Suggest: Recreate world button

Hi blizzard and company,

I want to thanks you the recent sincere, transparent and detailed info provided at Diablo II: Resurrected Outages: An explanation, how we’ve been working on it, and how we’re moving forward that is the kind of information i was really specting from the begining and i really appreciate it and i hope you keep doining it that way from now.

Now i want to share with you some ideas i suggestions i have, because thought, from the begining, that all that problems comes, in mayority, from game creation and destroy issue from the beggining and now you confirmed that in your post. Thats why a want to share some ideas to deal with game creation flood without impacting players experiencie or, in the best case, even improve it from original.

Premises:

  1. The mayority of fast game creation and destruction (< 1 minute) comes from solo player farming. You know the meta. Create a game, kill a mob (pindlesky for example) leave the game and create another one.

  2. The reason people leave and create fast games over and over is, most time, to respawn enemies

  3. To share a game in a public list, or for a friend to join in private, the generated world and its state must be persisted in server side

  4. you (and also me) do not want to change the meta of the game so much, you only considere implement a feature for something there is already a workarround for achieving it originally

Following ideas can be implemented alone but also combined for a biggest impact on performance.

Idea 1:

Develop a recreate world feature and put a button in the UI near to exit game lets say “Recreate World”. This button will:
a. Show a loading screen
b. Send your character to current act spawn point
c. Erase any item in the floor
d. recreate zones and mobs

The idea is that this button cause same effect as create a new game but reusing the current game avoiding creating a new one letting a ghost game behind it witch the server have to deal with and destroy

Considerations:

  • This feature can be implemented, initially, in online solo games, in the future can be a vote recreate world feature for multiplayers games but, premise one, focusing in solo farming games will have the biggest impact right now

  • This feature can be scalated into a more complex solution where you split the world into a self handled zones (Like you actually do in world of warcraft). This way you can track visited and non visited zones in a game to reload only those areas during the world recreation process. increasing server performance and resources usage

  • This will also improve user experience without breaking the original meta. Premise 4, develop a new feature that do the same that you originally could do at diablo II in some way. Recreate de world by a button instead of leave and create new game.

Idea 2:

Based on premise 3, i think that if you do not have to share a game with others, it is never listed in public list and it is not accesible for others and also you can not leave and join again there is no reason to persis and storage the game once it is served to the client.

If this is true, you can implement an online solo game mode creation for those who create and destroy games alone (99% players 99% of time i think).

The only one handicap with that kind of games is that if you die you could not leave the game an rejoin to get your body back. And thats why i suggest a way to present a loading screen, respawn at current act spawn point with your body at your feets, loosing the experience the same way that if you leave and rejoin the game, but fakering it.

You may ask: What are going to motivate people to create this kind of online solo games? maybe you can implement the feature one (Instant world recreation) only for those kind of games :wink: .

I hope you find this post interesting and considere my ideas. I would really thanks a blue reply if you find this information util.

Kinds regards.

3 Likes

Wow, thx for the link to this post, i had a very similar idea.

but i think the map reset would be more comfortable if killing a boss (andariel, duriel, mephisto, diablo, baal) would be the trigger to reset all acts of the game which dont have any active players in it.

A button to recreate the world would be a huge advantage for farming pindle/eldritch even faster: Kill, press button, go to pindle and do it again. i think players should be pushed to do more content of the game.

I know that i need less than a minute for one complete mephisto run (including loading times), but currently im killing all bosses except duriel before restarting the game because its more fun than doing the same thing over and over again.

So i add a timer: You can only create one game per minute (or 5 minutes). And i would offer the reset by killing a major boss. So farming iss till possible but players will do mephisto/pindle all the time instead of pindle only. Due to the timer, waiting is not an option at all.