Can we get a /players 6 command?
" While I can't speak for the OP, I do think that his main point was his finishing line: "It provided more challenge and rewards for those who wanted." " Playing with multiple people is not an intended way to make the game more challenging. The reason it scales for more players is simply because if it didn't the game would be utterly ridiculously easy if you were playing with other people. I always hated the fact that you could not use that command in d2 ladder. " It's not just a tangent, it's the whole foundation. A party-simulation command is exactly the same as choosing difficulity levels (when not in a full party). There is no reason why higher difficulity shouldn't give more reward. Infact that is exactly what it should do. " Repetition due to lack of content is exactly what the current "difficulity settings" are. It's not needless because it saves alot of developer time (16 different acts vs 4 acts used 4 times), why would that be any different just because you can choose difficulity at will? Last edited by Sickness#1007 on Jan 20, 2012, 11:57:52 PM
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"It provided more challenge and rewards for those who wanted."
Yes, because it simulated the boosted difficulty (challenge) and the boosted loot/xp (rewards) of a party for those who wanted it... In a single-player environment. These levels of difficulty scaling are independent of the actual difficulties, although they stack. "Ok, I misstated my thought. If you want the extra difficulty that comes from having more players, you're intended to play in a party. The /players x command was made for the purpose of simulating that extra difficulty, not for changing the overall difficulty level of the game. There were play-throughs for that, from which you can select after you've played through them with that character (just like in PoE). So, you actually can select your difficulty, in a fashion. Still, this isn't the type of game in which you pick a difficulty and play through the entire game on it. "Repeating the same content as difficulty levels is the system in use because it worked in other games. The devs didn't make the content and then say "Oh crap, we'll have to repeat this to make a full game." They decided on this difficulty model early in the game's design, most likely before they even mapped out the 3 acts. They're meant to be difficulties. The enemy stats curve upwards in a way that supports this (although it's not properly balanced yet). In a selectable difficulty setting, enemy progression would be linearly comparable to character progression because difficulty would be decided by means other than play-through number. Simulating party difficulty is very different from selectable difficulties. With party simulation: 1-6 members in Normal 1-6 members in Cruel 1-6 members in Ruthless 1-6 members in Merciless There are 24 levels of scaling. Enemies become more difficult based on play-through. With 4 difficulty selections (comparable to the current 4), but retaining 4 play-throughs that don't have upward difficulty curves, since they're only play-throughs and not difficulties: 1-6 members in Normal 1 1-6 members in Normal 2 1-6 members in Normal 3 1-6 members in Normal 4 1-6 members in Medium 1 1-6 members in Medium 2 1-6 members in Medium 3 1-6 members in Medium 4 1-6 members in Hard 1 1-6 members in Hard 2 1-6 members in Hard 3 1-6 members in Hard 4 1-6 members in Insane 1 1-6 members in Insane 2 1-6 members in Insane 3 1-6 members in Insane 4 There are 96 possible setups, but only 24 levels of scaling. It's a ridiculous system. Character levels become arbitrary due to linear scaling. The cap of 100 is meaningless because the game didn't get progressively harder as you advanced unless you manually changed the difficulty. The other option would be to have play-throughs scale as difficulties as well as having selectable difficulties, which is even more ridiculous due to overly-complicated redundancy. That's without the extra complexity of party-induced boosts. Closed Beta/Alpha Tester back after a 10-year hiatus.
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" This is already a mechanic in the current system. I didn't know of it until I spent a couple hours in the default league, but the term "chaos leecher" should ring a bell. "/players X" would reduce the hassle of involving extra accounts (open beta) or leechers (current). | |
"So... Just add a cheat function because people are going to cheat/exploit anyway? That's a terrible philosophy. A better idea is to prevent the exploit you mention. Closed Beta/Alpha Tester back after a 10-year hiatus. First in the credits! Last edited by WhiteBoy#6717 on Jan 21, 2012, 2:18:33 AM
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While I have already stated that Diablo 2 did not have this ability for mainstream multiplayer use, I didn't share my own opinion about whether this could be OK to introduce or not.
Overall, I don't care much either way. Especially considering that it's a free game, it seems a bit hard to enforce people not using proxies or something to simulate multiple players (assuming a 1-IP-address-per-account rule was also enforced), which would just be a big hassle to everyone, and give some people more of an advantage than others (the people who either have different internet lines, or know how to use proxies for it and such). But something to point out: how would the /players command work in instances where other people could freely join the instance? Right now if any player WAS in a party, they could still join the instances that exist for their OLD party, even if they aren't in it any more. If that gets changed, there would still be the issue of cutthroat, where that functionality is intentional. Would /players just not be useable at all in cutthroat? When you have more than one person in a group, there could be disagreement to the number of players — there's no hosts like diablo 2 had, and even if there were, it wouldn't be fair in my opinion. Fresh cakes for all occasions.
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I used this command a lot in Diablo 2 (mostly played solo offline, occasionally with friends on LAN). I basically used it firstly so characters would end up more prepared for Hell difficulty when they hit it, rather than ending up underleveled and needing to grind a bit, and secondly because it makes leveling a bit quicker at the start. After years playing and god knows how many unfinished characters, the start of the game really does need that boost. :P
I'd be absolutely fine with it not being in the game, just as I've been fine with it not being in other games; mostly because it's not needed as long as balance isn't too wonky. Having said that, I disagree with pretty much every objection Whiteboy has put forth here. If it was in I'd probably use it on some characters - it tended to be something I either have on all the time for a character, or not at all - and I don't see what difference that would make to anyone. "As a "minimum" difficulty; if you set /players 4 playing solo, and four other people join, the scaling difficulty goes up to 5 as it would normally. "Why are you grouping with people you can't cooperate with? |
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" How is ANY of that cheating? And just to be clear the Diablo II /players X command WAS NOT A CHEAT. Its was introduced in the 1.09 patch of Diablo II From the Patch notes: Typing "players X", where X is a number between the current number of players and the maximum (8), in the message box will now set the effective number of players in the game in single player, open Battle.net and TCP/IP games only). Still sane exile? Last edited by Skizo#3308 on Jan 21, 2012, 6:06:34 AM
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A few words on the entire "its too easy, no its to hard" discussion.
This issue is fundamental to how most of PoE's game mechanics work. First of all a lot of damage added mods are multiplicatively - which means that when you stack them, they very quickly get out of hand. This plays right into the min/max mind set that people have. Secondly you have a high variety of items, there is gigantic leap from the worst items to the "best". Now if you combine these two things, and think about it for a minute, you will realize this: A player (joe noob) plays this game and does not understand the passive tree at all, and knows nothing about items. He will build a character that has little killing power and survivability. Another player (joe ihafnolajf) knows the passive tree inside out, he has tons of items and is good at trading, he will build a character that has tons of killing power and is almost immortal. The gap between these two players is gargantuan. And here comes the problem, do you balance it so that job noob can get through merciless? or do you balance it so that joe ihafnolajf is challanged even in the end game? I you do the first, joe ihafnolajf will have no challenge whatsoever. If you do the latter, a lot of people will struggle and will give up on the game (it will be to hard for them). All of this does not even account for the time factor - as time goes people will get better and better at min/maxing the passive tree and items - again boosting killing speed and survivability (making the game even easier for some). Still sane exile?
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This seems like a fairly large tangent, but anyway:
"But one reason the split/repeat difficulty thing is successful (well, let's say "used" at least, everyone can argue what success here would mean) is that it overcomes this problem. New players get to beat the game, because Normal difficulty is always built as a "any build can do this" section. Expert players can do Normal difficulty with much less, well, difficulty, and move on to something more challenging. Joe Noob won't have to give up from difficulty alone until he's at least beaten the game once, and by that time, he'll probably have enough of an idea to have a solid shot at at least the next difficulty. So if you choose the "make the hard difficulty hard for good players" route, which I absolutely would recommend, the only concern is that people who aren't good at the game and yet feel entitled to beat the hardest difficulty, won't be able to do that. I don't see the problem; that's a pretty unreasonable attitude this hypothetical person has. This would be an issue if it was a normal, one-trip-through game, and we were just talking about each new stage being harder than the last, because then not being good enough means you actually miss stuff. That's the kind of thing that makes me enable god mode for one level if I'm really stuck. But here, the only thing you can miss is stuff you've already seen and already done. The set of people who have both the desire to play the same character through the same quest four times, and yet don't have the learning capacity to actually achieve that, is going to be really quite small. |
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" You didn't understand me. THE GAME DOES NOT BECOME MORE DIFFICULT WHEN YOU ARE IN A PARTY. Monster stats does not increase with +100% for each extra player. The only reason there is scaling is because without it the player side would overpower the mobs so much that it would always be utterly trivial to play when you are in a party. " Explain to me the difference of making something more difficult vs... making things more difficult. Sigh... " What? " Why not? It fits PERFECTLY in this type of game. It would solve alot of problems. " No they didn't say that, but that doesn't mean the point of the "difficulties" is content. It's easy to see the benefits of doing so before you start making any content at all. " Sure. But it's still a really bad way of handling difficulties. It leads to this: If I want a challenge I am first forced to play through the easymodes and get bored. If I don't want a challenge the game ends for me at low level. Both of those are bad, but it's SO easy to avoid it. " According to many, normal is the hardest difficulty:) " There is no logical reason for why that would have to be true. " There is nothing ridiculus or overly-complicated redundant about that. It's infact simple and extremely beneficial to the game. You are completely ignoring the negative sides of the current way of handling difficulties. In practise, the currenct difficulties works as content. It's higher level places where you can keep progressing your character. You seem very stuck up on the "/players 6" == party simulation, it distracts you from the real issue. So lets instead call the difficulty scaling "normal", "hard" or "elite". Explain how adding that would make the game worse. |
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