As someone who plays both D3 and PoE, my only gripe with D3 is that there is no 'finish line' (like e.g. level 100 or 40/40 Challenges in PoE). Every time a D3 season starts, I just have to ask myself "if I'm not going to play for the whole ~3 months, why even bother?"
I wish that at least your "highest rank on the leaderboard achieved" in Diablo 3 saved somewhere on the profile. I mean, sure, the people who farmed the whole season deserve their credit and high ranking finishers and a place in the hall of fame, that's fine, but I think that my rank 1 achieved mid season should have some weight too. It being visible to people who specifically inspect my profile would be ok.
It just feels pointless to do that again, and I don't want to farm the whole season either, which just means I do the season journey and quit immediately. And the season journey is just remarkably short, and the only way D3 endgame is actually fun is if you push. It just feels like a terrible design loophole.
Hey. I'm playing barb this season and looking for a clan. I got both the rat runs and the high tier meta setups ready. Paragon level is 1360, highest clear in 4man is a 117.
After season starts do the challenge rift straight away. Or in your case just start levelling. Just remember that people that did the challenge rift and gotten legendaries will be very much ahead of you in levelling time.
Wouldn't legendaries rolled at level 1 get outscaled pretty fast though? At some point, massive gains in toughness/sheetdamage should outdo most legendary effects, no? And that's assuming you even get legendaries at all, let alone actually useful legendaries.
I can't see this being worth it, assuming 4man leveling at tryhard pace.
Edit: or well, I guess you can pre-learn the Challenge Rift since the reset is on Monday, and you kind of want to do it anyway for Bounty mats, and Blood Shards are super available anyway... Starting to make sense.
Can someone tell me how exactly the Challenge Rift works on season start?
Can you somehow complete it just before a season releases, or are people (that talk about blood shards on level 1) going to take the time to do the Challenge Rift after the season begins? Because in that case I'll prefer to just jump straight to leveling.
Other: I'll do the journey (for tab and 'best' portrait) and then stop playing D3 altogether.
As pointed out, the changes in S6 are minimal. I'll come back next time there are major/core changes or new content. Just shifting the meta/balance a bit is not enough to "refresh" the game for me.
Not that this is a bad thing, I've put a bit over 1k hours into the current state of the game. Think it's pretty normal to have had enough of it, lol
There's a conceptually simple solution to what you describe and it's already in place for XP. People don't bot XP for a simple reason: it's worthless. The best case scenario is 250b xp/h (info is from "show off" forum sections of these tools), which is close to nothing possible via manual play.
They could just make botting keys/bounties worthless relatively to what you can do with manual play. Up the difficulty.
After that, it's a matter of a few banwaves to make people scared of risking their accounts for something with little value.
"Why they're cheating" would be a super interesting thing to know for a developer of a game like this.
It's a useful discussion.
No it's not.
Here is the list:
Tedium - Picking up items
Farming - The sink (can't or won't do it)
Malfeasance - Fuck the police
That's it. That's literally the list of the reason why people cheat. There is nothing more too it. If you can think of any reason that isn't covered under these 3 bases. I'd would love to hear it. FFS there is a dude with no arms that doesn't cheat. What is your excuse?
"Can't or won't do it" - why they won't do it?
i.e. they don't want to / don't enjoy it - the question is, why they don't want to / don't enjoy it. As a developer or a designer you're constantly asking yourself "why/what do people enjoy/don't enjoy about my game/product"
And you still don't understand. There is no excuse. I'm not saying that there is an excuse, either. I am just saying that the subject is more interesting than "people who cheat should go play another game".
If there's a lot of people who say that your product sucks (or a certain part of it sucks) - via words OR ACTION (action in this case) - then it's all worth reviewing, analyzing, and learning from.
There are two types of botters: those who do it for competitive reasons (to gain an advantage over other players, to crush the leaderboard/paragon ladder, etc), and those who do it for convenience reasons (the only purpose is to make the game more fun for themselves, they don't care about the leaderboards or paragon race or whatever; people who "lack time" or are just straight up too bored of TX rifts/bounties all fall into this category).
Well they could improve some things in game. QOL changes like: auto pick on mats (with an option to on/off this feature), DB dropping rate and where, remove keys for GR, changes to enchant (like roll only above the number that you have on the item for that stat), reforge on cube to revert EXACTLY the stats you had (ancient items will remain ancient items), improve kadala (weapon types/drop leg rate).
You might disagree with this, but after all the time spent playing, some things in this game become really boring and ridiculous, and I could understand botters that does this for convenience reasons.
I can only agree with this because that is my entire point.
Although I do disagree with your solution. Imho, the core issue itself is that the "farming" content (bounties and neph rifts) don't scale. Once you reach the level of power where you oneshot things on TX with a speed build, that's it, it doesn't improve from here in any direction at all. Right now I am farming with the exact same speed I was farming over 2 months ago, nothing has changed despite me gaining A LOT of power on my characters during this time.
That's what makes it boring. We need higher difficulties or farming content that scales. A more powerful character should be able to farm slightly faster than a less powerful character (it can be due to the more powerful character being able to run a higher difficulty or run faster). I'm sure they could introduce more Torment levels which are scaled appropriately to the the maximum power characters will have in a season (with best gear and, say, plvl 1k+). All of this is possible to calculate before a patch goes live, even the community has the tools required for this (d3planner).
It's called Grifts. And it has been in the game for quite sometime. You literally have what you are asking for... already in the game. That's the reason why Grifts are ranked as well. To show who is the highest in the game. If you find the game boring, then this game is not for you. Why perverse the game with cheating? It makes no sense.
Because you need rift keys for GRs. That's literally a direct requirement. And because Rift Guardian loot is worthless when you only lack 2-3 slots (which are weapons/rings/amulets, which have very low drop chances in random loot tables), so your best bet at upgrading those slots is doing bounties for materials for reforging and upgrading at the cube. You could say that's optional, sure, but it's undoubtedly the best way to gear up right now, nothing else even comes close.
What doesn't make sense? That sometimes people cheat with the purpose of avoiding parts of the game they don't like, so that they can do parts of the game they do like? It's not exactly rocket science. I don't know how else to explain this. I guess I'll just stop trying.
Edit: also, if you're pushing GRs for ranks, the amount of rift guardians you'll kill won't be very high. It's mostly 0 or 1.
There are two types of botters: those who do it for competitive reasons (to gain an advantage over other players, to crush the leaderboard/paragon ladder, etc), and those who do it for convenience reasons (the only purpose is to make the game more fun for themselves, they don't care about the leaderboards or paragon race or whatever; people who "lack time" or are just straight up too bored of TX rifts/bounties all fall into this category).
Well they could improve some things in game. QOL changes like: auto pick on mats (with an option to on/off this feature), DB dropping rate and where, remove keys for GR, changes to enchant (like roll only above the number that you have on the item for that stat), reforge on cube to revert EXACTLY the stats you had (ancient items will remain ancient items), improve kadala (weapon types/drop leg rate).
You might disagree with this, but after all the time spent playing, some things in this game become really boring and ridiculous, and I could understand botters that does this for convenience reasons.
I can only agree with this because that is my entire point.
Although I do disagree with your solution. Imho, the core issue itself is that the "farming" content (bounties and neph rifts) don't scale. Once you reach the level of power where you oneshot things on TX with a speed build, that's it, it doesn't improve from here in any direction at all. Right now I am farming with the exact same speed I was farming over 2 months ago, nothing has changed despite me gaining A LOT of power on my characters during this time.
That's what makes it boring. We need higher difficulties or farming content that scales. A more powerful character should be able to farm slightly faster than a less powerful character (it can be due to the more powerful character being able to run a higher difficulty or run faster). I'm sure they could introduce more Torment levels which are scaled appropriately to the the maximum power characters will have in a season (with best gear and, say, plvl 1k+). All of this is possible to calculate before a patch goes live, even the community has the tools required for this (d3planner).
He doesn't have a point and it's entirely moot. His point could literally reflect anything, anywhere. All it shows is his morality. Its beating a dead horse. Cheating perverse the point of the game. In any aspect, in any form. If you have to cheat to get by, then what is the point? Why can't get he enjoy the game for what it is? Get where he can get? He isn't playing the same game legitimate players are, he is playing an entirely different game.
There are two types of botters: those who do it for competitive reasons (to gain an advantage over other players, to crush the leaderboard/paragon ladder, etc), and those who do it for convenience reasons (the only purpose is to make the game more fun for themselves, they don't care about the leaderboards or paragon race or whatever; people who "lack time" or are just straight up too bored of TX rifts/bounties all fall into this category).
People who bot for competitive reasons are directly malicious to the games competitive integrity, and they will cheat and bot whenever it is not too risky (most common reason being "well, everybody else does it, so will I"). The only way to fix this type of behavior is directly punishing it. The risk of losing an account is virtually the only thing keeping this type in check, but the efficiency of this strategy only depends on how active Blizzard is with updating detection and banning. It is, however, very possible to scare away all of these (even a single big banwave at the end of each season will be enough).
People who bot for convenience are a more interesting phenomenon. For them, the game is simply not fun if they are forced to play the intended way (e.g. a statement like "if I do get banned, I don't care, because these bots/cheats made the game significantly more fun for me, I acknowledge the risks and I believe it's worth it"). The intent itself isn't malicious - the intent is just to make the game more enjoyable for themselves. These players don't really damage the competitive environment simply because they don't participate in it (generally). Now the most important thing is, these players aren't afraid of getting banned - they literally state that they aren't. If you do ban these players, especially without fixing the things that they are willing to lose their accounts for, you are more than likely losing them permanently. From a developers point of view, it's much wiser to first fix the core issues that created this group, and then proceed to warn and/or ban people. (This is exactly how they handled their recent banwaves in WoW, for example.)
Note that I'm not defending anyone and my point isn't that any one type of botting/cheating is justified. I'm not making a "this is ok"/"this is not ok" statement. I am just analyzing two things which I think are different, and I am doing it from developer standpoint. I think this might explain why their bans were quite selective, and the bias towards competitive players can be clearly tracked. Those players will still come back (most of them), just on different accounts.
What's really great about this banwave is timing. It's impeccable, absolutely perfect; just a few weeks before the end of the season. It will hopefully give some of the legit players who quit because of botters an incentive to come back (though I believe it's too late for many, it seems like Quin is going to stay with PoE for good this time). They should've done this in S3/S4 as well, as everyone was waiting for it, and we would've never even arrived at this state - but at least this time they got the timing right. I think everyone saw in the example of Gabynator's first ban in September 2015 that an early ban does nothing - he came back and still got rank #1s, just botting on his new account.
The most important point of this banwave though is the message: Blizzard finally stood up to it's ToS and showed initiative. For the first time in over a year this was a major banwave against botters. If you listen to the background Teamspeak discussion on any of the SoS guys' videos from yesterday (Gaby, Chainer) you can hear them say "I played legit for so many seasons but they never did anything, so I started botting because everyone did it". That's why they should've done this earlier - many top players either quit or started botting, and that's because there was no action in Season 3 and Season 4. Let's hope this improves the situation in Season 6 (more legit players coming back and more botters stopping to bot). Let's be clear about it: banning at the beginning of the season does nothing. All those guys have multiple accounts (don't ask me why, but they were all admitting they do on said Teamspeak discussion), and if you're a top player you don't care about a new game license for a few bucks anyways. But knowing that if you bot from the beginning of Season 6 might get you banned towards the end - including a wipe of all your records - will make at least some people think twice about botting in Season 6. What's most powerful in stopping people from botting is not even the ban itself, but the fear of being banned just before you can reap your rewards.
That being said, not everything's perfectly good now. It was a first step, but they didn't catch all of them - not nearly. Again, aforementioned TS discussion was so interesting to listen to, as in the background you can hear people say "I botted like crazy and didn't get banned". Also, in the hours after the banwave they went through clan and communities rosters and friends lists and were wondering why certain people were online (as opposed to being banned). This holds also true for my personal experience; I talked to a lot of people yesterday who were happy about the ban wave, but everyone knew a lot of people (both casuals and high-profile players) who are botters, yet didn't get banned. It seems as if Blizzard manually confirmed every case before executing the bans, or is maybe banning in waves, or maybe is online banning a selection of botters, by whichever criterion.
A last point that was already discussed on Reddit is the fact that we have a lot of fragmented teams on the leaderboards now, and some people argue that the entire group record should be wiped if one of the people in the group was banned for botting. There was quite a lot of pushback; however, I think this should be the case. It's like in relay races at the Olympics: If any of the participants gets banned for doping, the entire team loses its medals. Note the difference: the other team members do not get banned, but they need to re-earn their 2 player/3 player/4 player record, because their existing record was achieved by the help of "cheaters". The argument against this is that it would punish those people who might not have known about their team mates being cheaters. I personally argue that this is very unlikely. Most groups on the leaderboards, and I would suspect 100% of the groups in the top 100, know each other - they are either clan mates or have each other on the friends list. In that case, you know if someone is botting or not. If you spent hours and days of flipping rifts you will eventually have to farm TX for keys, and if one of your team members never participates in the TX key farming - well, it's at least highly suspicious. People at the top of the leaderboard aren't dumb, they know what's happening.
Well, let's see where we go from here. It's a good start, a sign of life from Blizzard. The ship has sailed for many players, but at least they're not done with the competition entirely and seem to care about their game. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in Season 6: how the community reacts, if the amount of botters will go down, and if they repeat this ban wave to catch more bad guys (as plenty of them are still out there).
I disagree completely.
I'm within the upper half of the LB and I did it by playing with random people I found in communities. I only added to my friendlist those of them that I liked/chatted with a lot, declined all the other requests to not "litter" my friendlist with people I likely won't play again with.
I have no clue whether some of them botted or not, and I definitely don't want to fish for good 106 and 107 rifts ever again. I'm done with 4p as it is and it'd be fucking lame to get forced back or lose the records. Was a struggle
0
As someone who plays both D3 and PoE, my only gripe with D3 is that there is no 'finish line' (like e.g. level 100 or 40/40 Challenges in PoE). Every time a D3 season starts, I just have to ask myself "if I'm not going to play for the whole ~3 months, why even bother?"
I wish that at least your "highest rank on the leaderboard achieved" in Diablo 3 saved somewhere on the profile. I mean, sure, the people who farmed the whole season deserve their credit and high ranking finishers and a place in the hall of fame, that's fine, but I think that my rank 1 achieved mid season should have some weight too. It being visible to people who specifically inspect my profile would be ok.
It just feels pointless to do that again, and I don't want to farm the whole season either, which just means I do the season journey and quit immediately. And the season journey is just remarkably short, and the only way D3 endgame is actually fun is if you push. It just feels like a terrible design loophole.
0
Hey. I'm playing barb this season and looking for a clan. I got both the rat runs and the high tier meta setups ready. Paragon level is 1360, highest clear in 4man is a 117.
0
Wouldn't legendaries rolled at level 1 get outscaled pretty fast though? At some point, massive gains in toughness/sheetdamage should outdo most legendary effects, no? And that's assuming you even get legendaries at all, let alone actually useful legendaries.
I can't see this being worth it, assuming 4man leveling at tryhard pace.
Edit: or well, I guess you can pre-learn the Challenge Rift since the reset is on Monday, and you kind of want to do it anyway for Bounty mats, and Blood Shards are super available anyway... Starting to make sense.
0
Can someone tell me how exactly the Challenge Rift works on season start?
Can you somehow complete it just before a season releases, or are people (that talk about blood shards on level 1) going to take the time to do the Challenge Rift after the season begins? Because in that case I'll prefer to just jump straight to leveling.
0
Hey, I'd like to rejoin the clan (I was a member in Season 5). Planning to play a lot with competitive goals, starting on a Demon Hunter.
Mikle#2598
0
Journey?
1
Other: I'll do the journey (for tab and 'best' portrait) and then stop playing D3 altogether.
As pointed out, the changes in S6 are minimal. I'll come back next time there are major/core changes or new content. Just shifting the meta/balance a bit is not enough to "refresh" the game for me.
Not that this is a bad thing, I've put a bit over 1k hours into the current state of the game. Think it's pretty normal to have had enough of it, lol
0
There's a conceptually simple solution to what you describe and it's already in place for XP. People don't bot XP for a simple reason: it's worthless. The best case scenario is 250b xp/h (info is from "show off" forum sections of these tools), which is close to nothing possible via manual play.
They could just make botting keys/bounties worthless relatively to what you can do with manual play. Up the difficulty.
After that, it's a matter of a few banwaves to make people scared of risking their accounts for something with little value.
1
"Can't or won't do it" - why they won't do it?
i.e. they don't want to / don't enjoy it - the question is, why they don't want to / don't enjoy it. As a developer or a designer you're constantly asking yourself "why/what do people enjoy/don't enjoy about my game/product"
And you still don't understand. There is no excuse. I'm not saying that there is an excuse, either. I am just saying that the subject is more interesting than "people who cheat should go play another game".
If there's a lot of people who say that your product sucks (or a certain part of it sucks) - via words OR ACTION (action in this case) - then it's all worth reviewing, analyzing, and learning from.
3
"Why they're cheating" would be a super interesting thing to know for a developer of a game like this.
It's a useful discussion.
0
Because you need rift keys for GRs. That's literally a direct requirement. And because Rift Guardian loot is worthless when you only lack 2-3 slots (which are weapons/rings/amulets, which have very low drop chances in random loot tables), so your best bet at upgrading those slots is doing bounties for materials for reforging and upgrading at the cube. You could say that's optional, sure, but it's undoubtedly the best way to gear up right now, nothing else even comes close.
What doesn't make sense? That sometimes people cheat with the purpose of avoiding parts of the game they don't like, so that they can do parts of the game they do like? It's not exactly rocket science. I don't know how else to explain this. I guess I'll just stop trying.
Edit: also, if you're pushing GRs for ranks, the amount of rift guardians you'll kill won't be very high. It's mostly 0 or 1.
0
I can only agree with this because that is my entire point.
Although I do disagree with your solution. Imho, the core issue itself is that the "farming" content (bounties and neph rifts) don't scale. Once you reach the level of power where you oneshot things on TX with a speed build, that's it, it doesn't improve from here in any direction at all. Right now I am farming with the exact same speed I was farming over 2 months ago, nothing has changed despite me gaining A LOT of power on my characters during this time.
That's what makes it boring. We need higher difficulties or farming content that scales. A more powerful character should be able to farm slightly faster than a less powerful character (it can be due to the more powerful character being able to run a higher difficulty or run faster). I'm sure they could introduce more Torment levels which are scaled appropriately to the the maximum power characters will have in a season (with best gear and, say, plvl 1k+). All of this is possible to calculate before a patch goes live, even the community has the tools required for this (d3planner).
2
3
To be honest, Uglytoes does have a point.
There are two types of botters: those who do it for competitive reasons (to gain an advantage over other players, to crush the leaderboard/paragon ladder, etc), and those who do it for convenience reasons (the only purpose is to make the game more fun for themselves, they don't care about the leaderboards or paragon race or whatever; people who "lack time" or are just straight up too bored of TX rifts/bounties all fall into this category).
People who bot for competitive reasons are directly malicious to the games competitive integrity, and they will cheat and bot whenever it is not too risky (most common reason being "well, everybody else does it, so will I"). The only way to fix this type of behavior is directly punishing it. The risk of losing an account is virtually the only thing keeping this type in check, but the efficiency of this strategy only depends on how active Blizzard is with updating detection and banning. It is, however, very possible to scare away all of these (even a single big banwave at the end of each season will be enough).
People who bot for convenience are a more interesting phenomenon. For them, the game is simply not fun if they are forced to play the intended way (e.g. a statement like "if I do get banned, I don't care, because these bots/cheats made the game significantly more fun for me, I acknowledge the risks and I believe it's worth it"). The intent itself isn't malicious - the intent is just to make the game more enjoyable for themselves. These players don't really damage the competitive environment simply because they don't participate in it (generally). Now the most important thing is, these players aren't afraid of getting banned - they literally state that they aren't. If you do ban these players, especially without fixing the things that they are willing to lose their accounts for, you are more than likely losing them permanently. From a developers point of view, it's much wiser to first fix the core issues that created this group, and then proceed to warn and/or ban people. (This is exactly how they handled their recent banwaves in WoW, for example.)
Note that I'm not defending anyone and my point isn't that any one type of botting/cheating is justified. I'm not making a "this is ok"/"this is not ok" statement. I am just analyzing two things which I think are different, and I am doing it from developer standpoint. I think this might explain why their bans were quite selective, and the bias towards competitive players can be clearly tracked. Those players will still come back (most of them), just on different accounts.
0
I'm within the upper half of the LB and I did it by playing with random people I found in communities. I only added to my friendlist those of them that I liked/chatted with a lot, declined all the other requests to not "litter" my friendlist with people I likely won't play again with.
I have no clue whether some of them botted or not, and I definitely don't want to fish for good 106 and 107 rifts ever again. I'm done with 4p as it is and it'd be fucking lame to get forced back or lose the records. Was a struggle