Fruitless Grinding

by

Hey Folks! I thought I would give a bit of an update on my Diablo Immortal madness. I am not even sure why I am continuing to go down this path other than to serve as an example of what not to do for others. I am still a “free” player and have managed to get up to Paragon level 40 and am still getting bonus XP as the Server Paragon I believe is 50 currently. I however have hit a bit of a wall, in that I am not getting anywhere near the number of materials that I need to keep upgrading my gear. Additionally, I have noticed that once I hit Paragon 30, I have stopped getting near the number of legendary drops that I once did as well. I am not sure if this is a “dry spell” or something inherently built into the game, but I am struggling a bit to get the gear and more importantly combat level needed to progress in the game.

Because I am over Paragon 30, I should in theory be accessing the Hell 2 difficulty for greater rewards. However, that is not happening because I do not have the gear to actually complete this. Everything in this game boils down to your combat rating and your resonance and combined these determine how effective you are in combat. Combat rating can be increased through upgrading your gear, acquiring better actual items, or equipping/upgrading better legendary gems. The whales were farming Hell 2 long before they managed to reach Paragon 30 because the gems that they had equipped pushed their combat rating well beyond that which was required to do the content. Weirdly enough I can actually function fairly well within a Hell 2 zone, but eventually, get overwhelmed. This is because the game has decided to penalize me for not being at 1220 Combat Rating and is causing me to take 61% more damage and deal 38% less damage.

Since I am unwilling to spend any money on Legendary Crests and the $25 gamble to get 5 Star gems… my only real recourse is to either find better Legendaries/Set Pieces or to continue upgrading my gear. As a solo player, I am not running around constantly in a group of four players, and the game numbers have dropped off enough that it is actually a bit of a challenge to fill a party. That means my best option is to go out into the world and grind for gear. This is cumbersome and tedious, and also involves competing for resources against every other free-to-play player who has come to the same conclusion. In order to take all six legendary slots from Rank 7 to Rank 8, I am going to need the following.

  • 24 – Glowing Shards – Gained from salvaging Legendaries
  • 660 – Enchanted Dust – Gained from salvaging a Yellow or bought for 10 scraps each.
  • 3,600 – Scrap Materials – Gained through salvaging White (1 per) or Blues (3 per).
  • 132,000 – Gold – Gained through many sources

Since getting yellow drops are completely unpredictable, the source of most of the Enchanted Dust that I have gained in the game has come from converting 10 Scrap Material into a single one. So if you flatten the materials required you are essentially looking at 10,200 Scrap and then salvaging 24 Legendary items.

Sitting down this morning before writing this post I decided to run an experiment. I completed a round of four bounties, not because the bounties themselves really are that fruitful in materials, but instead because it gave me a fixed purpose to go out into the world and kill a lot of things in a structured manner. The full round of bounties took me roughly 15 minutes. During the course of that run, I happened upon a random world event and a treasure goblin both of which will have increased the total count of items gained. Every time you open a world event chest until you hit the daily cap… you are rewarded with 4 enchanted dust and 2 blues. After you hit the cap you stop getting the enchanted dust and only get blues, so these are not a viable long-term means of grinding out enchanted dust really. On my 15 Minute run, I got the following:

  • 19 White quality items – 19 Scrap
  • 18 Blue quality items – 54 Scrap
  • 2 Yellow quality items – 2 Enchanted Dust – 20 Scrap
  • 4 Event Dropped Enchanted Dust – 40 Scrap

So flattening this for the sake of easier calculations, in 15 minutes I gained the equivalent of 133 Scrap Materials worth of items. So I know from playing this game that it is not realistic to take that 15-minute swath as representative of what I can expect to gain every single outing. There will be times when it is much more fruitful and there will be times when I walk away with a considerable amount less. However once again for the sake of making the math more simple while understanding that my sample size is bad… if we took for granted that I gained 133 Scrap every 15 minutes, it would take me a little over 19 hours to grind out the 10,200 scraps I need to upgrade my six legendary slots to the next rank.

I’ve also approached trying to do whatever I could to get some Hell 2 gear dropping from the activities that I could complete. If you manage to do a Level 30 Challenge Rift, it unlocks the ability to get Hell 2 drops from Challenge Rifts, Elder Rifts, Cycle of Strife, Vendors, Bounty Rewards, and the Horadric Tome. However, as I said before I have seen a massive drop in the total number of Legendaries that I have gained. Prior to Paragon 30, I seemed to have about a 50/50 chance of getting a Legendary when I ground out 10 Monster Essences and turned them in for a Horadric Tome page. Since dinging Paragon 30 I have yet to see a single Legendary drop in this manner just as an example. Similarly while out in the field I seem to be getting far fewer Legendaries off the Orange skull mobs that are designated as having a higher Legendary drop chance. Basically, I feel like there is very little that I can do to move forward that does not require a ludicrous amount of time spent.

That said, why don’t we close out this post with something a bit more enjoyable. I really do like the build that I am running and out of all possible legendary items in the game, there are only a few left that I might be interested in. I do really enjoy the Essence Transfer system because it allows me to essentially keep to the same build while occasionally swapping out items when something with a higher combat rating drops. My build looks a little something like this:

  • Primary Attack
    • Punish
      • Largely using it because it gives me an additional block rate for surviving massive pulls
  • Secondary Skills
    • Draw and Quarter
      • My main strategy is to use the holy steed that you summon to gather up large packs of mobs in order to burn them down with my AOE skills. My shoulders increase the duration of the steed by 30%, my pants cause it to catch everything on fire, and finally, my chest causes the steed to call down bombardment on packs around me.
    • Holy Banner
      • My helmet converts the banner into Holy Beacon which zaps everything within range with Holy Light damage which is excellent for big pack clear.
    • Consecration
      • My shield causes the consecration to slow enemies by 30%, just as a way of keeping them in the bad a bit longer to help whittle them down.
    • Falling Sword
      • My weapon converts how the falling sword works so that it is a charged line attack that grows the longer I charge it. Essentially this is the sweeper that I use to mop up anything that did not get killed by my Consecration and Holy Beacon.

Essentially the way that I play is to run around on my horse, gather up three or four packs worth of mobs, lead them back to a central location, drop holy beacon, drop consecrate, and then start hitting punish to try and keep up my block. Once I am down to only a few stragglers I angle my Empowered Sword so that it cleaves through the entire pack and finishes them off. Very fun gameplay and very fitting for the Crusader class.

I wish the game had some measure of tracking how long I have played because I figure that number is going to be large. I’ve managed to finish the free track of the Battle Pass and now every time I gain a new level I essentially get some gold and 150 Scrap Materials. I have to admit there is part of me that wants to pay for the battle pass now that I have unlocked it fully, and would be gaining all benefits. Traditionally this is how I approach a battle pass system. If I can manage to grind out the free track, then I “reward” myself by paying for the full access track. However, with Diablo Immortal I am deeply conflicted because I do think that even as a purely PVE-only player… I am being negatively impacted by the existence of all of the paywalls. If I was spending money I would have better Legendary Gems and would not be staring down the barrel of a 20-hour grind… to MAYBE be able to get access to Hell 2 and start getting the gear my paragon level would denote. Buying the battle pass would do almost nothing to help me out, because in the entirety of the track… it only includes two Legendary Crests.

I think ultimately that is the conundrum of Diablo Immortal. It is a game that I have really enjoyed quite a bit, but the monetization will forever taint that experience. Knowing that my experience is suffering in large part because entire systems in the game are effectively locked off from me… feels awful. I think very soon I am going to reach a point where I just put this game to bed for now. Mobile games ultimately soften their requirements over time, this is the nature of the beast. They launch in a state that is deeply prohibitive of the free-to-play players in order to extract the maximum amount of cash from the whales.

At some point in the near future, I expect there will be concessions and probably an apology letter, and the game will change drastically… while also introducing a brand new top-end money grind. I genuinely do like this game, I just think that maybe it is best to wait for Diablo 4 and forget this one exists for a while. In the meantime, I have Diablo 3 and am starting to finally grok Path of Exile. Diablo Immortal could have been a great game, and might still be at some point in the future. For now, however, the monetization path it has taken has ruined that experience. No one can dismiss the fact that I have put effort into understanding this game and trying to keep moving forward. There is a path forward, as Demone Kim outlines in the above video… but just not one I am willing to take.

Ineffective Emotional Hardware

by

Sometimes in life, a sequence of events takes place… and you don’t really have the mental pathways prepared to process it. I am struggling with one of those right now and as a result, I am in a bit of a funk. The above picture is of a cat that is not ours… but the one on the left was going to be. We lost my baby Kenzie in December of last year, and it has taken me a long time to process that as well. Recently my wife has been on this kick of bombarding me with kittens and claiming that we need one. On one hand, I agree that Kittens are adorable and I love them all… and on the other hand I have been slowly trying to bring Mollie our exceptionally skittish cat out of her shell. The latter has made me extremely hesitant to do anything to upset the delicate balance, especially given that the death of Kenzie threw her into a bit of a tailspin.

I had finally come to terms with the idea of getting a cat, and one of our friends about an hour away had a litter of adorable babies. My wife drove up to visit them and the cat on the left pretty much adopted her. I would show you some much cuter pictures… but they also include my wife and she would probably kill me for publicly posting them. Essentially it was decided that we would end up with this baby and started going through the planning phase for a new kitten. We were effectively waiting until she was good and weaned, and had set a date for this last Wednesday. I had taken the afternoon off and we were going to go pick the kitten up and then take her back to our veterinarian where she would get tests and such to make sure she did not have anything communicable that could harm our existing babies.

We did not go to get a cat on Wednesday, because on that morning three of the kittens… were just missing. These babies were indoor/outdoor animals or as we generally refer to them in rural America “barn cats”. The problem with outdoor animals is sometimes things happen to them. I remember as a kid having plenty of barn cats that would occasionally disappear never to be heard from again. We don’t know what happened to them… we know that the kitten we were about to adopt is gone. At this point a few days later, we have to assume the worst. I am struggling with this a lot. I had gotten attached to the idea of us getting this kitten… that granted I had never actually met myself. I had been flooded with pictures of the said kitten… but never actually met her.

Now I find myself in the position of my wife starting up the kitten bombardment.. and talking about how we need to go to a local shelter that is at levels of overflow that might trigger euthanasia. I however find myself still mourning a cat that I never actually knew. It is like I don’t really have the emotional hardware to process this one. My wife is largely fine because she went into this with the logical realization that outdoor cats can and do disappear. I, on the other hand, am far too soft-hearted for this and while I can shrug off the loss of a human… animals are precious babies that need to be loved and protected. I know that I will probably concede to being drafted into this mission of kitten hunting this weekend, but for now, I am exceptionally melancholy about that prospect.

Unsustainable Shadow Clans

by

I feel like at this point my attachment to Diablo Immortal is very much the definition of a “guilty pleasure”. I feel fairly guilty for continuing to play it, but I am having quite a bit of fun with it. The problem however is that none of the systems of this game seems sustainable. The core long-term rhythm of the social side of the game centers around the “cycle of strife”. Last Sunday across the world the very first Immortals were crowned, and on Monday following that everyone that was in a shadow clan was unceremoniously booted back to Adventurer status. This begins the Shadow Lottery all over again as folks start to build up a critical mass of players in order to challenge the Immortals for their status.

It feels very much like folks fought their way to “server first” in trying to claim that Immortal throne, and now have stopped playing. Megashield, the Immortal for Doombringer the server that I play on… is more or less absent from the leaderboards right now whereas he previously dominated them. It is more than that, however. The dungeon queues seem to take much longer than they did, and there are just lacking a critical mass of players to do several of the more difficult zone events like the Blood Rose. There was a push to be first, and anyone who did not manage to get that title has seemingly moved on with their lives. The restarting of the cycle is asking an awful lot of players.

I wish I had a screenshot of the original “Become a Dark Clan” page, but I appear to have failed to snap a picture. Right now we have collected 6 out of 30 signets, which means that three of our members have managed to get through the Shadow Lottery. In order to convert our clan into a Dark Clan once again, we will need to get 12 more players through the Shadow Lottery and have them choose to turn in the two Akeba Signets that they get in order to finally convert the entire clan. I am pretty sure the first time we did this the number we needed was either six or eight in total. This means every few weeks… each clan is going to have to grind once again in order to convert to a Dark Clan and gain access to the benefits of being a shadow. I have a feeling that before too much longer folks are just going to stop going through these motions.

The problem with this however is that by NOT being a Shadow, you are missing out on a large number of activities that you could be participating in. In theory, if you forgo the clan experience… you can spend a single one of the two signets you get and join the Shadows on your own. I did not choose to do this, unfortunately, and I donated my signets before realizing just how many we needed. Right now there are three members in the clan who are actively playing, with a fourth on vacation. However, that means it is entirely unlikely that we will manage to convert the entire clan before this current cycle is over. That also means that if I am still playing the game when the time next Cycle of Strife begins… that I will probably just go solo missing out on the entire clan experience. I feel like this entire design is centered around a critical mass of players joining giant cattle call clans and deeply harms any smaller more chill groups from ever participating.

All of this is unfortunate, as is the horrible monetization scheme that I have not forgotten or forgiven… because the game is rather fun. I rolled a Barbarian alt the other night just to see how that class plays in contrast to my experiences with the Crusader. I have to say it is equally enjoyable and apparently now that the Server Paragon level has been increased to 40… everyone is getting a massive dose of catch-up experience. I managed to get to 30 in about an hour of playtime just poking around and following the quest chain. If this leveling rate is sustainable, I will easily ding 60 long before I finish the main story quest. It seems like the Server Paragon level is playing the role of boosting anyone who happens to be lagging behind the pack and funneling everyone towards a shared level bracket. I mean this is good for grouping purposes, but even with that in place… I am still finding it pretty hard to find any groups as I work through the story dungeons.

Given that we are already seeing a massive drop-off in player interest, I do wonder how long before server mergers are happening. The viewers on Twitch continue to drop as do the total number of channels streaming Diablo Immortal, and it seems like the zeitgeist is starting to move past it. There was a reported $24 million dollar earnings within the first two weeks, but I do wonder how much of that profit is legitimate. I watched a streamer yesterday for a little bit that was running $25 rifts… but was going through a money laundering shuffle of taking WoW gold, converting it to tokens, then converting those tokens to Blizzard Balance… and using the Blizzard Balance to buy the Legendary Crests for the runs. Then he converted any gems that he did not need to Platinum through the in-game auction house to purchase the things he actually needed. There is an awful lot of liquid World of Warcraft gold out there, especially among those communities that sell in-game runs for gold. There is no real way for someone to “cash out” other than selling an account, but it does make me wonder how much of that “revenue” was the recycling of existing “blizzard currency”.

Anyways I am still enjoying the actual gameplay, and still following the drama surrounding it. I do think that if this game is going to exist in six months, there will need to be some serious system redesign because the current structure is unsustainable as player interest plummets.

Respect Your Casuals

by

So this is a bit of a weird tangent, and I am not even certain where it is going to end up… but here we go. I’ve been seeing sentiments for years expressed each time a game fails or a game flounders and I think in large part they point at a larger misunderstanding by a segment of the gaming community. More recently this has been happening quite a bit in the New World community, where everyone can for the most part agree now that the game is failing or is in a failed state… but no one can agree as to why. I’ve seen lots of people point at the game’s failure because one of several reasons… here are some summary takes that I have read:

The game is failing because…

  • it abandoned hardcore dark souls combat
  • it did not focus solely on open-world PVP
  • it did not focus solely on arena combat
  • there isn’t enough endgame PVE content

There are of course other takes that I could include, but I am largely focusing on these four takes because I have seen them the most. My feeling is that New World is failing because it did not create an ecosystem that was friendly to casual players and did not give them a reason to stick around. It launched with a poor server design that had a cap of 1500 players, making it deeply difficult for people to get logged in and actually play on the same server as the rest of their early adopter friends.

They created a dungeon design system that made it difficult for players to group up and do things together and a questing system that literally made it impossible to help someone out with key gating quests after you had completed it yourself. Then when the most hardcore of players had “finished the game” by rushing ahead in the first day or two… a patch was released that moved the goal posts for more casual players to where they might never be able to accomplish the same things actively breaking some of the most casual friendly content in the game.

Basically, my takeaway as to why the game failed is that it did not respect its casual population. Please note I am not a casual gamer. I spend a truly stupid amount of time playing whatever game I happen to be hyper-fixated on. I am no longer full-on Hardcore, but I live in a comfortably Mediumcore existence where I cherry-pick the activities that I care enough about to actually focus and gear for. However, one thing I have noticed over the years, is that that games that ultimately thrive… are the games that respect the casual player base the most.

What I mean by this is these are the games that make it easy for you to drop in, play with your friends if you have them, or still get content done if you are a purely solo player. As much as the more serious gamers lament the existence of LFR in World of Warcraft, it allows players to see end-game stories without having to deal with the treadmill of endgame progression. Similarly, I think the big open-world boss battles in Guild Wars 2 are a testament to just how good a game can feel when it has respect for its casual player population.

The problem here however is that the Hardcores are always a vocal minority in any game that they are playing, and they are ultimately trying to skew things towards their own demographic. I specifically called out Guild Wars 2 because that game implemented a very casual unfriendly world game event in the Dragon’s End zone, that also gates access to one of the key features of the End of Dragons expansion. This has started discussions within that community, specifically among the content creators about how exactly they can make players hardcore like themselves, and take all of the endgame progression seriously. The thing is… this is not a battle that they can win and if the game clamps down to focus more on serious content… the player numbers that they rely on will dwindle.

I feel like we have been watching this play out without realizing it in World of Warcraft. That game starting with Burning Crusade has become more and more a game that slowly pushes you onto one of several endgame onramps. You currently have three competitive communities of Raiding, PVP, and Mythic progression. I think there is a large group of players who come in at an expansion launch, play through the story, level a few alts, and are not seen again until the launch of the next expansion. What is left outside of the three competitive communities, is largely unrewarding and repetitive world content. Guild Wars 2 has shined in this department in that there are multiple paths to the best stuff in the game, one of which is a very serious crafting process that requires no endgame participation in order to accomplish it, just copious hours of gathering or gold.

Honestly, Final Fantasy XIV has the same problem of players bouncing when they complete the story content. I am very much one of these people, in spite also having been someone effectively playing the game many times in the past when it was considered to be in a content lull. The difference with FFXIV though is that they have a large number of systems not tied to the core game that folks seem to enjoy engaging with. You have the minigame-laden gold saucer, housing extreme if you can luck into winning a plot, the deep dungeon systems, and even the “limited job” of Blue Mage which effectively is a spell collection minigame. Even though there are still players that come and go with the content tides, there is way more content to keep folks engaged that is not directly tied to the core pillars of dungeons, raids, and ultimate.

The most thriving game is ultimately the one that respects its casual players the most and makes them feel like a part of the larger community… without asking them to conform to some specific ideas. I think the thing that the Hardcore player base needs to understand, is that they are very much in the minority and that not everyone views the games that they play as a competition. Please for the love of god let the casual players just enjoy the game, and stop trying to change them. This “change” takes place in two ways, indirectly by appealing constantly to the devs to make mechanics more punishing and more tailored to your specific interests. The other key way that change is invoked in a community is by creating an atmosphere that is hostile or toxic to anyone who does not perform in a specific manner under specific conditions.

I remember reading a specific article back in the day as to the small portion of the player base that ever experienced Naxxramas in World of Warcraft. While I could not find the specific article as I was writing this, I did find a YouTuber that tried to do some math on the percentage of players that saw a full clear of Naxxramas before Burning Crusade. This YouTuber clocks it at 0.07% of the total player population had a verified clear of Naxxramas before the Burning Crusade pre-patch. While raiding is significantly more popular today than it was at the time… you are still talking about a very small segment of the total player base that plays the game seriously enough to clear end-game content. I am not saying that end game content does not have a place, but the players who are actively engaged in it… need to understand the perspective that even today they represent a small minority of the total player base.

The success of a game over the long term… is in large part about the retention of your casual players. So when I read comments that a game is failing because it was not “hardcore enough” in one area or another I struggle to take them seriously. I’ve yet to see a game survive solely on their most hardcore players. If I could change anything about the larger community discourse, it would be to show a little respect for the players who are just playing the game to have fun. Maybe stop shaming them for not turning in the DPS you are expecting, or not having the right gear. Maybe just let them play the damned game and do whatever it is that is bringing them joy. The more welcoming the game is to casuals… the more casuals will ultimately decide on their own that they want to get serious about the game. Broadening the player base will also by side effect broaden the pool of players that eventually trickle up into the more serious content.

So again when I hear about some game failing, my takeaway is generally going to be that they did not support the more casual gamers enough. A game.. especially one with social aspects to it… needs to be super easy to engage with. Possibly even more important however is that games need to allow you to engage with your friends instantly. Too many games are situations where you need to get to some arbitrary objective where the “real game” begins before you can actually play with those who were early adopters. As someone who is often one of those early adopters, please give me ways to take my friends along in the journey rather than having to come up with ways to gently pressure them into focusing on leveling to the point where I can actually start helping them. I want my friends to love the game as much as I do… so please make it easy to love.

Anyways I have rambled enough for one post, and I am not sure I have a succinct point to wrap up. Basically, respect the casual gamers out there, and stop trying to change them. Let them engage with games in whatever method they choose, and stop shaming them along the way.