Well, I got disconnected and am stuck on the “character is already in a game” for upto 24 hours so thought I might as well post this.
Realistically, assuming bugs etc will be fixed, my only real improvement requests in the game would be:
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The ability to switch character without leaving and recreating a game, just re-appear in town on the other character in the act they were last in. I think this will solve a lot of problems, including a lot of pointless game creation on the servers. Looking through my mules at the moment can take over half an hour, if the cooldown wasn’t there it would still take a while and be more awkward than it needs to be. EDIT: Oh and delete any TPs when you switch to stop you giving yourself waypoints.
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Show unique / set drops on the map. This is more to eliviate the constant terror I feel that my merc / skills have killed something just off-screen that is incredibly rare and I don’t notice haha. Gotten spoiled by D3.
Only issue I see with character switching in game is using a higher level character to mostly clear/mostly kill a boss for lower character. If they do this they must make quest not able to be completed if a character who has completed the quest gets swapped to during an in progress game or the character you are switching to must not have completed the quest that have not yet been completed by the creating character.
As far as the loot drops, bad idea. This was fine when you had personal loot drops but because of how D2 drops work don’t think this is appropriate and gives players an edge. Imagine low level loot ninja on faster run walk/faster cast teleport ninjaing loot from 2-3 screen away… ya… nope.
Thanks for the insight, hadn’t thought about some of that.
As the character switching is mostly to make mules less of a pain and lift what I assume to be a large unnecessary load on the servers, maybe being able to access other character’s stashes is a viable alternative. But I expect that to be a more difficult/complex change. My idea for switching would be implemented as:
- Flag game as “switching”, meaning it won’t be deleted immediately (~30sec maybe?)
- Follow same process as joining a game normally, just access the character selection screen while still in a game. Should be very little code change here in theory.
Maybe keep shared drops but only show on the map if it came from something you killed? That should be pretty easy to implement as I believe the distinction is already made during the merc MF calculation, so the game already identifies who killed what when things die. I don’t really care too much about this one tbh, my paranoia makes me check anyway.
I like the idea of items being flagged based on who caused the drop. I posted a suggestion regarding a holy grail quest system and having items track who caused the drop for the purpose of a “self-found” completion tree.