Update from D2R lead producer on what's next for the game

ganseng wrote: 22 hours ago

Rest wrote: 23 hours ago

ganseng wrote: 23 hours ago

don't use it if you don't like it. i'm fine with the way it is

Powercreep in action. Why would I use a inferior (and harder to get) item instead of Spirit?
If there was better balance across, we would see a lot more different type of items being used, which is overall a better design and better for the players.

the powercreep happened a few decaded ago when Spirit was introduced. now it's meta, and if alternatives that are <= Spirit rather than << Spirit are introduced, there won't be any powercreep.

So I vote for reducing Spirit from +2 skills to +1

Trang Oul wrote: 1 day ago

Inethil wrote: 1 day ago

Personally, I feel that nerfing long standing items, like Stealth or Spirit is a serious mistake. In my opinion, the community would be much better served by making never used items and skills relevant, not on cutting the legs out from under existing builds or styles.

If you want to maintain proper balance, you need both buffs and nerfs. Otherwise it’s a straightforward power creep - and we know how such a series of buffs ends (D3)…
Maybe if the game difficulty was cranked up to compensate the buffs, but I’d still be afraid of an infinite treadmill.

I agree, naturally, that buffs and nerfs are a natural part of the process. To clarify, the items mentioned, while good, are not breaking anything, while half the skills in the game languish unused. My personal holy grail is that perhaps one day I will be able to select the element of Skeletal Mage. Yesterday, trying to raise one mage in act 5, I had to use the skill 9 times in a row just to get anything except cold or poison. It never really feels random. Honestly, if they only guaranteed that, with each cast, you would get a different element, I would be alright with that, as at least I could be sure that within 4 uses of the skill I would have a viable minion, but ...

I ask you, in all seriousness, what does it add to the game to force necros to have to cast the same skill over and over again just to get the mage they were looking for? And would fixing this cause an imbalance? There are pain points like this where an adjustment would simply remove pointless friction.

But not all friction is bad. Inventory tetris has a real place in the game and I would not adjust that. Giving everyone the same charm inventory would, in fact, lessen the game. Right now you have to decide how much space to Sacrifice, but if the inventory was dedicated charms just become the same for everyone. That decision is part of the strategy of the game.

That said, this is academic until we see what they actually do, but whatever it is I pray they do it slowly enough to allow the community to test and weigh in on it and for those who want more, more, more, and that more easily, I would suggest, respectfully, that they choose another game and let us keep our old fashioned, difficult, quirky, beautiful D2.

AardvarksAdvance wrote: 1 day ago

Inethil wrote: 1 day ago

"Improve the lobby so perhaps play games and trade games are separated or colour coded. Use AI to terminate inactive games. ID and get rid of the ad bots and auto channel pushing."

Most of that I agree with, but I've passed Horadric cubes between alts in games and would hate to lose items on the Ground just because an overly aggressive AI sees the game before I swap in.

That will depend on how inactive is characterised.. most items disappear after x time on Ground anyway, so having a rule that terminates games longer than that a certain time frame beyond that should hopefully not cause any lost item issues described above.. I’m thinking mainly of those 6- 126 hour long running games on the servers…

Yes, good point, I'm sure it could be adjusted well. I suppose my anxiety stems from an uncertainty over whether Blizzard is still capable of such fine tuning.

After the D5 announcement and hearing a dev stating that D4 combat was in a good place ... my anxiety only grew. D4 and whatever comes next can keep its millions of damage, numbers so large they lack any meaning at all, and skills aimed more at waves of monsters without individual threat identity. One of the reasons I cherish D2 is that the pace and strong monster identity allows for actual tactics, rather that just blowing up the screen.

ganseng wrote: 19 hours ago

So my interpretation why D2 didn't receive any updates was the economy. There is an article from polygon indicating 1.9 million warlocks, we may infer 1.5-2 million copies or some $50m in revenue. sounds like a lot and probably covers the development payroll many times over, but not sure what other operating expenses/return on investments expectations are. companies not necessarily treat their capacities as variable but can rather allocate resources to projects with higher returns. plus, there are cannibalization effects draining player base from other products, and the funnel effect with each subsequent DLC bringing in less money than the first one.

It's all a bit vague, but to make it short, is there another explanation other than economy?

don't really believe it's about not willing to make mona lisa imperfect

In 2020, Blizzard's then CEO got 154M USD "compensation" for his hard work. 50M in revenues might sound like a lot to you. For him it does not.

In addition, your estimation is for too high, expectating every player only made one warlock character.

dionisy_cn wrote: 14 hours ago

So I vote for reducing Spirit from +2 skills to +1

Maybe a range of 1-2.

mikelessar wrote: 1 day ago

Not really.
I can look at the Middle East Conflict without fixing it.

Are you saying it's impossible, a fool's errand, to fix the unique item situation? Because it sounds like you're saying that anyone who even thinks about getting involved, even by helping those involved, should expect to regret their decision.

mikelessar wrote: 45 minutes ago

I exaggerated a bit by pointing out a huge problem that has been analyzed multiple times but not solved, yet. My I shouldn't have chosen such a grave topic and I didn't intend to mock any side in this conflict.

The inadequate state of lots of D2's uniques is much simpler and ultimately meaningless, of course.

What I meant is that analyzing that something is wrong, which even Blizzard has acknowledged by now, and fixing it, are two entirely different things.

I was just blatantly using your post as a springboard for further commentary.

mikelessar wrote: 45 minutes ago

Look at the uniques that they have changed so far. Each of them was trash and is now a little bit stronger but still far from competitive, at least in the endgame.

I think that's where they're trying to make improvements. it does't feel good to play through the game and disregard most of the unique drops. They're supposed to be exciting and cool and memorable, and instead they're generally garbage that is unusable. We all know why this has happened, and how the game has moved on and left a lot of them in the dust - or that some of them seem to have been poorly conceived in the first place.

I think the devs have VERY clearly stated that they don't want to contribute to power creep, and they don't want to kill everyone's favorite runewords (though there was some stated willingness to slightly decrease the power of Spirit). I think they want to buff uniques to be more helpful mid-game. Manald is a really good example. Manald was a pretty worthless item for just about any character. it was hard to figure out how it could possibly be useful for anyone at just about any point in the game. Some mana leech might have limited usefulness in some very specific situations, but not many. I'd wager the number of players that actually equipped manald is pretty low. So they buffed it, and now it has a spot in my best-in-slot speedrun setup between levels 15 and 29. Now, theoretically it could be topped, but it's kinda challenging to top it in those levels. The same is true of blinkbat. That was a completely forgotten item, and now with a little buff, it's in my best-in-slot speedrun setup between levels 12 and 17. I'm actually looking for it!

I think this is largely their idea - to give uniques at least some kind of home. Llama went through a very lengthy exercise recently where he considered a huge set of uniques and talked about what it would take to make each of them viable for use in some scenario. For a lot of them it came down to just dropping level requirements to something more reasonable. Tyrael's would take more.

D2R has a massive number of uniques that are complete garbage. And I think that is a problem for the game, and I'm excited that it is getting a very measured look.