“Why?” question: a) Weak motivation for leveling up dungeons (as a result, it’s more efficient to play solo). b) It’s simply not fun. c) The inability to transfer unique items dropped within a group (there was an excellent system in D3 - why it was changed is unclear).
“How?” question: Almost complete absence of group auras and player interaction methods in dungeons.
Possible Solutions:
“Why?” - Increase the reward for completing dungeons at levels 50-70 and beyond. Increased drop rates, a higher chance of encountering The Butcher (a big thanks to the person who came up with the random appearance of the Butcher in dungeons - that’s brilliant), a noticeable increase in the chance of obtaining “new items” and ultra-rare items.
“How?” - Understanding that rebalancing abilities and items is a complex and painstaking task, I suggest introducing a new type of item in the game - demonic/angelic/soul items - which would enhance not only the player but also the group. These items could be equipped in a new slot (to mitigate their impact on existing item interaction mechanics), similar to a cloak. Alternatively, a limit on the number of items of this type a player can have (to prevent aura bots) with a drop chance somewhere between ultra-rare unique items and regular unique items. I see this as a 50% chance over 20 hours of gameplay.
Examples:
An item that increases resistance/damage/CDR/resource generation with an aura for the entire group, in a percentage ratio. This way, a group with several players having these items with different parameters would be much more effective and interested in playing together.
An item that provides a new experience in group play, such as “shoulders that summon elite monsters when using a shrine” (hello, D3) or an item that creates copies of your allies, replicating their abilities’ usage.
An item that splits damage among all allies (again, hello, D3).
An item with an aura that increases the item level of dropped items by “X”.
An item with an aura that increases movement speed.
An item that allows the use of abilities while mounted (for fun horseback riding in the open world).
Negative enhancements can also be applied to all these items:
Auras can affect monsters as well.
Increased chance of encountering The Butcher in high-level rifts, stronger Butcher, or the possibility of encountering two Butchers.
The essence is to make group play enjoyable and provide an advantage over solo play.
Reason 2: I wanted to write that ultra-rare unique items could drop slightly more frequently, but it seems that in the new season, you are addressing this issue. I request that you consider reworking group events - world bosses should not feel like a one-button event with unclear rewards. An example of how I envision a rework: after defeating Greed, the world boss, let a dozen goblins appear on the field and make it an entertaining chase with obstacles.
I want to thank you for creating this genuinely good game, and I hope that after a few patches and seasons, it will become a game where I would want to spend several thousand hours.
I think you’re missing the core problem of group play, which is the ease of use to form a party. Diablo 2 you could join any game and easily invite people to a group within the game.
D3 took out the invite mechanic completely and made it so anyone who joined the game would group up together.
D4 offers nothing but a chat channel no one uses, and a discord that no one uses for grouping purposes.
More incentives to group would help, but it would be just a band-aid to the overall problem. Have to think of the average player, they logon, they’re in town, they go adventuring, typically solo. They get to endgame, they start to do Helltides, and NM Dungeons, again solo.
They might see people while roaming around, but they’re not about to invite those random people, and chances are even if they did, it would be declined. People barely accept invites to World Bosses and Legion Events and they’re standing right there.
It’s not a bad solution, but have to fix the underlying problem before tacking on new systems.
You can easily invite people in D4 too, but as you said most people aren’t interested and just decline and/or never talk. There’s no system that change peoples’ unwillingness to talk or group up with other people.
The people that want to play Diablo as a multiplayer game have always been the minority, you probably just didn’t notice it in something like D2 because people that weren’t interested in multiplayer just stayed off BNET altogether. The only difference now is everyone is forced to be online, and you can only see a limited number of people at a time… including those many people that never want to talk or group.
You can’t though, they either have to be on the screen with you, you need them in your friend list, or you invite them via the chat that no one uses. That’s it. As seen on these forums, social media, reddit, etc. peoples friends left the game, and there’s typically only 1 or 2 left from a pack of 10+ friends.
Now if they we had a party finder, where you could set it up for different events, that would make it a lot easier and people could easily pick and choose which party to join or setup themselves. Chat would become livelier with people advertising their groups. Guarantee people would join more NM dungeons as a group when they could see it in a party finder with the exact modifiers on it. Not everyone would use this system, but it would be more helpful then what we currently have in the game.
I completely agree, but the OP’s solution was for incentivizing group play, rather then fixing the ease of use of which to party, which is the bigger problem. Again you have to look at it from the perspective of an average player, 9-5 joe, who plays 1-2 hours a day. Are they going to waste their time trying to find people to group with when no one talks in chat? Or are they just going to go solo because it’s the path of least resistance?
Just to add to this you can also open up the social tab and see nearby players even if they’re not necessarily on your screen, in chat, or on your friends list. I think a good first step would be not limiting the social tab to only nearby players in the same “shard” though. I’m not sure why they decided to make that so limited.
I agree, I overlooked a very important aspect - the ease of creating a new group. But even with a long list of friends who play, with whom I could easily start playing together, I don’t do it. We just sit together in one voice channel but play solo games individually. I think this is wrong
I agree there needs to be more player density per server in general.
There have been some really fun moments in pvp when there are alot of players in there and this part of the game could provide a lot of replay longevity…
IF there were more players in there.
Lately there have been so few players per server instance, its not poppin.
Let’s tell the devs we would like to see more player density per server, or pvp servers…
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People should keep in mind that the game has to be able to run on something like a PS4. There’s definitely going to be a limit on how many people can be on screen at a time, and it isn’t going to be anywhere close to a game like WoW.