Blizzard’s official forums have been filled recently with multiple threads regarding the disparity between solo and co-op play. What many of these folks don’t seem to realize is that this is all an
intentional design of making online matter.
Lead Content Designer Kevin Marten’s says, “Diablo plays best when you’re playing with other people” and “We have a lot of plans to make online matter. For us, it’s about that connected experience.”
And as if that isn’t specific enough, the following paragraph in the above article should make it even more clear:
“We didn’t add co-op in. It’s not a value added feature. It is the ideal,” he said. “It’s not something we want to force upon people, but the idea it’s always available – the whole drop-in, drop-out thing – has been of value since the very beginning of the project. We tried to make the game with that in mind.
“As we add new things, as we look to the future, we’re still trying to enrich that. We still are doing a lot to make online matter. Improved matchmaking, new social systems and extra rewards for playing together.”
This is the design the team went with to fulfill the corporate objective of “making online matter” (more so after removal of the auction houses). It’s all spelled out in the risk factors (piracy of their intellectual properties) of ATVI’s filings with the SEC. It’s better looking for Blizzard than justifying the always online requirement as being mainly due to anti-piracy measures.
So they make multiplayer lucrative as possible to entice players into the co-op meta (it’s also why they aren’t going to make solo leaderboards really solo because they want players to group to make further progression that can then be used to push the solo leaderboards compared to what someone who tries to do it purely solo, wouldn’t be able to do).
Note that during closed beta, they disapproved of this split farming play style (which was worse given the way rewards were tuned) early on and tried to resolve it (but they obviously never did accomplish that completely on purpose).
Previously, players would receive the XP and gold rewards from bounty objectives regardless of where they were in the game. So you had that power leveling meta where the low level would AFK in town while 3 other high level players split off to different acts and completed bounties (and the AFK player would quickly receive all of those XP rewards). Furthermore, the Strength in Numbers buff used to always be active in co-op regardless of where players were.
Travis Day snuck in the following comment about split farming while discussing what was then, the hot topic in the beta (legendary drop rates).
Lastly on the topic of split farming, this is very clearly not how we want players to play the game. We know of the problems it causes as well as the reasons its occurring and are actively discussing ways to address the problem. While we love coop and we want players to enjoy playing the game together, the right answer should obviously not be “Lets play coop and all go solo in the game!”. I’m walking into a meeting as soon as I post this to discuss the issue and possible solutions.
The following was their “solution” that was hotfixed into the closed beta server.
Players no longer receive rewards for a bounty if they are not in the same level area as the bounty as it is being completed. This is part of our solution regarding the concern of “split farming” bounties. Please note that we are still exploring other options. Players now need to be within 100 yards of each other in order to benefit from the Strength in Numbers buff.
Note that the above did not touch the ability to earn the bounty cache reward. Why? Because if they did, split farming bounties would have died a quick death and along with it, a compelling reason for getting players into co-op games to do bounties. So all they did was address the multiplayer buff “rewards” when it came to gold and XP (and after the blood shard exploit, removed the shards from blood thieves being world drops).
Basically, they can close this off if they so desire (where all players need to be together in combat in the same act for each objective to qualify for each acts cache). But its one of those other options they know very well about that they don’t want to touch.
Myself, I also prefer solo and know exactly the end result of playing solo given this design. Would I like to see this gap closed a bit? Sure. But I know that there are ulterior motives behind some of their designs to the point where lobbying for certain changes is going to be like clapping with one hand.
Basically, they aren’t going to screw the pooch now that they have even larger numbers of the existing player base trained to fall into the entire “group up to make even further progression” mentality. They already understand the addicted nature that many in the player base have where they literally have these players in their hands. I mean, look at how many get on the same hamster treadmill and push Greater Rifts over and over again all for the sake of being in the top 1000 on a meaningless leaderboard.
Difficulty in this game is relative with bigger numbers (damage output, mitigation, health pools). The actual content and mechanics remain the same where actual player skill isn’t even comparable to what is required in playing at a competitive level in say real time strategy games where RNG does not play a huge role in dictating an outcome. That’s why most realistic people don’t look at ARPG’s as a competitive genre (nor take their ladders/leaderboards seriously).
And the endless scaling nature of Greater Rifts is exactly that. It’s all the same except the relative numbers between a players characters and those monsters. Want to simulate a higher tier Greater Rift at a lower one; you find the breakpoints and equip yourself in non level 70 items and low ranked legendary gems (or none at all).
But they have many players believing this is challenging by having them doing the same thing over and over again for ever marginal power increases from items while being complemented with the multiplicative experience gains that allows players to reach higher and higher Paragon levels (where all Paragon points over P800 end up being usable only in main stat and vitality).
And I’ve noted it before, this kind of infinitely increasing design which allows that power creep to spill over into the base game, is a flawed design. Challenge modes like this should always be self-contained (and if not, limits placed on how much of that increased power can be used outside this challenge mode).
It’s not that much different with “infinite” Paragon. I don’t have any issues with continually gaining experience (such that it gives the illusion you are making progress). Where I have issues with their Paragon 2.0 design is the lack of meaningful choices with the point distribution. The round-robin design was just a stall tactic pre-P800 because once one reaches that, every single character will have all their points distributed to fill up every bonus. Beyond that, we have both main stat and vitality inflation. And that inflation has an impact on the base game where the core difficulty system becomes trivialized as time passes.
That is NOT good design. It’s a stupid design because the game designers are making decisions that will affect how they need to balance the game in the future. By the time the next expansion rolls out, the divergence between what is a low Paragon account and a high one is going to be extremely huge. With Reaper of Souls, that transitional gap was maybe only around 330 Paragons (and players had to round robin their points – so there was no main stat inflation).
But with the current inflation due to the multiplicative XP in Greater Rifts, there will be accounts reaching P3000 or even more by the time that expansion goes live. And this isn’t even touching upon legendary gems for those players (GR100 will likely be beaten by then unless the game becomes totally unplayable at those levels without server side optimizations when it comes to calculating overlapping effects).
And all of this is multiplied in group play because the rewards in co-op play is that much more lucrative. It’s actually humorous watching this trainwreck happening because “infinite” is not really infinite unless your entire core design, was created with that aspect in mind from the start. This game was NEVER designed that way. Everything they’ve added is a tacked on BAND-AID fix that continues to weigh on that underlying foundation. This team has humorously designed themselves into a corner via this “infinitely scaling” Greater Rift meta with groups (to make online matter and to fulfill the “this game was built with co-op in mind”).
Whats going to happen when accounts begin reaching P5000? Basically, we’re talking about an acceleration in progress as ones power level increases (because it just feeds on itself with multiplicative XP gains unless that entire curve is carefully planned out and are continually more exponential; the problem is that there is a certain point where it is
linear in Paragon 2.0). Can the actual engine (with all of this tacked on bandaids) allow the game to be actually playable when character and monster stats are at these limits where server side calculations need to go on for far longer because that is always going to be the nature of Greater Rifts (where players will always be butting up against this upper “infinite” boundary). It’s why I use the simulated “gimped” gear strategy because that is what an infinite scaling design means (there is no upper ceiling such that your gear and gems will always be realtively “gimped”).
As it stands now, players are already complaining about lag induced by damage over time and area damage. You seriously cannot make this stuff up; this is all designer self-inflicted with poorly made decisions (but thats not surprising for the D3 design team from Martens on down as this is the same group of people besides the current game director [who was originally part of the console design team], who have been there from the get go).
But none of this matters with the entire solo versus co-op argument so they are going to be extremely careful with how they narrow the gap because what they don’t want to do is make it where the solo rewards have any kind of perceived advantages that would detract from pushing players towards the co-op meta.
The irony in all this is by ignoring the style of play the game designers want to convince the player base to believe in, one can still enjoy playing the game within its original parameters. As a matter of fact, just as the auction houses short circuited ones reward loop when it came to item drops, their methods of making co-op lucrative, short circuits what little character progression (which is mostly about reaching level 70, and then its all about items and legendary gems + the supporting materials for crafting, re-rolling, and now, the cube) exists in this game. And this isn’t surprising for this team; they have no core philosophies they stick to; it’s only designer bullshit speak to fit their bandaid fix based objectives.
Soloing, one can still work steadily towards reaching T10 without ever short circuiting their character progression, never trivializing the base difficulties of the game, and not be afflicted with poor game play experience in higher tiered Greater Rifts.
October 15th Update: players are already over Paragon 2000 in non Seasonal and reaching Paragon 2000 in Season 4 (as of this post, just around 1.5 months). These folks are literally going to show how broken the games design is given the designers short sightedness and piss poor decision to allow XP gear and XP sharing along with multiplicative XP in Greater Rifts. They’ve now officially screwed themselves unless they start re-scale Paragon XP soon before these folks hit another thousand Paragon levels.
http://kr.battle.net/d3/ko/profile/난강하다-3283/career
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Ryuzaki-2177/career
