Boosting in default begins

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derbefrier wrote:

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duolc wrote:

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Mr_Bill wrote:

Easiest way to fix it in races is by not allowing grouping at all.

Also a sure way to alienate the majority of your player base.

well split it into 2 leagues a team race and a solo race!

This stuff only happens in 1 week races, no one has time to worry about it in the shorter races. A solo 1 week race, no social aspect or trading allowed, would be fucking terrible.

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Nildrem wrote:

since the best way to fix this is to make it known and talked about, and in the interest of fairness during the race, it would be nice if somebody could level the playing field either in this post or in a PM.

speaking as somebody trying to enjoy my first race, playing as hard as i can, i was extremely frustrated to see myself barely holding rank 30 after playing almost straight since the start. now i come here to see its because everybody else is cheating, or at least many are.
it feels very unfair.

Many aren't. At least as far as I can tell. If you're playing solo, you're also getting less exp than in a group which plays smart. In certain maps, don't stay together.

I've been playing in groups the whole time, and now that were running maps, our exp has shot up big time. Were trying to get at least 3 of the 4 in top 10, and its looking like its going to happen.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

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darkjoy wrote:

I think they should leave it as is. Rushing was a big part of making new chars in d2 for trying new builds.

Why does everyone want to nerf all the fun stuff in every game these days, I don't get it.

Because boosting in this sense is not for the low level player to gain xp quickly.

Ban hammers don't work too well in a F2P game. Further, once OB comes, we will be seeing more higher lvl players. So one should expect to see a lvl90 playing with a 60-70. Since 60 can be reached quickly, this is when a lvl difference gap begins to hurt regular players

Easy solution then you cap the player to the monster level of the next zone cannot enter if you are either same level or more possibly a couple of levels less.

This way will stop level 1s being used and if they want to take time to boost characters up to level 40 or 50 to get in zone then fair enough.

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Stretch163 wrote:

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SL4Y3R wrote:

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darkjoy wrote:

I think they should leave it as is. Rushing was a big part of making new chars in d2 for trying new builds.

Why does everyone want to nerf all the fun stuff in every game these days, I don't get it.

Because boosting in this sense is not for the low level player to gain xp quickly.

Ban hammers don't work too well in a F2P game. Further, once OB comes, we will be seeing more higher lvl players. So one should expect to see a lvl90 playing with a 60-70. Since 60 can be reached quickly, this is when a lvl difference gap begins to hurt regular players

Easy solution then you cap the player to the monster level of the next zone cannot enter if you are either same level or more possibly a couple of levels less.

This way will stop level 1s being used and if they want to take time to boost characters up to level 40 or 50 to get in zone then fair enough.

This would prevent rushing, which is what racing is all about.

I think some of you guys aren't really fully comprehending the reasons behind/for boosting, how it occurs, and how to stop it. So i'll try and explain it.

1. Boosting occurs mainly in merciless when it's near end-game content. Why?

There is no need to boost in cruel and ruthless because there will always be monster areas which are higher level than you are. Hence, you can always maximise your experience by constantly being underlevelled and rushing through zones. It will not be time effective to boost alternate accounts through to cruel/ruthless just to boost yourself in cruel/ruthless when the time spent could be used to bring your main to merciless.

It is only in merciless that boosting occurs because it is in merciless that players start to overlevel their zones and it starts becoming tedious to level up when you get to around 60+ because of the increased experience needed to level up from that point on. It is at this point that the so called boosters start to resort to their boosting methods. It is also at this point that people start to seriously farm for end-game gear to help them survive in maps and boosting also increases mf in the instance. This "boosting" mainly occurs in RACES.

2. How does boosting occur?

People just rush alternate accounts through the various difficulties by partying these alternate accounts with their mains and using their mains to do the quests for their alternate accounts, all the way to merciless. Hence, the reason why you see level 1s in merciless.

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Easy solution then you cap the player to the monster level of the next zone cannot enter if you are either same level or more possibly a couple of levels less.

This way will stop level 1s being used and if they want to take time to boost characters up to level 40 or 50 to get in zone then fair enough.

that is hardly easy because you want a game to be as less restrictive as possible and allow as much freedom as possible. restricting players to their corresponding zone level areas will, as slay3r mentioned, totally negate the point of racing at all, not to mention make to so boring because you have to grind at the same area till you reach a level high enough to proceed to the next zone.

So over here we have this situation.

Level 1s in merci, but we do not want to over-restrict the freedom of players nor discourage partying.

Solution?

as I mentioned earlier in the thread, the solution is simply to make it time-ineffective for players to try and bring their characters to merciless to boost themselves. In other words, make it such that they need to spend time leveling their alternate accounts to bring them into merciless such that the time spent will be too costly and it will be pointless doing that as the subsequent boosting will not be able to gain back the time they had already lost to their fellow competitors.

Proposed Solution

Tentative level caps for difficulties.
Must be of minimum level 20 to enter Cruel difficulty
Must be of minimum level 30 to enter Ruthless difficulty
Must be of minimum level 40 to enter Merciless difficulty
Must be of minimum level 52 to enter Maps

With this method, you will make it time-consuming for boosting to occur. Will it be too time-consuming? In HC, very likely, because of the chance that your alternate account might die in the process of levelling. In default, I'm not sure. the level caps could be increased later on to make it more time-consuming, i don't know.

With this method, you do not impose any restrictions on players at all because as most experienced players will tell you, all if not the vast majority of people generally enter cruel at >25, ruthless at >35, merciless at >44, and kill Vaal at >53 (HC tends to be >55 but i'm making allowances for default)

The only disadvantage to this solution is that the effectiveness of it will diminish the longer the race length. 1 week Race effectiveness? Yes. 2 weeks? Probably. 1 month race? Probably not.

Still, it'll be a start.

Edit because i accidentally pressed enter while typing and didn't finish typing

A good solution is to introduce a new hazard to act 2. A poisonous mist that does light chaos damage while you stand in it, but is lethal enough to kill a low level character. CI+EB characters would still be fine as they're chaos immune, but low level characters would choke and die. The mist could be present in the ancient pyramid and vaal ruins, doing appropriate damage at each difficulty/level area.

Dead lowbies still give the boost.

At the end of the day i suppose we can always keep going on about this but unless GGG actually acknowledges this or even respond then there is no point so i guess it will be a case of if you cant beat them at there own game then cheat them at it.

Pretty crap that it has gone this far unless it is the way GGG intended and if so they wont mind how to do it being posted on the forum then everyone has the same chance.

I mean it is only fair. Whats good for 1 is good for all.

Be looking at a lot more level 1's in Merci in the near future.

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anubite wrote:

A good solution is to introduce a new hazard to act 2. A poisonous mist that does light chaos damage while you stand in it, but is lethal enough to kill a low level character. CI+EB characters would still be fine as they're chaos immune, but low level characters would choke and die. The mist could be present in the ancient pyramid and vaal ruins, doing appropriate damage at each difficulty/level area.

please no. vaal ruins/ancient pyramid are already painful enough with all the chaos damage in them to normal characters without having a chaos dot the whole time (boosted characters never even enter the zones until the boss room for the final 2 seconds anyways).

If you impose level limits, they will just level those characters to the limit and still use them. level 40, or even level 60 to the super hardcore is 1-2 days tops and in the grand scheme of things that is nothing. This might work for 1 week races, but over the course of a month or longer its meaningless.

I do like the averaging party members levels idea. If a level 60 and a level 1 were in a party, the average level of the party would be 30 and neither player would get exp in a high level zone.

Another method could include a /players command like the one d2 single player had (I know it wasn't in battle.net) that would let you specify party members and eliminate any need to have extra clients/accounts. Then anyone who wanted to up the difficulty/drop rates could do it solo if they wanted. You'd still have to be able to do the damage to make it work.

Edit: BTW this is a big issue even in HC. It is quite a bit harder to get them to merciless, but people are definitely doing it. It is quite easy to notice on ladder tracker as the majority of the deaths show up at level 1. I seriously doubt that many people have trouble getting off the beach.

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hit reply instead of edit apparently and I cant find a delete.