Just wondering if there has been a hard set on a player party cap yet for this game. In all the videos, they only show up to 4 players in a party at any point in time. Does this mean the player party cap is set to 4 then? I realize that this may be the optimal amount for PVE, but I would rather play in a less than optimal environment if that means I can have a few more buddies playing along with me. 4 max is not enough for me.......
For now 4 is max, thats all we know i'm pretty sure they might've touched upon this at a blizzcon saying that since the effects are much more dramatic in this game the optimal player count is 4 because with more its a clusterfuck and you can't tell what you're doing.
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As lore-wise and game-wise heroes are now supposed to be much more powerful than ever before, more than 4 at a time would be too much power (and visual/internet lag)
The benefits of the 4 player cap simply out number the negatives. Though one could say numbers don't matter in something like this, since one negative could represent most of someone's opinion.
In general though 4 players (while admittedly a low number seeing as a lot of people would love to play D3 with 7 friends) benefits the game. To this day my favorite D3 video content out is (drum roll)
Not even because it focuses on the Monk, (I'm a Barb guy! :barb:) but because it has tons of HD footage of 4 classes mowing through mobs. It gives a great feel for how while 4 sounds like a low number, the power and visual effects of each player really dose fill the screen nicely when all 4 players are on screen. Non of the classes even have pets or summons on screen. Imagine 4 Witch Doctors each with 3 zombie dogs, and a Gargantuan. At that point not only is it a problem for you to distinguish things currently, but it also could cause major FPS (Frames Per Second) drop. I remember in D2 a single summon Necro during a Baal run would cause my decent PC to drop to like 3 FPS, making the game hard to play, and horrid to look at. Between the Sorcs casting spells, the Barbs casting buffs, the Pallys with their auras, everyone with a mercenary, it was just a mess.
All and all 4 players, while it has its down sides, will greatly benefit the game.
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” - Albert Einstein
The benefits of the 4 player cap simply out number the negatives. Though one could say numbers don't matter in something like this, since one negative could represent most of someone's opinion.In general though 4 players (while admittedly a low number seeing as a lot of people would love to play D3 with 7 friends) benefits the game. To this day my favorite D3 video content out is (drum roll)
Not even because it focuses on the Monk, (I'm a Barb guy! :barb:) but because it has tons of HD footage of 4 classes mowing through mobs. It gives a great feel for how while 4 sounds like a low number, the power and visual effects of each player really dose fill the screen nicely when all 4 players are on screen. Non of the classes even have pets or summons on screen. Imagine 4 Witch Doctors each with 3 zombie dogs, and a Gargantuan. At that point not only is it a problem for you to distinguish things currently, but it also could cause major FPS (Frames Per Second) drop. I remember in D2 a single summon Necro during a Baal run would cause my decent PC to drop to like 3 FPS, making the game hard to play, and horrid to look at. Between the Sorcs casting spells, the Barbs casting buffs, the Pallys with their auras, everyone with a mercenary, it was just a mess.All and all 4 players, while it has its down sides, will greatly benefit the game.
My thoughts EXACTLY. It will be GLORIOUS.
Also, I saw way too much color and rainbows in that video. Blizz needs to make the game way more gritty.\
Obvious downside is that you can't play with more than 3 friends at once. However, as has been WELL ESTABLISHED by both previous posts and Blizz themselves, the game lends itself best to 4 players. I think this is probably the minimum they could go with without causing massive rage amongst players (and 3, no matter how many fireballs and arrows and summons is too low), but they figured it was a good number.
The lower the # of players, the more strategic the encounters can become. You allow 8 players, now the scaling issues are tough. Make it too hard and you have to ensure that every single person in your group is amazing. Make it too easy and any 8 morons can zerg any encounter. And then the matter of scaling down difficulty for successive groups of 7, 6, 5 players, etc... (and substitute for whatever the # of players you want as a limit).
In terms of why it wasn't at least 5 or 6 rather than 4, I think the number of classes set to 5 also makes it a bit more attractive. You CANNOT have all the resources of the classes present during a game. And with the customization, even if you have 4 diff classes, each one will offer different abilities than perhaps another player of the same class (we just saw runes updated, gives you an idea).
What I sincerely hope, though, is that we get some kind of combat besides arena, and some creative modes in which there are more than 4 players. Even a 4v4 arena wouldn't be bad, or some kind of objective-oriented battleground would be good. And if anyone mentions WoW, please remember that WoW did not invent ANYTHING, and that's a lame thing to bring up. In any case, 4-man parties are not such a bad thing, performance-wise they'll keep things under control and balance-wise they'll be able to offer a pretty finely tuned experience given there's only really 3 things to balance (2,3 and 4 player teams, and I guess im not counting single player with followers, but thats a given).
Was looking around for this also as It crushed my vision for the game, sadly I don't think anyone I know is going to actively play when we will have to split up into small tiny parties of 4 just to complete missions.
They should make the Max player cap AT THE VERY LEAST 6, and just raise the difficulty of the mobs as more players join, its just dumb .... 4 players? really? not even 5? really?
1+ 4 is perfect, I mean, you can't even have one of each class in one game? thats just DUMB.
As it stands I have 6 people playing (who are fairly sure they are gona play) so that leaves parties of 4 and 2 or 3 and 3, which is just dumb in my opinion, a group of friends 8 (atleast 8) should be able to join up in one party, what kinda ONLINE game only has 4 players? THIS IS A SIGN THAT THEY ARE PLANING TO PORT THE GAME TO CONSOLES IMO, where 4 players would be optimal, but for PC???? REALLY??? 4 PLAYERS ONLY???? Just because consoles have a 4 player limitation issue (not even really) doesn't mean they should gimp out the PC port of the game.
Completely ruined the game, i mean the rumors that it plays exactly like torchlight (rumor says its a clone of torchlight pretty much) and that the maps where epic fail.... where disheartening enough, now to only have it be 4 players??? really just kills the game for me, I think im just gona buy it and play through it a few times as a single player game... sad to see 10 years waiting for DIABLOW instead of DIABLO
I guarantee they are going to add 8 player support with an expansion, I don't understand why they want us to suffer with only 4 player support till the exp. pack comes out... just dumb it should ship with THE VERY LEAST atleast!!!! 5 player support so you don't get the oddball "someone is sitting this run out" scenario....
This game is going to be huge at launch and people are gona log in and be like "WTF 4 PLAYER PER PARTY ONLY?" the forum is going to be flooded day one because its not generally known by people waiting that its only 4 player.
Its probably some joke or something just to get people angry or a limitation for beta only... for sure the game will launch with 5 to 8 player support at a min.
Well, I never liked the player cap back then when it was announced, and I still don't now. Unfortunately I'm one of those that has ~5 friends I want to play with online when the game comes out, and it seems that one of us will need to sit out because of it. It sucks.
But I understand what people are saying. Yes, maybe it is a mess when there is more then 4 players. I wouldn't know - I haven't played the game yet. But I'm honestly not seeing the real difference of instead of just four, having five or (possibly) six. I can deal with five, one for each class if necessary. I don't see how your group of four people would suddenly jerk to a 10 FPS standstill once a fifth person becomes involved in the fray. Okay, maybe a little lag would occur, but are we really assuming that the netcode is that bad / people's computers that are playing the game are that bad? If there is a problem with 5 people running around, isn't it likely that it would be the same for 4 people anyway, due to bad programming? Okay, for the "can't have every class" argument, isn't it going to be the case of that anyway with 5 players, since more then likely there will be 2 of one class in a random game, and I don't see how it would restrict you that much if that was the case anyway. Besides, you're fighting against demons and the world is falling apart, are you supposed to know what the shit is going on anyway, despite how colourful and pretty your spells effects are?
I get that 7 or 8 players might be too much for this game as shown by Diablo II, but this is the year 2011 (and possibly 2012 by the time this game comes out) and you can't get 5 people together in an Action RPG game? ASDF
1) In D2 the only thing I (and many others) did actually together with more than 2 people was cow runs (where still most would wander off alone) and sometimes things like baal runs etc. Basically endgame stuff. I have never ever played through the entire game with more than two friends.
2) Now I also play some online games regularly together with around 6 real life friends. The thing is though, that they are never online at the same time, so the party size varies. Hence, a cap of 4 will often be enough for me. There will be some occasions when more people are online though, but then you'll just have to split up in groups (depending on character level/quest progression). The new battle.net will allow for more flexibility in joining each others' adventures, so it should be easy to cope for that. I think my online experience will be a lot nicer than with the usually useless 8 player cap from d2, which only served a purpose in relatively dull endgame activities.
Graphics are too flashy for more than 4 players is the lamest excuse ive ever heard, so why did they make them so #@$$ing flashy to begin with
keeping a 4 players cap to preserve balance is a much better reason, so your not sitting there flailing in this monster for 10 minutes because he has 1000% HP increase
But maybe we will see a 5 player cap when Expansion comes out i dont see any reason why not, that 1 extra player isnt going to destroy the balance, or fun factor.
I am hoping they increase pvp cap to atleast 8 if not more, so far it seems like 6 cap,
can you imagine how cool 4 v 4 clan matches would be ?
All things considered, I still don't think that adding at least one more player, and at most two more players to the player cap would make my eyes bleed with special effects. I think this for several reasons. First, PVP. In the PVP arenas, you seem to be able to have up to 8 players blasting at each other with more special effects than what your screen can show in reality. And I haven't heard anyone cry about this so far. Second, you are assuming that all players will be relatively positioned such that all their overly-awesome-special-effect spells will all be seen at the same time on screen. Sure, statistically, the chances of this happening are favorable, however, I do seem to recall in the days of D2 that people did seem to have a difference in opinion when it came to battle tactics. That is, you would have the adventurous players running off in all different directions, and the not-so-adventurous scrambling around trying to decided who to run after. The end result? 2-3 of the 8 players were on screen at any given point in time.
ALL IN ALL, I am not convinced that pushing the player cap to 5 or 6 will ruin gameplay. And even if it does, I think that Blizzard should leave it up to us to choose whether or not we want to "ruin" the gameplay in light of us not having our friend Billy playing solo style as the odd man out.
All things considered, I still don't think that adding at least one more player, and at most two more players to the player cap would make my eyes bleed with special effects. I think this for several reasons. First, PVP. In the PVP arenas, you seem to be able to have up to 8 players blasting at each other with more special effects than what your screen can show in reality. And I haven't heard anyone cry about this so far. Second, you are assuming that all players will be relatively positioned such that all their overly-awesome-special-effect spells will all be seen at the same time on screen. Sure, statistically, the chances of this happening are favorable, however, I do seem to recall in the days of D2 that people did seem to have a difference in opinion when it came to battle tactics. That is, you would have the adventurous players running off in all different directions, and the not-so-adventurous scrambling around trying to decided who to run after. The end result? 2-3 of the 8 players were on screen at any given point in time.
ALL IN ALL, I am not convinced that pushing the player cap to 5 or 6 will ruin gameplay. And even if it does, I think that Blizzard should leave it up to us to choose whether or not we want to "ruin" the gameplay in light of us not having our friend Billy playing solo style as the odd man out.
Exactly what I think. Although I believe PvP is 6 players from what we've seen so far. (don't know if this is the max)
First, PVP. In the PVP arenas, you seem to be able to have up to 8 players blasting at each other with more special effects than what your screen can show in reality. And I haven't heard anyone cry about this so far.
That's because in PvP it's just players. Imagine 6 players (or more) and 40 monsters in a screen. Add the spell effects and you'll see you can't see what's going on there (other than flashes of light and some blood splashing).
Seriously, though, it's getting old. Perhaps they'll add one more player with the expansion. But I don't see them adding more. They said they tested and it felt better with 4.
And again, how many times were all 8 players (talking not leechers) together at the same place in Diablo II? Only place i remember was Ancients Hell. And that only the first few times after a ladder reset when we didn't have the gear to kill them easily (and were on Hardcore). In most cases there was a group of 3-4 people killing, another 3-4 leechers and perhaps one doing MF by himself on Andariel or Mephisto.
1st run through, you are forced to play at 4 player cap (per difficulty) after you clear the game you can create games with higher player caps (per difficulty)
Let players decide who / howmany people they want to play with.
WTF are you supposed to do in an online game with only 4 players?
Diablo is not online game, it's primary single player game with online multiplayer. People currently on diablofans are far from average player, Blizzard has their numbers and amount of people that never played multiplayer in SC2 or joined instance in WoW is likely higher than you and me think. This relates to follower system too.
They keep saying all the time they design it primarily for multiplayer though.
Still I think the 4 player cap is a good thing. It's not only the chaotic aspect, even though I do think 8 player games would soon seem like a game of Mario Smash Bros. It's also that it's easy to cooperate and stick together with 4 players. Hence, they can easily balance the game for challenging gameplay. While if 8 people could join your public game, at least two of them would idle in town or wander off by themselves. If they want to drastically increase difficulty with each player joining, that's a problem then. That's why I also don't think we'll see a higher level cap any time soon. But again, 4 is fine, just split up your group if you're with more players.
W/e single player or not , I guess im gona play it for atleast 2 months.... better than no diablo at all I guess.
such a shame to sit there and make "diablo III" and limit it so much , its a shame when the sequel to a game has less capability than the original.... don't get me wrong all that arena crap they are adding sounds fine and dandy but , diablo was about the story / clearing with friends / epic loot, if you sit in a room alone all the epic loot in the world isn't worth anything, (thats like finding buried treasure and not being able to spend it or share it) ^^... whats next? gear is going to be bind on pickup? ;p how stupid would that be....
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Just wondering if there has been a hard set on a player party cap yet for this game. In all the videos, they only show up to 4 players in a party at any point in time. Does this mean the player party cap is set to 4 then? I realize that this may be the optimal amount for PVE, but I would rather play in a less than optimal environment if that means I can have a few more buddies playing along with me. 4 max is not enough for me.......
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In general though 4 players (while admittedly a low number seeing as a lot of people would love to play D3 with 7 friends) benefits the game. To this day my favorite D3 video content out is (drum roll)
Not even because it focuses on the Monk, (I'm a Barb guy! :barb:) but because it has tons of HD footage of 4 classes mowing through mobs. It gives a great feel for how while 4 sounds like a low number, the power and visual effects of each player really dose fill the screen nicely when all 4 players are on screen. Non of the classes even have pets or summons on screen. Imagine 4 Witch Doctors each with 3 zombie dogs, and a Gargantuan. At that point not only is it a problem for you to distinguish things currently, but it also could cause major FPS (Frames Per Second) drop. I remember in D2 a single summon Necro during a Baal run would cause my decent PC to drop to like 3 FPS, making the game hard to play, and horrid to look at. Between the Sorcs casting spells, the Barbs casting buffs, the Pallys with their auras, everyone with a mercenary, it was just a mess.
All and all 4 players, while it has its down sides, will greatly benefit the game.
My thoughts EXACTLY. It will be GLORIOUS.
Also, I saw way too much color and rainbows in that video. Blizz needs to make the game way more gritty.\
That was sarcasm, if you couldn't figure it out.
The lower the # of players, the more strategic the encounters can become. You allow 8 players, now the scaling issues are tough. Make it too hard and you have to ensure that every single person in your group is amazing. Make it too easy and any 8 morons can zerg any encounter. And then the matter of scaling down difficulty for successive groups of 7, 6, 5 players, etc... (and substitute for whatever the # of players you want as a limit).
In terms of why it wasn't at least 5 or 6 rather than 4, I think the number of classes set to 5 also makes it a bit more attractive. You CANNOT have all the resources of the classes present during a game. And with the customization, even if you have 4 diff classes, each one will offer different abilities than perhaps another player of the same class (we just saw runes updated, gives you an idea).
What I sincerely hope, though, is that we get some kind of combat besides arena, and some creative modes in which there are more than 4 players. Even a 4v4 arena wouldn't be bad, or some kind of objective-oriented battleground would be good. And if anyone mentions WoW, please remember that WoW did not invent ANYTHING, and that's a lame thing to bring up. In any case, 4-man parties are not such a bad thing, performance-wise they'll keep things under control and balance-wise they'll be able to offer a pretty finely tuned experience given there's only really 3 things to balance (2,3 and 4 player teams, and I guess im not counting single player with followers, but thats a given).
They should make the Max player cap AT THE VERY LEAST 6, and just raise the difficulty of the mobs as more players join, its just dumb .... 4 players? really? not even 5? really?
1+ 4 is perfect, I mean, you can't even have one of each class in one game? thats just DUMB.
As it stands I have 6 people playing (who are fairly sure they are gona play) so that leaves parties of 4 and 2 or 3 and 3, which is just dumb in my opinion, a group of friends 8 (atleast 8) should be able to join up in one party, what kinda ONLINE game only has 4 players? THIS IS A SIGN THAT THEY ARE PLANING TO PORT THE GAME TO CONSOLES IMO, where 4 players would be optimal, but for PC???? REALLY??? 4 PLAYERS ONLY???? Just because consoles have a 4 player limitation issue (not even really) doesn't mean they should gimp out the PC port of the game.
Completely ruined the game, i mean the rumors that it plays exactly like torchlight (rumor says its a clone of torchlight pretty much) and that the maps where epic fail.... where disheartening enough, now to only have it be 4 players??? really just kills the game for me, I think im just gona buy it and play through it a few times as a single player game... sad to see 10 years waiting for DIABLOW instead of DIABLO
I guarantee they are going to add 8 player support with an expansion, I don't understand why they want us to suffer with only 4 player support till the exp. pack comes out... just dumb it should ship with THE VERY LEAST atleast!!!! 5 player support so you don't get the oddball "someone is sitting this run out" scenario....
This game is going to be huge at launch and people are gona log in and be like "WTF 4 PLAYER PER PARTY ONLY?" the forum is going to be flooded day one because its not generally known by people waiting that its only 4 player.
Its probably some joke or something just to get people angry or a limitation for beta only... for sure the game will launch with 5 to 8 player support at a min.
But I understand what people are saying. Yes, maybe it is a mess when there is more then 4 players. I wouldn't know - I haven't played the game yet. But I'm honestly not seeing the real difference of instead of just four, having five or (possibly) six. I can deal with five, one for each class if necessary. I don't see how your group of four people would suddenly jerk to a 10 FPS standstill once a fifth person becomes involved in the fray. Okay, maybe a little lag would occur, but are we really assuming that the netcode is that bad / people's computers that are playing the game are that bad? If there is a problem with 5 people running around, isn't it likely that it would be the same for 4 people anyway, due to bad programming? Okay, for the "can't have every class" argument, isn't it going to be the case of that anyway with 5 players, since more then likely there will be 2 of one class in a random game, and I don't see how it would restrict you that much if that was the case anyway. Besides, you're fighting against demons and the world is falling apart, are you supposed to know what the shit is going on anyway, despite how colourful and pretty your spells effects are?
I get that 7 or 8 players might be too much for this game as shown by Diablo II, but this is the year 2011 (and possibly 2012 by the time this game comes out) and you can't get 5 people together in an Action RPG game? ASDF
Maybe I just don't get it.
1) In D2 the only thing I (and many others) did actually together with more than 2 people was cow runs (where still most would wander off alone) and sometimes things like baal runs etc. Basically endgame stuff. I have never ever played through the entire game with more than two friends.
2) Now I also play some online games regularly together with around 6 real life friends. The thing is though, that they are never online at the same time, so the party size varies. Hence, a cap of 4 will often be enough for me. There will be some occasions when more people are online though, but then you'll just have to split up in groups (depending on character level/quest progression). The new battle.net will allow for more flexibility in joining each others' adventures, so it should be easy to cope for that. I think my online experience will be a lot nicer than with the usually useless 8 player cap from d2, which only served a purpose in relatively dull endgame activities.
keeping a 4 players cap to preserve balance is a much better reason, so your not sitting there flailing in this monster for 10 minutes because he has 1000% HP increase
But maybe we will see a 5 player cap when Expansion comes out i dont see any reason why not, that 1 extra player isnt going to destroy the balance, or fun factor.
I am hoping they increase pvp cap to atleast 8 if not more, so far it seems like 6 cap,
can you imagine how cool 4 v 4 clan matches would be ?
ALL IN ALL, I am not convinced that pushing the player cap to 5 or 6 will ruin gameplay. And even if it does, I think that Blizzard should leave it up to us to choose whether or not we want to "ruin" the gameplay in light of us not having our friend Billy playing solo style as the odd man out.
Exactly what I think. Although I believe PvP is 6 players from what we've seen so far. (don't know if this is the max)
That's because in PvP it's just players. Imagine 6 players (or more) and 40 monsters in a screen. Add the spell effects and you'll see you can't see what's going on there (other than flashes of light and some blood splashing).
Seriously, though, it's getting old. Perhaps they'll add one more player with the expansion. But I don't see them adding more. They said they tested and it felt better with 4.
And again, how many times were all 8 players (talking not leechers) together at the same place in Diablo II? Only place i remember was Ancients Hell. And that only the first few times after a ladder reset when we didn't have the gear to kill them easily (and were on Hardcore). In most cases there was a group of 3-4 people killing, another 3-4 leechers and perhaps one doing MF by himself on Andariel or Mephisto.
1st run through, you are forced to play at 4 player cap (per difficulty) after you clear the game you can create games with higher player caps (per difficulty)
Let players decide who / howmany people they want to play with.
WTF are you supposed to do in an online game with only 4 players?
They keep saying all the time they design it primarily for multiplayer though.
Still I think the 4 player cap is a good thing. It's not only the chaotic aspect, even though I do think 8 player games would soon seem like a game of Mario Smash Bros. It's also that it's easy to cooperate and stick together with 4 players. Hence, they can easily balance the game for challenging gameplay. While if 8 people could join your public game, at least two of them would idle in town or wander off by themselves. If they want to drastically increase difficulty with each player joining, that's a problem then. That's why I also don't think we'll see a higher level cap any time soon. But again, 4 is fine, just split up your group if you're with more players.
such a shame to sit there and make "diablo III" and limit it so much , its a shame when the sequel to a game has less capability than the original.... don't get me wrong all that arena crap they are adding sounds fine and dandy but , diablo was about the story / clearing with friends / epic loot, if you sit in a room alone all the epic loot in the world isn't worth anything, (thats like finding buried treasure and not being able to spend it or share it) ^^... whats next? gear is going to be bind on pickup? ;p how stupid would that be....