Stories from Development: The Map System

For a little while there, Hillock was a sort of endgame...

If only GGG was able to deal with stability issues...

Many times i had kinda nice maps, went into map, BOOM - random game crash to the login screen. Not only my character got a DC but many if not all at that time (i asked on global chat and there were hundreds of complains about it).

But well, DC isn't that bad, i have 5 more portals, right?
Wrong...
After game crash, there are no portals, and nice map is gone... and GGG isn't even responding to bug reports.

But maps are nice.
I was disoriented at first with that tier reorganizing in War for the Atlas patch, but i don't complain :) More maps to farm :)

nice insight! thanks

On my opinion atlas mechanics is really cool now, its like playing story line even your inside the atlas, all map bosses is in thier place. I really glad GGG put them all at the higher tier so makes them more interesting to deal, but the disappointment here is bosses doesn't gives you nothing rather than risk, I never play HC bcoz I hate running away on any bosses, spam maps gain xp! May be its a bit complicated on HC player, I may suggest that any higher tier maps can only be obtain by fighting bosses, w/o balls no maps. White and yellow fine but shaped/red maps you must get it on bosses. In that way all bosses has more useful! Thanks!

in two years there will be a development story of the great opportunity to shape your atlas and sextant blocking to run one map thousands of times. looking forward to this development insight.

Oh so this is where "endless Ledge" comes from. Makes much more sense now.

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Notpointed wrote:

Oh so this is where "endless Ledge" comes from. Makes much more sense now.

also probably where the darkshrine idea came from, sacrifice an item to give the area a mod of some sort

Amazing line history, Tom Hanks!! T. Hanks! Thanks.

I like this "Multiverse" mechanics.

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FadeXF wrote:

WHY is it that GGG is perfectly ok with level 90s being stagnant in T10 and under content - "kiddie pool" content - instead of the actual end game maps?

I don't quite get this. I guess you have completed just 1 map per red tier map(or even less in case you run some shaped stuff) except for T15+ so you can run the same map per tier over and over? While I am not doing this, this is what everyone seems to do and most of the people I know have little to no problems sustaining a good map pool in mid reds.
So I'm not sure what your issue is there. If there are so many people able to sustain and you are not, is it really GGGs fault or is it maybe you, who did something wrong, messing up the atlas or the maps?

And if this wouldn't work for all these people I wouldn't even wonder. This "one map per tier or less" is exactly what is stated in the Dev story as something they don't really want to have.

I tried some different approach this league and am going to complete every map on the atlas. Right now I'm at 154/157, just Vaal Temple and two Uniques missing because I didn't bother to do them yet. And, surprise surprise, I don't have any issues sustaining red maps.
Most of the time I start my map rotation at tier 10 because I feel including them, run all of them, do this on every tier up to 15 and repeat from 10. T16 gets sold, everything else will be run.
I'm not running more than maybe 4-5 same maps in a row, I'm running maps from a pool of 30+ different maps. So I do get to see some different maps, layouts, bosses every day and get a great return of maps.
(Just alc and go, sextants and stuff wouldn't make any sense anyways when running different maps all the time)

So if the meta gameplay of running the same maps over and over doesn't work out for some in terms of map sustain, maybe this approach delivers the desired results. Sure, it can be a bit tedious fighting in annoying layouts or having really bad bosses and is certainly bad for clearspeed but it's a bit of a challenge and I don't see a way you could go down in maps that way.