Recently hit one of the class topics of “players 8” command to be implemented in private online games. Classic responses types like “just play in lobbies” or “this will ruin the game” or even more classic “go away youngling leave my game alone”. But what I do not understand as an ex-gamdev is what is the actual problem of implementation. No, no… not because I DON’T undestand, I just REFUSE to understand that standpoint and why exactly Blizzard never cared to implement it, because I can give you a whole line-up of what it could benefit for both hosted and private games.
Benefits:
- Hosted games would be cleaned up from us, MF’ers, that just keep infesting trading games or any random lobby where people playing casually and forgot to set up a password or just really trying to find friends to play with for their progress just to be ruined for this run. We MF’ers would mostly now stick to private hosted games and for better results (explained below) will still go public for cow/baal runs where needed.
- Bots lobbies would diminish efficiency drastically (yeah, accept reality Blizzard) as people will tend more to play either in legit run lobbies or private players boosted games.
- Doesn’t not affect PVP at all, if not discovering it more due to more clearer list of games, which is also important, because PVPers are just screaming for help with “D U E L S” hosted game names.
- Expanded endgame an trading cycle (explaied below) for every next character you attempt to build.
Now to the part of how do you exactly achieve it
- Players loot scaling in private game would have a diminished returns: the MF curve at private P8 game should be reduced to approximate results of P5-6 of what you can get in a hosted P8 game. This will still keep the incentive to play in hosted games (like do Cows or split MF) and while some MFers will still keep infesting some hosted P8 games (check final notes), this will create a better and more healthy curve for both looting, especially for ladder resets.
- Players XP scaling private games should be kept the same: the more and better gear you have, the more benefits you should get from that improvement and experience is not any sort of currency in this game besides boosting by any means (lets not forget the 10-lvl diff mechanics fall-off) and maybe min/maxing sklls at 99 for top output. This will also give you a nice backbone in case when there is literally no public games with big player numbers, because you decided to play at 4AM in local time and everyone is asleep but bots.
- Ladder resets: while this might sound weird, but it will create a more linear way to compete for those who still fight for that top 10 spot today. Because of private games having players boost you can also have a proper way to get your char better not depending on the fact of how many players are currently in lobbies, because you came home late from work and nobody is doing P8 runs anymore.
Final notes with some reality checks:
- Lets be honest with ourselves and admit that 90% of P8 lobbies that people run are bot lobbies. Yeah, not news. Doing the thing above would ruin that at a bit, for good.
- For “loot overwhelming” in question aka “8 people getting P8 loot, or one player getting P8 loot each” - the answer is no. Lets be clear on that only high-end (and idiotic Mosaic-like builds) have power to clear P8 setup time-wise, so what is implied here is that you need to gear and min/max your character to make that happen to run private P8 games with P5-6 output for loot (explained above). People would still want to run cows at full-scale P8 and they will gather up in hosted games as they did before. People will still have to trade things at approximately the same exactly rate. Not like you gonna get 100 sojs in one day just because you run a P5-6 like private game, lets be real with that one.
- Leveling will only improve and nobody cares what level you are, besides the fact you can start getting those shiny rare gloves/circlets/rings/ammys with +2 fancy 20%IAS stuff and etc. Nothing is going to really change on that one as its still tied to your magic find.
- We’ll see less sorcs in public games and more of other classes (joke ofc, no offense to dear sorcs)
Thanks.