Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

[Kiroptus]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

The problem with monster recovering is that it would create grief among the party. As if one player creates a TP and the monsters regerenate a % of hp, wasting the work that the party was doing. Its also a very ungraceful solution I mean... a player creates a TP nearby and out of the blue the monsters regain HP, it doesnt make too much sense.

TPs/Checkpoints that allow you to go back to town in certain intervals of the dungeon is, IMO, the way to go. Plus there is no need to worry about "getting in the action" as the players will be able to summon their party members to the battle.

 

[AnimeCraze]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

How about if we make TP's so that you can only use them if there is no monsters around the TP for a certain distance (say 2 screens). As no monsters are around town, you can always go from town to action, but not vice-versa (until you clear the area near the TP out). That will preserve the benefit of instant back-to-town when you need to sell stuff, but is hard to abuse. If forcing the player to clear out is a bit much, make the player freeze for 5 seconds if there are monsters around. (similar to the WC3 TP, except you aren't invincible)

 

[Akse]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

there are many ways to remove lazyness and boosting lowbies. Main thing is to remove the possibility to gain _ANYTHING_ for your character if you are playing with a too high level one. Why would you get any rewards and experience when the other guy is doing all the work.

 

[zorro8081]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

how bout something like an 'item portal'? you can send items back through it and form a pile in town for when you go back, and then the summon mechanic can always put friends in the action with you and you can still have placed town portals from shrines and whatnot throughout a dungeon. 1.Loot? check 2.Friends? check 3.No abusable TPs? check i don't know....what do you guys think?

 

[mrtoker]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

Sure you can concentrate on all the ways to abuse a TP.
But really a TP is part of diablo and its also there to make the game fair.
If they took away teleport from the mage class you could play around with the idea of removing TPs all together. But since the wizard can teleport they will be OP in getting around AND getting back to where you died for example.
They could make TPs only usable out of combat and make them unsusable inside boss areas like Baals. But using a TP to get someone to a WP isnt all that big of a problem. If someone has taken the time to lvl up and then takes the time to help and boost someone, making it go a bit faster doesnt hurt other players. Its up to you if you wanna play the game with/without help.

Another side of the story are the passionate players that change chars and builds the same amount of times we change our underwear (roughly once or twice a week). We dont wanna be sitting around running hour after hour after hour. =) People arent being lazy, just effective.

Edit: Or they could add movement abilities to other classes so they get around faster (sprint? =D) or an entirely new function/item that chars can buy from vendors that dont work like TPs but instead increase movement speed while out of combat for a ceratain amount of time.

 

[noticks]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

I don't see the problem with TP's as they are now. If you're in battle and you wait until near death to cast one, you likely won't be able to enter before death anyway. You must admit that it does take some (however slight,) amount of foresight to cast one you might need before getting overwhelmed.

Maybe that's just my overcautious HC mentality. Still it's my 2 cents.

 

[Nimbostratus]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

Here's my idea to stop portals from being too much of a "safety net" or item hoarding device. There will be two kinds of portal scrolls available.

Scroll of Town Portal: Like in D2, creates a portal to town. However, they can only be used in certain places. These places will be somewhat randomized, but can still be found often (similar to shrines in D2). A "portal shrine" cannot be reused for x amount of time, and they do not spawn near bosses.

Scroll of Meditation: There's probably a better name for this, but whatever. Can be used anywhere to create a portal to an unlinked room away from combat, but not a town either. As this is simply intended as a means for players to go afk without having to rush to the nearest portal shrine when somebody calls them, the player's character is unable to do much of anything while in this room. Regen, poison damage (incoming and outgoing), and prebuffs are essentially "paused" while the player is here.

 

[Nihilas]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

I think many people here are forgetting the use of tps to get partymembers to you. Imagine you are in dungeon you have to walk and find a shrine? Could be a long way, same goes for overly expensive tp, which low lvl would concider buying one just so a party member would come.

Removing/tweaking tp wrong way would only result to that you dont want to use tps to get partymembers to you which ultimately result to less partys. Then comes some questions

Should there be an automatic tp when you join a party? This will probably be abused
Should there be an automatic tp where only your partymember can enter?

Hard to get a good solution.

 

[Gonzo]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

It's funny, the one thing people hate about D1 - taking a long time to walk around town - is also the only thing that was really balancing TPs.

 

[Kiroptus]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

I think many people here are forgetting the use of tps to get partymembers to you. Imagine you are in dungeon you have to walk and find a shrine? Could be a long way, same goes for overly expensive tp, which low lvl would concider buying one just so a party member would come.

Removing/tweaking tp wrong way would only result to that you dont want to use tps to get partymembers to you which ultimately result to less partys. Then comes some questions

Should there be an automatic tp when you join a party? This will probably be abused
Should there be an automatic tp where only your partymember can enter?

Hard to get a good solution.

Again it was already said that the player deep down in the dungeon can summon their party members to the area. The problem is not players getting quickly into the dungeon but how easily they can get from dungeon to town.

 

[sicilian]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

The problem with monster recovering is that it would create grief among the party. As if one player creates a TP and the monsters regerenate a % of hp, wasting the work that the party was doing. Its also a very ungraceful solution I mean... a player creates a TP nearby and out of the blue the monsters regain HP, it doesnt make too much sense.

TPs/Checkpoints that allow you to go back to town in certain intervals of the dungeon is, IMO, the way to go. Plus there is no need to worry about "getting in the action" as the players will be able to summon their party members to the battle.

How about this... the Boss doesn't heal until all the party members have left. BUT, to keep people from going back in shifts to heal, once you TP out of a boss fight, you can't return until either the Boss is dead, or your whole party is dead. That way, you can leave if you have to without negatively impacting your party, but can't abuse the system by healing during a boss fight?

 

[Kiroptus]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

Actually in a boss fight no one should be allowed to return. Its a freaking boss fight FFS, you better be prepared for this, plus there are health globes, we dont know how the bosses will function with the new healing system, maybe after some beating some spur of blood from them falls and spawn a globe for the party but the idea of the boss is to keep the fight going its supposed to be a struggle and not a race with many pit stops, what happens in D2 is a travesty to any sense of epic battle.

But anyway, In D2 I never really felt anything epic in the boss fights, it was more like fighting big pinatas. Hopefully D3 can bring some cool boss fights that actually require cooperation.

 

[Starving_Poet]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

My only problem with Blizzard's stance on town portals is that they deem that my pack-rat nature is not 'fun'.

Town Portal should simply have long cool-down timers. 5 minutes or more.

 

[Wolfgang Abenteuer]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

Maybe they could have it level-based, like players from clvl 1-25 get 1 TP per game (not per login, otherwise you could logout and log back into the same game to replenish TP), clvl 26-50 get 2, 51-75 get 3, and 76-100 get 4. They could also replenish (but NOT accumulate...they would obviously have to be a non-tradable item or a counter like skill points) on level up, so if you're level 8 and you spend your TP, it gets replenished when you reach level 9, and if you were level 78 and reached level 79, you'd get four.

*shrugs*

 

[Wirt]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

They could make TPs only usable out of combat

I think this gets rid of the abuse to flee from and return to boss-fights, thus imbalancing those boss-fights.

Wirt

 

[jel]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

I don't know if this has been adressed, but for the ability for party members to join the party quickly, though without the ability to abuse tp's, how about one-way tp's. You cast the tp, people from town can go down to you, but not the other way (back to town). That'd also be very logical as then demons and stuff couldn't follow you back up.

For ways of returning I'd suggest a different skill, very costly teleport mechanism, as it should really likewise be one-way only, but also for a single person only, because otherwise creatures would be able to follow (the way it's in diablo 2 makes no sense, some guys cast a blue portal, monster storms after guys, guys go into blue portal, monster stops and wonders where guys are).

In boss fights and other places where you should not be able to leave quickly, there could be an anti-teleport field, which means you would not be able to teleport back to town, you'd still be able to create a tp to get reinforcements, that way if you fall in battle you'll also be able to quickly come back, but you can't return to town.

Then there's the "problem" with combining the new tp type with the teleportation back to town, however as already mentioned where the new tp's would be very cheap, the teleportation back to town would be expensive, other types of teleportations, such as you can teleport items you find into a very large inventory of yours would solve the problem of filled inventory space, however again these means should be limited, so some kind of tactics would be required.

So making the trip back to town too expensive to abuse, and impossible to use in major fights, but still make it possible for other party members to join and items to be transfered to your stash, would kind of solve a lot of problems if you ask me.

Maybe you could even make a range, which means if a tp has been cast in an area you can't teleport back to town unless you're in a radius of x yards away, now for non teleport areas against major opponents, one could imagine that the major opponent would actually create a tp of its own from where demons/undeads/animals/etc. would be summoned, whereby completely preventing the ability to teleport out. Likewise as objects are now an important part of the game, one could imagine the major opponent would start off by destroying some wall so you can't get far enough away to leave battle.

So what do you think of a system like that? How expensive should it be to teleport back to town? It should probably be based on character level if you ask me, and make it harder as further you've come into the game on the same time, maybe make zones, in stead of basing it on character level, however if you don't base it on character level, people would probably start rushing big time again.

You could also set a level-limit (or in stead of level-limit then maybe a limit on the quests you've completed or something like that, something that actually measures your own skills) on tp's so other people can join you, that'd also be a major hindering in rushing.

 

[AnimeCraze]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

I don't know if this has been adressed, but for the ability for party members to join the party quickly, though without the ability to abuse tp's, how about one-way tp's. You cast the tp, people from town can go down to you, but not the other way (back to town). That'd also be very logical as then demons and stuff couldn't follow you back up.

That's more or less what I suggested, except that I also allow one to go back to town if there is no enemies nearby the TP.

 

[jel]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

That's more or less what I suggested, except that I also allow one to go back to town if there is no enemies nearby the TP.

I think it's a good suggestion then

But how will you measure if there's enimies nearby? What's nearby in your book, does it only depend on range or also the threat of the enemy?

I mean take the den of evil as an example, we know that many times there'll be 1-3 monsters left we've accidently run past without seeing, would we not be able to cast a tp before that quest was done, eventhough a fallen is no threat?

However if we measure according to threat, then what a barbarian (high life char) sees as no threat, could be a high threat for a wizard (due to low hit points and easy to hit), which means the barb may need to give the targets 20 hits, but the targets needs to give the barb 80 hits, while the wiz only needs to give 1 hit, 4 hits from the target would eliminate the wiz.

Therefore it'd in that essense suddenly be so that some characters can make tp's where others can't, which I think is unfair.

 

[FlamangoHellfire]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

You know, maybe I'm going way out on a limb here, but what's to say that there's going to be a 'town' in DIII? I mean, there were a lot of problems with DII, not just in gameplay but also in immersion. I could see them adopting a more classic RPG structure to try to remedy this. What's to say the there won't be a world map? I mean, they never really gave us a map in DII, and it's one of the first pieces of information we're provided on DIII site. I think the way they might remedy town visits is some sort of rest system possibly. Certainly they don't give you the option to heal and slow down the game when you're grubbing around in a dungeon, but once you get outside? I mean, I know it sounds crazy, and it would be unlike other Diablo games, but they are trying to make a better game, and new game mechanics might need to be introduced. I certainly don't think that items are going to drop nearly as much as they do in DII. IMO, the regular monsters will drop their junk weapons (the weapons that they are actually using, not some amazing unique piece of equipment) and not much else. The really good drops will come from chests and mini bosses. A little bit like the weapon distribution in Oblivion or Morrowind. The normal weapons are pretty much rubbish, and you really have to take on harder monsters for anything of value. This way you never have to go back to 'town' to sell stuff. You'll be getting 5-6 awesome items per dungeon, and the majority of the dropped items will be from the level boss.

 

[visom]

Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.

i prefer there being no TPs, just waypoints or TP shrines (if there is one).

Better yet, have TP but limit them to certain areas, such as preventing them from being used in boss chambers and such