Serious Suggestion for keeping players playing

The problem with leagues is you know they will end after X days. Who wants to:

A)Start fresh
B)Roll new characters

when they know the league will end in 1 month? Or even 2 months? A whole month of play is gone! It'll feel 'inefficient' and discourage players from playing. Keyword: inefficient. Or... 'feels bad'.

What I propose -- as someone who loves coming up with stupid ideas for builds in the middle of mapping an endgame character (coughpillarofthecagedgodelementalhitcough) -- is the introduction of a new weird hybrid currency/consumable/affix item:

This is a MOCK item and not meant to be taken exactly literally!!!



Okay. This is not an idea for a unique. This is an idea for a CONSUMEABLE ITEM. It's designed after flasks - but it's more like a currency item. You use it and it's gone.

The item drops as you play. The item is "flask-like" in that it provides a stat-based item-based buff for a duration. But it's "currency-like" in that it is GONE when you use it once. The template is:

Flask of [Something] [Something]
Requirement: Level 65 OR LOWER -- not intended to be used past A3 Merciless. Maybe this should be lowered to 60, but this is just a mock idea.
Implicit Mod: Experience gain or Movement speed
Explicit Mods (Actual Max of 3):
I give some examples in the above picture. Give a keystone effect, increased stats, or a "funness mod" like - "Your hits make things explode horribly". These stats could even encourage people to use specific skills or damage types while leveling.
Duration: 10, 20, 30, or at most, 60 minutes. Depends on 'base' of the item.

These would drop fairly frequently and would not need to be identified.

The general theme is this - make leveling FASTER for people who are rerolling. You will accumulate these items as you play in the league, to the point where they will become cheap for people to get them if they want. They will allow you to more quickly breeze through 1-65
I like that characters are "permanent" and that regrets are expensive. I like that. I like that I can't do the D3 "class build shuffle" - I find that stupid and dull. But I also don't like being hampered on doing build ideas by the fact "I must spend 8-10 hours to get a build from level 1 to endgame ready minimum". Saps the fun out of making new characters AND lowers enthusiasm mid/late league.

You would collect only the "flasks" that you like/find fun, with combinations of things you want to do with your build. Then, when you make a new character, you pop a flask, and boom-- you're zooming through normal...cruel...merciless, experiencing the game in a different way, hopefully.

The best part is? Maybe don't make them drop until after the first week of a league has passed - this would allow for the hardcore players to enjoy the competitive leveling aspect of the game (which I also like). Then after they start dropping, it wouldn't feel too bad about creating new characters in the last month of the league - they could pop a super leveling mode flask and get to level 65 in a 4 hour play session, maybe!

This idea is a little rough but with some refinement I think the general template is a good one.

--

Ideas to chew on--

One of the modifiers could be "+200% increased xp against Rhoas" -- fuck you've gotta save this for A1, right? Then go farm areas you wouldn't otherwise, just so you can skip areas you're tired of leveling in (maybe the second modifier on the flask is "+100% increased run speed if you haven't attacked or cast a spell recently" - wow, you can now skip areas you hate more easily). Another mod idea I have is -- "Monkies have a chance to drop Kraityn's medallion" - meaning, if you want, you could spend a few extra minutes fighting monkies in order to skip a whole zone!

And maybe the item does something like "+50% increased damage taken from Rhoas" - so now you have this great leveling flask that makes you build around Rhoas...?

Sounds like an interesting concept at least

But you are right: The real turn-off from leveling for me (which I generally think is fine and fun) is that it is inefficient. It doesn't produce currency. I can produce currency much more efficiently (10- to 100-fold) with an end-game character, and even much faster when flipping.

So you have item and orb starvation while leveling (for whatever reason) and massive amounts of crap and still orb starvation in end-game. I've recently entered Dried Lake, the amount of stuff that drops there compared to a vaaled T14 map... well.

Buffing orb drops in general, specifically while leveling, and nerfing the amount of crap that drops in the end-game, would, for me, make both the leveling and the end-game more enjoyable. It would also facilitate trade, because you could then actually spend currency while leveling, which both leveling players / new players (as buyers) and end-game players (as sellers) would profit from.

If you want to keep players playing, don't gate progression behind RNG. That, for me, is the no. 1 reason why I always get bored of mapping. Atlas made it worse because at the start, with nothing unlocked, progression was worse than before.

I'd like GGG to post numbers. Did more people get further into maps with Atlas, than before, or not? How many people got to guardians/shaper? What was the breakdown among the playerbase of how much of the atlas was unlocked?

I heard if you unlock most of the atlas, it rains maps. But if you don't, well, you are SOL. And, if you get bored of mapping before you unlock most of the atlas. Well, guess it's fuck you. I just SMH because GGG took was was bad about mapping - the rng - and made it worse by adding a second layer of rng with the atlas.

And I have to unlock the atlas AGAIN next league? yea, might be enough of a reason NOT to play another league...

I give +1 for consumables that speed up ur story progession, after going with it 100+ its painfull. This season I had like at least 20 build ideas but I ended up doing 6 cuz I got bored of leveling, to freaking long to get 3x4 acts. Its like repeating broken record.

If there is a small boost to speed up at least by 15 - 20% progression to lvl 60, I would be hyped.

My main reason for not logging in is that my character isn't FOTM or similar and thus meets a brick wall progression-wise due to overtuned damage output of monsters. At this point, there isn't really much left to do other than trying to buy challenges or rerolling and I don't have the time or desire for either. In case of rerolling, it isn't because of the time consumed as it's fairly easy to do with the hundred or so of leveling uniques and quality gems you probably looted at this point, but because of the uncertainity of this new build being able to handle endgame content, which usually isn't the case.

I would love to have % increased chance with maces :P



Seriously though: items like this would be a huge improvement to the leveling process and would be most welcomed by me!

Good idea.

I like that it has 'requires lvl 65 or lower'. Before I noticed that I was kinda freaking out.

I'm one of the people who don't mind leveling new builds, though.

Your choice of stats boosted on this mockup is clever. Resolute technique and crit chance. Yay elemental hit! Yay Rhoas. lol

Yeah, it was just a smattering of stats just as a suggestion of what could actually spawn. Obviously, getting RT with crits would be silly.

..and yes, maces are so bad you need a CHANCE just to even think of a stat being associated with them.

A consumable that increases exp gain alone is all that is needed for those who grind inefficiently.

You can get 1 - 65 in a day right now. It would be difficult to do though if you are not playing as if you are racing. People often waste far to much time killing things they dont need to. For reference you should never be the same level or higher than the zone you are in.

sorry about that mis-read your title.
-- hijacker jumps off the plane wheeee --