Amazing. I actually agree with everything in a Shrukn post.
(except I care very much about MP)
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I played GD with some friends and it was cool, but that doesn’t really require it and the random community pool is mostly people farming high end Crucible. Needless to say, not the best example of strong ARPG MP.
PoE, on the other hand… I think the last time I joined randoms for anything was back before the reworked the campaign and people still did Dried Lake runs to level up. That game’s MP is basically its “trade” system, which amounts to spam whisper 100 people to get 3 replies and 1 party invite, join his hideout, do the trade without saying a word, and leave with someone occasionally saying something like “thx” or “tft” at most.
Lack of player instanced loot like D3 and Wolcen did is a huge part of this, but so is unshared progress, “rogue-like” nonsense, and most builds playing at wildly differing speeds. Where D3 messed up trade in one extreme, PoE did it in the opposite (and it’s equally as much a fk up).
I would love an ARPG to nail both MP and trade, but I honestly don’t expect it to happen. That’s not a knock against EHG either; it’s just a monumental thing to ask.
Looking back now (as I was playing PoE/D3 at the same time) I only started loathing MP due to how it is handled in PoE. I am keen to see it good again in a more relaxed setting, theres a lot of interesting skills in LE which will work for Allies and you could even have character just for MP for example
This and Ledge runs were my best memories of POE. Meeting random strangers. Talking BS while grinding some xp and hoping for some sweet loot drops. It’s a simple but really good MP experience. I really hope LE can deliver that feeling again. And maybe even one up it.
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Hm… its very interesting how this topic turned into a discussion about if MP can be called a “core” concept or not. The wording is a absolutely not relevant. It’s a feature EHG mentioned right from the start of the KS and is present on all their advertising sources. This is because they know that it will be a selling point for a relatively huge part of the future player base.
If they get it done right they cannot only satisfy the SP community that already is in a good mood. They can - on top - get MP and coop enthusiasts into their game.
So call it a core system or not, doesn’t change the fact that it’s going to be a make or break topic for many people. I’ll bet money that with the drop of the MP patch player numbers will explode in relation to the current numbers.
And that’s the reason why EHG is hesitating to implement it too early. I get that. I just don’t get the silence about the topic.
EHG already admitted in the past that they were to short on the topic for a long period. They promised to do better. If this wasn’t the case, I would not be that annoying regarding the topic.
If they had said “We cannot talk about MP for [REASONS]…” I’d shut up.
But as I quoted in my very first post in this thread, they promised better infos. And here we are reminding them of that promise since the last info is about 5 months old.
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Exactly this, exactly this 
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What makes you think it’s not?
He’s not talking about MP specifically, his comment could just as equally be applied to SP. EHG don’t want LE to go down the zoom zoom rabbit hole that PoE has.
Also, @AndrewTilley has typed out all of the streams which are then easier to search.
Except PoE does have instanced loot, if you select the option for it. GGG seem to have D2 put on such a massive pedestal (take care @EHG_Mike) that they seem to want to keep all of the “bad” things from it, double down on them & then say “#### you!” to all of the changes and improvements that the genre has seen over the past 2 decades.
But it does have instanced loot.
I suspect that shared progress can be difficult in a game that would allow players with different game-states (quest progress) to join each other’s games. And I imagine that the RNG of a monolith web would only add to this.
Yeah, that ####'s likely a non-trivial thing to get “right” (even assume there was only one version of “right”, which there isn’t).
You might be, but there’s be plenty of other people who wouldn’t & they’d pop into game or discord & say “MP when?” or “Gib Rogue MP” every day for a year or so…
Well, they already do… It would just be worse, lol.
I take comfort in the fact that it can always be worse.
The best MP system in aRPG genre is in D3. Where MP really matters and you need to have skills to be able to do higher GRs, where party members depend on the skills of their party mates (I’m not talking fast GR 120 runs but 140+ GR of course). Not a meaningless one in PoE where you just kill stuff faster and faster 2 screens away and clicking on the ground to pick up the loot.
If MP in LE would be like in D3 I would be happy.
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Yes, but it also didn’t have anything which had a “quest state”, or anything like the monolith web/PoE’s maps. D3’s MP was significantly simpler which allowed them to focus on just getting players into a rift killing stuff without having to worry about whether completing that rift would give a specific reward (in LE’s manner), give enough stability to unlock a quest echo (or maybe it would be a quest echo & allow you to unlock the next monolith), or unlock more monoliths on the web.
What happens to the players who aren’t the party leader & their monolith web is significantly more complicated in LE than it was in D3.
This is why while I am happy that there is complexity in LE’s endgame system, I am concerned whether they will run into the same POE issues.
To be fair, considering the game’s release has been pushed back anyway, what does it matter WHEN MP is released? As long as we have enough time to play and test it, and EHG has enough time to fix the bugs before beta or launch, does it really matter that much whether it comes out next month or next year?
The game is in early access and is still missing a bunch of features. I don’t necessarily think the remaining classes or endgame systems are more important than multiplayer, but I don’t see why any of them in particular should be prioritized over the other. They are all pretty important. I came on board just last year, but I’ve been waiting for the Falconer since I go the game. If it takes another year for that class to come out and MP comes out 5 months from now, I suppose I won’t be terribly upset even though that’s a lot of the reason I bought the game. I guess I’m not sure if the reverse is true for people who really want MP.
As for communication, this seems to be the impasse that every dev team and community comes to: do we want progress updates even when nothing major is happening, or would we rather only hear news when there is a big step forward? Because it’s entirely possible that we haven’t heard anything simply because most of the work over the past few months has been the boring, non-sexy groundwork that, while important, will not be completed any time soon.
Jmo
Yeah. That brings me back to one of my first suggedtions: Make the MP status more obvious/visible/accessible.
wow I missed a lot, love the passion with which everyone cares about the topic, hopefully it doesn’t get personal…
As for myself, I seem to be giving the impression that I want to rush the devs into releasing something not “ready” - it’s not that at all. There’s nothing I want more than for this game to succeed on ALL levels and I want nothing but success for these devs.
Because of that, I feel the need to point out something that strikes me as inefficient in the development process. Of course I don’t know the inner workings of the company, so that’s where more communication would be helpful. But from the outside view, all I can see is that many months of very hard work were put into releasing another patch that was focused on endgame systems that will very likely need to be re-done again for multiplayer, as well as other niceties like UI improvements, etc. Now perhaps there are enough company resources that a core MP team is always at work independent of the regular patches, but that’s a little hard for me to believe. And again, something as big as the endgame is clearly going to be impacted heavily by multiplayer.
So to be clear, when I say “focus on multiplayer” - that inherently includes things like optimization which everyone seems to complain about. If the next patch was nothing but optimizations - especially if they were specifically targeted to help MP performance - I would be fine with that.
Back to my OP, for the good of the game’s longterm development, I would like to see that a focus is placed on MP asap. I don’t care if it takes a longer time to get to the next patch because of this, but personally I think it’s more important to get MP in the mix so that other systems don’t have to be changed and refined without MP already in place.
As much as I want to have a multiplayer version of this game up and running, I don’t want it to come at an expence. In other words, I’m willing to wait for a solid mp experience, tested and bugs fixed, than for them to rush out a garbage product. This game is shaping up to be really, really good, and let’s not force something to happen too soon.
you bring up an interesting point, which reminded me of how unbalanced some things were back in the early days of wow pvp. There were some drastiacally messed up stuff that could have been game breaking, and then the pendulam swung way too far the other way, and it felt like forever before they put out something reasonable. It would be in the game’s best interest to see how different specs meshed with each other so those issues could be taken care of in a timely manner.
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I think there’s a misunderstanding about what’s possible in development environments – the changes they’ve made to single player absolutely will affect multiplayer. But, all of these systems and such that they’re implementing aren’t going to need an entire overhaul in multiplayer from a code perspective – for balance issues etc, maybe – but that’s just twiddling with numbers or creating new systems specific to multiplayer itself. You can absolutely have a team working asynchronously on multiplayer, while another team is working on UI updates, end game systems, etc.
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Like having an automated daily post that says “still no new news about multiplayer”, or something?
Daily might be a bit excessive, but I agree it wouldn’t hurt for them to just update a sticky at the top of the forum once every week or two to just say, “Hey, we’re working on this right now,” or even, “Still working on existing projects, nothing new going on yet.” While it doesn’t actually matter much to the development of the game, it might help some people to have some notion of what’s going on.
Then again…
They might just be accused of spamming copy/paste messages to offer a placebo for their very vocal and impatient section of the player base. Sometimes there really is no winning, lol.