Replay-ability / season longevity

I don't think that there is any problem with season longevity. Median is mainly a single player game (with some features like trading) and every single player game gets boring sooner or later. And i agree with Siosilvar, because in median playing not so much people, like in other ARPGs, the lack of people feels more stronger. How we can attract more players? I think we can't because it 20-year old game with its problems... But i really like many build possibilities, QoL changes, areas such as Skosglen and the current state of mxl.

felix0808 wrote:I don't think that there is any problem with season longevity. Median is mainly a single player game (with some features like trading) and every single player game gets boring sooner or later. And i agree with Siosilvar, because in median playing not so much people, like in other ARPGs, the lack of people feels more stronger. How we can attract more players? I think we can't because it 20-year old game with its problems... But i really like many build possibilities, QoL changes, areas such as Skosglen and the current state of mxl.

It doesn't have to be a "mainly single player game" though. Right now, it doesn't benefit people to play in groups... but if monster HP wasn't scaled up so high, it easily could be. You pin a steamer on the forum, and the game fills up pretty quick... The desire to play in group is there.

More so, I found a "partner" to play with this season. Our builds complemented each other, and we were able to farm certain trophies easier and more efficiently as a pair. If there were more opportunities/reasons to play with a friend or group, it would keep people playing longer.

I don't have a perfect solution to turn MXL into a more 'multiplayer' game... but an easy bandaide would be to not scale up the monster HP so much.

Personally, I would not play an offline only (single player only) mod. I have no desire to play exclusively by myself. So to say MXL is "mainly a single player game" isn't really true at a fundamental level. It mostly benefits you to play by yourself in a multiplayer game, which is sad.

PitStains wrote:So to say MXL is "mainly a single player game" isn't really true at a fundamental level.

...except for the fact that it is. The mod was primarily singleplayer for a long time, and there's a well-documented 80% SP/campaign/casual vs 20% MP/competitive/hardcore split in every single genre. Even in Median's niche of folks looking for an ARPG with a challenging endgame, you still see about 4-5x as many mod downloads as you do TSW accounts. By nature of making a forum post, you're in an even more exceptional ~5%.

Which is not to say that Marco and SB should just ignore us, of course, but just keep it in perspective.

Maybe multiplayer "raids" would bump up TSW account numbers. Would love to see Player8 rifts or endgame content that scratches that itch.

To increase the player base, MXL should be strictly marketed to people who played D2 back in the day (who are mostly now 30+). I had found about the mod when randomly browsing a reddit-like forum, otherwise I would have had no idea. The alternative would be a word of mouth from a friend.

Players who care about the mod should invite their friends, with each successful invite an incentive of something like 1000 tg would be alluring.

TLDR, MXL requires serious marketing, maybe players working as a digital marketer can help the devs for the next steps.

Victor wrote:To increase the player base, MXL should be strictly marketed to people who played D2 back in the day (who are mostly now 30+). I had found about the mod when randomly browsing a reddit-like forum, otherwise I would have had no idea. The alternative would be a word of mouth from a friend.

Players who care about the mod should invite their friends, with each successful invite an incentive of something like 1000 tg would be alluring.

TLDR, MXL requires serious marketing, maybe players working as a digital marketer can help the devs for the next steps.

I foresee a lot of issues with "recruit a friend" bux.

Victor wrote:To increase the player base, MXL should be strictly marketed to people who played D2 back in the day (who are mostly now 30+). I had found about the mod when randomly browsing a reddit-like forum, otherwise I would have had no idea. The alternative would be a word of mouth from a friend.

Players who care about the mod should invite their friends, with each successful invite an incentive of something like 1000 tg would be alluring.

TLDR, MXL requires serious marketing, maybe players working as a digital marketer can help the devs for the next steps.

That's pretty much what I was going to write (after reading Siosilvar's first post in the thread, which talked about needing to attract more players).

I was a pretty avid d2 player back in the day, but I didn't hear about this mod except by accident a few years after it apparently came out in 2008. I think I was searching for diablo stuff and came across the mod in the search results mainly because the keywords I chose that time somehow included it. So yeah, marketing seems a major issue.

New games get advertised heavily on Steam, GOG etc but mods... not so much. PoE has itself up there as playable through Steam so it gets the benefit of search hits and can share patches and updates that way.

BTW - I bought D2R a while ago and quickly asked for a refund (they refused grrr). So I picked it up again when their new ladder started - and soon stopped again. It's just so SLOW! Unless you get into telebaal games but even then it's painful even to get that far and then gearing up is painful af. How did I ever play this?

And their interpretation of "dark". Sigh. The player base doesn't seem to express itself very well, when they say dark I'm pretty sure they're talking about the atmosphere (versus cartoony d3), but Blizz just make the game so there's no light anywhere you go. And all that to get an almost non-existent end game. Median is much better, people just need to hear about it and try it. And it could use some more co-op features and more incentive (how about ladder being based on a whole account, not just one toon?).

P.S. The merc bug doesn't exist in D2R, so it was introduced here.

Siosilvar wrote:
PitStains wrote:So to say MXL is "mainly a single player game" isn't really true at a fundamental level.

...except for the fact that it is. The mod was primarily singleplayer for a long time, and there's a well-documented 80% SP/campaign/casual vs 20% MP/competitive/hardcore split in every single genre. Even in Median's niche of folks looking for an ARPG with a challenging endgame, you still see about 4-5x as many mod downloads as you do TSW accounts. By nature of making a forum post, you're in an even more exceptional ~5%.

Which is not to say that Marco and SB should just ignore us, of course, but just keep it in perspective.

Understood, although, I don't think that you can correlate every "download" to an individual. I've probably downloaded the mod 10+ myself over the years because of new computer/new hard drive/etc.

If the mod was truly single player focus/priority, the mod wouldn't survive, would it? Passion for coding/modding will only carry a mod so far; the modders need some financial incentive to keep it viable. Do the modders benefit from single-player-only/offline players?

Either way, I think a lot of ideas in the thread are good ones. I think there's a way to improve SP and MP at the same time; I don't think it has to be one or the other. I don't think improving things on the MP side would be bad for the SP community. I don't think improving things on the SP side would be bad for the MP community.

About MP vs SP

It used to work like league mechanic in PoE. Stuff added first on MP (usually items), then added to SP couple of patch after. There were some MP-only items i think, but mostly kept on closed (server side) character. SP people usually dont mind about MP only stuff, but it would be sad if developer work hard to create many new mechanic, only to never added into core of the game. This is one of the reason why I like the treasure goblin in the past, despite i think wyrmshire didnt added to the game iirc.

I think donation was solely to keep server up, as it is not cheap to host multiple servers over many months. Thus, the implementation of TG system. If you dont like, you can simply dont use TG to buy stuff.To reduce TG in the pool, there is auction system and maybe some other perks you can use TG for. Just to encourage participation, TG also are given away to any event winner in the past.

While I dont think TG is p2w system, it is quite safe to say that the one who took opportunity & skilled (as in know current market price) will be able to hoard large amount of TG over many seasons. Having no TG at all would be tougher, as I think you need to resortt to manual bartering system & forum listing which again will take huge chunk of your time, especially if you want to update according to market price.

One of easiest way to increase server longevity is probably to reduce drop rate (actually lack of players setting is one of the reason i hate in SP atm) so people tackle higher content at slower rate. Problem with that is people will get burned out running on treadmill without good result, end up quitting the game altogether unless it was buffed to decent rate.

Alternatively, i think something needed to be added on either forum / game side to increase activity. I was thinking something like destiny 2 where developer added a global progress or ncryptic puzzle (Alternate Reality Game) where whole server will work together. Then whole server will be benefit from it. This can be form of secret uber that required many of obscure steps, which can be automatically unlocked (or rather share step by step by developer) multiple weeks after league start.

PitStains wrote:It doesn't have to be a "mainly single player game" though. Right now, it doesn't benefit people to play in groups... but if monster HP wasn't scaled up so high, it easily could be... The desire to play in group is there. I don't have a perfect solution to turn MXL into a more 'multiplayer' game... but an easy bandaide would be to not scale up the monster HP so much.

I always wanted this change to happen and said this many times. In teory +50%hp and +7% dmg per player is not much, but in practice it is huge. It feels like the mobs becomes 2x stronger. And if the stronger char are not prepared to this challenge - the party will break and both goes to play solo

. I miss the times of baalruns, but we get what we get.