Incentive behind working on this mod for so many years?

I recently got updated by dear forum players that a new "Sigma" would be coming soon. Another big work project for median. This reminds me of my old inner questions what the incentive is on working for this mod? What the motivation is on working for this mod? Why keep working on such a old engine and really improve it? Every question with an eye on since there is no money involved and player numbers will be sinking each month? Ofc I get the feeling of creating your own world but maybe I can read the modders thoughts, might as well from other users.

Because diablo 2 is the best ARPG ever made, thats enough motivation to improve it with median, which essentially makes it a whole different game from vanilla for the better.

MrClean wrote: "Sigma" would be coming soon

fixed

actually there is money involved now, and it probably gave a huge boost to motivation for sigma development

prime, i see
gekko,how money? advertisement? gifts? ingame RLM item shop :flip:

?

the third you said, you can donate cash for Trade Gold and buy ingame items with Trade Gold

Gekko64 wrote:actually there is money involved now, and it probably gave a huge boost to motivation for sigma development

Not so much. If you are talking about TG, the "earnings" you could have from that are not high, and if you were to eventually split it with the team members it becomes insignificant. Also you need to deduct the realm/forum costs (which have gone up noticeably and we'll need even a bigger forum for sigma release).

The incentive? I don't know anymore. The biggest problem for me is that there is too much stuff on the plate. You have sigma, but then you have ultimative too, there is TSW, the forums, the community, and all of these demand time

If the game was profitable it would be great as the money could be used to hire people for each of these aspects of the mod. But whatever.

I think the focus should be on sigma, new forums are nice but I didn't mind the old ones tbh

considering the arpg niche has no real killer application at the moment a game based on d2 with higher resolution, better interface and updated mechanics could develop quite a following

Gekko64 wrote:I think the focus should be on sigma, new forums are nice but I didn't mind the old ones tbh

Except the old forum was even more demanding for much less reward

We had to manually make TG transactions as well as check donations and add TG to users. Not even mention that we didn't even own that forum as it was on a free host.

Saying "full focus should be on sigma" is not saying much, because it's not an option

You cannot release sigma before upgrading the forum first, because after seeing XVI release, I can tell the forums will not be up by the time of release. TSW also would require a lot of care (and specially testing). Releasing sigma without a MP environment would be such a failure. You cannot ignore ultimative because eventually the people playing ultimative will be the ones to tell their friends sigma is finally out. So yeah, the things I mentioned are not addons, they are requirements. That's not even mentioning the work related to the documentation, or marketing aka getting the word out and promoting the new mod, which is practically as important as the mod itself (how you "sell" it).

yeah marketing is huge in an era where packaging is more important than the product itself, but I think you can handle that. the twitch box was definitely a step in the right direction.

from a player perspective, atm the bottleneck is the old gamecore greatly limiting the changes that can be made to the game. new patches are nice but the community is still mostly made up of veterans who lose interest a couple months after ladder reset.

I think the untapped market is made up of people who won't play it atm because it looks too similar to d2, better graphics and new mechanics would provide a good incentive to try it out.

realm wise I hope the non-ladder chars feature is also present in sigma, and unique drops are brought more in line with SP values so there's really no reason for people to play SP. atm even with non-ladder chars it's still a very different experience due to the drastic change in drops. increased char level, bounties and pvp would provide the longterm community involvement instead of having to reignite with frequent ladder resets.