domah wrote:That's all.
To the mod that edited my original post, and all other people in this topic, i'm still amazed by today thinking that if somebody critize/hate/dislike/wathever a thing in the game, they always assume that's a skill issue and can only answer thing about getting gud or whatever.
It's really fucked up and stupid, and remove any possibility of dislinking anything.
Because if you like something, it's ok and you're good.
If you don't, you just suck and you have to like it and get gud.
So i guess every immune mechanics, purify thing, gated content in median xl is very good and greatly designed, and if you disagree, git gud scrubs you suck.
The game dropped from a peak 16k players to 4K in few season, but that probably mean that was 12 000 scrubs that need to get gud, not bad game design and bosses that keep pushing players aways. Just noobs that are bad.
edited by AI
Absolutely right. For example I have been making basically the same complaint for years and all that happens is that some cheese-eating 13-year-old on these forums (who plays games for 75% of his non-sleeping time) thinks he is "Da MAN" by typing juvenile "u R a N00B hehe" insults when people point out the game's (many) shortcomings. As I have repeatedly noted, due to the large number of 1-shots and 2-shots that you encounter, particularly in Hell, the game is for all intents and purposes unplayable in Hardcore (at least for the 99.9% of us who don't have the reflexes and precognition of Superman) and even in Softcore, it is still very frustrating at times.
Also, the
SLIGHTEST bit of lag that you may encounter in on-line play (e.g. TSW) will doom any character, no matter how well-played. Median's higher level monsters, especially bosses, do so much damage (even with maximum resists, damage reduction etc.) that taking more than a single hit without dodging is likely to be instantly fatal. This makes the game effectively unplayable online, at least in Hardcore.
For example today my Level 116 throwing Assassin got 1-shotted by Aldric Jitan even though I was using the tactics (e.g. lure him out, Broadside and tele away) that I used successfully to get the trophy from him on my last session. I can just imagine what this quest would be like to any character that wasn't clanking with "elite" gear traded for in some way (that is, a character that honestly tries to play the game in the way that Diablo-style aRPGs are meant to be played, e.g. SSF), or as any normally-geared and-skilled melee character -- you would not get within half a screen of Lord A**hole Jitan before you died in a hail of arrows from his Guard Towers.
I think a great deal of this is due to the fact that (in sharp distinction to D2 LoD which is very well=known), Median is sparsely documented in terms of "you need 'this' level of resistances, 'this' defence rating and 'this' many hit points to have a chance against 'this' boss monster". This might have been an explicit design objective, in the sense that it adds "an element of excitement" to the game... but from a player's POV it makes some quests frustrating and unrewarding to the point where it seems much easier just to give up on Median altogether and try something a little less suicidal. In many ways Median feels more like an arcade game (e.g. "insert quarter to respawn for the 45th time today") where you expect to get repeatedly 1-shotted if you don't dodge the incoming fireballs of death, than it does a conventional aRPG.
(Note : To be fair, the same issue exists with many other RPGs -- for example PoE in which, in the later difficulty levels, you are repeatedly going up against godly boss monsters whose strengths and weaknesses are almost completely unknown, and the only way to learn is "to get killed a lot". Maybe some players find this "entertaining"... I don't.)
I do sympathize with the mod designers, they are being pulled in different directions by various members of the player base and they obviously can't please everyone all the time.
Median in 2024 is
vastly better than it was in early revisions of the game (how do you like getting 1-shotted by "Startled Witches" at Level 11 in the entrance to the Tamoe Highlands, eh? oops, did one of your minions trip over a Dragon Egg in the A2 Normal Rocky Waste? sucks to be
you, dude) but it is still nonsensically unrewarding at its higher difficulty levels and -- despite providing
great play value for a very reasonable price (e.g. "zero"), as the game is currently constructed, it represents a missed opportunity, IMHO.
Which is a shame because at its core it is really an excellent RPG.
