Re: Town Portal abuse - it's time to end it.
Play my way or Hit the Highway seems to be gist of far too many posts here. Just because one person likes to have fun a certain way doesn't mean everyone else enjoys that. The fact that someone else might be having fun playing the game a different way shouldn't trouble anyone.
If town portal makes it to easy to run away, than don't use it to run away when you are playing.
If you don't like giving portals to people asking for them, don't cast a portal for them.
If you don't like people leeching off you, don't join their party or let them join yours.
With the thousands (at one point hundreds of thousands) of people playing Diablo on Bnet at any given time, you should be able to find a group of people who enjoy playing the game the same way you do. Finding people you enjoy being around is a social skill worth developing, and if more people on Bnet had this skill they would find their gaming time far more enjoyable and successful.
If someone isn't in the same game with you, what difference does it make whether they are suffering and struggling at every twist and turn, or getting through the game without much trouble? When someone’s pain is someone else’s joy, than the former is simply a griefer no matter what ideals they pretend to hold.
The game is supposed to be fun. Difficulty does not equal fun in all cases. Would it be more fun for the programmers to be forced to code the game in Cobol? Would it be more fun for the lawyers battling pirating if companies were forced to take all copyright protection and CD keys off the games? Should five random Blizzard employees go without a paycheck each month so they can have more FUN with the paychecks they do get?
If challenge is the only measure of fun, than we can all go back to some of the the joys of Diablo I, like your character losing all their gear when they die. Go back to the fun of the old lag monster ready to eat your game at any time. Stash size? Forget all about that stash and that wimpy backpack too. Characters get what they can wear and use sounds more fun because it’s more difficult right? No towns, no checkpoints, no health globes, and no running. Just the pure FUN of waiting for your character to heal and a long slow walk everywhere. In fact, forget using the mouse, let's all just use key combinations to make things even more fun.
No thank you. Been there and done that in too many other games where the programmers excluded user friendly options. When I was playing these non Diablo games, I kept thinking why did the programmers drain all the fun out of the game by making things unnecessarily difficult. I had played great games made by Blizzard, and I knew better. There is a time and a place for challenge, but the user interface with entering and exiting active play isn't it.
If too many players are abusing the town portals to run away from battles, than that suggests either a fundamental game design flaw or a player flaw. Neither Blizzard or any other human entity is going to fix flaws in the player's psyche. Players should be relishing every moment of the big battles. Leaving a battle with a town portal should leave the player with as much anguish as having the television go out during the last minutes of a close playoff game with your favorite sports team.
If characters are getting persistently blown to bits by the monsters and are leaving because of that, than either the monster needs to be toned down, or the game set up so that characters can't get to that monster without being better prepared (Killing monster level N or completing quest level N before being allowed into a portal for a level N area for instance).
Blizzard has a strong following because they make fun games, and I think town portal is a key part of an online, multiplayer real time game. With town portal to take an instant break, you can handle that brief phone call from the real world and not have to leave and rejoin a game.
A brief cool down period could be used for town portal, but then that idea could be used to nerf all kinds of spells and skills. A character could only be allowed to carry one town portal scroll and the town vendor only replenishing their supply of scrolls on a timed basis. All sorts of methods could be used to limit it, but none of them address the underlying cause of the so called town portal abuse.
Game balance and overall game design would fix most of the "abuse". Having useful items drop when your character can and still might use them, or realistic item stat/level requirements for instance. They could try overall re-scaling of the whole game so that Boffo the Barbarian doesn't have 18,427,547,302 hit points and do twice his hit points in damage with an axe that's three times the size of the Statue of Liberty. Don't let the game get out of control in the first place, either with the characters, the gear, the skills or the monsters. Three difficulty levels might not be enough for the wide span of character levels Diablo allows. Does it mean some more work for Blizzard to get it right in the first place? Yeah, it does. But, it will also mean a game that has a much better flow throughout. A game whose challenges are anticipated and sought after. A game that players around the world will look to as the pinnacle of what a game can be.
I don't buy Blizzard always knows best. They thought they knew best when they decided not to make PK'ing optional in Diablo II. Giving people more options usually means more fun. Less options seldom means more fun. If it did, why bother letting us choose our character types, skills etc?
Just for the record, I'm not an anti-challenge player. I don't mind the heaping helping of humble pie. I do mind the time wasted over and over on game mechanics that add little if nothing to game play. The walkathon as RPG is not my cup of tea. Things that make it simpler and quicker to get to and from the real action in a game like town portals and waypoints are good IMO.
I've enjoyed playing all sorts of characters, from the unusual builds to the cookie cutters, ironman, and even the oddball zero point characters. If you want a bit of a challenge try making Wirt's leg your character's only piece of gear. Whether its agonizing endless deaths at the hands of a creature you just can't seem to kill (Think Deathspit) or just cruising along chatting and blasting everything that moves to smithereens (which is possible with any well thought out and played co-op group), it can all be fun. Just let other players choose how they decide to have fun and play, and you can choose how you want to play.
For me a large part of the fun from Bnet games comes from interacting with the other players in the game. It's not just about me or my character. Any change in town portal that limit the way I can interact with other players could seriously diminish the game's potential for fun.
