Fist of the Brotherhood Report #16

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Fist of the Brotherhood Report #16

Gaming Poll has now closed. Lots of information on Diablo 3: American and European Clans, the future plans for Clusters of Fire and Pendants of Blood in the game, and a run down on Club First Achievements coming with the Expansion that can earn you a Pendant of Blood!

Gaming Poll Closed

Last report I announced a Gaming Poll focus on discussion about whether Gaming Platforms should have additional rules applied to them to level the playing field among the members. Also in that report I said it would remain open at least through my beginning of March Report. In the last two weeks the Poll had sixty six responses submitted to it. That represents a pretty sizable chunk of our members, so in order to get into the data review / discussion part of this project I've decided to close the poll at this time.

Either my end of March or mid-April Report will summarize the findings, discussions, and chosen path forward based on the Poll Results. As I mentioned before I'll be pulling in the Dark Council, as well as Independent House Quaestors and Clan Consuls for these discussion points.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback to this poll!

Diablo 3 News

Information on the Diablo 3 Clans, changes with the upcoming expansion to Clusters of Fire and Pendants of Blood, and what Club First Achievements will be out there once the Expansion launches that will earn you a PoB.

Diablo 3 Clans

Earlier this week Diablo 3 saw a major patch, and we have created a American and European Battle.net Clan. Membership in these Clans is not a requirement to earn CFs in Diablo 3, they exist purely as a way for us to interact socially and find groups easier. Currently any member can invite someone else to the Clan. You can also do a Clan Search and request an invite to the Clan, however only Officers and myself will be able to see the requests.

So who are the Officers? I'm going to set any member of the Dark Council and Fist Staff as an Officer, really this is just to facilitate getting members into the Clan in a timely manner. I reserve the right to add more folks as Officers (especially for the European Clan) to accomplish this goal if I feel its needed.

The American Clan is already up to 28 members, 9 of which were online a few minutes ago when I logged in to check our count. If you're requested a Clan Invite it has been accepted, I just checked the que. I believe you need to log in again within 10 days or it will expire though.

  • American Battle.net Clan
  • Language: English
  • Clan Name: Dark Brotherhood
  • Clan Tag: DJB

The European Clan is just me right now. I've ensured it is listed as "Looking for Members" so it should display in a Clan Finder search. The only thing I can find is that there are language options for English, English (British), and English (SAE) listed for each Clan. It defaulted to English when I created ours. This may be preventing people from finding the Guild if they're looking for another option. I can change this if needed to whichever is preferred, European folks let me know what you want.

  • European Battle.net Clan
  • Language: English
  • Clan Name: The Dark Brotherhood
  • Clan Tag: DJB

My Battletag on both American and Europe Servers is Valhavoc#1917 (Euro Server I only recently set this up). If anyone is having trouble finding the Clans we can try to link up and get online at the same time so I can fire off an invite.

Diablo 3 Proposed CF & PoB Changes

I mentioned earlier I was looking at an entirely new system for awarding Clusters of Fire and Pendants of Blood as we approached the expansion. Here's a quick look into my notebook at the (current) leading idea:

Clusters of Fire first. In the existing system Clusters of Fire are earned from defeating Elite enemies, it is impossible to play Diablo 3 and not fight Elite enemies. This makes this PVE Platform challenging to balance with, as peoples gear increases they can mow through Elites faster. I looked for something in the Game that would be relatively similar to TOR Flashpoints to award people for.

The closest thing I've found is to award CFs for completing Events, Cursed Chests, and Cursed Shrines all of which are currently available in game. Once the expansion hits this list will likely be expanded to include Bounties and Nephalem Rifts. These events are found intermittently while playing, and are not constants. One game you may find an Event in a certain location, the next game that Event may be missing.

Related to Pendants of Blood, with the new Account wide Paragon leveling system this gives us an interesting option. Rather than award a member for each Level 60 Character, I'm looking at awarding a Pendant of Blood for the first Level 60 Character and then every 25-ish Paragon Levels a new Pendant of Blood being awarded. Chances are I'd cap the Paragon PoB Limit at Paragon level 150 or something. A second or third Level 60 Character would not grant additional Pendants of Blood.

Diablo 3 Proposed Expansion Club First Achievements (worth a PoB)

The Pendant of Blood Wiki lists a loophole for awarding Pendants of Blood to members who complete "Club First Achievements", so what are these? Here's a few examples I'm looking at for when the Expansion comes out:

  • First Level 70 Character
  • First Level 70 solo kill of Malthael (Act V End Boss) on Torment 6 (the highest) difficulty
  • First Level 70 Full DJB (4 actual Club Members here, Clan irrelevant) Group kill of Malthael on Torment 6 difficulty

I'll create a competition with additional information on these as the expansion nears.

March Gaming Competitions

A bit lighter for March considering the Run On that's in progress. The first two competitions end on March 4th, get in there!

March Gorefest

Gorefest will to start on Friday, March 21st. As a reminder, any member of the GMRG can compete and earn bonus CFs for any Gaming activities!

February Gaming Competition Results

Gorefest

  • 1st Place - JK Aerin Taggart of House Odan-Urr
  • 2nd Place - SWL Quejo of Clan Taldryan
  • 3rd Place - OP Kazmir Natas of Clan Taldryan

Minecraft: Look What I Made

  • 1st Place - GW Putra of House Odan-Urr

TOR: The Mighty Hunter

  • 1st Place - DJK Yuriko of Clan Naga Sadow
  • 2nd Place - DA Aabsdu di Plagia Dupar of Clan Plagueis
  • 3rd Place - DJM Keirdagh Taldrya Cantor of Clan Taldryan

Injustice

  • 1st Place - DJK Seren Dipity Puer-Irae

TOR: Flashpoint Fun

  • To Be Announced in Mid-March Report

Pendants of Blood

  • 09Feb2014 - 22Feb2014: JK Aerin Taggart of House Odan-Urr, PVP Score of 38.76 (96 Matches Played, 61 Matches won)

Is the CF idea just proposed, or in effect, or will it go into effect once the expansion goes live, or what? :P

One issue I can see with the CF idea is that since the events are random as you say then someone could end up playing hours for no gain, whereas in TOR it's rather easy to sign up for and complete a warzone or a flashpoint.

Or... award a PoB for the first time a member hits level cap on any character... and that's it.

Kaz - they're the leading ideas right now. Nothing is set in stone. I'm more than happy to consider other ideas, just add the "Why" to the idea as well so I understand where you're coming from.

Malik - The only time I've never seen an Event is when doing maps where None ever show up. At times I've found two events on one map. It's a consideration, but the CF per Elite formula isn't working at the moment, it's returns are too high. So something new for geared folks, and if I level it then they're too low for new folks.

Aidan - Curious on the reasons you think that is a better system. Not knocking it, just seeking to understand.

If it's mostly being changed because the number of CFs rewarded is too high then lower the weekly cap to 20 per day instead of 30 or something like that.

I echo Malik's statement about the event CF system. In TOR, I can go and run a flashpoint and get CF's. I don't need to wander around looking for a flashpoint or operation, hoping that it will pop up on the map, in order to earn CF's. I've played for several hours at a time and not seen more than one, maybe two events total. Sometimes none. In every other gaming area, there's an assurance that if I play I can get CF's. I play X matches of JA, I get Y CF's (win or lose). I play X flashpoints, I get Y CF's. Moving to the "maybe they show up" event system means that I could play Diablo for quite some time and not get squat. I think the problem of "fast" CF's could be solved quite nicely with a serious reduction in per-elite CF awarding coupled with maximum level restrictions for difficulty levels. The party select screen shows all party member levels now, so adding in one more screenshot to submit would ensure that everyone in the party was the proper level.

As for the PoB thing, unless you're going to change the way TOR awards PoB's too, I think that's horrendously unfair. If that system is put in place, the maximum number of PoB's that any person could earn from Diablo would be 7 (one for the character, 6 for paragon levels). In TOR, a preferred player can have 12 characters and a subscriber can have 22. So a TOR player can earn 12 or even 22 PoB's, and a D3 player can earn... 7. Yeah... (And I've earned all the PoB's I need to rank up to X in the GMRG, so I've got zero personal bias here. =P)

Its being changed because in TOR (the only other PVE platform really) you don't earn CFs all the time by just playing with another DJB member. In Diablo 3 that's basically how it works right now, as long as you aren't just standing in town you're out killing Elites and earning CFs.

Perhaps an explanation of Bounties and Nephalem Rifts is in order, although these will only be available if you own the expansion. In the Expansion you can play in Campaign (normal story) or Adventure Mode. Adventure Mode unlocks all Waypoints to all Acts and allows you do participate in the earlier mentioned Bounties and Nephalem Rift Events.

Bounties are optional, randomized objectives. They provide players with a guided layout within a specific Act. Bounties could include slaying a unique monster, killing a boss, clearing a specific dungeon, or completing an Event. Completing them gives you gold, experience, and (based on some Blizzard posts) access to some Legendary items only available through Bounties (sounding like a D3 Flashpoint yet?).

Bounties will also award Rift Keystones, which can be used to access Nephalem Rifts. These are randomized dungeons which should be able to be completed in 10-15 minutes. They're supposed to give pretty good amounts of loot as well.

Check out this Blizzard Blog Post (yes its a little dated) for my references or if you want to know more about these things. Hopefully my reasons for switching to an Event based CF system make more sense now.

Obviously I don't know how long it takes to complete a typical Bounty yet, so its hard to assign a CF value to it right at Expansion Launch. So expect a 1-2 week lag between Expansion and any changes (whether its these changes or not).

Regarding the PoB idea, nothing says the Paragon levels need to cap for PoBs being awarded. That was an initial idea.

pew-pew. nice report, Val!

Its being changed because in TOR (the only other PVE platform really) you don't earn CFs all the time by just playing with another DJB member.

I'm not sure that it's necessarily a bad thing that people get CF's for playing with other DJB members. Motivating people to be social and game/hang out/whatever seems like a constructive goal. The issue it seems is that people can get a whole mess of CF's crazy fast with the way the CF equations are set up for D3 right now. If the CF per elite award was reduced to anywhere from 10%-25% of what they are at currently while adding in character level maximums for each difficulty, wouldn't that solve the issue? Saying that in TOR you don't get CF's all the time just for playing with another DJB member is true, but I think it's better to say that TOR is the ONLY gaming platform in the entire DJB that you don't just get CF's just by playing with another DJB member. I'd say if TOR had an easily trackable way to reward members for playing together period we should do it.

Is Diablo III rewarding stupid-high numbers of CF's currently? Yes. And I've even left some CF's on the table here and there (By not emailing in to request CF's still left in the queue when I hadn't hit the weekly cap due to the way the daily cap works) because I almost feel bad earning CF's that fast. Should the answer be to offer less places where members can be rewarded for playing together? I don't think so, as member co-operation and interaction should be something we try to encourage as much as we can. Should that reward be revised to keep it from being insane? Oh yes. :P

To be fair, running Battle of Ilum on HM can be done in 10 minutes, which equates to 15 CFs in half an hour (give or take depending on how practiced your group is in doing it). Add in a bunch of other flashpoints (which are also all easy when geared up) and you get figures that can even exceed the D3 ones because ToR is not capped in any way.
The main difference between that and D3 is that D3 is actually fun to play on a daily basis while grinding out FPs quickly becomes a bore.
If you keep the "kill all the elites" thing, then you lower the weekly cap. If you go by the "event-based" system for D3, it may become even more exploitable if you don't impose a cap anyway (or it may lead to no CFs at all, depending on RNG'ers).

Selika - Appreciate the feedback. Earlier this week during the CF change to accommodate the new Difficulties I "reduced" the highest CF rewards to 1 per Elite in any Torment Level. They're still rewarding high. Level Caps don't really work in Diablo with the new Difficulties. Monsters scale to your character Level now. So a brand new 60 (or 70) might only be able to fight stuff on Normal or Hard. When I'm looking at cutting CFs earned in half (again) for Diablo 3, that tells me that its a flawed reward system. I'm not sure what isn't social about changing the CF reward to being based on something other than just killing Elites with another member.

Kaz - Good point, maybe its time to put a level 54 cap on the previous Level 50 Hard Mode Flashpoints in TOR. They don't really award any real upgrade anymore with the Basic Gear that's available, last time I checked. Lowering the D3 CF cap doesn't change that you can hit the cap stupidly fast. I think you missed my explanation of Bounties and Nephalem Rifts, in the expansion you will have options to earn CFs. These options are designed to be the post 70 activities that people do. And, again, nothing says we can't put a cap on the number of Event-Based things that are done per day.

When I'm looking at cutting CFs earned in half (again) for Diablo 3, that tells me that its a flawed reward system.

I would disagree, it just says the number that was selected the first time was crazy high. I know it's been reduced more than once or twice already it seems like. Just as the TOR flashpoint CF's have also been reduced (even before the expansion), like when Athiss was awarding 11 CF's. The system of CF's per flashpoint wasn't flawed, simply the number of CF's per whatever was awarding them was unbalanced.

Also, I think my biggest issue is that pegging CF rewards almost exclusively to expansion based content is that it is basically the DJB pressuring people that already have the game to go out and purchase the $40 expansion.

Add in a bunch of other flashpoints (which are also all easy when geared up) and you get figures that can even exceed the D3 ones because ToR is not capped in any way.

Actually, TOR is capped as far as flashpoints go since you can only run the same flashpoint three times per day, and Operations can only be run once per week per character.

Nice report, Val. Appreciate the hard work trying to balance all this stuff for us so we can reap club-side rewards in addition to enjoying our favorite games.

Keep it up, brother.

Slags, those limits aren't exactly the same as the cap on D3. ToR can potentially give you more CFs in a week than D3 can. Sure it may be more time consuming and boring after a few runs, but people have muscled through more for their shinies. But I do agree that forcing people to buy a very pricey expansion might not be the best way to go.

TOR-wise, it might be nice to work out a system where DB'ers running dailies together can gather CFs for completing all dailies on a planet. Right now dailies are good for easy credits and reputation, but working in CFs could be pleasant. Just a thought. Focus on these massive D3 CFs being given heh

My view on the D3 situation can be summarised: I will not pay an extra $40 for a game that I do not play enough to justify a huge purchase just to earn CFs. If you want to balance it, lower the CF gains between 25% and 50% - lowers it but does not totally invalidate the game.

I'd like to throw some support behind the idea Aabsdu posed. CFs for Dailies (even if it's a handful) would motivate TOR players to jump on at a regular time and burn through their dailies.

CFs for dailies - I'll add it to my list. However you can earn CFs for Heroic Missions (usually 1-2 per Daily quest hub), so make sure you're submitting those. Suggestions on how to "screenshot" the completion of all dailies on a planet and a potential CF value are welcome.

D3 CFs - I'll be doing some timed Elite Farming runs later this week. Data will be posted and updated CF tables calculated based on it.

On When to Buy a Game - Computer gaming is expensive. From the machines that are capable of running the games to the games themselves. If people feel like they are only buying a game to earn CFs that's just wrong. Last time I checked the only games I have bought for the DJB that I really didn't want were JO and JA, so I could participate in Horizons Duels. Those days are gone now and we have many more options including Free to Play TOR with a Level 15 Duel Bracket.

Buy games because you enjoy the game or because you enjoy playing it your friends. Don't buy games to just to milk the CF cow.

I do not think we should tie CFs so heavily to bounties/neph rifts until we learn how Adventure Mode is unlocked and if people can join other people's Adventure Modes even with them unlocked. If it's not hard to unlock it, I think it's fine to do so, but if is hard to unlock it, we may need to consider that system kinda carefully. We also don't know what Event frequency will be like in the expansion act. You may need to beat all of D3 (including expansion) to unlock Adventure Mode, there may be tons or no events... I think it's hard to b e sure what to do about CFs yet. But there is a problem with them.

I actually think that in addition to TOR potentially not granting enough relative to D3, actually dueling people is not giving enough relative to D3, either. It seems to me that the best way to earn CFs is through PvE; in fact, there seem to be harder caps on PvP CFs than PvE CFs, understandably since they are easier to exploit, but we may want to explore that angle of CFs as well.

From an interview with PCGamer:

And you do have to kill Malthael once with one character before Adventure Mode is unlocked.

Meh. :(

I actually like that PvE grants more CFs than PvP. My basic reasoning here is that it supports cooperation. This is the biggest problem I see with nerfing the CFs for D3 that much. Yes, it needs a significant cut, for sure; I earned half again as many CFs as I already had in 4 hours, and that's just dumb (I totally wish I had discovered this months ago). But, I've enjoyed it. It's a no-pressure game, where you don't really need to know a bunch of mechanics just to earn CFs.

I echo the concern with limiting it to events and chests. I just played D3 for the last four days straight, leveling a second character to 60. I ran into maybe 10 events, including cursed chests and shrines. I spent a substantial amount of time playing it. One of the reasons I'm playing it is for CFs, for sure. I stopped playing D3 after I hit 60 on my Wizard. Something else I discovered though, I'm playing with people I've never played with before. I'm meeting other members of the Brotherhood and interacting with them, and that's the point of this club: activity. D3 doesn't require the time or effort that ToR does to acquire the best gear and learning the best rotations, etc. It's low maintenance, and I can pick up the game after 12 months of not playing it and not be substantially behind at all.

I'm enjoying playing D3 with other people in the Brotherhood. If suddenly the way we've been accumulating CFs is changed, they may stop playing and then I will stop playing. This isn't ultimatum, but if it suddenly becomes super difficult or random to acquire CFs, it becomes less likely that people will change it.

Lots of people are gaming together in a platform that's not ToR. That is a good thing. Weaken the awarding of CFs for D3, sure, but don't change how it's done.

"First Level 70 Character First Level 70 solo kill of Malthael (Act V End Boss) on Torment 6 (the highest) difficulty First Level 70 Full DJB (4 actual Club Members here, Clan irrelevant) Group kill of Malthael on Torment 6 difficulty I'll create a competition with additional information on these as the expansion nears."

Do we need 2 competitions - one for EU and one for US because of different timezones? I don't know if we have so many hardcore people out there. But Europeans start their day like a couple of hours earlier. ;) Depends though when the D3 Expansion starts in each zone. If its Midnight for Europeans but early morning for US people....

So we'll keep CFs coming from Elite kills for the time being. Two things will get changed as we move into the expansion related to this though

  • CF awards will be modified based on some time run research I'll be doing later this week.
  • Level range restrictions for groups will be added.

A Level 70 Expansion geared person jumping into a Level 60 Non-Expansion persons game and killing the level 60 elites would destroy any system I can make. Something like all characters must be within 5 character levels of each other to earn CFs will do the trick I think.

Xia - possibly for the first 70. We'll see what the launch timeframe looks like. Or I could calculate it from launch time for your server to time you submitted and keep it as one.

I highly doubt anyone will be killing the end game boss on Torment 6 even within a week of the expansion launch. It was literally months until we accomplished that after launch on the original game.

That said I'm not too worried about a few hours time difference for launch and the Torment 6 achievements.

Honestly, gear makes more of a difference than level. My level 50 with level reduced weapon is more powerful than most new 60s. And the cap on elites means running through normal at a low level is basically pointless. With decent gear, you can already run through Inferno 1 and kill everything in seconds. Unlike in TOR, where one could conceivably just run through low level FPs one after the other to generate huge numbers of CFs, the D3 cap prevents that. Also, do the level of games adjust to highest level person, or group leader?

What exactly is the problem we are addressing? I think that D3 CFs are too easy to earn, relative to other platforms, especially for PvP but also other PvE. One solution is to boost the others, which I suggest (at least for PvP), and certainly nerf D3 CFs (I like the idea of tying it to adventure mode, too bad the dudes in charge limited it so much). But, we should nerf it in a way that doesn't destroy interest in the game. Making it so I have to stay within 5 levels of a friend is the wrong answer given the cap on CFs that exists. Before we try to fix the problem, we need to make sure we understand where the problem is. Is the CF inflation because people are powerleveling a single friend? Or is it because groups of us roam around destroying elites like butter, even on Inferno 3?

I've wondered about awarding people CFs based on number of DB member in a group, too, in addition to difficulty - most PvE encounters in TOR require more than two people. This promotes big groups of DB members, at which point it's not some 70 PLing a low level player. Maybe it's a 70 PLing a bunch of low level members, but at that point, that is someone actually helping DB members and I think that's a good thing to promote too.

We could also isolate Inferno difficulties away from one another, depending on where the issues are with CFs.

I would propose the following:
* Scale CFs based on group number. Base all CF award amounts around the idea of a group of 4; each person "grants" .25 to the total, so a group of 2 would get .5 the CF total of that difficulty setting, while a group of 3 would get .75 and four would get 1. This encourages DB members to group up as much as possible and helps to lessen the impact of a single member PLing another single member through "easy" elites. However, the cap on CFs per day largely takes care of that.
* Recognize that leveling is quick, and that CFs during the difficulties below Torment will be low. This isn't a huge problem. I don't even think anyone plays Normal at all anymore, so we'll just keep it grouped with hard. At current, hard earns you .5 CFs per elite kill, I think. I'd lower that to .25 for a group of 4 (1 CF per 4 elite kills). This would mean that two people leveling together would get 1 CF per 8 elite kills. Last night, I played on Hard in the 30s with another member. In about an hour, we got 40 some elite kills. This would net us 5 CFs under my proposal.
* Realize that Inferno is not really one difficulty, just like the MPs were, and consider how to address that.
* Continue to explore alternatives: E.g., some way to award quest completions, purple mobs killed, adventure mode, etc. We could decouple awarding elites, while still awarding specific mob kills, instead of awarding random events (though frankly I don't think it's a problem to award them too)

dudes in charge = blizzard. not the DB dudes. :)

dudes in charge = blizzard. not the DB dudes. :)

...sorry :p wtb edit feature to comments.

I like Mav's ideas. It addresses the ridiculous CF-gains while also adding a new element of communicating (and playing with) more Brotherhood people.

Not all tor heroic missions give cfs. I've done all the beginning ones on 4 characters and was told they don't count cause i solo them.

Problem is many heroic quests have to be done by certain level or they don't work, and many times, i either can't find anyone online or they don't have characters low enough in levels to participate in them

In about an hour, we got 40 some elite kills. This would net us 5 CFs under my proposal.

Honestly, that's actually not all that competitive with TOR right now. If you're geared decently enough for whatever Flashpoint you're running (be it one while you're leveling or an end game one) you're going to earn at minimum 4 CF's. If it's a HM or endgame HM level FP, you're getting five to six. Those Flashpoints don't take anywhere near an hour to run, most are in the 15 to 20 minute range.

I have noticed that when you're running stuff that actually is in your level range since 2.0 dropped in D3, even geared well, the elites are not dropping anywhere near as fast as they used to. It feels like everything in the game has gotten an HP boost or some other balance change, so I think it's important to see what Val (and other people working for him) can start to see as far as how many elites are being downed versus time.

Scale CFs based on group number

I'm also a fan of this. In essence TOR CF's sorta do this already with the difference in CF's between 8 man and 16 man content, and D3 scales difficulty based on party size just as TOR does between raids. Anything that encourages more people to play with one another can be constructive in my book. :)

Something like all characters must be within 5 character levels of each other to earn CFs will do the trick I think.

As for this, the only real issue is making sure that there aren't characters too high above the level of the content. With the way the game handles difficulty scaling, bringing along a person (or two) that are a number of levels below the content actually makes things take substantially longer. I'd say just have a rule that all party members must be no more than 5 (or even fewer, like 2-3) levels above the level of the game itself. (Which is set based on the level of the party leader). The other issue might be to break 1-59 and 60-70 into separate grouping restrictions might be a good idea. As Mav alluded to earlier, gear is probably a bigger deciding factor than level is, and once you start hitting 60 you can start stacking gear that is a significant improvement.

What about basing CFs around Unique (Purple) Mob kills? This has some randomness as not all of them spawn, but it also means that people that go through acts and kill main boss mobs would get credit?

Alternatively, just nerf the crap out of how many CFs we get as it is per elite and leave the system largely in tact.

Val,

Thanks for keeping us up to date on the process. I've earned CFs/POBs/LOCs/DFCs in multiple systems over the past 15 years and I don't really remember the gaming guy asking for feedback and taking into account everyone's comments. I know I didn't (COO ftw!).

I think a bit of patience is needed for D3 and how the expansion will play out. I'm sure a decent system will get fleshed out once a bunch of us help determine how much effort is required to accomplish certain feats/situations in game.

Also, for history sake, best of 3 XVT matches could be over in less than five minutes and win a player some decent awards. This was done without the required coordination, team building, and group dynamics associated with some of the games today. I think there is a lot more benefit involved in the group dynamics/social aspects of a bunch of DB members getting together and having a good time. The CFs...are gravy to encourage DB community play......so I don't mind that a player in 2014 can earn a slightly higher rate of CFs than I could playing XVT in 2003 (slightly higher, a few of us would have a lot of CFs if we had flown for the DB instead of the TC).

Who the hell played best of 3 XvT Matches? 5/5 was the standard :P

I think what should probably be done, is break it down to basics, and then make the system interact in a fair and open manner. My personal belief is that you should essentially take Pazaak as a baseline for "CFs earnable" because it's the one gaming system that can be used by every member in the DB, and break it down into a per hour basis. Then extrapolate the CFs you can earn in Pazaak during say, and hour long session, and extrapolate out the rewards in PvE stuff to be on level terms.

The only problem with how CFs are awarded in D3 right now, seems to be the amount of them that can be earned. People talk about community building and all that, and it's all well and good for people who like the game, but for the rest of us? Having the games we like to play be almost punitive in the amount of CFs you can earn while playing them can actually do the exact opposite of community building. It builds resentment and anger that those people who LIKE to play the game de jour (or are willing to play games they don't like to reap the rewards) get awarded in obscene amounts, and if we want to get the same, we have to either play a game we don't like, or get left out in the cold.

Either way, I'm with Sarin on this.. I'm sure it'll get worked out, and I'm also sure it will require some trial and error, but thanks for keeping people in the loop Val.

"That said I'm not too worried about a few hours time difference for launch and the Torment 6 achievements."

Yay for being in an earlier timezone then :) You US guys do your naps - we EUs do already work for about 6 hours!

j/k. I doubt anyways we have any hardcore european players in the DJB who would abuse this advantage. ;)

Ok super long response to concerns or suggestions made...

Mav (1st Post) -

My concern related to the Level thing was driven by gear. As members who do not have the Expansion can still group with Expansion enabled members. So if you had a geared level 70 character and I had a level 60 character I could invite you to games where you would demolish Torment 6 Difficulty level 60 monsters and we net easy Clusters of Fire.

Changing the baseline for the Cluster of Fire to the current Diablo 3 model isn't something I'm looking at (more explanation on this in my response to Yacks below)

The number of members in a group is already given an incentive by Blizzard, with increased experience and how monster health scales (increases by 75% per additional player, 325% Health of monsters with 4 players in a game). Most DJB folks will be joining the DJB Clan, and playing with other DJB members in their groups already. That said, scaling with the number of DJB members may be a way to work in Nephalem Rifts or something like that as a bonus award, that scales to amount of DJB members in the group. This would encourage people to bring more DJB members into the "end game" D3 content, which sounds like a good to me (who doesn't want Legendary items?!).

Torment Difficulty CF rewards, just like Inferno MP Levels, will be isolated and awarded differently... in time.

I understand that Leveling is quick to max level, but leveling isn't quick if someone does not buy the Expansion. They are forever 60, and they'll be playing with 70s who can trivialize their level 60 content as I mentioned earlier. That's what's driving my concerns about level restrictions.

Brim -

TOR Heroics require another member to be in your level range and grouped with you while you complete them. Its a fair process, unfortunately its hard to find people at your level before end game. My recommendation, as it was before, is to reach level 55 and group up there. In TOR and even D3, that's where you really start being able to group up with other members, enjoy the game, and earn some CFs.

Selika -

Thank you for the information on how Diablo 3 determines the "Game Level". Based on how this works with Group Leader, as long as the highest level person in a group creates the game I'm ok with CFs being awarded. If a higher level person joins a lower level persons game this causes an issue though, which I see you understand as well.

Mav (2nd Post) -

I appreciate the suggestion on Purple Mobs, the problem I see is that they are hard to track. I used to need to screenshot and submit each elite I killed in D3. That sucked, I died alot trying to get screenshots, and I missed screenshots at time too. That's why I changed it to allow people to use the Elites Defeated part of their profile. I'm more inclined to keep it as the current Elites Defeated with an adjusted CF reward rate, for member convenience.

Yacks -

I'm a fan of your system based approach, it's basically what I did last year however it just wasn't explained by the Fist at that time. I plan to continue using it. To explain a bit more, back in my M:Fist days I leveled all Clusters of Fire with the baseline of a Jedi Academy / Jedi Outcast Match being 1 CF for the winner. We worked out how many matches per hour would occur and adjusted values for other activities based on that.

I'd like to maintain that baseline with JO/JA, since everything is set to it at the moment and most things feel accurate to it. Many people see alot of CFs coming from TOR, many more than PVP duels, but if a person spent the same amount of time dueling multiple people as they did playing TOR I'm sure they would get more CFs. Just because the nature of TOR only rewards for specific activities with another member, not everything in game. The amount of game time a TOR player spends solo or grouped with a DJB member outside of Flashpoints or Operations is huge. However, folks who don't play the game just see big CF numbers at times and get upset on occasion (I know you play TOR and understand this btw).

That is all for now, I'm going to take advantage of this experience bonus in Diablo 3 to get sweet, sweet Paragon levels

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