whist wrote:People on multiplayer have been playing without an extended stash for years and they were fine, and that was before the character's inventory, cube and stash got heavily expanded in size. The plain truth is, you don't need to hoard every items. If all this space is not plenty for you, it much likely means you're hoarding, and for what really? The sad thing I've observed over the years with people hoarding, often reaching hundreds of PlugY stash pages is, more often than not, they never ever actually use a huge part of these hoarded items.
Make use of storage items like shrine vessels, arcane crystal clusters, etc. Stop keeping items you can always re-find in minutes like runes, and turn the unique items that are of no use for your characters into signets. There is no ETA on extended storage space, and even when it will be there, it will not be unlimited as it was with PlugY.
Look.
Multiplayer is excellent. The entirety of the team made a good job over several years. Economy is fine. Gameplay is fine. Lag is minimal. You have a dedicated core of players. Muling is fine.
But !
Singleplayer is a different beast altogether. It's still in a good spot (at least until lvl ~115 or such), but later it's not.
People who want to play MP and SP don't really do it for the same reasons. In multi, you got a community, you got an economy, you got a meta. In single, you are here for the gameplay alone.
I don't need to remind you that Median started ad a pure SP mod focused on pushing the DII engine AND exploring gameplay element ?
"Hey ! What happens if I give Unholy Armour to Necro ? How will players use it ?"
"Hey ! What happens if I give cdr to Assa ? How will players use it ?"
"Hey ! What happens if this skill is unusable if you have been hit recently ?"
"Hey ! What happens if these mobs are invulnerable, but this one boss isn't ? How will players cope with that ?"
...
Then, the mod evolved to become more legitimate as a game. The broken things were pushed out.
At this point, the mod was ready to go multi. And that's what your team did. And that's both logical and great !
You succeeded too. Your multi is working in every aspect.
The team is focused on multi, which is probably a good decision for the long run.
But if this team has one problem. Just one. It's that the attitude of the vocal community members toward SP since the multi shift has always been dubious. Especially concerning the feedback.
When someone playing multi gives you feedback, he talks about gameplay, economy, community and servers. That's a ***** mess to sort out.
When someone playing singleplayer gives you feedback, he only talks about gameplay.
And that's frickin' golden to improve that particular aspect of the game.Should you catter to singleplayer at the expanse of multi ? NO !
Should you hear the feedback from SP ? Yes. And you should be especially attentive to that concerning gameplay. Because it's the only feedback you will get that's not polluted by a "meta" and players mostly focusing on the best way to farm.
This shit leads to balance being thrown out the windows (barbs, hey ?).
PS: example of a reason to play singleplayer. IMO: melee assassins, unholy melee pal and holy caster pal are the classes with the most interesting and compelling gameplay of them all. They keep you on the edge of your seat, asking precision and timing of the player.
Yet they are seldom played on servers, because the tiny lag is enough to severly devalue Blink and Divine Apparition, and they ask for a gamepaly too active to farm for extended periods of time.
I can play on server. I never do because each time I try, I am reminded of how I can't play the way I love best. It's not the servers fault. The fault entirely lies on the fact that Median WAS a SP game that went multi. And that there are tons of remnants of SP focused gameplay elements.
PPS: Hope I don't come out too harsh.
Team has done an excellent job. But some design decisions are objectively eyebrow rising. And I don't use the word objectively lightly here.