[2019] Multiplayer

We will do a big deep dive into our loot system. Right now in the early stages of multiplayer loot will just be fully random and whoever clicks on it first gets it.

Down the road this will change, a lot. It will never be as far to the extreme as D3 is. I love finding gear for other characters or friends. I’m working with the rest of the team to make a big push happen with the game ASAP so we’ll have a bigger devblog that goes into this in detail soon.

Dude! I’m so sorry I wasn’t clear.

Nothing is set in stone.

I’m a massive LAN party guy. I’m one of the lead organizers of a massive annual LAN party. I go to monthly LAN parties. We are absolutely working towards LAN play. It’s just not something we are doing for our pre-Kickstarter demo. It’s not our current focus. I have an active D2 LAN character that I play with my buddies once every couple months at a LAN party.

We absolutely want to have LAN play. It is not cut from the game. If we get an outcry for LAN play as a primary feature then it will move up the list from a want to a need.

Dunno if you’re aware, but you may be interested in this;

https://london2038.com/

(Sorry for off-topic post.)

Hi Terranisaur!

We definitely want to have difficult boss fights to ensure that the endgame is challenging. This is something which will likely not really be seen until late in the alpha or even the beta.

We don’t plan on having roles such as those. Typically either healers aren’t really capable of doing much content solo, which doesn’t feel good - or they’ve the same damage as everyone else, so everyone plays healer because they’re superior. Some classes (Paladin’s a good example) will have more utility than others. There’ll definitely be ways of helping your team, but not to the extent of an MMO’s healer.

We’ll be testing multiplayer during our beta stage of development.

The alpha is primarily client-side.

You + 4 of your friends = 5 people.
 

The number of base classes isn’t too much of a factor here. If we were to hypothetically add a sixth base class in an expansion post-release, it would be unlikely to affect the player cap.

@GingerNation and @kiss_me_quick I’m not sure where you read that. I think you might have not quite understood Kyle’s intended post. We don’t have plans for bosses which are only doable in group play. We do have plans for bosses to maybe change in group play to have more mechanics to keep things interesting instead of just increasing the numbers. We do want it to be possible to play through the end game content and get the gear you want in a solo self found mode.

I’m sorry. I see where the confusion is coming from, that’s my bad. I would focus a little more on the “up to” part of the description. The plan is to have the game be fun and exciting with anywhere from 1-5 people in the game at a time.

The restrictions for loot trading with randoms in a party may end up being very similar to D3. If you’re all playing together and you drop an item, you should be able to share it with your fellow party members. The primary action that we are attempting to restrict is going to a website, buying an item for $5, going in to game and someone gives it to you.

Yup, that’s going to be a really tough one for sure. I think we can do it

Like I said, the primary action that we are trying to restrict is RMT. We still want players to be able to get items in game through the Bazaar. We want the experience of being a RMT seller and the experience of being an RMT buyer to be difficult enough that it’s just not really worth it. We also want the in game systems to be good enough that it’s just a better experience to use the in game systems.

We know that people are going to do it. We just don’t want the main way that you gear out your character to be going and spending $20. We’re doing what we can to make playing the game fun and cheating at the game annoying and boring.

There are lots of little things that will help achieve this goal. I would love to dive deep on it but I don’t really have the time today. (trying to get some skill fixes in before the next patch). If you haven’t read the plans for the bazaar yet I’d give that a read as it outlines several systems which will deter RMT.

Top tier items will be tradable through the bazaar. Some things people do to crafting those items could cause them to become untradable. For example, a crafting glyph could be 100% success chance but binds the item to you so it’s no longer tradable. (This isn’t implemented yet but it’s a general example)

Selling crazy cheap items for ultra high value will give a percentage to the bazaar itself, thus helping with inflation and repeatedly doing this may be cause for warnings. I say may because we haven’t set out specific guidelines as to what behavior is OK and what is not. We would be more interested in restricting the RMT gold sellers than the players interacting with those systems.

Because we want to foster a competitive scene we would like to keep RMT as rare as possible.

As for the legendaries, not uniques, most legendaries will not be tradable and yea it sucks to pick up one that you don’t need or want. We do have a plan for them to still be very useful. I don’t want to give too much away about that system because it’s still very early and could change but we do have a great plan for that.

For sure, we know we can’t get rid of it completely and we aren’t going to try. The primary goal is to have the game be fun and engaging for the players.

I would love to be able to give you the answers you are looking for with all those questions. Most of them aren’t really decided yet. D2 is a big influence in our online experience. We are going to make our system a little different in order to fit the different gameplay systems. I’ll do my best to give answers to what I can.

• It will probably be part way between D2 and PoE. We really like the D2 lobby system where you can create game names etc. We’re not a huge fan of the general separation that it can give to the community sometimes. We are probably going to make that lobby feel a little more like a town itself, which fun fact was the initial intention for D2 in the first place.
• First off, the rate at which you get arena keys will change dramatically. We know that the arena is a sweet system but we really don’t plan on it being the primary, secondary or even tertiary end game system when the game is released. It’s going to be more of an extra little thing you can do on the side sometimes. We initially added it as a way to have things to do when we only had 30 mins of content. I know that’s not really what the question was asking though, I tried to dodge it because I don’t know yet I suspect that we will work out a system to try and make the player’s participation in an event reflect their reward proportionally.
• I love D2 mercs too. It’s actually one of their primary character building systems. We currently don’t have any plans to have a merc style system in the base game. (reading between the lines means that this might come down the road as a temporary feature?)
• I’m not sure yet. I suspect that the party leader will have a little more control over the party than anyone else. We’ll have to discuss this internally before making an official decision on it.
• Yes, we will have a system to report bad behavior. I’m not sure what that will look like yet but we can’t really sustain a positive multiplayer environment without some sort of it. As a side note, I really loved the old LoL community arbitration system where you could participate in the disciplinary system and got a proportional reward for being better at it. I don’t think we’ll do that but I just wanted to share
• I’m not sure if we’ll have emotes yet. I think that emotes and/or dances would be a cool thing to have. I think it would help to express the different character personalities. We’ll see.
• Well, with lines like “f*ck me, they’re all over us! We’re doomed!” how could we not? But seriously, I’m not sure. We haven’t talked about this one yet. I suspect that we might not. Being able to send sounds to other people’s computers over and over can get real annoying fast. I think that if we can do it well, it would be awesome. I’m not sure if we will try or not.

As always, general disclaimer: we’re still developing these systems and it still early days so things might change in the next few months.

Lots more movement haha.

Currently we are planning on having individual loot per person. We have talked about making this an option that could be turned off or some sort of hybrid option too but for now the plan is just individual loot for everyone.

Multiplayer is not available on the public client right now.

I’m glad you liked that. I remember coming very close to removing that from the post too.

Welcome to Epoch traveler, I’m glad you’re enjoying your time here

I’m sorry to say that we don’t have any detailed info on when multiplayer will be available to beta players. It’s something that we work on every day and it’s our number one priority. If you check out our development forecast we are in Phase 2 right now and multiplayer is in Phase 3. I know that just brings up the question, “when is Phase 3?” and it’s the same answer, sorry, got nothing.

I can say that it is progressing. I know that means very little but it’s not just sitting at a road block or something so good news?

Edit: This thread got resurrected and I would just like to take a moment to point out that the initial post it is 8 months old.

Yea, that’s the sort of thing that would be an interesting multiplayer boss fight variant. Maybe the boss would have a tentacle that was easy for specific classes to deal with and it spawned one for each class in the fight and you had to find “your” tentacle to do it quicker. If you’re solo it might just spawn one for you though. That’s the style of mechanics that we are exploring. It’s still a work in progress for us and we welcome more ideas like these for sure.

I can neither confirm nor den-
 

Oh, right. Phew!

Sorry no, when we do have a set date for multiplayer, it will be very obvious on the front page of our website, steam page, facebook page, subreddit, everywhere.

It’s not, we never said that.

Multiplayer is still coming, we have no intention of abandoning it at all. It’s still advancing and moving along.

Lots of great questions in there. I think that we have probably been a little too tight lipped about it as of late. I think we can open up the dialogue a little more. Unfortunately we are going to put a slight delay on that just until we’re over the patch hump. Once we’re through that, we will take some time to get the community communication regarding multiplayer going better.

There was a little bit of talk kinda regarding it in the interview Boardman just put up.

The post you are quoting is 2 and a half years old. It also goes on to explain that it won’t be how things are done long term.