Multiplayer continues “wrecking” this game in hilarious ways. This one has to be done in multiplayer since it utilizes the global drop mechanic with goblins in the game. This is similar to past issues where experience and rewards scaled erroneously.
Rewards dropping from goblins seem to be global as they are with chests (so when someone else pops a chest in a co-op game, you don’t have to be even near that player, but when you visit that chest location, your own drops are there).
In this case, players are using higher rank Greater Rifts since the rewards dropped from goblin kills outside the Greater Rift, scale according to it. Basically, one player has to leave the Greater Rift and find a goblin (in this case, players are searching for Blood Thief goblins for shards). Once the player locates it and kills it, that player gets the normal amount of shards for that particular Torment difficulty. The other players within the Greater Rift, will end up seeing the amount of blood shards dropped for them, scaled to higher amounts due to this bug when they port out and visit the location where the goblin was killed. Players cycle through this routine so that the player doing the killing is able to sit in the Greater Rift so they can collect a large amount of shards.
For those sitting in a 45 Greater Rift, the amount of shards being awarded is around 30k/hr. So yes, a lot of time is spent porting back and forth to gamble them with Kadala. The issue of course is the ability to quickly gear up (and the abuse is being used to game the leaderboards).
This doesn’t affect me since I don’t care about the leaderboards. And as far as I’m concerned, this is par for the course with the Diablo community (not saying everyone engages in this but it’s part of the general community makeup dating back to D2). Even without an offline mode, the amount of cheesing that goes on, is symptomatic of this community because the chest-pounding “e-peen” factor is such a huge aspect to many players. That is part human nature though since even in real life, there are many who enjoy flaunting their power and wealth.
But this is a freakin hack-and-slash video game with layers of RNG associated with it. There is no skill involved in that; just the fortitude to do the same old thing over and over again for hours on end. I’ve already posted in the past opining why the competitive aspects in this game is a farce. This just highlights it even more and D3 players (the competitive leaderboard types) wonder why outsiders laugh at them when talking about being ranked in this game.
The leaderboard aspect is totally meaningless (as it should be) because the game was not designed to be competitive to begin with. The real skill in D3 is being able to play the same repetitive shit over and over again for 8+ hours straight every single day for weeks, months (and for some, since launch). You have to hand it to Blizzard for being able to hook, line, and sinker these addicts as D3 for these folks is like crack.
It’s always interesting to hear the opinions of folks that used to sink several thousand hours into D3, realizing later how mundane the game really is (that includes Reaper of Souls which did fix a lot of issues, but fixed in a way that its more of a bandaid then a real root cause fix) once they eventually burnt out, tried some other games, and found out through that other play, the areas that D3/RoS is generally lacking in (like how the current meta has devolved into RIFTS; where there really isn’t anything else to do in the game because there is no PvP, there are no other competitive/challenge modes such as daily/weekly/month long “race” events).
Myself, I’ve never sunk that much time into the game (except at launch when everything felt new and from leveling up all the classes). Once at end game though, playing several hours straight would always have my eyes glazing over. There have been numerous periods of downtime of not even touching the game for months at a time. Season 2 was the longest I played for the first time in awhile because this was the first time in both vanilla and RoS, that my luck was well above average for everything. That just made playing my character enjoyable.
As with other past “clever use of game mechanics”, there won’t be any action taken against players that used them. The devs will just fix the issue and that will be it. Sure, it is going to suck for those who actually play Seasons for the leaderboard aspect. But this is also why it isn’t worth taking stock in those leaderboards.
It’s like solo leaderboards should be exactly that. The ranks there should be based on completely solo play where no advantage is gained from multi-player where you get more drops as well as the ability to level up gems much faster compared to doing all of that solo. But the devs aren’t going to do that because their focus is making co-op play more rewarding (and the backstory for that is because they used the entire social aspects of the game, as a key reason for deciding to pull having the offline mode they were originally planning to have back in 2010). The sell point they used was that Diablo is best experienced when played with other players (since it easier to sell that as opposed to the security issues due to the RMAH but more importantly, the fact that it prevents easy pirating of the game).
