So, lets say Diablo 2. Do you honestly think Blizzard expected you to start from the act 3 town, and run through all of act 3, every time you wanted to farm Mephisto? That it was the intended gameplay?
No, they add waypoints, and consider that the gameplay experience.
If you allow what other players are doing to personally effect what you are doing.
You’re the problem.
You know, that one thing that most of the community hates the most is that armor because it killed other choices besides like Fortitude or whatever the other runeword was.
But yes, it is relevant because if you don’t need an item to beat the game. Then it doesn’t matter. You don’t need Engima to beat the game and to do the content. It just made it easier. That’s it. It’s not a mandatory item and that’s how it should be.
This has no bearing on what I said. There’s a wrong way to do things and there’s a correct way. Diablo 2 did fast traveling the correct way, but again, un-needed and it wouldn’t be needed actual if the zones had more of purpose to them.
If Diablo 2 from the moment you stepped into the cold plains all the way to Anderial had a purpose and you could farm good items. I doubt anyone would really complain about having to walk back to the boss every time.
That really depends on how you define ‘beating the game’.
I very much doubt most people consider “killing Baal” as beating the game. In A-RPGs, the gameplay is all about making your character strong, optimizing it. Beating the game essentially means “made the character as strong as it could possibly be” (how strong that is depends on the build etc).
Whether you consider it mandatory or not, it was endlessly easier to get it through trading than finding one yourself. Trading clearly made a difference.
What I am doing in this scenario affects myself. If I trade I play easy mode, if I do not trade it is hard mode. What others do is somewhat irrelevant in that regard.
Of course, you cant truly ignore what others do either, considering the game is a wannabe MMO this time around. Also there is supposed to be PvP.
Come on. Waypoints are entirely needed in D2. The whole game is build around their use.
That would be a bet I would be willing to take.
Fair enough, I don’t agree myself, but I understand that point of view.
Don’t have to - There’s a Diablo mod that basically does that, adds in new boss like monsters to each zone that you can hunt down and get awesome loot. It’s fantastic, now I don’t feel like I have to just way point, kill boss, exit game, and repeat. I can take my time getting to the boss because there is more opportunity to get a good items else were.
(Diablo 2 enriched mod and Diablo 1 HD mod are great games.)
I can’t edit my post. What I meant is un-needed if they designed the game to make every zone useful. If they did that - then the waypoint system wouldn’t be mandatory but a boon.
But my whole point is demanding two game modes because you don’t like trading is ridiculous. Now if you want to have a separate leader board for people who choose to opt out of trading. This I can get behind. It can be option you can choose when you create a character like choosing hardcore or not hardcore. You should also choose no trading or trading.
I feel like this would be the best solution for everyone.
In one game mode, where trading is allowed, you can only really end up making a worse game for either; 1) the traders (too high droprate), 2) the non-traders (too low droprate, or 3) everyone (too high and too low droprate for each group).
If D4 ends up with anything remotely resembling D3 droprates, I bet traders would not be particularly positive about it.
This is why Diablo 2 was unaffected by trading. They didn’t design the game around trading, they designed the game and added in trading as an extra feature.
They didn’t intend for trading to be that big and that much of successful and to think otherwise would give them WAY too much credit.
Again, build a game first then we discuss whether or not to add trading, but if the game itself is designed without trading then trading is added as an extra feature. Then trading itself didn’t effect the game.
As for the drop rate discussion. The reason why Diablo and Classic was as popular and successful is because they didn’t shower you with loot and they didn’t make loot a mandatory thing.
You don’t need full epic gear to do raiding in Classic WoW. You could beat the raid without the perfect gear. The perfect gear only made it easier.
This called “Gear checking” where you do need gear to pass content and I don’t like that.
The key thing is that Diablo 2 doesn’t have an auction house. While it has open trading, it’s not the focus for most people because it takes effort. The auction house in D3 took no effort and made trading simple and easy so that it became the focus.
That’s why I say D4 should have very open trading, perhaps with minor restrictions on certain key items. As long as there’s no auction house it should be fine.
But again, and I’m gonna really hone in on this point.
To make the assumptions that the Diablo developers while designing knew the exact out come, predicted, designed, on purpose the trading and expected the out come on which happened is insane.
They had no idea that trading in Diablo 2 would be a massive hit. They just put into the game because thought it would be cool.
It turns out it was cool. It’s a big hit.
D3 vanilla had tons of problems. Auction house being one of them. Most item drops sucking and even most legendaries that dropped were crap. Was just a big mess. People who blame it on trading are just scapegoating.
Trading is fine with if the itemization is done well. Just don’t have an auction house else it heavily entices everyone to trade everything they find.
Yeah, but I’m sick of people acting like Diablo 2 was big hit because the developers planned out everything in advance and thus give them way more credit than they deserve.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not also in the same breath saying that Diablo 2 isn’t a great game. It is a good game, but the untended yet awesome benefits of trading was most likely never even in the mind of the developers at the time.
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What you don’t understand is that with unrestricted trading you have more players that will be botting to get the extremely hard to find items for the purposes of selling them for real money.
Plus you have the fact that the items under their current iteration that are hard to find BoA best items will be much harder if trading is unrestricted. Because the drop rates have to be balanced around the fact that trading exist.
In time it could mean that players are forced to trade in order to progress their characters as far as gear goes.
What they are doing is splitting the difference between no trading and free and unrestricted trading. It is something that even David Brevik would be okay with. He suggested such a system in an interview with Rhykker.
You need to trade in order for items to be exciting. Does this mean that you wouldn’t want to use them to make your own builds. That wouldn’t excite you at all.
I thought that is what finding awesome loot is all about. Find a piece of gear that changes either causes me to make a new build to try out or changes the way that I am playing my current build would be exciting.
Third parties selling digital Diablo property still exists in the form of selling accounts. Stopping trading didn’t stop the third party sites, or even harm them. Now you have to spend far more on an account, rather than fifty cents for an SoJ.
I’d also like to say that third party sites aren’t even a bad thing, and I have no idea where that idea came from. Kids being able to make money on a video game is a good thing. Back when 1.08 Valor was brand new, it would cost someone $1500 to buy it off of Ebay. Can you imagine being 12 years old and making $1200 off of a single item?
You will always have digital property being sold online, and there is no point in trying to stop it. If you stop trading because of that, you’re just pigeonholing the buyer into spending hundreds of dollars at a time, rather than a minuscule amount.
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The exciting thing about trading is being able to make profit off of the trade. If I find something amazing that doesn’t go with my build, I can trade it for other items that do go with my build, and make a ton of profit.
Trading becomes a huge game in itself. Buying low, selling high, etc, and it keeps a game healthy and alive for years and years.
I don’t care that Brevik said that. I watched that interview, and I’m open to his idea, but the greatest ARPG’s in existence allow open trading. The games that invented the genre allowed open trading. Just because Brevik says something, doesn’t make it law.
Players being forced to trade didn’t exist in D1 or D2. Solo players never even had to interact with other players, and they could still beat the game.
If you don’t want botters, then take anti-bot measures in the game. Don’t kill one of the aspects of an ARPG that actually keeps it alive well into the future.
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Also this. Blizzard has a bad habit of focusing way too much on balance because they are too heavily invested in that 10,000 view count in their Esports which ruins the game for everyone else.
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They have something that is riskier and less likely to happen. As opposed to being able to sell items and gold which are more plentiful. I can guarantee you that with items and gold third party sites would be making more money than you think.
If you don’t think so, or really believe that little things don’t add up. Then I guess stores like dollar stores don’t make a ton of money.
Oh there is something that you can do to find out if I am telling the truth.
Take the pay you get from work. Now say that you are willing to take a pay cut of one dollar a day. Then try to tell me that in time that you wouldn’t be working for free if that were to happen. Little things add up pretty quickly and most people should know that.
Well know since there is nothing wrong with breaking the rules I guess you would also support botting as well.
Say the same thing if you are the parent of the child that spent $1,500. I am pretty sure that you would be upset and ground that child for a long time.
A diablo game should be about finding awesome loot to use. Did I find something that I can make a build off of or does it work with my current build.
As long as trading is not require to reach the same content that others can do by trading then that system is okay.
I don’t want to be forced to play yet another trading game just to advance my character. I don’t think anyone else wants D4 to be called D4: The Trading Game.
That is how it would be seen if the players feel that the only way to advance was to play the trading game to even have a chance at getting decent gear to advance their character.
I will make some numbers up and I might go a little extreme to get the point across.
Let’s say that the top end game dungeon on the keys is 30. Now let’s say that after enough farming the highest I can go with the current system and gear would be 10. Then the other players say well you are not playing enough.
Where the only way to get higher is to do one of the following
- Spend almost every waking hour playing D4.
- Bot
- Or play the trading game where I get my gear from those that do bot or have no life outside of playing D4.
This is what I want to avoid. If I can go through the game and in time make it where I can play the rank 30 end game dungeons with the build that I choose then I will be cool with the system that is eventually developed.
But if the drop rates are so crappy that it isn’t possible. Where players say well you have to be among us elites (small 1% of the players) in order to reach those levels and get that awesome gear. Otherwise you don’t deserve to ever be able to find that gear.
It would only get worse as time and expansions come along. With more levels and more ranks of endgame dungeons it would keep getting harder and harder to progress.
What antibot measures are there in a game?
Even in a restricted system you will still have trading that will keep the game alive for a long time to come.
How would you feel if you made a game where only one class and one build is used because it is head and shoulders above the rest. Remember devs make a game that takes a lot of hours to make. So all classes and possible specs should be important because time and effort went into creating them.
Also how is it fun to fight an impossible fight. A fight that you cannot win because the player made a build that the game allows that gives him a god mode that can also one shot everyone that he hits in PvP.
I hate saying this but I don’t think that you will be able to prevent power creep entirely. It can be slowed down by taking much smaller steps where it is not as obvious as is the case in this game or others that obviously have power creep.
Let’s say that you have decided to not increase the levels or add new skills and items that would boost the character’s power. This means that in time the game would get boring playing the same old thing over and over and over again.
Ironically trading was removed from D3 because it was destroying the game…Remember launch… we need either limited trading or not at all.
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How about if D4 was just a cool complex challenging game that wasn’t just one big gear check. Then people could trade around gear with their friends play the trading game if they wanted and the rest of the people could just collect loot for their character.
Why do the game design choices have to revolve around people needing to reach some prestigious point
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