Definitely. It’s based on my personal experience interacting with ARPG communities since D2, over 20 years ago. So obviously it’s subjective and might be wrong. But over all those years a trend does emerge rather accurately.
This was even more surprising to me on my last such interaction (before LE) which was the clan in PoE, because I was expecting it to be more biased towards hardcore grinders and min-maxers, but that turned out not to be the case either. Even in a clan most players were casuals and didn’t bother getting BiS gear. Most didn’t even care about corrupted gear.
I never accused you of anything.
I agree that you shouldn’t alienate the current active population. But you also shouldn’t make changes that alienate the casual players, since they’re the biggest source of potential active players.
As for what we were discussing initially, which was boosting CoF drops so you could have similar gear progression rate as MG, there have been plenty of posts in the past few months about drop rates (regarding CoF or not) and plenty of players that are happy with the current difficulty and that will leave if it becomes too easy.
Much like there will be players that will like it if it becomes too easy.
Wherever you draw the line, some players will leave and some will stay.
So, ultimately, it’s up to EHG to decide which players they want to appeal to.
See, that’s why I picked out those “we, the vast majority this” and “you, minority that” claims out of your posts. They pollute your posts, which I otherwise mostly agree with. We have the same background, but I refuse to speak for people outside my bubble anymore.
We have a tendency to cling to similar-minded people which leads to the illusion of everyone else thinking the same by fading out people outside this echo chamber.
I cannot contest that most players don’t finish act 9, but I can contest the relevance of this metric. How about counting player groups by hours played? If a minmaxer has played 500 hours that’s the same ingame time of 50 casuals that dropped the game after 10 hours. And if you measure like this, I’d be truly interested, how high the percentage of those casuals really is - of course only EHG would know.
So the question has changed from COF or MG to whether we should pay more attention to all players, including casual players, or core players?
I would like to say that D4 has received a lot of negative reviews in the past year because it has not designed the game experience for core players. I can even conclude that the developers themselves are casual players, so they always ignore the end-game experience of the game. After reluctantly moving closer to D3 step by step, the number of online players in the game has recovered significantly.
CoF did not indicate to players at the beginning that this choice is suitable for players who constantly try various builds at low corruption levels. Instead, it seems to be the first choice for players who like to keep farming.
Even if we take a step back, a good balance design should at least make the number of players in the two camps almost equal - but now in the game, I often encounter situations where everyone around me is MG and I am the only CoF (haha, in my area, almost all players are what you call minmaxers, if I understand correctly. And there are definitely a lot of players in this area). There is no doubt that COF needs to be strengthened, and the new version update also proves this, but I think it is probably not enough.
Well moving closer to D3 sounds like a negative here. Maybe that’s still up from where D4 was, but from an LE pov that would be bad.
I can only reiterate what’s been said already, maybe in a different thread:
If you want to be somehow competitive or match the progress of your friends, you need to go MG. CoF cannot ever match that speed of progression. Think of it as SSF with a plus.
But as a CoF player I am grateful for this plus and I don’t want to be done with the game as fast as with D3.
As I said before, no matter how many reasons there are, when the number of people in the two camps is really seriously unbalanced, it is difficult to think that this is a correct design.
And when I play the game, every day there are new players asking which camp to choose, and most of the answers are MG, while only a small number of CoF supporters say that the two are different:)
I have always been in CoF. Yes, you can say that if you want to become stronger, go to MG, but this also defaults to CoF as a synonym for lack of competitiveness. I don’t think this is the original intention of the designer.
Finally, I want to say that the fatal flaw of CoF is that too many equipments are completely unusable by oneself. The fundamental reason is that a character can farm too many things that do not belong to his profession, and the complex profession and affix design makes it difficult to grasp the value of all equipment even if you play for hundreds of hours. At the same time, there is no way to handle these equipment unless you play four or five characters at the same time. Since the original intention of CoF is to avoid trading with others like MG, it is better to reduce the drop rate of unusable equipments.
In addition, D3 is not a game that can be completed quickly. You think it is fast because it has been more than ten years since the game came out. I persisted until the end of the first few seasons of D3. In the following days, players continued to complain about D3 in various ways, but after playing various other competing products over the years, I found that D3 is still the most reasonably designed Diablo-like game so far.
That isn’t necessary and I don’t think it was the intention of EHG to have an equal share of players in both. If so, that was kinda naive. People default to trade for the reasons you listed. I strongly doubt PoE has the same amount of players in SSF as in trade league.
I don’t want that. I already dislike that I only get a fraction of class specific gear for other classes, I want to collect everything to make alts.
Ok, so this makes you arguing on behalf of the best iteration of D3, which was during those early seasons, I’d say it peaked around season 4.
You haven’t witnessed the countless “content” additions that came after that:
stronger legendaries
even stronger legendaries
set bonuses going from 500% to 20,000% damage
I don’t know when exactly I last played it, but believe me, my char was done over the weekend. BiS in every slot, GR whatever to unlock everything. The only thing left to do was finding the exact same BiS items again with slightly better rolls. Oh and paragon I guess… zZzzzz
Also, with those power creep patches, they invalidated their own content. D3 used to have pinnacle bosses when you played (those uber fights in town that gave the Hellfire amulets). Beating those was a relevant endgame chase in early seasons. Due to the aforementioned power creep that was completely invalidated for they became pushovers.
Yes, of course I mean the state of this game at its peak, because as far as I know, there are few online games that can maintain its reputation for five years or even longer - the only example is made by Blizzard itself, but we all know that Blizzard is no longer the the way it was.
Obviously, the depth of Diablo-like games cannot be compared with MMORPGs at present, so I don’t have too many expectations for the state of such games many years after release. For example, the current peak number of online users of LE is only 3,000 . I hope that after the new season it can reach more than five times the current level.
I know you and others have discussed before which group of players are the majority, but I have to say that players who want to collect equipment for all classes must be a minority…
The intention of the devs was to implement a system where people that don’t like/can’t trade don’t get screwed over, like they do in PoE. It’s not meant to be equivalent.
In PoE, if you don’t want to trade or you want to play SSF, you’re basically screwed because you have the base drop rates of everyone else but you don’t get the benefits of using the market.
In LE, you have an alternative that will give you better loot than the base. That’s all. It’s not meant to give you guaranteed BiS gear in a few days if you grind it like you get in MG. Nor do many players want that.
It was always too fast. Even early on (I played until S5 and then returned at S19(?)), you got to max level in less than a day and you got all your gear in 1-2 days. After that, you just min-maxxed. And that’s fine, because D3 was clearly targetted at casual players.
But LE isn’t, so I hope they never go down that route.
I don’t know what you mean by reputation in this context, but there are plenty of online games that are still at the top year after year, like PoE, CoD, CS (both 1 and 2), PUBG, Minecraft, LoL, Fortnite, etc.
I honestly don’t know how the division falls, but I don’t think it’s important, because EHG devs are almost certainly altoholics which collect gear for other classes. And this is because pretty much everything in LE is designed to incentivize you to make new characters.
Would you ignore any other drop you wanted because you’re farming for a specific piece? Ultimately, that is why some people prefer a drop-based item acquisition method over an AH one.
But it probably will, eventually.
Sorry, weren’t you just saying that you wanted to significantly shorten the CoF acquisition grind?
I did not say shorten, I said make it POSSIBLE. Even if you play 16 hours a day, each day, for the entirety of the league in current COF you will be like 99.99995% away from your BiS gear.
Uncertain about return after reading patchnotes, massive nerfs along the board, slower leveling. Unclear what are the new uniques, even more unclear which builds are playable.
Hyperbole makes comments so impactful, 'cause that’s quite clearly a big steaming pile of shite. Could you perchance come back when your posts aren’t something liek “OMGZorz, teh gaemzes iz soa hrad ahm n0t gaeting mah bezt en zlots gaer w1t|-|in teh h0ur!”
Funnily enough, it’s been shown that not being able to carry a conversation without using pejoratives is usually a sign of lower intellectual capabilities.
