Several PTR patches and seasonal resets have occurred since I last posted several weeks ago. I barely put time into PTR Season 2 but noticed how they are handling the entire rollover process (this was before the recent blog posting giving a more detailed preview of Seasons).
The first one I noticed was that our actual seasonal character does get rolled over to the non-seasonal roster. My prior thought was that this would not happen (that only the experience, gold, and items would roll over). I’ve documented my thought process in prior posts as to why I felt this way.
But it now makes sense why they did not separate out the seasonal character creation process from the rest of our character slots; the seasonal characters aren’t going to be transient. But it looks like we aren’t going to get additional character slots either as nothing was mentioned in the above preview posting. This implementation is absolutely ridiculously flawed because players who are already maxed out on characters, will need to constantly delete at least one for seasonal play. And eventually (after several seasons), anyone left playing will be faced with that same issue.
The decision to make the game online only, and thus having to have limits on the amount of storage per game client, is a burden that falls on the design team. If they put in a ladder type of mode and actually roll those seasonal characters over to the non-seasonal roster, one key question that should’ve popped up is character slot limits.
With vanilla, many players were already maxed out (5 softcore characters and 5 hardcore characters of each class). The standard edition of Reaper of Souls provided two extra character slots (while the Digital Deluxe/Collectors Edition provided an additional three on top of the standard edition). Thus the current maximum amount of slots is 15.
True, many players are now using a lot of those slots as character mules to store items due to the account binding aspect. It’s why I have several max level wizards for example; they are holding items that I can’t make use of on live yet. That again is something symptomatic of a much larger issue that goes beyond the scope of this post (but I’ve touched on these issues ad-nauseum throughout this blog). Still, others are legitimately using up almost all their character slots by playing one of each class in all play modes. These players won’t be able to do the same in Seasons though unless they delete some non-seasonal characters.
Maybe it’s the actual thought process the designers went with since their rationale might have been that once the season is over, that character will roll over anyway. Thus deleting a non-seasonal character might have been seen as a non-issue to begin with. What they miss though is there is actual data associated with that character (specifically time played and amount of monsters killed). Killing off a hardcore character in-game allows that data to be stored until ones graveyard is filled (at which point, one has to begin deleting them from the Hall of Fallen Heroes). There is no way to do that with a non-seasonal softcore character though.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but all I see in their various design decisions is the lack of forethought. It’s understandable especially in this case since Seasons is a mode they are tacking on (and tacking on to a game that is already a patchwork of designs which the original game, was not meant to handle). But that also means making concessions elsewhere to offset those issues. Increasing character slots is one of those. The other is doing something better with stash space.
With stash space, I believe there should just be one stash tab that is shared across all characters; the rest of the stash tabs should be solely for that character. Yes it does potentially increase the server side storage limits per account since this means more potential muling (muling in Diablo III though is an issue that is more symptomatic of core design issues as opposed to the smaller niche of hoarders who like to collect everything). The downside to this design is it increases inventory management without an out-of-game stash inventory browser/management system.
Speaking of stash issues, the roll over of seasonal items at the end of a season will utilize the in-game mail system. Those must be claimed (by any character) within a months time. Paragon experience, gold, and blood shards are automatically rolled over (excess shards over 500 likely will utilize the mail system). Thus for some players, stash space is going to be even more of an issue and will require clearing out stuff constantly.
Again, modifying the stash where it’s one shared tab and the rest being solely for that character, will yield an increase in storage space. But it’s only going to be a temporary one if/when all that stash space, is filled up with account bound sets and legendaries that the player is muling away because they can’t make effective use of them immediately.
And that is where the problem lies; it’s a combination of account bound (bind on pickup) as well as set and legendary items that are too tied into having other support items to be useful in endgame play. With set items, that is understandable because you need the whole set to make the most out of them; it’s why one of my mules, has Firebird items not only on the character itself, but in that characters personal inventory. I’ve already documented how the changes to the set in 2.1, will finally allow my main character to handle Torment VI difficulty using that set. And that would not be possible had I not muled them (some folks used to just salvage the set). The same goes with many other items muled on the other characters.
Again, set items I can see. But my other wizard mules (and that is only one class as I haven’t even maxed out my main on live to even begin doing the same for the other classes) are mainly filled with legendary items that cannot come to full realization unless I find other items I’m missing. Usually that is going to be a weapon and/or class specific item that also happens to be uncommon or rare. I’ve also documented the kind of bad luck/poor RNG that I had early on which is another reason why I end up having to mule stuff. If I don’t save it, I may never come across another one again for awhile. This is all a result of excessive levels of RNG (what drops is solely at the mercy of luck) along with lower drop rate chances on some items.
Seasonal play doesn’t change any of this; it actually will magnify it since the designers did not really address any of the core issues (not that I expected them to anyway). I couldn’t even get my main class decked out on live pre-2.1 after 3-months of play. So I get to do that all over again each Season by being subjected to that same level of RNG? No thank you. Maybe I’ll get lucky… fat chance as my luck hasn’t been any better while playing on the PTR. All I see myself doing is getting to level 70 to collect the transmog unlock and maybe (to a lesser extent), some of the banner stuff. Leaderboard placement isn’t an objective for me because I’ve already opined about how the competitive aspect is a farce with their design and implementation of these challenge modes.
Seasons and Greater Rifts (by extension) are just the usual underwhelming take on content that currently exists (again, this doesn’t surprise me as I mentioned this in previous postings). It’s just that with each PTR patch (and as this actual patch closes in to actual deployment), serves as yet another piece of proof that this content patch is mostly a reuse of existing content with the exception of the new seasonal legendaries (all 10 of them which aren’t even that good to begin with) and legendary gems. I did mention before how this dev team lacks any sense when it comes to whole reward/effort angle and they are proving it yet again.
The bulk of the designers time has probably been spent more on class balance issues related to skill changes, legendary gems, and trying to do that while also balancing Greater Rift scaling (which I also opined about given that this is what Diablo III is being distilled down into). Just to summarize that opinion; Greater Rifts a designer created degenerative sort of play which is where most players will end up playing the game. Even though Greater Rifts aren’t meant to be the place to farm, the current design iteration with Rift Trials (which do not reward anything except some level of Greater Rift key) and using a self-failing type of game play, means that players will just game that whole setup to maximize their loot yield as well as chance to upgrade their legendary gems.
Sure, some of the iterative design changes being made to legendary gems when it comes to upgrading them are meant to give players a reason to push onwards in terms of taking on the “challenge” involved in dealing with higher tiered Greater Rifts. I’m going to state the obvious though; there is a fine line between challenge and masochistic game play when one is at the absolute limits of the numbers associated with their characters gear.
In an infinitely increasing bottomless dungeon design, it is implied that there will NEVER be an easy way for a character to beat that design. You can’t because the upper end has no reasonable bound except on the programming side when it comes to integer storage. All that the designers can do is to appropriately scale the characters numbers to where it allows incrementally higher progression. And that progression has to be in such a way that it isn’t constantly frustrating/punishing. The D3 designers are utilizing legendary gems to accomplish this. There is a point though where it’s going to be ever difficult to progress in the sense where the game play of Greater Rifts doesn’t feel torturously masochistic. The reason is that there is only so much scaling that can be done with legendary gems that can only be equipped in 3 slots.
Then there is the flipside that I mentioned before. The power creep involved with these legendary gems will render the base games difficulty system, obsolete. Once a players character reaches a certain level of power (Greater Rifts wise), their only place where they can continue playing the game with any semblance of challenge, is going to be Greater Rifts. Sure, you can keep adding Torment difficulties beyond 6 but exactly how much. And you then run into the issue of rewards scaling. It’s no difference if the current difficulty curve is re-scaled either which has other problems associated with it (that itself has a huge impact on newly created characters as well as items/skills balancing). See what I mean about designing and creating a system that is doomed to the kind of degenerative and pigeon-holed game play they thought they were being so smart and creative at avoiding. That is what happens when difficulty is based on simple monster health pool and damage increases.
I’ve already given my own take of difficulty scaling as well as having an actual player effectiveness system in place which would allow better dynamic scaling (this would also allow for temporary scaling of healing as the difficulty increases; and that scaling would also take into account player effectiveness – the better their play, the more their healing will scale). But given the track record and design philosophy (which they are lacking a cohesive vision) of this design team, there is absolutely no way they’d be able to properly pull off such a system. And they have yet to prove me wrong in this key area.
The entire competitive angle with both Seasons and Greater Rifts is going to appeal to a relatively small fraction of the player base given the way both have been implemented. The only leaderboard that “impresses” me any are the two hardcore conquests in terms of killing Malthael and the Soul of Evil at max level on Torment VI. And since RNG plays a huge role in terms of luck with drops (along with character death not being an option as opposed to how one can try multiple times on softcore), it’s why these are the only two leaderboards that I even look at.
The reason I have the word impresses in quotes is that gear (subject to layers of RNG) is a huge factor (like I already mentioned how the changes to the Firebird set allows my character to move from effectively farming T4 to T6) as opposed to actual game play skill. Had the games difficulty system and scaling been based more around increased monster abilities (which I’ve also written about before) as opposed to scaling just their health pools and damage output, then and only then would the majority of the leaderboards, have any meaning to me when it comes to looking at them from the competition point of view.
Again, I was remotely hoping that the D3 designers would prove me wrong in these key areas but nope, they proved me wrong in other less important parts of the game. This first “major” content patch is just continued proof of how slow moving the PC D3 designers are, and how unimpressive their designs turn out to be once implemented. It’s pretty much why I’ve stopped playing, why I no longer even log in and read/post feedback on the Battle.net forums, and why my end game has been relegated to making these kind of broken record blog postings (even this, I’m close to ending as it’s all the same things that I’m posting).
I do believe that Seasons will be enough to help tide over that portion of the player base that has remained steadily addicted to playing Diablo III (these folks are easy to spot as they are easily in excess of 3000+ hours played since May 2012) until the second expansion. There really isn’t anything except that persons own freewill to stop playing the game if they’ve managed to put in that much time into a continuous stream of underwhelming design iterations. But I can’t bag on these folks too much either because I used to play Diablo II (especially Lord of Destruction) excessively as well (and that had numerous issues). I do have to say that Diablo III (especially patch 2.0 and onwards including Reaper of Souls) has done a great deal to get rid of that addictive sort of continuous game play for me though.
Prior to Reaper of Souls, even though there were several periods where I stopped playing, there was no way given the amount of hours I had (the majority of it was before Paragon 1.0 was implemented though), that I could have been considered a casual player. There would always be some point where I’d return to play and do some grinding again. At one point, I stopped playing on the US servers and played hardcore on Asia for a few months. Now though, I’m clearly falling into that casual demographic (though I believe it’s going to be more on the super casual end since as mentioned, there’s only a few things I plan to do with Seasonal play).
This 2.1 PTR is the lowest amount of hours I’ve logged in any D3 PTR; as noted earlier, the “new” content is anything but new. The notion of Rifts (whether it be Nephalem or Greater does not make that huge a difference) as THE place to play for the best rewards, is nauseating even on the PTR. And there is a limit to just playing the rest of the game outside of the whole bounty -> rifts -> greater rifts system; part of the fun is getting legendaries (and they don’t drop as often outside of rifts).
Given how they nerfed campaign mode (experience rewarded by certain monsters as well as quests, plus the drop rates were all reduced to deal with game flipping of certain quests), doing seasonal leveling via the story line is unrewarding. Fortunately, they did prove me wrong in the area of having to also unlock Adventure Mode each season (it will always be unlocked so long as those requirements have already been met in the games respective normal or hardcore modes – the same goes for Master and Torment difficulty unlocks). Yes, that means I’ll get sick of having to do bounties/rifts from the get go. The upshot is that I should have a decent supply of rift key fragments where I don’t have to continually do bounties at max level (I am so over trying to get a RoRG that I’m not going to even try). This should give me enough bounties and rifts to unlock some of the banner rewards (whoop-dee-doo but it’s better than nothing) and get some of the easier achievements since I don’t have the intention of grinding for level 70 gear in seasons.
And that leads me to my final gripe; the PC designers are stuck in this mindset of balance and legitimacy; while forgetting this is a VIDEO GAME. It’s meant to not be taken so seriously. Yet that is what it boils down to; making Seasons seem legitimately competitive is serious business (equals PC Diablo III being serious business) as opposed to making these kind of game modes more of the fun sort of competition. ARPG’s will never have that same kind of e-sport competitiveness because the whole RNG angle that is used in these sort of games, can never result in the kind of base balance required to put everyone on equal footing without creating a mundane sort of game play.
That’s why I laugh when people get all excited about how someone hit Paragon 800 or now, 1000. I mean yes, congrats for having the intestinal fortitude to grind that out. But it doesn’t mean anything more than that. It’s even funnier now where many folks use sites like Diablo Progress as a legitimate measuring stick (not everyone plugs their Battletag into that database). Yet there are players within this particular game genre, that are serious about this kind of stuff where they feel it legitimizes their actual skill. Something like StarCraft I can see when it comes to ranking because it requires levels of playing and decision making skills to be in the top echelons; Diablo II, III, and Path of Exile, not even close.
The PC D3 designers have forgotten that fun aspect though. It’s a contextual thing because this is in contrast to some of the design decisions made for the console version of the Ultimate Evil Edition (UEE). The whole “couch co-op” game mode plus the fact that they are allowing offline play has a huge impact on these decisions of course, but the reality is that this is how Diablo III should be period regardless of platform. I almost choked when I watched the following developer Q&A video with Lead Console Designer Jonny Ebbert and Associate Producer Tiffany Wat.
There is a point where Ebbert says that they’ve removed almost all the trading restrictions at around the 54m50s mark (i.e. there is no account binding for obvious reasons; the game play especially with “couch co-op” has to be fast paced). The part where I choked though is when he said they can do this on the console because it has less of a global economy as compared to the PC version. Uhm, the PC version now has no global economy at all with the extensive use of account binding, very restrictive trading of items (2 hour window for players in the same co-op game), and removal of the auction houses. In typical fashion, we went from one extreme to the other. True, if one plays long enough, the potential does exist to find every item in the game. Doesn’t mean that it will good as it may roll poorly. And just because an item is rare, doesn’t mean that it is that much better. But this is the PC D3 design/dev team we are talking about.
Earlier, he also addressed a question about modding/cheats at around the 28m05s mark. Thus I might as well go off on a tangent and talk about offline play. Obviously with any offline mode, there is the loss of control when it comes to hacking and modifying character game files, and they acknowledged that again as such. He did mention they do have some anti-cheat methods in place for public games (this is probably in regards to the ranges of stats on items that will be considered valid) which is on top of whatever encryption that is being used for the saves. Encryption will always be beaten since it cannot be so difficult where it requires an ultra-sophisticated method for the game itself to open them.
Ebbert’s response is unsurprising as they realize it’s impossible to stop hacks/cheats when a game has an offline mode. But that minor aspect also doesn’t detract from their main goal of having the game be fun though. It’s one reason why folks who played the PC version, and then played the PS3 and Xbox 360 version of D3, found the console version refreshingly fun. Sure, it was tuned that way on purpose but this is why I believe the PC side is taking this whole “legitimate” thing way too seriously (when I’ve already opined that games of this genre, are laughably competitive at best – that “legitimacy” is something psychological).
Again, I’ve always been meh on this particular subject matter because this is a hack and slash game where it’s competitive aspect is minor when compared to games that have an actual e-sport following. It’s fine to have anti-cheat mechanisms in place so long as it’s like the above philosophy (but it is clear that this legitimacy issue is a desktop PC sort of thing due to PC gaming having this long history of cheats and hacks).
There are reasons why even Path of Exile game streams with PvP or race events don’t even draw a fraction of the amount of viewership compared to say Hearthstone or higher level SC2 matches. It’s often time not about actual player skill/decision making (though the players like to think otherwise) and furthermore, it’s not very viewer engaging for long periods of time. D3 would have that same issue (more so since characters are even more gear dependent).
Games like Diablo II and Torchlight II have offline modes that have cheats/hacks up the yin-yang. The latter even goes to an extreme and has an actual console command to put the game into god mode. One’s TL2 character does get flagged as such though when using such cheats. Early on with D2, I did try some but eventually steered away from that since what is the purpose when you are just waltzing through the game. The good thing is it allowed you to test things out. But if you have every single item in the game at your disposal and have all maxed stats/gold, there is no reward loop when actually playing the game (because anything that drops is immaterial).
Diablo II of course had several modes including offline play, ability to play those offline characters in multiplayer either via LAN play or Open Battle.net, and finally, the actual closed Battle.net realms (which is pretty much how Diablo III is). Nonetheless, such game play cheating does get boring after awhile where the player either quits playing, or actually plays without resorting to cheats. D2 has loads of hacked items/characters that are usable only in the offline/open realm modes. Offline also offered a side benefit with a ton of game mods (some of them excellent alternatives in their own right which gave the game it’s unparalleled longevity).
Diablo III during it’s design and development in 2011, was going to have an offline single player mode. That eventually changed to being completely online as there was that thing called the Real Money Auction House as well as the less often discussed, DRM to prevent piracy of the game. The dev team did try to use other reasons to justify online only (like players kicking themselves for making a mistake in creating/playing offline when they meant to do it online via the closed realm or that the game was designed to for multiplayer). I personally do not buy these excuses though as they are reasons created to fit the desired message.
They could have easily followed the D2/TL2 model and improved on those by a great deal. The online component could have been easily sold as the preferred method since you’d get an online web profile/armory, online web achievements (which they have yet to implement), and all the social aspects associated with Battle.net 2.0 (not that they are great, but would be better than the offline alternative which is none). Online play would be the only way to earn achievements (this is how SC2 works with its offline mode). Events (like the community buffs) would be online only as well. Offline mode would be just that, sandboxed and lacking any of the perks that come with having your character stored server side.
As mentioned, offline would mean hacked characters but since they are sandboxed from the actual Battle.net servers, it doesn’t really matter. Anyone who wants to be free of that would choose to play a closed character anyway. Having an offline mode is meant for those cases for those folks who have average network connectivity or for those cases where one has none at all (like killing time while flying/traveling).
Others argue that having the game offline as a local binary means that hackers can analyze and try things offline to hack the actual Battle.net servers like for duping item purposes. Even with the current client/server implementation, the server has crashed due to regular game bugs. But those instances have been fairly rare. I don’t know, but with enough server side validation when it comes to items (which I believe they do have in place), this shouldn’t even be an issue.
D1 and D2 had such issues because at least with D1, multiplayer was hacked onto it while with D2, Battle.net 1.0 was somewhat of a hack itself that didn’t have very good security/validation measures in place. It didn’t help that the client was trusted in such cases. As far as I know, the only way items have been duped in D3 was due to the use of account roll backs and also coding bugs (like with the gold auction house gold dupe). Hackers have tried using lag inducing schemes with D3 in the earlier (2012) days to perform item duping without any known level of success (there were some fake videos but that was it).
My point is that cheating/hacking when it comes to hacking offline characters/items, is really more of a curiosity that only a very small number of players, continue engaging in for any lengthy period of time. Most players who actually want to get their monies worth out of a game will eventually gravitate towards playing it without using those cheats. The irony is that D2’s offline mode (and using a mod like PlugY but without any hacked characters/items), is actually one of the more fun ways to play without having to deal with all the bots that are on those closed Battle.net realms.
Even the Gamespot host in the above video (29m10s mark), kind of poked fun at the whole cheating thing given this tactic approval by the console designers that cheating is going to happen; “you can have a little cheat party, get your friends over and sit on the cheat couch, play your cheat games with your cheat snacks… the whole cheat lifestyle”. I’m just surprised he didn’t say that those cheat snacks were “Cheatoes” which would have been the rimshot moment.
But this is all futile trying to argue for an offline mode for the PC version. It’s not going to happen without someone taking the time to recreate the entire engine. And as the Moeege emulation server showed, it wasn’t easy just getting the Falling Star quest to even work as it did (no, it wasn’t an exact 100% emulation; it just allowed getting a feel for how characters would play as most things did not function correctly). Thus even an emulation server (100% true to some patch version) is something that realistically isn’t going to happen.
With that said, some folks were trying to extract all the server side files from the Xbox 360 of D3 to help with a more updated version of the emulator. But since the 360 is PowerPC based, all it’s executables are thus PPC (and the decompiled assembly is thus PPC). Thus there is just a lot of work involved just to extract information and get it all into a format for x86.
There might be more folks taking an interest in the PS4 version of the UEE though since the hardware is x86 based with the operating system being FreeBSD based (the frameworks and actual heavy lifting above the kernel are probably all very proprietary code though like what Apple does with OS X). Some folks are working on such a PS4 emulator and getting useful information. But just because it’s x86 based doesn’t mean that creating an actual working emulator will be easy (as it’s the proprietary stuff that comprises the rest of the PS4 operating system that will take awhile to reverse engineer). Same goes for the Xbox One (also x86 based and utilizing a Windows kernel). Then once at that level, such projects tend to have issues with DMCA takedown notices for most repositories.
But the people interested in creating a D3 emulation server are going to be more interested in the actual engine of the PS4 version (probably the Xbox One as well) of the UEE as opposed to the underlying emulation (just the information as to how things work might prove to be useful). Regardless, something like this isn’t going to happen anytime soon/likely not at all. Thus it’s probably easier to just play the game on a PS4/Xbox One if one is really interested in an actual offline mode. Sure, it’s not on the PC, but the reality is that the line/distinction between PC and console gaming is blurring and the constant in-fighting between both camps of gamers is one that is primarily in those folks heads. One is mainly keyboard/mouse while the other primarily controller (the irony being of course that many PC gamers want controller support). It is no different with game designers who buy into these sort of distinctions either. Myself, I no longer really care about this aspect (offline mode) since my overall interest in Diablo III is rapidly falling as it is.
To bring this back on topic though, patch 2.1 will more than likely bring players who haven’t played for several months now, back to the game. But I firmly believe that they also won’t be sticking around that long once they realize that the reasons why they stopped playing again, weren’t really addressed in this patch. The RNG issues are still there and will be magnified again for some playing Seasons. The mind numbing repetitiveness of certain rift maps will come to the forefront in both seasonal play and Greater Rifts. Some returning players will find the need to delete at least one character to even play Seasons, and will find the so called rewards associated with seasonal play, anything but that.
So yes, I’d like to be proven wrong on patch 2.1 in terms of its ability to make Diablo III Reaper of Souls, live up to its full potential where the game has that fun replayability (yes, I know this isn’t an actual word but it’s still fun to use to rile the dictionary purists up) in the gaming sense when it comes to the differing options. What will be telling is whether it can serve as the base foundation for at least one more future content patch to hold the game over until the next expansion without losing more players in the process. Judging by how quickly I dropped off of Reaper of Souls (faster than even I expected), I kind of doubt this patch has that kind of legs. Quoting Tyrael (yet again), time will tell.
