Playerbase Dying Down?

subaridji wrote: 2 years ago

Borderlands 2 solved problem by generating separate loot for each player.

Perosnal loot was invented way, way before Borderlands 2. Also, personal loot wouldn't work for D2.

iamergo wrote: 2 years ago

Also, personal loot wouldn't work for D2.

Why not?

I mean, other than the obvious coding effort that would likely lead to Blizz breaking the legacy code entirely.

It'd merely have to be (or at least should be) implemented in a class-independent way. So same loot as now but rolled for each player separately. None of that D3-style "you're a sorc so you only get sorc stuff" crap and no soulbinding nonsense. That'd not only not work with the concept of dedicated MF/farming chars but it wouldn't even work for those classes without ruining the just for fun builds.

But if all you do is change public loot to personal loot and nothing else about how it works, then it'd work just fine. Albeit resulting in a higher number of available drops overall, due to 8 people getting

Baal loot and not just one. That's easily countered by removing the drop bonus for higher player numbers though. Anything still increasing loot beyond that probably wouldn't be too noticeable overall. Plus all of the younger modern-day players are constantly complaining about too little loot and farming taking too long anyways..throws them a tiny Bone I guess.

Whether it'd be a good idea or not is a separate topic. But there's no reason as to why it "wouldn't work", so long as it's done right.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Whether it'd be a good idea or not is a separate topic. But there's no reason as to why it "wouldn't work", so long as it's done right.

That's what I meant by "wouldn't work." It would open the path to LOD botting levels of exploitation and annihilate the value of items. People who own enough D2R copies and powerful enough hardware to multi-instance currently use it to farm annies. This is going away with 2.4, but with personal loot, they'd only need to park 7 mules in CS and clear it out for ~8 times the loot, a lot of which will again be SoJs.

The only solution is "souldbound" loot. Which runs counter to D2's strongest side, trading.

Ergo, it wouldn't work.

iamergo, in reality, where D2's strongest side is trading, multiplayer playerbase is doomed) It will remain the same, as 10 years ago.

You share with other players the struggle to kill the boss, but then compete for the reward. That DEmotivates multiplayer.

We can clearly see the results now: everyone's rushing together to lvl85-90 (that almost every game in normal-hnightmare), and then split into single games for farming\trading the loot (that's almost every game in hell).

Without new content or core mechanic tweaks, that change gaming experience, this game is dead even before 1st season even starts)

subaridji wrote: 2 years ago

iamergo, in reality, where D2's strongest side is trading, multiplayer playerbase is doomed) It will remain the same, as 10 years ago.

You share with other players the struggle to kill the boss, but then compete for the reward. That DEmotivates multiplayer.

We can clearly see the results now: everyone's rushing together to lvl85-90 (that almost every game in normal-hnightmare), and then split into single games for farming\trading the loot (that's almost every game in hell).

Without new content or core mechanic tweaks, that change gaming experience, this game is dead even before 1st season even starts)

Is D2R your first Diablo 2 experience? It sounds like it is.

personal loot is not going to happen. even if it worked for d2. Rod Fergusson (EP of the Diablo franchise at Blizzard) wrote on twitter like 6 months ago that it's not going to happen.

I've always thought that a compromise would be to introduce a WoW Classic-style greed loot rolling system into D2. The biggest problem I have with D2 looting is I'lll be standing there in the middle of a pack with 4-5 other people, something drops, and the guy with the autoclicker takes the item. Or the guy with substantially better ping gets the item, or I'm too slow to compete for it, or whatever. I'm not willing to put up with it, so I don't do it and never have. I have always played solo to avoid being around other players because of this. Only exception really being LAN sessions with friends, but really never with random people.

Seems to me that an automatic /roll system to randomly pick who gets the item could solve the biggest problem I have with loot distribution. And I would limit the /roll for items of a certain value, and only for players within reasonable distance to the item when dropped - so leachers in town aren't part of the item roll, players off screen aren't part of the roll. Only players who contributed to the drop and in reasonable distance to get the drop in the fist place would be part of the roll. No personal loot, no change in item generation, just random loot distribution for whoever was in range to take ping/autoclickers/faster reflexes out of the equation. I'd be a lot happier with that and would probably play public games. Even though I'd lose most of the items still due to RNG against a bunch of other players, I'm more ok with losing to RNG than losing to slow reflexes or bad ping.

I wouldn't put the won /rolled item directly into a player's inventory either. I wouldn't even show the /roll to people, or even show other players that it had dropped. The /roll would just happen server side, and the item would drop on the Ground like normal but be invisible to everybody except whoever won the server-side roll. Still not personal loot, just a change to visibility and accessibility to whoever won the roll at the server. No change in loot drop rates, no change in how items are generated, just a random distribution of who gets to loot specific items according to the existing item spawn rates. I can't get mad about not getting items that I didn't see drop in the first place, lol.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

In my opinion, that's still the single biggest problem and the single most critical bug (or..collection of bugs) in all of D2:R. The chat is so freakishly broken that everyone has simply given up on social interaction in what is supposed to be a multiplayer experience.

I still can't believe how bad the chat system is in game. It is so broken, it is so bad, there effectively is no chat system at all. That really does push D2R even further into being a glorified single-player game. They definitely tried to re-create the awful chat system of the original game, that's for sure. I can't even think of ways to make it better. The entire system just needs to be scrapped and replaced with a modern chat interface. Every single time I ever traded with somebody we'd use the battle.net app outside of the game to communicate. Any time I tried to talk to friends we'd have to use Discord on 2nd monitors. The in-game system is so bad it's not even worth trying to use. Straight up the only messages you see in game are the same item selling spam scrolling the lobby. The exact same spam site since launch, which blizzard has either ignored or been completely ineffective in dealing with, lmao.

Beardozer wrote: 2 years ago

Seems to me that an automatic /roll system to randomly pick who gets the item could solve the biggest problem I have with loot distribution

...

They definitely tried to re-create the awful chat system of the original game, that's for sure.

I dare say the "I" in "problem I have" is a rather big factor there. There's plenty of people (myself included) who have always and will always hate random roll systems. There's a simple argument to be made that reflexes and not misclicking when trying to loot are part of player skill and should be rewarded as such. Whether one agrees with that argument or not is a separate issue but both sides most certainly do exist and for me for example, I just despise random roll solutions. If I contribute more to something, I shouldn't have the same crap roll chance as the leecher next to me. If I actually pay attention and invest enough time to train my looting reflexes to the point of being better, the semi-afk dude next to me should not get the same roll chance. If I misclick or the actually not afk guy next to me is just better/faster and gets the loot before I do..he beat me fair and square and I don't want to take it from him with some random roll.
Then again, maybe I'm just jaded from all the time I spent in WoW, topping the DPS charts by a mile, only to have the mostly afk douche at the very bottom roll on everything and win...

Mind you, that is assuming fair looting mechanics. No pickit, no "controllers get a loot button to mindlessly spam, keyboard/mouse needs to actually wait for the item to drop and then still be quick enough and not miss it" (you can literally controller-loot before keyboard/mouse even has a technical chance to react...) and for that matter, no "skills are not interruptable for looting purposes" (the fact that a strafezon for example is better off leeching than attacking because every attack blocks her ability to loot until the entire cycle is done is just silly) and so on...

As for the chat system, it worked just fine back in the day. Given, there's certainly more elegant solutions that have become the norm nowadays but it worked. The main problem isn't following an outdated concept, the main problem is that they flat out broke it along the way.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

I dare say the "I" in "problem I have" is a rather big factor there. There's plenty of people (myself included) who have always and will always hate random roll systems.

True, and that is a fair comment too. My idea for random rolling off high value items is a personal take for sure. I straight up do not play public games solely because of the current loot system. It is a big enough problem for me that I just will not deal with it. I'm not arguing that it's a good change for everybody, but it is the best solution I can think of for the problem that has kept me playing solo since the launch of the game. It's debatable whether the current loot system is an issue for enough people to warrant a change in the first place, but it does seem to suppress people from playing together in public games for anything outside of zerg rush levelling. It is also debatable whether that is an issue either because the game does lend itself towards being a single-player + trading experience.

And that's the problem with museum-piece games like D2. They can have all kinds of problems, but you can't really fix any of them with disappointing core fans who like it as it is. So realistically, while I hate the current loot system enough to avoid playing with other people, that's just what the game is and always has been and I understand that probably never changes - and that may not even be a bad thing either, even for me. The game just is what it is.

Indeed. Not an easy thing to want to address (if one wants to address it at all).

I am curious though..do you currently lose every single drop? Or what would you say the ratio is?

Reason I'm asking is..imagine for a second you join an 8 player

Baal run in a /roll environment. You now know for a statistic fact that you will lose 7 out of every 8 drops simply because you are merely one out of 8 people rolling. To me, that would actually be significantly more of a reason not to join multiplayer games (with unknown pugs) than at least having a chance at the pieces I want, even if I do lose a lot of them to someone quicker than me.

it's mainly a

Baal run problem. any other place you can easily kill monsters far enough away from other players to secure most of the loot you want. and also the ubers who don't have much reason to share loot.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

I am curious though..do you currently lose every single drop? Or what would you say the ratio is?

The only thing I've kept track is the cumulative feeling of seeing high runes and unidentified uniques disappear from my feet from every

Baal run I've ever run, lmao. It all just adds up to a bad enough time for me to avoid other players to avoid it. I don't know. I can't remember ever coming away from one with something other than some levels. But I have seen plenty of nice things snatched away from under me, and it's always a bad feeling. And that is why I would do an invisible /roll server side and only make the item appear for the 'winner' of the roll. I would never see the items I didn't win, nor would I even know they dropped. I wouldn't change anything about loot tables or number or types of items that dropped, I just don't want to see them if I can't have them lol.

And you're right about losing 7 out of 8 drops due to RNG with my idea. But because I'd only have the "winner" see the item drop, I wouldn't see them. So it's less of a numbers thing, and more of a 'what does the game make me feel while I'm playing it' thing. Plus the fact I'd only have the server rolling for people who were pretty close to the item drop in the first place, but these are all just minor implementation details - I just really hate seeing things drop that I can't pick up fast enough, and I hate it enough to only play solo because of it. I would probably prefer the increased difficulty of full games and play public games if I didn't have to face this.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

There's a simple argument to be made that reflexes and not misclicking when trying to loot are part of player skill and should be rewarded as such.

I also don't play D2 for any kind of player skill, it's pretty much 100% slot machine simulator for me. So anything tied to reaction time or reflexes or anything like that doesn't add value for me. I just want to click away absentmindedly and see what drops.

Beardozer wrote: 2 years ago

I just want to click away absentmindedly and see what drops.

Quite possibly the best description I've ever seen for this game.

My game experience overlaps with the Beardozer's one. It is not a good feeling to see for example HR drop in you feet and suddenly it's gone because someone came out of nowhere to grab it And as I said in some other topic, I have a lot of stuff to do in my daily life - job, kids, housework, ... and when I sit to run the slot machine, I don't want to train my reflexes or push them to the limit
But, as you said, neither the loot distribution will change nor this is necessarily a bad thing.

Agree with the multiplayer loot problem. I have only played solo for a while now. As for my personal

Baal “loot ratio” when more than a couple people are the the game. It is literally 0. Zero out of a lot of

Baal runs. I have never picked up anything of substance despite being part of the fight, in close proximity, and clicking frantically every time. So, I stopped.

how does this sound? the loot from most monsters and chests are kept free for all. but the loot from bosses, super unique monsters and sparkly chests gets auto rolled on by those in range. the loot you win is highlighted, lost loot dimmed, or something. new game options let you hide loot you lost.

Wouldn't that just be the worst of both worlds? People who hate rolling will hate boss fights. People who hate first come first serve looting will hate drops on the way to the boss. End result: Everyone hates it, those currently going solo due to free for all will still do so, those who would hate the roll would switch to solo because of it.

Alternate idea (again, if that is to be changed/an option at all):
Make it a host decision. Just add an option to game creation to "roll for loot" that results in any sets, uniques, rares, runes, whatever triggering an automatic roll for everyone in the area (so long as they are not idle and not significantly below the area level aka just leeching/being rushed). Winner of the roll gets say 30 seconds to loot while the loot is dimmed for everyone else. After those 30 seconds, it becomes free for all (so loot doesn't just get wasted because the winner goes afk).
Add a filter to the game lobby at the same time so one can easily limit which games to join based on loot mechanics.

Honestly they just need to implement a players option in private online games and it is no longer an issue.

Those who want to play with others still can, those who don't get the same benefit as single players while still being able to trade with the community.

You're never going to "force" people to fight for loot if they don't want to. So you either join random lobbies and possibly ruin other games, or are forced into P1 farming which is incredibly boring.

Well, it certainly wouldn't help the "get players to play with others" part..but yeah, I for one would love to see /players added for online games as well.