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Quote from jamesworkshop

because they wanted to, still doesn't make it a major issue anymore than cursed chest farming or the wretched mother farming outside new tristram

It's not even close to cursed chest farming or wretched mother farming.

The current exploit is not bad design. It's literally a bug where the Torment XP modifier would be applied while you're standing in town and you would, for some reason, still get XP on kills made in the Greater Rifts. If you think this is similar to anything mentioned above then you've got to be trolling. Standing in town getting (not killing anything) MORE XP PER KILL than your buddies who are killing the monsters.... that isn't anywhere close to "normal gameplay."

As far as I'm concerned anyone who actually thinks that standing in town getting tens of billions of XP per hour while not killing anything is "valid gameplay" is exactly the problem that this community doesn't need. It shows that some people will go to any lengths to justify things as "creative use of mechanics" even though they are clearly exploiting things to gain some kind of advantage. The community, and the game, would be better without these low-lifes and parasites.

We don't need people who know they're cheating but claim up and down the street they're innocent. Throw them the fuck out just like Lance Armstrong.

Quote from ruksak

Quote from xpose

What exactly did they do to warrant a ban? Oh no, they put it on t6 and ran greater rifts...better ban them.



Retarded reasoning.

That's an interesting spin. I'm not sure you know what the fuck you're talking about.

I laughed pretty hard at the lack of understanding.

"Ran greater rifts"

NAILED IT!

Quote from mister_p88

Don't get me wrong, I do not like exploitation either and I too think cheats should have their accounts stripped but in this case, this is another symptom of Blizzards poor software development cycle, specifically, the test phase. Anyone with any insight into SDLC will immediately see Blizzard's recent patch list has poor QA written all over it.

I'm not even going to touch on your analogy other than to say you need to understand that a BUG, by definition, is accidental and unintended. Therefore, comparing a bug in a piece of software to someone knowingly, and willingly, putting all their wares in a wheelbarrow and leaving it unattended in the middle of the street is not remotely accurate.

2.1 was rushed. It is a hot mess of lack of balance and badly-implemented ideas. From the constant frustrations with various monsters in GRifts to the fact that they left pet survivability take a massive hit in the nuts even though they knew, and acknowledged, it was a problem, to the brain fart that trials are, to the fact that the community has begged up and down for Blizzard to make difficulty amount to something more than just scaling damage, it seems more that they were interested in getting a patch live by a certain date than making sure the patch was actually complete. This isn't really a QA issue, it's an issue of straying from the "it's ready when it's ready" mentality to the "must get it done for <date>" mentality.

The bounties that could be used for fast T6 XP were reported during the beta. Pet survivability was reported during the beta. Both issues were ignored and allowed to go live. The Blizzard I remember would have fixed them because they were significant issues. For some reason, this time around, they chose to let major issues go live to bend to a deadline. That's the problem. Not QA.

2.1 doesn't have "poor QA" written all over it. It has "we completely skipped the QA process and also ignored a significant amount of beta feedback so that we could push this patch live ASAP" written all over it. And *that* is a much deeper, systemic and cultural, issue that scares me.

Quote from ruksak

This detached behavior translates to online gaming. When a major exploit comes along, people say "OMG FKING BLIZZ SUCKS". Instead of the more reasonable approach of calling out those who are purposely ripping the game.

It's basically a case of among teenagers being a troll is cool.

I remember playing WoW and people would sit around with their guildmates, people who were trying to come together to do something more than they could as individuals, and goad them into arguments, spam the table flip ASCII thing, respond to everything with "umadbro?" etc.

You could clearly tell the teenagers from EVERYONE ELSE. It's really a lack of parenting more than anything else. Anyone who believes that exploits are Blizzard's fault probably needed their dad to come home from work and beat the shit out of them with his belt because the kid got mouthy with his mother. But that probably wouldn't happen because the kid has six siblings, each one from a different father.

When I was a child no one gave two fucks if I thought Hasbro made an inferior cement truck toy. Kids today are raised to believe their opinion matters. Just look at Facebook. You have grown adults who communicate on the level of amoeba. And they're everywhere. Why? Because instead of holding their children responsible for being a party to their own education, parents nowadays just go to schools and blame the teachers for failing their children. MOTHERFUCKERS.... YOUR CHILDREN ARE FAILING BECAUSE YOU ARE BLAMING EVERYONE EXCEPT THEM. YOU ARE GIVING THEM A FREE PASS.

And then they grow up into mouthbreathing neckbeards who think that they are God's gift to everything they touch. D3 isn't perfect? RIOT! XP bug? NOT MY FAULT.

Bitch. If a shopowner leaves his front door unlocked that doesn't give you the right to go in and steal all the items from the shelves. Just because there is a bug in a piece of software that doesn't mean you have an open invitation to use it.

The best punishment for exploiting in a season would be a reset in the current season and being unable to create a season character for the first 14 days of the next season. THAT will get peoples attention and make them think twice about it. If you take these people's ability to wave their ePeen around by giving them a handicap in the next season as well as a rollback in the current season, people are going to really shy away from this kind of stuff.

And, sure, you could say it's schadenfreude in that I just want to see people punished, but just like baseball players caught on steroids, there has to be a penalty for cheating. In fact, MLB is a great example of what happens when detection and adjudication of rules violations are ineffective. You draw a line in the sand that shows you're serious.

Quote from mannercookie

which is why players like him need to be reset, an exploit like this is just simply too game-breaking when there is actually a leaderboard and "competition".

Bans are fine by me.

The line is crossed when you're doing something that you know you shouldn't be able to do. If you're standing in town pulling in tons of XP that clearly is not how the game is intended to be played. Anyone who thinks that thing was INTENDED by the developers, and not a bug, is simply lying. To me this issue is pretty black and white as it involves a clearly-unintended behavior.

You know, just like duping gold via the RMAH. Clearly the RMAH wasn't supposed to dupe gold for you. Regardless of whether or not the bug passed through the PTR, it was very obvious that the behavior in question was not intentional. And, for me, that's the only "test" necessary for bans.

Quote from Shapookya

Of course there will be that very low number of people who are extremely unlucky, but then again you don't say that football is a game of luck because players can get a bad season and miss more than usual, do you?

Huh?

That is a pretty terrible analogy. As Vaestmannaeyjar said, it would be like a schedule that included nothing but one of the best teams in the world. There's a reason why in almost every professional sport that schedules aren't randomized. You play the teams in your division a lot. You play the teams outside of your division less. There is little "random chance" in your schedule. You have equal numbers of home and away games. They attempt to make the schedule as fair as possible to avoid things like this.

When you have a competition you have to keep things fair, within reason. Sure everyone's schedule isn't going to be exactly the same. But you don't have one team playing the world champion 25 times while everyone else plays them zero times. And the solution isn't "next season you'll have a different schedule so the law of large numbers will even it out!" Only a complete moron would think that's a reasonable solution.

If you want "competition" in the form of seasonal and non-seasonal leaderboards then there has to be balance. Imbalances undermine the fundamental idea of "competition." I don't know what is so difficult to understand about that.

I don't see why anyone would think a roll of the dice to determine if you'll have a winning or losing rift due to map, density, and monster types is a good form of "competition." It's like rolling a dice before a soccer match and if it comes up an odd number you're not allowed to have a goalkeeper in that it's completely nonsensical and destroys the ultimate purpose of the game.

It makes much more sense to increase the challenge by going up a GR level, not by somehow randomizing monsters that curbstomp you every so often.

Quote from Shapookya

What genius in the dev team thought that monsters who play tennis with the player is a good idea? -.-

What genius, seeing rifts, and having Greater Rifts on the PTR, thought that the current set of monsters was OK for timed runs?

Between the massive balance issues in GRifts and the asinine gem leveling system, I'm just not sure any of the devs even played their own game during the PTR. There's no way people play this and think

"Gee, I really love how Morlu Incinerators completely destroy my fetishes."
"This shield on the Corrupted Angels is really sweet with our new single-element-centric builds!"
"It's fun as fuck to stand around waiting for wraiths (and others) to come back on the field of play."
"I really enjoy clearing a GR level and having 4% progress due to shitty density."
"DH or bust!"

among other, very obvious things that were repeatedly pointed out by players during the PTR. This is not the kind of QA we need with "competitive" gameplay. It undermines the very idea of seasons and leaderboards when such blatantly obvious issues are left completely unaddressed so they can push the patch out sooner.

Quote from silvach

You don't understand that this has nothing to do with how many hours you dedicate to play but if either you are lazy crybaby or player who likes challenges.

You don't seem to understand the fundamental flaw of "You have to do 1000s of bounties in a season that probably will only last 3-4 months in order to get an item that is necessary for most builds." It... just... doesn't... work... at... all.

You keep ranting and raving like some kind of entitled gamer... the worst kind of gamer... without showing one bit of comprehension as to what problem they're attempting to solve. This isn't a "make the game easier" issue. It's a "the old way doesn't work in seasons, at all" issue. Can you please, for fuck's sake, get that through your thick head? I know it's tough because all you seem concerned with is convincing us that you're superior to the rest of us, but if you calm the fuck down for ten seconds and stop thumping your chest a bit, I have confidence that even you can understand it.

There are players who haven't got a single RoRG in standard mode yet. That just doesn't translate well into seasons when, to this date, 99% of builds are centered around it. There's nothing more to it. It's not casuals vs hardcore. It's a band-aid fix on an item that is far too mandatory for most builds being far too unavailable to the average player given the timeframe of seasons. There is no fun in having to farm a RoRG per character per season. That's just asinine gameplay, and I expect something similar to be done about the Hellfire Ring & Amulet as they're decidedly unfun to repeatedly farm too.

I would expect that sometime in the future the RoRG and it's near-mandatory across-the-board status is addressed. But, as I see it, this is a stopgap measure until that time comes.

Try to understand the problem before you go bat-shit roid-rage over the solution.

Quote from Pietrak

The point is that being somewhat forced to farm RoRG on each new character in every future season until we get the next expansion (regardless of how easy it is) is highly undesirable.

I'd like to emphasize that this situation is far less horrible with the new drop rates as compared to the old drop rates.

The old drop rates were a MASSIVE deterrent to playing seasons. Seriously, with the old drop rates who really would want to farm up a RoRG once per X months? Even if X is 12, that doesn't sound anywhere close to fun for me. It's very similar to why most people aren't even touching Ubers. There are simply too many layers of RNG.

Did the keys drop to make the IMs?
Did the organs drop to make the ring/neck?
Did the ring/neck roll well?

Did you get a legendary from the cache?
Was it a ring?
Did it roll well?

That kind of RNG clusterfuck is completely counterproductive in seasons. The game is based on RNG, surely. But there's just too many RNG walls to slam into for those two systems, in particular, to be engaging and enjoyable when repeated every X months. Think about the Hellfire Ring/Amulet. Even if they made the keys and organs 100% drop rate on T6 there would still be a ton of RNG in terms of how the items are rolled.

The RNG most people are used to conquering in these games are:

1) Rarity (like Starmetal Kukiri, Wand of Woh, or Enigma); and,
2) Quality of stat rolls

Once you lump in that third layer of RNG it becomes rather punitive and unbearable for most players. Having high drop rates for non-rift activities tends to make up for the otherwise-horrible legendary drop rates outside of rifts, so I'm OK with it. Split bounties are still a total exploit as far as I'm concerned, but there really does need to be a reason to do things other than rifts. This, at least partially, addresses that by making cache-only items not seem like an impossible task unless you have three other people split farming with you. They need to similarly address Ubers.

When we're not doing rifts we're sacrificing drops. Therefore the items we're trying to target MUST be more-accessible to counterbalance that. Risk vs. reward. It's important.

Quote from Jamoose

How is it better game design to have people farm 2k bounties to get 1 crappy ring?

It's not. It's just more rose-tinted nostalgia circlejerking, to put it bluntly.

Having to farm hundreds, and thousands, of bounties just to get one ring, and have that ring subject to RNG, doesn't work with seasons. There was already pretty big backlash about that very fact on Reddit. People saying that RoRG was going to keep them from playing multiple classes in a season because it's just not enjoyable to have to farm like that.

Let's be honest here. Even on T6, even with this buff, you're still getting fewer legendaries/hour doing bounties than doing rifts. But, unlike before, your time doing bounties isn't completely wasted.

And, while we're being honest, let's remember that on T6 you're getting one legendary per cache. You are not getting one RoRG per cache. I did three A1 bounty sets last night. I got two RoRGs, one Mad Monarch's Scepter. Both RoRGs were bad. I don't see the problem there. I've only ever received one "good" RoRG and it had the wrong primary stat, meaning it really wasn't even "good" for the character I was currently playing. What fun is that? How nostalgic does someone have to be to think that was enjoyable?

All they have to do is fix split farming and I think this solution is spot-on, especially considering seasons.

They had to do it. RoRG + Seasons => frustration.

Sure some people enjoy farming RoRG, but getting shoehorned into doing it once per character per season just wasn't a winning formula with the current drop rates. I'm not a big fan of the huge drop rates, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a necessary evil as the alternative is significantly worse. On the upside it makes attaining certain items (Illusory Boots, I am looking squarely at you) much more reasonable... and that's a good thing.

EDIT
5 T6 caches, 5 legendaries so far

Quote from ConundrumNSA

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/14058937238

LOL, closing the barn door after the horse has run out, knocked up the neighbors horse and burned down their house...

Now what was that some of you were saying about valid and legitimate playstyle?

As much as I think they should have changed this to be in-line with their "killing monsters is where it's at" justification of BoA, I think it's absurd to do it mid-season. It's like they don't have a single goddamned clue.

Things that aren't outright exploits (where account rollbacks would be considered) cannot be nerfed midstream. It doesn't make a damned bit of sense. The people who used these methods have what they need, the rest don't have access to it. If they're not going to do rollbacks then there's no point in nerfing it partway through the season.

They had the opportunity to do this prior to S1. They opted not to. Good, bad, or indifferent, my opinion is that it should remain in the game until after S1 has concluded. Also.... really.... disabling them in standard? GFY!

Quote from st0rmie

Or just do another pass over the XP values for different mob types. Since the progress bar is now apparently driven by mob XP value .. if certain types are making rifts ridiculously harder, then those types should be worth more XP. That would not only ease the rift problems, but would also be better and fairer for general gameplay in the Acts where those monsters appear.

The amount they'd have to increase the XP gains from, say Morlu Incinerators, to compensate for how much longer it takes (petdoctors in particular) to kill them would completely "break" the game for builds that don't suffer from the same problems (M6 DH, for example).

Napkin math here. A "normal" T6 elite pack (not extra health, not horde, no electrified, fairly easy to cluster up, no insane monster-specific abilities like Morlu Incinerators and such) takes me roughly 10-15s to kill. Morlu Incinerator elite packs on T6 can, and have, taken me in excess of 2 minutes to kill. Let's just say 90s to be fair. That means Morlu Incinerators would have to grant 6-9x as much XP as a "normal" monster to remain competitive in terms of how quickly they fill the rift bar.

They surely could do that, but it would also mean that M6 DHs, in particular, would "win" by getting Morlu Incinerator rifts because they don't take 6-9x as long to kill them. So either the bonus XP is going to be high enough that it evens things out for WDs, but then makes Morlu Incinerators the "must have" monster for DHs to get better GR results, or it won't be high enough and WDs still won't want to encounter them because the XP/time is not worth it.

It would VERY MUCH help to isolate the problem if they'd just group monsters into difficulties and not give us rifts with lots of "hard" monsters. I could probably slog through a Morlu Incinerator rift, but nine times out of ten a Morlu Incinerator rift also means Terror Demons, Mallet Lords, or Corrupted Angels which takes "could probably slog through" and turns it into "why even try?" It's the same with A5 monsters. Anarchs by themselves might make things harder, but Anarchs + Exarchs + Executioners + Winged Assassins + worm things makes it feel more like RNG just took a giant shit on me.

If we were less likely to get 2+ "hard" monsters all lumped in together the perceived difficulty of each individual monster would decrease and there would be less overall balance necessary.

TL;DR
Not every "hard" monster is "hard" for every class or every spec, so simply buffing XP given would then give other classes/specs a significantly easier time clearing rift levels with the buffed monsters. Better RNG when populating the rifts would solve most of the problems at hand. Therefore, the problem should be addressed, first, from that perspective and then fine-tuned by other means.

Quote from Helycon

The fact is, that some of these mobs are highly unbalanced when you compare them to a zombie. This works well in campaign mode mode, where you ease in the difficulty, but not so much in a GR where the first level of the rift can be easy as taking candy from a baby, and the second trying to solve the world's food problems.

Progress in GRs shouldn't amount to "I didn't get hard monsters." That's simply asinine and undermines the idea that GRs test your gear and your skill.

I've said it in other threads, but I'll say it here too. My best GR27 clear time is ~10 minutes. I've failed GR25s because they're composed of Morlu Incinerators and Mallet Lords. It's OK for monsters to have different abilities and, therefore, varying degrees of difficulty, but that kind of discrepancy is simply too large. We don't need pinpoint equity here, we just need parity.

If I can clear GR27 in ~10 minutes, if I get Morlu Incinerators and Mallet Lords, I should still be able to clear GR27, maybe in 11.5 minutes, but I should still be able to clear it. I shouldn't be failing two levels lower because of them. That kind of difference in actual monster power is chasmic.

EDIT
What would be best would simply be if they categorized monsters as easy/medium/hard and only gave you one hard monster per rift level and two each easy and medium. Then you'd never get stuck with, say, Corrupted Angels *and* Morlu Incinerators *and* Mallet Lords, which does happen. Instead of nerfing monsters, simply limit the number of "will fuck your rift up to the point of frustration" monsters to one and that would probably clear up 90%+ of the problems people are seeing.