… is going to be addressed.
Yet, so many folks who utilize it, are in absolute denial that the developers won’t be addressing it in some manner. I myself don’t use it because it’s not how I personally want to play the game. I also do not view it as an exploit, nor do I care if others do utilize it.
The game in vanilla had become about playing the auction houses (flipping items and gearing up via the auction house) as opposed to actually playing the game for many. Blizzard went through great lengths to extricate the auction houses from the game while making most everything in the game soul bound with one of the key reasons being that players should be killing monsters for loot (yes, there were other ulterior motives including putting a stop to most third party real money transactions).
I posted the following several times in several of the Rift It Forward (RiF) topics on the Battle.net forums where several of Grimiku’s (one of the Community Managers for Diablo) postings were referenced as Blizzard’s stance on the matter. The developers however (specifically Wyatt Cheng and Rob Foote) did address RiF during the anniversary livestream.
Grimiku did opine about how it was a fun way for the community to get together. This however is not an official declaration that RiF will remain the way it is. The community managers do not design nor develop the game. Key decisions including their take on RiF are going to be determined by the development team.
They did address this during the anniversary stream (YouTube source below). Like myself, they also don’t see it as an exploit; they see it more so as a degenerative way of playing the game (basically sitting at the UI in chat and figuring out whose turn it is). To be blunt, it’s an outcome of their design decisions with how they implemented bounties and rifts. Enough player feedback was provided during closed beta regarding how unrewarding bounties and rifts were (much of that was ignored).
Note that I wrote them feedback via e-mail during closed beta about this design (that players would get sick of the repetitive nature of bounties and that there are better ways to counter this inevitability by making rift keys, shards, and souls drop from random events and quests out in that open world; basically that rifts should not be the only “end game” when it came to shards and souls).
But they basically flushed the full potential of an open waypoint system down the drain. They wanted us to be killing monsters to get our epic loot. Instead, we’re killing monsters to complete repetitive bounty objectives to get rift keys to do rifts, in order to get a higher quantity of blood shards, to gamble with an NPC for our items that aren’t dropping from monsters. (-_- ‘)
If the basic premise of adventure mode (with its open waypoint system) had been overall more fun/rewarding to begin with; where the exploration part actually had meaning (instead of this contrived gating they went with by forcing bounties and rifts), then some players wouldn’t have found it more rewarding to abuse certain efficient routes in the campaign which resulted in the typical kneejerk nerfing that impacted the general game play outside of bounty and more so, rifts. And because players have to do rifts (which they decided to make as the most efficient place for farming), players had to do these mind numbing bounties for keys. Thus RiF was a community derived solution to a flawed design. That is what the developers are going to be fixing (source below).
Anyway, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNwhz0yqHnM starting around the 15m10s part, Rob Foote re-affirmed what Wyatt Cheng had also mentioned during his part of the playthrough -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAJHJgoOR0g at the 36m40s mark where he basically says in plain english that it was a design oversight and that is something that is ripe for a revision.
While I myself don’t use RiF, I really don’t care if others do it while it still works. My only hope is that whatever the developers do to address it, that the solution is fleshed out better where it does not impact others parts of the game for the worst (like when they nerfed the XP from swarming type mobs and nerfed purples to deal with players running certain parts of the campaign over and over again; as both of these have had an impact when it comes to rewards (XP and drops) playing outside of rifts.
Unfortunately, the Diablo III community just has far too many people who are unable to see the big picture, have the inability to perform any sort of deductive reasoning, lack logical analytical skills, and have an overall lack of comprehension skills where even this, is not proof to them that the developers plan to address RiF. Some folks responded saying the above timestamps showed no mention of RiF.
The reason is that I left out the actual starting point where Wyatt Cheng began talking about trying out RiF (starting around the 35 minute mark). And the reason I didn’t note it from that point is that some folks with short attention span (which the naysayers of what I posted proved) would’ve meant them never reaching the 36m40s mark to hear his actual take to begin with (all they would’ve saw was that hey, he tried RiF and didn’t seem to have a problem with it as a runner).
Basically, he talks about trying RiF as both a runner and opener. And he said that he preferred being a runner because he also gets experience and drops in the process (something that a leecher/rift opener would be missing out on). Yet, many of the folks who want to remain in denial, latched onto this part as proof that the developers are still okay with RiF. Basically, there is no reasoning with these kind of people.
I essentially came to the conclusion that it is no longer even worth the time to continue trying to provide any sort of input/feedback regarding the issues with this game going forward. It’s just easier to play the game in silence/with other friends or likeminded players. But giving your two cents on the Battle.net forums is just a pure waste of time (I’m done with that place already) and not worth continuing to expend the time on.
What a lot of these folks cannot get through their head is that all of this is an outcome of the development teams deficient design philosophy; and that their way of “fixing” these kinds of things tends to make other parts of the game worse in general for most everyone else.
Imagine if they actually decide to reduce Kadala’s legendary chance for example. That would be the totally incorrect way to address it. But that has been the usual lazy way they’ve approached problems; nerfing things rather than addressing the root cause.
The proper way to address it without dismantling the RiF community is to scale the amount of blood shards given based on the involvement of a player in a rift. So while a player can still join a game towards the end of a rift to help clear out the rift guardian, their allotment of blood shards would be substantially less compared to those players who actually did play through the entire rift.
But the real solution is to actually address the root cause (which I noted above is with how bounties are currently structured within the current end game design they have with rifts) by making bounties themselves more rewarding and less repetitive. I would go even further and let go of the notion of forcing players through this system; allow monsters throughout the game world (in adventure mode) to also drop rift key fragments, blood shards, and forgotten souls. Bounties should really be rewarding objectives one encounters in their exploration rather than this force fed on-rails design they went with.
But given this development teams history, they are going to take the “easiest” approach which is probably just scaling the blood shards awarded based on player contribution (as opposed to making the rest of the game more rewarding). And that is what I meant when I said the developers will be addressing RiF. It will be balanced so that it will be far more rewarding to just run a full rift as being an opener, will no longer be as rewarding with the lower amount of blood shards they’ll be awarded. But as noted, there are many players who have their heads stuck in the sand about these kind of changes that will be implemented, by the time patch 2.1 is released.
And the dev team could just address it with patch 2.1. The thing is that folks like myself aren’t going to bother wasting time giving any more constructive feedback about stuff like tiered rifts and seasonal ladders. Why? Because history has shown the developers aren’t going to listen to most of it anyway, and there is little reason to waste time on feedback that will be summarily ignored.
