Jesse Powell's Blog

My Take on Skill Respeccing in Diablo 2 v1.13

Like most features within a game, whether respeccing is good or bad, balanced or broken, will depend entirely on how it's implemented.  Let's ask ourselves what some reasons for the addition of this feature might be.

1.  A dramatic change to the skill trees.
I think we can safely assume that there will be at least  some skill rebalancing.  A respec would save a lot of characters from the bin.

2.  Improvement of game playability/enjoyability at low/mid levels.
Something that has been missing for a long time.  A respec would allow characters to invest in skills that are good while you're playing through the game but bad for endgame.  Synergies helped with this problem somewhat but still left a lot to be desired.

3.  Giant changes fundamentally alter the way the game is played.
Let me explain why respecs work in WoW and what some of the fundamental differences are with D2.

a.  In WoW, endgame content requires a max level character.
  In Diablo 2, with the right gear, you can do everything with a level 75.

b. In WoW, creating a max level character requires an insane time investment.
  In Diablo 2, creating a level 75 character is a trivial feat that can be accomplished in a few hours.

c.  In WoW, the best items bind to your character.
  In Diablo 2, no items bind.  They're all easily interchangeable between characters on any account.

d. In WoW, you've got a lot to do:  quest, raid, battlegrounds, farm gold, farm ingredients, pvp
  In Diablo 2, there are 3 things you do:  PvP, PvM, magic find.

e.  In WoW, content is continuously being updated and the world is changing.
  In Diablo 2, you're lucky to get a small content update once every 3 years.

I don't think I need to go on.  You can see why respecs make sense for WoW.  It's an ever-changing world with a lot of specialized stuff to do,  where you need a heavily-invested character that is not easily replaced.

Now, if Diablo 2 became more like WoW in a few of those ways, cheap, accessible respecs might make sense.  If it does not, there may still be an argument for what I believe Blizzard has proposed--one easily obtained respec and possibly limitless difficultly obtained respecs.

Why do it?

I think the biggest reason, aside from saving characters from a skill rebalancing, is to make the early game more enjoyable.  It's largely skipped because it's very hard to make a low/mid level playable character that won't be ruined for the endgame.  I'd like to actually play through the game and explore areas outside of Worldstone Keep and Uber Tristram.  Of course, I'd like to be rewarded for it too.  I want to be able to find the best items while I'm playing through the game... maybe even some items that Baal runs won't give me.  It's crazy that there are 5 acts and, for the most part, people only play in 2 zones.

How would we go about implementing this?

Well, to make respecs valuable, they ought to require less time to obtain than a new character at your  current level.  That means that a respec at level 75 should probably not require more than a couple hours to earn.  A respec at level 99 could require two weeks to earn.  I'm guessing that they'll go with something in the middle that applies to everyone.

Are they going to make respecs a commodity?  Will the trick be to cube 12 Standard of Heroes, or will it be an intangible quest reward, or something else?  Maybe it'll be a small charm with 1 respec charge, and once it's used it's locked into your inventory forever, reducing your capacity to 39, and by one more for each successive respec.

What are some objections?  (I didn't say they were all good.)

1.  It creates a one-build world.  Less specialization, less investment, less variety.

This is Diablo 2 we're talking about here.  You can create a new level 85 character in a matter of hours if you know what you're doing.  If it's pretty tough to earn a respec, you won't see people doing it all the time.. they'll likely find the build they like and stick with it.

2.  It makes it too easy on noobs who don't know how to plan ahead and allocate points.

Indeed, it does benefit noobs a bit more than pros, however, even pros have lag-clicked an extra point into a skill they don't need.  If it's not an easy thing to do more than once, noobs will have to learn their lesson quickly.

3.  It ruins the role playing aspect of the game.  It's not very rpg-ish to have respecs.

You're not being creative enough.  Ever hear of a Hyperbolic Time Chamber?  Maybe your character got knocked on the head, lost all her memories, and got stuck in a timewarp where she did a lifetime of training in a matter of minutes.  Maybe it was all a dream and when you respec, you're just waking up from the bad build nightmare.  Who knows?  Use your imagination.

4.  If they're gonna do it, they should go all the way.  No limits!

The response to this is the first objection.  There are a lot of reasons to limit the respecs, at least with things the way they are now.  Plus, infinite, free, easy respeccing would surely be a bad thing for power leveling sales :P

So, that's my take on the issue.  We'll just have to wait for the PTR to see what Blizzard does.  Until they screw it up, we don't have much to complain about.

Mini BlizzCon 2009 Report

I arrived in Anaheim on Thursday evening, just in time to make the BlizzCon VIP dinner/fundraiser for the Laguna Art Museum.  It seemed fitting that I attend given that I own an art gallery, and a virtual items business, both of whose existence are largely thanks to Blizzard.

I was greeted at the door to the event by super cool guy, Jeff Donais.  I was sure I'd seen him somewhere before but couldn't place him at the time.  Later I realized it was from Wizards of the Coast, where he'd been involved with Magic.  The 'dinner' turned out to be more of an hors d'oeuvre mixer cocktail party thing.   The food was good though, and the live music was nice.

I was a little disappointed with the selection of Blizzard employees in attendance.   It seems like they made sure not to put anybody in there who could potentially leak anything.  Everyone I ran into was in art or lore development.  I was much more hoping to speak with some guys who had their hands on the meat of Diablo.  Not in that way.  Well, sort of.

I stuck around until the silent art auction was over.  Some pieces went for over $700!  I thought that was pretty nuts considering that they were merely signed/framed prints, and not even part of an edition.  It went to a good cause though, and some people got some cool stuff so what the heck.  I grabbed my swag bag on the way out and hit the sack.

I woke up in a Northrend wind tunnel.  The vents had been blasting ice cold air all night, despite my having set the thermostat set to 73 before bed.  It turns out that the heater had somehow been disabled in my room and rather than the system just shutting off when it had no means of raising the temperature, it decided to keep bringing the chillstorm instead.  FAIL.

So, I thaw my junk out and head downstairs for breakfast. 

I stepped into line at 10am thinking I'd have no trouble making it in before the opening ceremony at 11:30am.  Boy, was I wrong.  Things seemed to be moving quickly at first, and after about half an hour of the line heading away from the entrance I thought I spied the apex.  When I actually got to it, I saw this mess:

Where is the Prince of Darkness  when you need him?  We met the sun in that parking lot for a blistering hour straight.  Some men perished but it was their tent-like shirts that provided the shade to save many others.  They will not be forgotten.

Finally, 1 hour and 43 minutes after the quest began, I made it inside.. just late enough to miss the opening remarks.  I noticed that about 15 minutes later there was no line to speak of.   Tip:  screw getting in on time.  Sleep in, show up late, and don't wait in line.

This was my second year attending BlizzCon.  I hadn't been back since the first one in 2005 where rumors were already flying about Diablo 3.  I was surprised to see how much bigger the venue was this time around, and how many more people showed up.  It felt overcrowded and commercialized.  It was almost as if the whole event existed just to sell you more crap.

What's up with every member of every panel having a Mountain Dew bottle in front of him?  I think that if Blizzard is going to have your ass addicted to your seat for 16 hours a day, the least they can do is promote a healthy diet.  Diabetes Dew certainly is diabolical, but not in the good way. 

Did anyone else have problems with AT&T?  I'm guessing that 20k iPhone users descending on Anaheim, all simultaneously trying to blog and tweet and mobile upload totally wrecked their shit.

I managed to play Diablo 3 twice, and Starcraft 2 once.  They had a ridiculous number of computers set up so the wait was less than 10 minutes each time.  The downside to the short wait is that they accomplish it by kicking people out after 10 minutes.  It kind of limits how deep you can get into your quests.

My impression of Diablo 3 is that they've still got a lot of work to do, and they're still making major changes to the things we've seen so far.  I'd estimate it's at least 2 years away from completion.  We'd be lucky to see it hit shelves by Festivus 2011.  The game looks great and is very fun.  I'm really looking forward to the finished product.

I sat in on the Diablo III Heroes & Monsters panel, which was pretty interesting.  Unfortunately, a lot of video clips they'd prepared weren't playing.  I'm guessing they've since gotten those online somewhere.  Some issues I had with the game are apparently already being addressed.  I was glad to hear that they have plans to make endgame content more challenging, and more random.

After the panel, I was trying to think of a reason I should stay for 2 more days.  There wasn't one.  Everything else could be seen online.  I went back to my hotel room, packed my bag and checked out 2 days early.  I dropped my car at the airport, flew back and watched the rest of Blizzcon in my underwear from the comfort of my mom's basement.

Just kidding.  I have my own house, and a girlfriend.

In Second Life :'(

During the D3 Q&A session on day 2 someone asked if the Diablo 2 1.13 patch was going to introduce some lore that would facilitate the transition to Diablo 3.  Jay Wilson gave the answer that while the D2 team consults with the D3 team, they're entirely independent and he can't speak for them.  That answer was pretty much par for the course.  It seemed like 3/4 of all the answers given by panelists were "wait and see" or "we don't know yet" or "we can't say but you'll be pleased".  I'd be pleased with some F'n answers... not that everything couldn't completely change by the time the game launches anyway but wtf are you doing Q&A for if you're all locked down on NDAs?  I've lost interest.     

P.S.  I just found out that Mountain Dew has been rebranded Mtn Dew.  How ExTrEmE is that!!?!  Man bro, how could you drink the Dew and NOT be a better gamer!?  You know what would be better is the  straight syrup.  How are you supposed to game non-stop when you've gotta pee all the time?  Wait wait.. product idea!  MTN DOO: The world's moste extreme diapers for the world's most extreme hermits!

P.P.S. I quit Second Life after 10 minutes.

Mapping your GoDaddy Subdomain to your TypePad Blog

I had some trouble figuring out how, with GoDaddy, to map the subdomain jesse.forthewin.com to my TypePad blog.  To complicate things further, I was moving it from WordPress (mostly because Wordpress-hosted blogs can't use Apture).  There don't seem to be any decent guides out there so here's how I did it.

Your Domain Manager should like this:

If your domain has been sitting parked, Total DNS should already be available to you.  Since I was coming from WordPress, my first obstacle was to activate Total DNS on the domain.  If your nameservers are anything other than the GoDaddy DOMAINCONTROL, you won't have access to Total DNS.  To fix that, click on the Manage link under the Nameservers section of the Domain Manager.  When you do, this box should pop up:

Select the first option: I want to park my domains.  Click OK.  It might take a few minutes to update, but when it does, your nameservers will be set to DOMAINCONTROL, and your Total DNS info will appear, with a link to Total DNS Control.

Note:  It could take up to 48 hours for DNS to propagate.  I find that translate.google.com updates a lot faster than most ISPs so having it translate the site at the domain you just updated the nameservers for might give you a glimpse into the future.  Like so:

http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=y&u=jesse.forthewin.com&sl=en&tl=ja

Under Total DNS, click Total DNS Control.

Click Add New CNAME Record.

CNAME Alias is going to be whatever comes before the actual domain.  In jesse.forthewin.com, the alias is jesse; In www.forthewin.com, the alias is www (following . not necessary).  Host Name is going to be your TypePad blog.  Unless you have a reason not to, set TTL to 1/2 Hour.

You'll notice that I have 2 blogs set up.  One at jesse.forthewin.com, and another at www.forthewin.com.  I'd like for users who target http://forthewin.com, rather than www.forthewin.com, to be redirected to www.forthewin.com.  To do this, I had to set up domain forwarding.

If you've already got forwarding set up on the domain, click the Manage link under the Forwarding section in the Domain Manager.  If you don't have forwarding set up, you'll see an Add link instead.

The settings I've entered above will have http://forthewin.com forwarding to http://www.forthewin.com, where my 2nd blog is.

If you're reading this, you probably already know how to set up a subdomain on your GoDaddy account, but in case you don't...

 

If you don't have an existing subdomain, you'll have an Add link instead of Manage.  Click what you've got and get this:

Set the subdomain and forwarding.  By entering jesse.forthewin.com for the jesse subdomain on forthewin.com, when people hit it, that's where they'll stay.

That's it.  If you've got any questions, just ask!