Σ 2.1 Bugs&Feedback

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Solfege
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This kinda goes along with my last post, but something I’d like to see is more player-controlled outcomes rather than everything being so heavily centered around RNG.

Trophy Fragments are a good example of what I mean by “player-controlled outcomes.” The move to Fragments from the old model was kinda meh on its own, but the idea that the player could now create these new Trophy Fragments was what really made this a fantastic change. Not only did this give the player more control over an otherwise pure RNG-dictated outcome, it gave the player a sense that they were working toward a guaranteed result. Trophy farming no longer felt like a potential waste of time because, even if RNG never dropped a Fragment, you knew your efforts would still pay off at a predictable point. It gave the player an actual sense of accomplishment—a sense that it was their effort that brought about this result, not that they were simply gifted something because some random number generator decided they’d sunk enough time into a task.

The Catalyst of Disenchantment is another good example. Imagine what Early Game would be like without it. Imagine if the only way a player could get TUs was to find them naturally, or to collect enough Arcane Shards via random world drops to make them. I wonder how many players would actually play past Normal, let alone Nightmare and into Hell. This is exactly what End Game feels like. Players are entirely at the mercy of RNG for almost everything—SUs, Great Runes, Enhanced Runes, Shrines (both drops and Shrinecraft rolls), Charms (rolls), Cycles, UMOs, Oils, Whispers, Riftstones, Relics, and on and on. This is only compounded by the absurd rarity of many of these items, and/or the fact that some builds are so restricted in what they can use that they require a specific item (or items) in order to progress. Sure, it’s exciting when that 1 make-or-break item finally drops, but there’s no real sense of accomplishment there. The player didn’t do anything a bot couldn’t do to get that drop. There was no skill, no purposeful action that brought about that result. It was pure luck. The player only got that thing because RNG decided they should get that thing at that time.

When I play a game, I want to feel like my actions as a player affect an outcome. Leaving everything up to RNG doesn’t satisfy that because, by its nature, it can’t satisfy that. I’m not saying RNG doesn’t have its place, nor am I suggesting the current model should be done away with. I just think a more deterministic alternative way for players to get the stuff they need, in conjunction with RNG, would make playing with a non-meta build feel less...discouraging. The introduction of craftable Trophies does at least lead me to believe the devs are looking at ways to give players more control over certain outcomes, so hopefully we’ll see more things like that in the future.

There’s a lot more I’d like to say (like how much I hate lockdown timers and why they’re a discouraging and demotivating mechanic), but this post is long enough as it is.
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A New Start
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Solfege wrote:Players are entirely at the mercy of RNG for almost everything—SUs, Great Runes, Enhanced Runes, Shrines (both drops and Shrinecraft rolls), Charms (rolls), Cycles, UMOs, Oils, Whispers, Riftstones, Relics, and on and on. This is only compounded by the absurd rarity of many of these items, and/or the fact that some builds are so restricted in what they can use that they require a specific item (or items) in order to progress.


TG is supposed to be the fix for that, the problem is that trading in this game is somehow even more annoying than in PoE, and the fact that item value drops significantly after like a week nowadays doesn't help much. Unless you're one of the first week players and know what you're doing to capitalize on it, chances are you will have a very hard time making TG. That and the economy for some reasons keep getting more stagnate and die much faster now than before, like it was 2 weeks of booming trade and died down, now it's more like 1 week.

I personally have spending limit of around 100 TG a season to buy important SSU/Charms and then farm til I could recoup the loss. Sometimes I don't even feel like buying upgrade after a certain point (eg. being able to farm Faust fast) because the cost vs reward ratio to push further into Scogs and Labs are just too much and I will most likely go broke without any guarantee to make enough TG back before the season's economy dies completely. And yeah it's cynical to just equate items dropped to how much money it can be sold for in an ARPG, but that's sadly how all modern ARPG with a trade economy operates nowadays.
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Solfege
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@A New Start

I think your post pretty much sums up the root of the problem for me: Median is now an economy-focused game rather than a player-focused one, and I’m just not interested in that kind of game.

I highly suspect this shift toward a TG-based, economy-focused model is why the game has become more and more tedious over time, with more and more obstacles to progression added nearly every patch (e.g. clvl reqs for new areas, access to rifts locked behind random world drops, inane amounts of monsters that slow/chill, terrible drop rates for a lot of things, etc.). These obstacles are meant to slow a player’s progression—but not to encourage players to take their time and enjoy the game as a whole; rather, they’re an attempt to prevent people from doing stuff such as selling Laz charms an hour into a new season, or posting 20s Samael/Deimoss wtfpwn vids before even a week has passed. And while that’s certainly an option (I guess) for regulating the MP economy, it’s devastating to SP/SSF play (but then, SP/SSF players really aren’t the target audience anymore, are they).

At this point, only a sucker would start a season with the build they actually want to play. The shrewd player fires up an OP meta farming or bossing build on day 1 so they can rush to end game asap to farm what they can, as fast as they can. That way, they can sell their goods to the suckers for TG. Then, they can either use that TG to trade with the other shrewd players for the stuff they need for the build they actually want to play, or they just quit once they’ve sucked all the TG they can out of the other players. (As an aside, that Goblin Season 2.0 thread was quite a telling read.)

I guess the bottom line to this rambling post is this: I want to play Median, not TG Tycoon.
Bestendigo
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it’s devastating to SP/SSF play (but then, SP/SSF players really aren’t the target audience anymore, are they)

As a SP player, i gotta agree with that. Your posts just makes sense and i have to agree with everything you say. I dont use any TG, i play mostly SP (when i played MP, i just played for fun with other people, not to farm TG) and i played MP also for Goblin Season, because Goblins were not available in SP.

I also didn't like vanilla D2 trading. I loved old mods like Valhalla, Zy-El, Eastern Sun, Laz Median XL etc, because it was play to win, not trade to win. I just played and i enjoyed a lot. Don't get me wrong, i also love the newest MXL, but it's visible that MXL focus less on players, more on trading. I remember my lightning sorc, at 135 lvl i had still trash items (SP ofc), not even SSU but just basic SU or TU, i got only 1 relic (sic!) that was totally useless for my char. I had few chars and i never did any use of relics, because they drop very, very rarely and when they finally drop, it's useless for your char. And trust me, i farmed 120 lvl ubers a lot, got around 200% mf and still i didn't find any great item after many hours of playing. Not even a single SSSU. It took me like 80 hours to reach 135 lvl in SP. Been farming Duncraig and other 120 lvl stuff uber for like 40 hours, but i couldn't farm harder ubers cuz of crap loot i got. No good items = no progress.

MP and trading is the only way to play MXL right... which is sad.
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Lynderika
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Solfege wrote:I think your post pretty much sums up the root of the problem for me: Median is now an economy-focused game rather than a player-focused one, and I’m just not interested in that kind of game.


So am I. It's one of the reason the only arpg I ever loved was d2 and it's mods, I'm not a fan of endless mindless farming. However, I don't entierely agree that median fell into one. To me only scosglen, labs and sam are not ssf friendly, and they deserve to be so. (though scosglen kinda is, it just is much slower) Instead of devs, I feel like it's players that are more and more obessed over the "meta", the ladder etc. But most of the game still is about the same. And I mean, if you don't like scosglen for exemple, just not going is an option. It literally did not exist few patches ago, you know. Labs always were obnixious because of the terrible riftstone system, and sam is locked behind it's ridiculous price, no sp players can farm 1 billion Taha. That I agree. But again, the game is perfectly playable without overly farming. If you don't go to theses above named 135+ content, you don't need trophies, perfect whormhole, perfect gear or any umo or whatever.
I always start a season and stay with Nagisin, as the only char I really play since 1.0 regardless of whatever the meta is, and still get a profusion of tg just by selling shit I don't use. I don't even know what to do with it tbh. But one season, one day maybe I'll try out theses oh so obligatory relics, BiS and umos and see if it's really that fun.

But drops improvements can be made for sure. Here would be my 2 cents :
-Samael require a Taha rune only to create the stoneshard, getting the scroll only require Sigs now.
-Oils drops are tied to Vizjun instead of scosglen (increase Vizjun farm incintive as a "craft" zone. btw arcane shards, bellas and whispers of the damned drop like candy there so it's pretty fun, and having theses oils at scosglen make no sense and is too late in the game)
-Less shrines type. I've seen this suggestion long ago but still think it nice, instead the current system reduce the number of shrine to 4 : Spellcaster (spell damage, cast speed and elemental pierce), Attribute (aa, %aa, max mana) , Minion (minion stats + reanimates), and weapon related (Enhanced Damage/defense + ied, ds in weapon and cb+flat damage in armors). This way you get way more often the shrine type you want.
In my plays I usually don't mind the current system and just use whatever shrines until I get good stats, and just bless with the good one, but crafts in general isn't considered to be in a good spot so it could help it, I guess.
-Overall Rune droprate increase in every rifts.
-Scosglen Druids now have a rune drop biais.
-More runewords with oskills are added (to counter the need of relics), though I don't have any needs so no specifics ideas there.
-Cycle droprate heavily increased (That getting a whole trophy while clearing the map in the way do not reward you with a perfect whormhole of your choice is pretty terrible).

-Of course, increase the difficulty of many low level dungeons to compensate :twisted:
Edited by Lynderika 2 years.
Diaco
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Lynderika wrote:
Solfege wrote:I think your post pretty much sums up the root of the problem for me: Median is now an economy-focused game rather than a player-focused one, and I’m just not interested in that kind of game.


I don't entierely agree, to me only scosglen, labs and sam are not ssf friendly, and they deserve to be so. (though scosglen kinda is, it just is much slower) Instead of devs, I feel like it's players that are more and more obessed over the "meta", the ladder etc. But most of the game still is about the same. And I mean, if you don't like scosglen for exemple, just not going is an option. It literally did not exist few patches ago, you know. Labs always were obnixious because of the terrible riftstone system, and sam is locked behind it's ridiculous price, no sp players can farm 1 billion Taha. That I agree. But again, the game is perfectly playable without overly farming. If you don't go to theses above named 135+ content, you don't need trophies, perfect whormhole, perfect gear or any umo or whatever.
I always start a season with Nagisin, as the only char I really play since 1.0 regardless of whatever the meta is, and still get a profusion of tg just by selling shit I don't use. I don't even know what to do with it tbh. But one season, one day maybe I'll try out theses oh so obligatory relics, BiS and umos and see if it's really that fun.


I mean, sure, not going to Scosglen/labs is an option. BUT, Not going to Scosglen/labs/sam/deimoss means basically the only activity left for you to do in the game is to farm Fauzt and Dunc until you get bored and quit... which is more or less what I do (I play SP). I usually get to 130-135 and just move on to another character when I realize that unless one or two VERY specific items/high runes drop, the build can no longer advance in the game. I've had the luck to get a couple of very build defining items which at least let me farm Scosglen with one character or two (This after my... 10th-12th character maybe?), but that's just pure luck, I'd still have fauzt and dunc as my only activities left if they had not dropped because Scosglen was essentially off-limits without them.

Regarding "meta builds", people are obsessed with them because they are the ones that allow you access to the endgame content without an absurd tg investment. There are many builds that I love to play, but they are so underpowered in comparison to "meta" builds that there's not much sense in pushing them beyond 130 content unless you get extremely BiS gear.

Or maybe I just suck at the game? Dunno.

tl;dr: I totally agree that the game has become very SSF unfriendly, or that at least there are not enough mechanisms that would allow you to see endgame content without trading.
Bestendigo
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I doubt that devs will listen to us. Sadly they don't care about SP/SSF players at all. This game is MP and trading-focused and will stay like that. The difficulty of 120+ ubers is high, most of builds is not so strong, amount of items is huge and drop rate is relatively poor. Literally you can't do anything playing alone if you don't trade. I think it's meant to be like that and will stay like that. Our complaints doesn't really matter.

I also wish they give us more control over our character and less RNG, but i suppose it's meant to be like that and TG is way to go.
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Bestendigo wrote:I doubt that devs will listen to us. Sadly they don't care about SP/SSF players at all. This game is MP and trading-focused and will stay like that. The difficulty of 120+ ubers is high, most of builds is not so strong, amount of items is huge and drop rate is relatively poor. Literally you can't do anything playing alone if you don't trade. I think it's meant to be like that and will stay like that. Our complaints doesn't really matter.

I also wish they give us more control over our character and less RNG, but i suppose it's meant to be like that and TG is way to go.


I've been playing SP for 7 years now and while I definitely get the frustration, it's not remotely true that they're not listening. Neither the dev team nor the playerbase is one coherent thing so they're trying to juggle a lot of competing interests. MP economy vs SSF, hard endgame content vs. all builds being playable and all classes being viable, oskill complaints while wereowl is still in the state it is, dealing with burnout after the massive effort that was 2.0. Things have definitely swung in favor of the MP economy recently but I've seen Marco, Ben, and Gavin all explicitly acknowledge feedback that rune drops have gotten too low, class balance is out of whack, and relic/UMO stacking is a too powerful so endgame gets balanced too high to make up for it.

Like, yeah, it's rough to be SP and try to get past Fauzt; that's a consequence of all the stuff that's been added since Fauzt and Dunc were the hardest farming areas. But I wouldn't say it's going to stay that way, it's just a question of how long it'll take.

(also as someone who's played since Ultimative it's amusing to hear that there are too many items nowadays. RIP to every base having 3 SU variants)
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Bestendigo wrote:I doubt that devs will listen to us. Sadly they don't care about SP/SSF players at all. This game is MP and trading-focused and will stay like that. The difficulty of 120+ ubers is high, most of builds is not so strong, amount of items is huge and drop rate is relatively poor. Literally you can't do anything playing alone if you don't trade. I think it's meant to be like that and will stay like that. Our complaints doesn't really matter.

I also wish they give us more control over our character and less RNG, but i suppose it's meant to be like that and TG is way to go.


I actually believe the opposite. I think builds were buffed too much without the early ubers being changed at all, and that resulted to most of them being too easy. If 120s require you to trade to clear them I believe you're either relatively new or doing something wrong.
Again, tg talk and complaints should only be restricted to 135+ content, and again, I don't see the problem with that.
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I didn't play the Ultimative versions too much, just a little. I played Brother Laz MXL since 2008 to 2012 when Laz abandoned the project, then i didn't like Ultimative changes so i stick with Laz MXL. Laz MXL was great and i loved it. I started to play MarcoNecroX MXL when Sigma was released, so it was early 2019. And i am playing till today and i also love the 2.0 content.

Yes, there's too many items comparing to drop rates and drop quality. Drop rate for SP or drop quality should be higher. In order to build a good SP/SSF char, you need to play 6 hours every day for 3 months. Maybe then you will get a gear that allows you to beat 125+ lvl ubers. But who will play it like that? I would get bored after a week of such pointless grind. Thats why there's TG and trading and the game is focused around that mechanic sadly.

Lynderika, i don't have problems with 120 lvl ubers. I am cleaning Duncraig, Teganze etc without any problem with SP char. But thats the moment, when SP char hits the wall. You can't farm well very hard and extreme ubers, because of crap gear you find in SP where you can't trade. It's either a crap gear or a gear that is not right for my char. At 135 character level i was still wearing some TUs, some SUs, but not any SSU or SSSU. I couldn't even complete a damn full set for my build, i needed 1 item that never wanted to drop. And i had around 200% MF which is pretty good balance between MF focus and char power. Without MF i wouldn't find anything useful at all. It's really not my fault that this game is fully based on RNG and RNG is usually rough and there are too many items with relatively poor drop rates. As i said, i have to play everyday a lot for 2-3 months, maybe then i will finally get some item(s) that will allow me to beat just fine very hard and extreme ubers.

And yes, i play the build i want, not the ''meta'' ones. Because i want to enjoy the game, instead of playing one or two ''right'' builds. If i want to play one or two right builds, then i am playing imbalanced vanilla D2: LoD where 80% skills of chars are useless. But from MXL i expect smth else than ''play this build or else u will have bad time''.

You're a person with almost 7k TG, so you won't understand us SP/SSF players. We just want to focus on the game and just play the game, not on trading and economy.

Also one more thing - relics. As i said few posts ago, they're pointless. Since relics were introduced to the game with 1.6 update, i have made like 5 or 6 chars that passed 130 level and guess what? I NEVER did any use of relics. Because firstly, they drop ridicolously rarely and sometimes i didn't find any even after 130 char level. Secondly, when RNG finally bless me and a relic finally drops, it's always the one wrong for my char. So relic mechanic is totally useless for SP/SSF players. They just make sense when it comes to trading and TG but otherwise they're useless and i am sure not many people did have use of them while playing SP/SSF. They could be even removed from SP and noone would notice.