[mockery]

In a recent post found in our blue tracker, a Battle.net user pleaded with Blizzard to not require "forced leveling" in Diablo 3. Bashiok responded with the following clarifications:

Quote

Forced leveling? I'll just have to go along with what other people think that means. If forced leveling means a requirement to move through the game, such as "level 10 is required to move to Act II" etc. then no, there are no current plans to put level requirements on progressing through the game.

As far as I'm aware it's hasn't been mentioned by a Blizzard employee as being potentially included in Diablo III, but I could very well be mistaken.

So this level requirement business is usually discussed as a solution to 'glitch rushing' or a way of quickly leveling a character through use of bugs and loopholes. The assumption that these bugs and loopholes will exist in Diablo III in the first place is somewhat of a stretch of logic (maybe not as much as I'd like ;). So, the most obvious and popular solution is a level requirement. And yeah, it could work, but unless you can normalize XP gains you're probably fairly often going to be simply holding people back for no good reason. They've completed the act legitimately, but they're a single level shy of the requirement. Now they have to go grind for no reason other than to level so they can continue playing the game. It's not a very graceful solution. No, but there are solutions... nay, improvements! in how progression through the game can be handled. Ones that offer not only regulations on progression, but enhance the game itself.

What are your thoughts on the idea of level requirements in Diablo 3?

[kairu]

What Bashiok said. NO THANKS

[Ophion]

The term forced leveling means to me that you are forced to level up, you can't stop leveling on purpose to stay in one level. Perhaps for twinking or something,

As Bashiok said, neither of those systems would work. But a little mix would be to require the party to not have a too big level difference. Then high level people wouldn't be able to complete acts for them. They would still be able to kill for example Duriel, but you would not get the quest completed. So a level 9 in D2 that kills andariel with a team of 15s would get the quest and come to act 2. There they would manage to kill Duriel, which still would let the level 9 continue. But level 15s can't kill mephisto (I think?) so he/she would be stuck there and be forced to move back for more leveling.

This prevents rush but gives one problem that is tiny for some and major for some.

"What if I have a high level friend which I want to play and progress with?"

I am against rushing in all forms (not killing together for drops though), that includes friends. Just because you have a friend you shouldn't be allowed to be rushed.

This post has been edited by emilemil1: 04 May 2009 - 08:17 PM

[XXLaw]

Thanks for the update!

[JNM-illiquid]

this is actually a pretty tricky question. d2 had lvl restrictions, had to be over a certain lvl to do ancients etc but of course ppl found a way around this lol. both sides have positives and negatives. I guess imo i would like it to have no lvl restrictions. rushing is unavoidable imo, people will still find ways to 'rush'. it might not be as effective as it was in d2 but im sure people will soon find the best areas and best runs to gain xp on and rapid lvl up. and i got no problem with that, let people do wahtever they want. if you dont want to 'rush' or 'rapid lvl' no one is forcing you.

[kairu]

JNM-illiquid said:

this is actually a pretty tricky question. d2 had lvl restrictions, had to be over a certain lvl to do ancients etc but of course ppl found a way around this lol. both sides have positives and negatives. I guess imo i would like it to have no lvl restrictions. rushing is unavoidable imo, people will still find ways to 'rush'. it might not be as effective as it was in d2 but im sure people will soon find the best areas and best runs to gain xp on and rapid lvl up. and i got no problem with that, let people do wahtever they want. if you dont want to 'rush' or 'rapid lvl' no one is forcing you.

Quoted for truth

[DarkMagicc]

Well, I think I have a pretty good solution to this. I got this from playing City of Heroes.

Unless restricted, any level player can join a game. To join a party, you must be within the range of x levels. If you want to play with your friends who are low levels, then when you join the party it asks if you agree to being a lower level, and not getting experience, BUT, getting gold.

In a simpler way. I join a game with 3 low levels playing in a party, those people in that party, are in a range of x levels apart. If I am over this range of x, then when I accept to join a party, I am told the restrictions of not getting xp, but only getting gold. I wouldn't get as much gold either, only a small amount (it shouldn't be too good to get cash). When I accept the restrictions my level will be lowered to ONE level below the highest level'd character in that party I am joining.

I will have all the skills, and stat points that I had when I was that level. If I was level 50, and joined a party of a level 20, 25, and 15. I would be automatically lowered to 24 (a level below the highest level).

It is pretty much like I was that level again. For the gear. I don't suggest making them useless (because of the reduced stats), but make their stats 40% reduced.


If you are a lower level, and want to join a high level party, then you can. But your level won't be higher, and you probably won't be able to get to an area too strong for you to hurt a monster. If you are z levels below the level of the monsters you are fighting, then you shouldn't get xp..


I was just writing a lot, sorry if I repeated myself, and spelling errors..

[HARDCOREPOORE]

its just like ebaying items... i dont see why people get mad. you dont have to buy items, and you dont have to get rushed. play the game how you want to, and if you wanna get rushed you get rushed.

[LordRayken]

The more restrictions you place on a game, the less fitted you are to handle freedom in your game...

Didnt catch what I meant?

If you cant allow a player to do what he wants when he wants in your entire game world, such as a level 1 in World of Warcraft wanting to hang out in Northrend, (which they can), then your game isnt fun, its restrictive.

[Daemaro]

By "forced leveling" I thought he meant auto stats. :confused:

[Magistrate]

LordRayken said:

If you cant allow a player to do what he wants when he wants in your entire game world, such as a level 1 in World of Warcraft wanting to hang out in Northrend, (which they can), then your game isnt fun, its restrictive.

That heavily depends on the game. There are many games that require restrictions to keep the storyline going the way it's supposed to, to keep a player from being over-powered, to keep a player from TPPKing *cough fix in the patch cough*. Total freedom isn't fun- it ruins it for other players and can make the game, itself, harder to get through. In this case, I agree, the freedom should be there, but we all know that our post modern generation has learned not to deal in absolute ideals ;)

[Xtasy]

I don't know about most of you, but after completing each act, 3 times, doing that again on a new character isn't exactly always the most fun thing to do.

However, could they not put in some kind of leveling feature where you get absolutely lame EXP if you don't... do anything? Or don't get the quest completed on your character?

In the end though, putting these types of restrictions may seem like a good idea in the first place, but after getting level 70, 80, 90+ on a couple chars, I'd be bored as fuck going through all the acts over again.

And anyway, I'm sure people will find ways around whatever kind of restrictions they put in place, if they do infact do that..

[FreezeMe]

Original Post:
...do not have forced leveling be required in D3, at least give people a choice to turn it off. It was a major let down when they announced that there might be forced leveling in D3.

--------------------
I posted on the official forums but I guess no one agrees with me. It sounds like he is saying he heard it might be in D3 as though its a new feature. Also the option to turn it off would totally undermine the point of it in the first place.

Based on that I think he is talking about auto-stats.

1. Blizz has discussed possibility of auto-stats. Have not heard anything about lvl reqs.
2. The option to automatically put points into stats vs. manually is much more reasonable than enabling vs disabling level requirements.
3. Forced leveling sounds to me like automatic leveling which isnt far from automatic stat placement. After all leveling is just a number unless your stats increase.

But hey maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, seems like once again Bashiok posted in a thread that didn't make any sense.

This post has been edited by FreezeMe: 05 May 2009 - 03:55 AM

[Ryukenden]

I didn't unstand the point he makes. Did he said there should be "forced leveling"?

[afi44]

Well, the problem is people skip ahead, and say for arguments sake do "cow" runs, while higher levels kill and you gain levels. The way they fixed this in d2 was limited the amount of xp they gave and what not, for certain levels.

The reason people did this, it just was so much faster, why do the slow way, when you could have higher levels grind you up to 90s?

I don't see them doing that in D3, they didn't even do it in D2 (except maybe the ancients?) as far as "forced leveling"

They'll probably end up doing something like they have in Diablo II now

Where you do tristram runs for so many levels then you do act 2 runs.

Id like to see like end act rushes for certain level caps like
Normal act I Leoric tomb runs level 13-20 (most exp gain)
Normal act II _ _ _ _ _ runs level 20-28 (ideal exp)
and so forth.

I think of they balance the game around that, it would make it a lot more fun.
A fair, and even transition between a certain level gap and the acts/bosses.

Instead of doing like LVL 1-30 on a lower tier something and then grinding 55-99 on a higher tier which gets old fast in PVM.

If they balanced it out evenly, it would keep the game fresh, and would keep people thinking "man I cant wait to do the next tier dungeon raids, the gear is so much better"

If they did something like that, and kept it somewhat fast (no where near mmo leveling times) You'd have a pretty fun game imo.

AFI - my 2 copper

[Number1SuperGuy]

LordRayken said:

If you cant allow a player to do what he wants when he wants in your entire game world, such as a level 1 in World of Warcraft wanting to hang out in Northrend, (which they can), then your game isnt fun, its restrictive.

A player should be able to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, wherever he wants, otherwise the game isn't fun? This is a video game, not the Matrix. There are limitations for a reason.

When you leave a bunch of kids alone in a room they make up RULES for GAMES because without rules and limitations a game isn't any fun.

[akse]

Make the rushing itself non beneficial. If you don't complete quests before moving to nightmare for example, you can't get the rewards anymore. Yeah like in WoW when you are 10 levels higher than the quest you get crappy exp and gold reward for it.. or it used to be in reputation grinding that if the monsters that gave reputation to some faction were more than 10 levels lower than you, you would only get very small amount of reputation.
Your efforts don't feel so great to the faction when you faceroll the enemies with your eyes shut

Also make partying impossible if the companion is 15 levels or more higher than you. If you are 5 levels or more lower than partymember you gain less exp. If you are 10 -15 levels lower than partymember you gain close to 0 exp. This would make people do some work again for their characters and not just get rushed and leech exp.

Level restrictions aren't that bad either. Lets see D2 for example. I've played the game trough dozens of times without rushing.
Normal:
Act1: When I run trough the areas killing monsters and doing quests I'm quite often 13-15 level at Andariel. So make the level restriction 12 at Act1->Act2
Act2: Generally I'm about 22-24 at Duriel so Level restriction could be 20-22.
Act3: Only about 26 max when dealing with Mephisto So level restriction to move Act4 could be 24
Act4: Leveling here could be tedious sometimes, but most of the times you have to push over 30 in order to move nightmare (this is in classic). But the restriction to move to nightmare in classic version could be 25.

Something like this could be the way to implement restrictions to D2. Anyways, if we don't want Act restrictions, there should be at least difficulty level restrictions. There is ABSOLUTELY no need to get to higher difficulty before 25 or something.

[Dimebog]

HARDCOREPOORE said:

its just like ebaying items... i dont see why people get mad. you dont have to buy items, and you dont have to get rushed. play the game how you want to, and if you wanna get rushed you get rushed.

By that logic, they should also let people who like cheating use cheats and hacks. Why not? If you don't like it, just don't use it.

[Ophion]

Perhaps if you enabled the players to create chars in special rushing game modes, you would be able to rush up to a high level (by other players that wouldn't recieve exp) but you wouldn't recieve drops. The char can only be unlocked from the rush game mode by another of your characters, the unlocking character would put the gears the rushed character would recieve as his/her "starting gear" in a special "dummy inventory". You can transfer a full set of equipments, without items in them (socketed) and they would have to be lower or equal to the average level of a player that finished nightmare, this is tp stop the use of MF chars that would pump up your other chars, but nothing else would be transferred. And the unlocking character would have to be close to the level of the rushed character, or the rushed character would have reached the average level of where a average player would have finished hell. In that level, the player would stop gaining exp and would have to wait to be unlocked.

I know it is probably very fuzzy, and it would need alot of balancing. But the thing I had in mind is simple.

1. You would rush without getting anything other than exp, thus beeing very weak.
2. A non rush character would unlock you from the mode by giving you a full set of equipment.
3. You would not be able to go over a certain level limit to prevent you from abusing it to reach level 99 without playing the actual game.
4. You would end up very weak (unless your unlocker gave you good initial equipment), like in D2 after a rush.
5. The unlocker can't make you powerful instantly because of the item restrictions.
6. You would have trading disabled for some time to encourage you to get your own items by returning to nightmare. Or you could wait for a couple of days and then ask another player for some items.

What I wrote now is actually not my suggestion, it is a system that I would be against in many ways. But if rushing is available they should make it balanced, so you would get to skip the acts, but still not getting powerful faster than someone that does the acts. That is what the training penalty is for. While waiting you would play on another character. A completely free game without rules that lets people do whatever they want would be unfair to the people that likes to play normally. Atleast if the rushed chars will play together and like the unrushed chars, they should virtually not be any faster. It would just take less effort and be less repetitive. If you are impatient and want a sandboxgame, go play the sims and cheat a little.

[SNowfreak]

Dimebog said:

By that logic, they should also let people who like cheating use cheats and hacks. Why not? If you don't like it, just don't use it.

And this is how i feel about respecing! : )

I dont see why they dont just make it so its like diablo II but this time if the person is over 20 lvl's higher than you, noone gains exp or something like that. they could tweak this until basically rushing is VERY minimal. I mean you can make it through the acts, but what good does that do when you are a low lvl and just have to go back to fight in easier acts and difficulty modes.

the one thing i have to say is forced leveling is bad and by no means should be included.