Whatever happens, happens

I want to address the multiplayer design in Diablo IV.

We have an open world where players can meet and engage similar content with everybody having their own loot and spoils. We have some tools to organize a group or party for some specific job, however there is not much initiative for doing this.

While making the experience easily-accessible and non-player-toxic, the game becomes somewhat a mix of single-layer and multiplayer, with none of these two being purely developed.

Grouping is easy but unnecessary in most cases. Clans are there, but for the most part they play little role for the character journey. Bosses exist, but they are made to be beaten on varied difficulty by the players, and so loose their boss scary factor.

Well this is the situation and we cannot do much about it, but what we can do is think of a ā€œlayer-overā€ of multiplayer activities in the future that actually require some form of social bond, trust and maybe even a pinch of conflict of interest and disputability.

Because as the wise say: If something is all the time good, it is probably not good at all.

In the current meta, multiplayer looks like: someone meets someone else and whatever happens happens, but it will be great if we could meet and use our time for something else than random sequences and roll of probabilities.

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I run solo and I like it that way I hope you get what you are looking for.

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Solo ftw, my hopes is that we eventually get a SSF mode, I believe they can figure out how to do it well.

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This same argument could be made for D2 and D3 honestly. The only difference is it was far easier to group up in those games then it is here. If anything you either forced yourself into some random groups party or made your own that random people or your friends joined. However groups definitely weren’t needed for either of those games, and if anything in D2, because of the loot system, it was a free for all for loot when it dropped.

No Diablo game has ever been multiplayer focused in the sense that the games were built with it in mind to offer more of a challenge for something you couldn’t take on solo. You can complete every single Diablo game solo, on the hardest difficulty. ARPG’s, for the most part, are designed this way on purpose.

I don’t see them changing the game to require having a group to complete an activity of some sort. I personally wouldn’t want that either. I like being able to group up when I want to, and being able to solo all the content in the game without a group. This is what I’ve come to expect from Diablo games.

Now I wouldn’t mind ease of use to join a group, but that’s completely separate from requiring a group to complete content. Good luck with your suggestion though.

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Until they implement a group finder, I agree its a ā€œwhatever happens, happensā€ world. Since there are not different role classes, like healer, tank, dps, it makes a certain amount of sense.

Clans become much more important in that world though, as you can easily find someone to group with in clan chat or discord. Maybe that was the plan all along? If it was, they really need to step up their game with better clan tools like a clan hideout with clan stash, etc.

Problem here is the Clan UI and architecture/design is really, truly quite bad.

I’ve met some nice folks and lost them when saying ā€œbrb I’ll grab more summoning mats on my alt/muleā€.
OOPS forgot to add them or jot their name down. Silly me…
There’s No: Recently Played with for whatever reason
There’s No: Persistent Chat Log - Why not?!?! Something I’m so used to that the lack of it catches me by surprise from time to time.
There’s No: Easy way to party - most of the time people are forced to ā€œADD FRIENDā€ - utterly ridiculous that’s a solution.

The Dev team has a loooong way to go in order to even fix Clan UI(etc) and address various aspects of Multiplayer - things as simple as Matchmaking 101.

Conversely - I’ve said this many times before: Suck it up. Drop the pride in ā€˜but our design’ - accept failure, take the E-for-Effort and DIRECTLY IMPORT D3’s Clan System, Chat System, ā€œRecently Played Withā€ and many other various big QOL Menu/UI features that are sorely lacking in D4 due to having been poorly designed(it’s clunky and reeks on inexperience and lack of oversight/communication from hands-on experienced Dev-as-Players).

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What I’ve been suggesting is a seamless (no loading time between levels, you can see people come and go seamlessly like on the overworld) public endless dungeon where you only have one life and can only be resurrected by strangers who happen to pass by your corpse.

Aren’t there many games that give you this type of experience already? Destiny 2, many difrerent versions of wow, ff14, etc.

I can only speak for myself: What I like about games similar to Diablo/Monster Hunter is that I can play on my own terms, whenever I wish, but I still play with other people in a shared world

d2 is particular bad game for Multiplayer/MMO experience :laughing:
d3 I don’t think that game is good for anything, lel :smiling_face:
d1…what we are talkign about :dagger: purest SP

Only thing that makes d2 good for multiplayer is the need for trading, /players 8 (farmwise) and the Lobby which is great to chill in different games with people. (and the TCP/IP, long time ago). The game itself is pure SP game, probably the best of its genre. Multiplayer without it’s trading meta would not exist at all, everybody would be still playing 1.07 on linux broken laptops :sweat_smile:

I don’t know if you got my point. I say with OP that the game can offer much more in terms of MP without breaking SP experience. And I think this can be some future headline for the game. Yes I prefer SP as well, but this does not mean I can’t enjoy MP.

That’s a very vague statement though. How exactly would you increase the multiplayer experience without separating it from the solo player experience? If this is just another push toward more tools to help us on the multiplayer aspect I’m all for it, but your post comes off more as adding separate activities to do, that can only be done through grouping. Which isn’t what I personally want, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Yes, I think adding events that need more elaborated party approach will benefit the game. There is nothing wrong if you are against it, that is why the forum is here, for everybody to state their mind.

Example: I would love to join a siege of some sort where we need a role-oriented party of lets say minimum 3 players, where CC,DPS,DMG mitigation are important roles and random class build won’t be suitable for it. I’d like to sit and tinker with my clan and friends how to achieve good party composition for the siege. I think the rewards does not need to be special, everything should be available from solo play, but the experience itself of running a sleek party event will be the reward, imho.

I spend a lot of time playing solo but I also play a lot with my brother who has a lot of online friends he made playing D3. Playing with a regular group really is the optimum way to go. A regular group soon becomes a team where everyone plays in a similar way and backs each other up. Things that would be very difficult for a solo player becomes much more doable for a group. Materials needed for events are contributed by the group.

Finding teammates for a group is the hard part but is worth the effort.

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Repeat after me ā€œD4 is not an mmo even though it has a couple mmo like elementsā€ you’re welcome.

D4 is not an mmo even though it has a couple mmo like elements!

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D4 is not an mmo even though it has a couple mmo like elements!

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D4 is not even a game even though it has couple of game like elements! (its just a ingame shop)

Booo Booo… you broke the trend!

You probably already knew, but just in case :arrow_up:this happens to others: if you whisper someone, whispers are persistent in the launcher, if you’re on Bnet.

Agreed - lots of room for polish, catches me by surprise too. I’d spell out many of the clues that point to it being released 1+ year early, but such threads tend to get scrapped.

D2 and D3 let you instantly jump into random pickup groups straight from the character selection menu. I want that in Diablo 4.

The solo players have everything they want. Now add the options back into the game we had in the last two Diablo games.

It feels like the only group content in this game are World Bosses and Legion events, because it’s the only time you can get into a random group of players. Assuming anyone else actually shows up.