General Mentions
A couple of things to mention that can be applied to many of the topics here:
People will dislike all changes which reduce their confort. And that's understandable. Yet this doesn't mean that there should be a portal in rogue camp to Duncraig. Or that the "lucky recipe" should work 100% on white items. A great example here was the revert of the A2/A3 quest areas, compared to the first ultimative versions where you would get the finished flail right on trav. You could say it was a 'bad design choice' to revert that change, because 99% of the people who voice their opinions on the forums have played D2/Median for years and don't enjoy doing those quests. The actual bad design choice was editing those quests in the first place (although it was made to free up new areas, so it made sense).
The "sweet spot" is when you can make something as time-consuming as possible, while still keeping it fun. Faster doesn't mean better, which is something a lot of people don't seem to understand. Otherwise we might just bump exp and drop rates, and see how everyone complains about how ladder economy is dead after a week.
For this reason, the new locations have been implemented "as is" (well, additionally we are lacking an extended waypoints feature). There will be shortcuts in the future, but only the ones which are really necessary. Which ones are and which ones aren't will be discussed on each location. It is smarter to start with no shortcuts and then add them, compared to starting with tons of shortcuts and then having to remove them.
The last thing I need to mention is that some changes need time to settle. Ultimately they will be healthy for the game (such as preventing ladders from dying too quickly), but might be disliked at first. People jump too fast to make conclusions when they might still not know all sides about some new content (re: Ureh).
Ruins of Ureh
aerial wrote:I'm also quite puzzled by some design decisions, especially with the distance to run we have now (getting to old toraja for example, or ureh). In one hand you give us corpse respawn, which removes game rejoining and miles of running. But instead you put certain uberlevels ridiculously far from waypoint, so initial run is much worse pita than before. Both of those decisions seems to work against each other. I think it is quite popular opinion among players, they don't like to repeatedly travel very far in d2 to farm area. People even hate running 10s to npc to reveal map or id items (yet towns were turned to old layouts with higher running distances). What is the reason behind it? What would be wrong if all acts were shrinked to 2 screens, npc lined up, and all ubers were in one new zone next to waypoint (or with waypoint in sigma), and just all entrances to ubers organized by difficulty next to each other. It would be bad because ppl wouldn't have to run few minutes to get to area?Unless running is part of the quest, like ureh for example but do we really need to run 5 times as much now?
Toraja (Torajan Cemetery) - unintended. This location will be have shortcut. It's not that this has been overlooked, but rather that the red portal implementation in M17 has some limitations. How exactly this will be shortcut is still to be decided.
Ureh - intended. There is a logic way to know the location of the hut, which people have not yet discovered, it seems. You can get there really fast. The only issue with this quest is the fact that the documentation has not been adjusted for it and people get confused because they think ruins of ureh == kingdom of shadow.
Corpses weren't removed to reduce walking, btw. It can be one of the reasons, but definetly not the main one.
Would it be bad if all ubers were accessible from town? Yes, elaborated why in the general mentions.
Why did we elect the NPCs we elected for map reveal: no - we are not retarded (as people have been assuming since the feature was introduced). The feature had to be added to NPCs which had a non-variable amount of dialog options. So, the obvious candidate, deckard cain, would not work.
Torajan Jungles
aerial wrote:Another thing is, if you interview people on the street, who played d2, and ask them a question, what is most disliked area in the game they hate going through. I'm sure most will point at act 3 jungle. Everyone knows it, everyones been saying this since beginning of d2. Why on earth make it one of main themes of the game, where entrances to several areas are located in that hated jungle, then another huge uber linked to it is jungle as well
Oh the a3 jungles meme is definetly something that was considered when making the jungles. It doesn't apply here though, let me tell you why, its the maze mechanism what makes the jungles annoying. Because they are annoying to walk and can have dead ends (black marsh). Especially without map reveal (which now we have in-game). Torajan jungles are always the same, once you know the paths, there is no need to "walk back", as you can get to your desired destination efficiently.
Now, to address other things about this new area:
Akarat/Bartuc - are 100% fine as it they are
Jitan - I agree that keeping the 1/x chance to drop was unecessary, and will be changed to 100%
This is the thing with torajan jungles: it takes time to reach some of these re-allocated bosses, but you're not supposed to just farm these bosses alone, instead you are meant to farm these bosses WHILE you farm the torajan jungles. It's a new type of uber mechanism, and people are trying to farm these old summon bosses like they used to, when in reality you are meant to clear the jungles and profit from them. Of course, there's a chance that the torajan jungles are not a profitable farm area or they are too difficult, but that's expected for a new piece of content. Which is partly the reason for opening this as a new topic, because people have only been complaining about how big the jungles are yet have you given us any information on whether they are worth farming, or if the difficulty is appropiate? Because that's ultimately what will make farming bosses such as Akarat, Jitan or Bartuc enjoyable.
I still haven't figured it out completely yet, but I farmed a bit of Tegnazie? Tegnieneze? ... Unformed lands, and understand the lay of the land pretty well.
