Developer Q&A - Part I

Are you planning to make your website more comfortable to use with mobile phones.

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Chris wrote:

Will there ever be South African servers?

We can add servers to a new region once we know we have access to a reliable server host at cost-effective pricing, enough local players to justify the region, and tests of the servers meet our reliability standards. I don't know which of these issues has prevented South Africa in particular, but will bring it up with the server team to make sure it's considered.

From amazon's site:
We will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020.

South Africa in essence will service most of the African Continent (bar maybe the northern countries who can connect to europe) and as ive personally introduced the game to at least 10 paying customers im sure there are similar stories for plenty players. (i'm still waiting for my t-shirt...)

And if thats not enough Naspers(a South African company) owns 31% of Tencent and i own exactly ONE Naspers share, so you should listen to your shareholders :p

ok

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voodoov wrote:

-every character you create can align with one master (spawning only his missions at a higher rate) and choose to share it with your account. atm you are effectively reducing your income when starting new characters.

I also mentioned this in Q and A with bunch of other people.They already said a hard no to that , Chris also said No in some other announcement.

Wow, that's a much longer Q&A post than i expected tbh (especially with part 2 coming soon), nice.

Some thoughts:

1.I'm not sure what you mean by "scoping it", but Synthesis was bad because it was convoluted, tedious, bugged, unrewarding and boring + the intervention freezes etc.
2.I don't think players expect you to 1up every league. Players actually want simpler leagues like the 2nd generation leagues we had (breach, abyss, perandus etc).
3.What is this thing where you (GGG) think that the "economy" has to be a certain way. What does it even matter? Why don't you just let players sort it out?
4.Betrayal mods need to be WAY easier to get. I played like a month or 1,5 months fairly actively and did 36 challs and i still didn't get a lot of the mods. It's WAY too rare. Like you just don't get them at all lol... like how liches never spawned in early abyss.
5.Lol welp "there goes the" aspirations of people for an auction house xD .... Gotta sell those premium tabs huh?
6.Speaking of memory leaks (also memory not offloading), what is the deal with a top-down view arpg from the first part of this decade, taking like 7-9 gigs of RAM on PC ?? It's crazy.

Otherwise good post. Glad that you're removing craft recipes from t3 Atzoatl rooms. Yeah the betrayal interventions are very intrusive to gameplay and should indeed be changed too - that's good. Adding mobs inbetween boss phases = good. Fossils stacking (finally) = great!

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Paldamus wrote:

Otherwise good post. Glad that you're removing craft recipes from t3 Atzoatl rooms. Yeah the betrayal interventions are very intrusive to gameplay and should indeed be changed too - that's good. Adding mobs inbetween boss phases = good. Fossils stacking (finally) = great!

Yes, intervention was mandatory to do, recipes in T3 rooms were always a bother and useless, same should be done delve-related.

As for fossil stacking: You realize they just repeated the same old message again? 'We have to sort out some stuff first' can be 1 league or 5 years in the eyes of GGG, it's nothing else then a 'not right now' message as usual.

The community really should learn to discern between 'next patch' messages, 'not right now' ones and 'over my dead body' ones.

Trade + player-choice is here named in the 'over my dead body' category.
Most well-wanted functions in the 'not now' category.
A few things which aren't in ANY way as important (mostly) are the 'next patch' one.

Great reveal, right? We can hope for some stuff which probably won't see the light of day, we get left behind with some minor fixes and the most sought after changes aren't going to come, way to please the community.

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ichbinwerichbi wrote:

so i dont like the entire system, but its the best i can imagine.

I respect your opinion!

I have a problem with the other statements you make:

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ichbinwerichbi wrote:

BUT do the guys that are crying about an auction house or map selling house or something like this REALLY thing it will be better.

Yes, most of us do.

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ichbinwerichbi wrote:

YES you get then a map faster. BUT you must pay foufold or more currency for it.

The prices would decrease (or stay the same) because people would actually sell those 2Alch-Maps that are in their stashes for sale...
In the current state, people list them, get many requests and simply stop answering them. (Or only do bulk-requests)

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ichbinwerichbi wrote:

If you dont believe it. Set a cyclpean belt with 15 all attributes for 2 c in your selling stash
Then you better log out if you want to play again. Your pc will go down with the wsp.

If you do that, you are part of the problem.

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ichbinwerichbi wrote:

And if you can sell it over a action house, there will be people pricefixing erverything like the Mathil items.

Pricefixing would NOT be a problem anymore because people could buy the underpriced item as soon as it gets listed. (Pricefixing an item to a higher value is not possible. This is called "Law of supply and demand")

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ichbinwerichbi wrote:

There is no way as the system is working to make it not botable.

As of my understanding, there are currently curreny-tradebots.
Hence it would change nothing.

Any plans on buffing life and its tiers on items? Energy shield is currently just way to powerful to make life feel like a xecent option.

I'm actually pretty miffed that some of your design decisions are premised on protecting your economy yet you do little to address the core roots of those problems are from your misguided rigging the economy.

By your own logic why can't SSF players just be totally free of ever trading and enjoy a better RNGESUS than what we get? I know the answer it's because you would mis-execute the feature. I would gladly keep more interest in this title for total SSF in which I have no hope to ever trade just not be free of your precious rng economy based system which is crap. There's no reason for this not to be an option besides like offline you refuse to do some real work and ensure they work properly. Keep taking that MTX money and squandering how it gets spent back in to the company. I'd never play in trade league again if I knew RNGesus was a little more logical in SSF. I'd put a couple thousand dollars in to the game right now if this feature were to come.

You freely admit you need a certain amount players or money per league to maintain the game. Do you realize plenty of people don't play this game because feature creep is often way inconsistent and locked away only for super high meta aware players who take time to learn your game and penalize for doing so. I'd feel like a sucker if I could play as fast as some streamers knowing that high end drops are literally insanely lucky to get. You don't have a casual audience because there's little reason to play this game in that way. You make the game anti group unless your a band of thieves running deep and sharing well. I know plenty of arpg and mmorpg players that either could or have played but left due the very things you're saying make the game hardcore. Crap like I mention makes the game a boring tedious infuriating chore. People have said that feature creep lets us play snippets of the game instead of more of what we prefer and it's actually the very reason I got bored of d3 being stuck on the same boring undense maps I had to run.

I will vaal orb, chisel, and rig my elder/shpare innfluence on my maps when I can but you're rngesus systeme is a joke. I can go in to my temple with 5% IQ and still get better and more map drops then a decked out 100%+ map at times. That's what your dumb design decisions give us. The only way to get more maps is basically tons of speed, luck, and to invest in them with a permanent overhead cost or maybe I can get my streaming friends to dump tons of them on me.

This economy logic like synthesis feature creep is another reason I'm getting sick of investing 3 months when you freely admit at a game developers conference that the drop of of that economy is sharp as the season goes on. You take time to nerf any speed farming techniques to gain good benefits but on the flipside are keeping map drop rates and item drops crap to protect your economy, that's literally what you're admitting to any player with half a clue. That has nothing to do with playing the game hardcore. If you really want to have that argument let players who want bunk RNGesus choose so but don't write articles heavy handed from above giving me such tripe.

I don't admit to be great ever in this game but at this point I'm being blunt I barely enjoy end game cause you make it a chore if you're not break neck speed and abusing meta which you nerf anyways and made pricy to attain.

Can't have it both ways. Hope more players chime in with legit gripes about the game or qol that you never fix but got time to keep economy in check but not list the changes you make. If you ever had to list all the changes you made a lot of players would be storming these forums and giving you hell. Developers who make fighting games are infinitely more honest about changes they make then you guys are. I left diable cause they made mapping and doing things boring. I'm not leaving this game but I won't be playing it anything like I use too starting next season. The synthesis mechanic just isn't worth it I would prefer a well made incursion/betrayal buff or just more time in the delve when possible.

I'm done being a guinea pig for little reward. If new leagues suck I will just delete my content and go standard unless friends I know are playing or the mechanic is good.

For any haters this is still my favorite ARPG ever. I'm not a d2/d3 whore especially since playing it on a modern system or display is a pain and I wouldn't go back to remaster.

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xXBlurredXx wrote:

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ichbinwerichbi wrote:

There is no way as the system is working to make it not botable.

As of my understanding, there are currently curreny-tradebots.
Hence it would change nothing.

I encountered item trade-bots as well, they are by far more rare though.

I think they might work with the trade-API and live-search function there, using it and how mods are displayed on items to discern if the right one is in it.

I tried it out with a few items where price-fixers obviously were on them. Putting them in for the respective price and you get whispered for it fairly quickly. I then tried to start a conversation, the other side didn't react, inside the trade-window they waited for several minutes without saying anything or interacting further then putting the currency inside, obvious it was a bot at this stage.

No sane person would simply stare at a trade window for 5 minutes straight as the trade-partner waits for an answer, either a living person would just ignore the text and leave, or they would at least give any form of reply.

My record for 'bot-stopping' this way was 37 minutes by the way, watched a series on the side and ate my meal.

So yes, that's an issue presented in the game as well, just not as rampant.
'No, we will stay at our choice' my ass, GGG choose THIS, are you glad they did?