new maps that are just for GRs only. Then they can remove enough of the bad maps and add in the new ones along with the changes in progress for killing other monsters that are still not good. This will mean that we will need to fish a lot less to get a decent map to clear. Sure it won’t always be a dream map, but it won’t have to be.
What I mean by it instead of spending time fishing for a dream map. We just might spend the time actually trying to clear the map we get.
Kill fishing. Make it so the game remembers how long you have been in a rift and if its under a threshold, the time stacks before you can open a new one, even if you make a new game.
Will you organize another list after patch? I felt the distribution of maps served on PTR was better, but we don’t know if they weighted the new ones more to collect more data on them. Hopefully it stays as is.
Come on be honest don’t you think that the streamers know the other maps that are bad. I am sure they know those maps as well as the other bad mob types.
70 GR’s is a really small sample size. From my experience on playing each day on the PTR, as well as discussing with others that has done the same, there’s been a pretty big shift in what map spawns more often. Both “spagetti” and Corvus have much lower spawning rates for example. Was definitely obvious after over 600ish GR’s or so throughout the PTR.
I don’t understand why they removed sewer maps and why people seem to think these changes are good. The sewer maps were usually the better ones for me. Good mob dispersion with lots of elites and pylons.
Most of the sewer layouts were awful, and parts of the sewer obstructed your view, which is bad for pushing or HC. They are also really congested, which made it bad for builds that inherently don’t have a lot of toughness or need space to move around. Elites can cheese with arcane, where the beam can go through the walls and at times you cannot tell which direction they’ll turn because it’s hidden. There’s more, but this is the jist.
Sure, there were worst maps, though I’ve yet to see anyone pushing GR’s that was happy to open a sewer map and actually played it.
~70 GR’s with an average of 3 floors per GR = ~210 floors. Sample size looks darn good to me, especially when coupled with memories of countless GR’s done since their implementation.
So far done about 20 GR’s this morning, floor-spawn distribution looks to be more even than it did a week ago. Only 1 Orek Dream so far.
You mind recording your runs of you simply just moving through the maps without fighting? Considering that you presumed Wudi and Raxx are “stupid streamers” that don’t know what bad maps are, I think we’d need more than just written numbers from you and a “trust me bro” stamp.
This is not how player psychology works. If you want to push the leaderboards, you need to min/max your run. That includes finding the right map. If Blizzard removes the optimal maps or makes them much more rare, it just means you spend longer fishing. It will not change the fact that the fastest GR runs on the leaderboards will still occur under optimal conditions. It just makes the optimal conditions frustratingly difficult to find.
It is not fun to spawn into a GR that you set for your best clear attempt, find you’re on a spaghetti map and you’ve managed to spawn the poison monster set with grotesques and wasps. You know the second you see it that you will never achieve your fastest run on such a map. You just got started 10m behind the rest of the rest of the racers. That’s why people fish. Why waste 16 minutes finishing a map you’d never clear in time when you could just nope out and start a new game and be back in a better rift within 3 minutes? Even if you didn’t have a key, you could farm up more keys in a NR faster than playing through a non-starter run.
They should’ve gone the opposite way. Understand what the mode is: it’s a race. You kill ~500 monsters, spawn the RG and kill him as fast as possible. This means you want a relatively straight map with good monster density and appropriately spaced pylons. If it’s supposed to be a race, let’s make it a fair race and don’t ask one player to run 90m while asking another to run 110m in what’s advertised as a 100m race. They need maps that are designed for this mode, without the dead ends, without the long, windy passages with no mobs where your stacks drop off, etc. Then balance the exp gains for the difficulty of the individual monsters (which I know is a Herculean task and one that they are attempting to do).
Watching streamers feels like the little brother watching his big brother play video games because he won’t let his bro have a turn. I don’t enjoy it. Maybe others do.
When statistics runs into the cold hard reality of actually having to generate the “optimal” data. This is a pet peeve of mind on the internet. Someone presents some pretty convincing data that shows a lot of effort went in, then someone who doesn’t like the result comes in and says it’s not enough without providing any good-faith statistical rationale why more would be needed or how much. It’s criticism without the good-faith constructive component.
70 GRs with 3 floors each gives 210 maps. That’s plenty to ask for a PTR-level test. Demanding more data isn’t going to make a new pattern emerge. It’ll only sharpen the pattern that’s already there. And you don’t have to be the one in front of your computer for hours to generate the data. I’ve just been on too many chart crawls to get data for projects over the years to not respect the amount of work that goes into meeting statistical power thresholds. You do what you need to to make the statistical formula work, and not more, because that time and effort is valuable.
Entitled much
I still say that if you were to get rid of every map that someone doesn’t like there would be zero maps
and just because you have your opinion doesn’t mean everyone has the same opinion
Yes there is a disturbing pattern here apparantly only your opinion counts and the likes and dislikes of other players don’t count for anything
Heres a newsflash for you, you aren’t the only one that plays this game
And another thing you have edited this post 5 times already, looks like people bring things up about what you say and you are changing what you say
Oh I get it then you are the only one in the whole world that knows all of the bad maps and mob types right. No one else could’ve figured it out unless they got it from you Mr. D3 guru master right.
Look what I am trying to say is that with enough improvements to GRs you just might get that one map that will allow you to clear one tier higher at 13:53. Sure it won’t be the dream run that allows you to clear that rift at 10:25. But still a clear is a clear. Again this is for those that not concerned about hitting rank one on the leader boards. Or even bothering about placing on the leader boards.
I am saying that they can remove the bad ones and put new maps that would be like the best maps in the game. Along with making progress for killing all monsters worth it. Then those maps that you would instantly log out of would be rare. You might actually try clearing that GR if it looks like it is doable. What the only maps that are cleared on the leader boards are the perfect rifts. Nothing less than perfection can be cleared. I highly doubt that.
Again I am saying reduce the need for fishing by making special map tile sets for GRs that only appear in GRs. Map tile sets that are like the best tile sets in the game. Then improve all monsters progress to make it worth killing them instead of always instant skip. Where doing GRs for the best clears would be based on your build and your skill.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with bad map types being included. As long as the good ones appear often enough. And adding those good ones and removing two of the bad ones moves it more into that direction.
I look at it as we spend the majority of our time in GR’s, so having some variation in map types at least does a bit to combat boredom. And majority of our GR’s are speed runs, where map types are mostly inconsequential. Yeah getting that linear icy cave or awful spaghetti in a push sucks but seeing only wide open squares with 5 different tilesets for multiple hours per day while you are already doing something that requires very little mental input will also be bad.
Reducing the need for fishing will be great, or having some way of “20 varied sets” vs “I am pushing so just give me 10” would be ideal.