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TL2 official forums are pretty bad
FrodoFragins
Member EpicPosts: 6,050
Although the Runic people are perfectly fine, the forums are filled with personal attacks and Runic doesn't really care. Runic seems to have the attitude that they just release the game and let the community police themselves.
I thought the D3 forums were bad, but most people agreed with the problems in D3. The TL2 community is incredibly fractured. It's pretty discouraging when all is said.
A fair amount of the player base is pretty bad as well. I never had a bad experience in D3 multiplayer. In TL2, you have people kicking joiners left and right. Certainly some of them are just griefing because Runic gave them that ability.
I'm pretty disappointed with Runic at this point. It didn't help when they label anyone using the console with the term "cheater".
Comments
While I do agree that the OBoards for Tl2 are bad noone is saying TL2 is worse than D3, that's just silly talk. They both have their plus and minus points but Tl2 is obviously a better game. OP is pointing out how suprised he is at how bad the forums there are. No need to start a flame war over this.
Bartoni's Law definition: As an Internet discussion grows volatile, the probability of a comparison involving Donald Trump approaches 1.
The Blizzard fanobots have to rationalize their love for a flawed product somehow but seriously. I put 250 hours into diablo 3 it was a pretty solid game but the fact remains the loot drops are designed around the real cash market which killed it for me. The fun in arpg's is finding gear not buying it off the market and thats what sunk diablo 3 for me eventually. I have two 60's and a 53 but at a point the game wasn't enough considering you never really got gear you actually used.
With torchlight 2 I've only put in 60 hours so far so I can't say how the long term will be for me but it has that ooo look at this piece of gear I found feeling to it. I like collecting sets, I like finding the gear that goes well with my build and I like how it feels more like diablo 2 to me. Again just my personally opinion but the game just gets the feel right and since I only play with friends I can't really say I care about the lack of a always online enforced game.
As far as forums go it seems like every game has the same terrible community on the forums these days which just comes down to how people are now.
For the forum all i have to say is any official forums are bad even here on mmorpg you will get flame, insult etc etc. This is the internet so im not sure why you are so surprise.
Again i will say it to you cause you dont seem to understand. Using the console command for doing something the devs didnt want you to do is cheating. Not sure why this is so hard to understand, i know you dont like the fact that you cant full respect with out using the console or mod and to be honest i think everyones here know that since you made it real clear on others thread.
So seriously (and no offence) why you just dont drop it? This is becoming old.
They both have major issues. I haven't played D3 in over a month. I'm probably close to quiting TL2 though due to the lack of respecs and the community.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
I'll stop when I stop caring. That shouldn't be too much longer. I'll either move on to other games or people will make mods that allow respecs without getting flagged.
The two things that this game really needs are:
1) Code to let people run private servers themselves (Because they will never make their own)
2) Catch up with the times and allow full respecs
Runic is happy with their box sales and moving on. They didn't really show much interest in TL1 after it was released. they are at a point where they just want to make games they like and get paid for it. They don't seem to interested in the players opinions.
Full respecs without flags will arrive fairly soon. Not from Runic, but they can't stop them.
I also think they will provide some support for players to make private servers with characters stored there.
I'm simply disappointed that the people responsible for the diablo franchise are making small ARPGs rather than trying to make the best ARPG ever. YL1 lasted me one week and TL2 is likely to last me 3 weeks. I was simply hoping for the next D2. Clearly my hopes were misplaced.
By the way, why so defensive? You own stock in the company or something?
Edit: just see you're edit. Lol yeah i own stock.. make me laugh, i would love too tough. Why when someone is debating some game features, they are accuse of being an employee or something? Geez grow up.
The main reason for the majority of the kicks is a result of Runic being lazy. If you make a game and set it to friends only it doesn't work. Happened to me today, they got annoyed that i joined even though it was friend only. And the reason I kick people from my games is cause its Peer-to-peer. The lag is horrendous at times in this game. The lack of a real server structure kills the online. If they took some time and invested in one the community would be better as a whole. But as you said, they are letting us do their work for them and policing at our will. It makes for a terrible online experience and its Runics only lackluster area in them making TL2.
Respec mod that doesn't label you as a cheater:
http://kotaku.com/5948335/this-nifty-torchlight-ii-hack-lets-you-easily-respec-your-character
Enjoy!
(empty your shared stash first though)
I had seen that, but I'm pretty sure those potions will flag you pretty soon. I have no idea why they didn't in the first place. Apparently they only flagged the person that spawned them.
I didn't realize they had a friends only option. Seems like a simple bug to fix there. I was under the impression that passwording for your friends was the way to make games.
Why make an internet game if you are going to kick anyone that joins because it lags? Why not make single player?
Being kicked with an explanation isn't that bad, if the explanation makes sense. But being kicked without a single word of explanation justs makes the community look worse.
I've had plenty of bad experienced with d3 multiplayer, its why I just do it solo.
The TL2 cheater tag SHOULD be in there, its stupid to let people cheat and walk around casaully like 'hey, I didn't do shit for this gear but I'm better then you and you put actual effort in!" truthfully I wish they had it seperate and any 'cheaters' were banned from online.
There's a difference between respeccing your first character, because you realized you don't like the way it works or it's a crappy build, and using the console to make yourself 100 and get all the gear. To the TL2 devs they are both just as bad as the other.
Whatever though. It's their game. They don't advertise and they don't really listen to the community much. They already know exactly what they want to do with the game.
FrodoFraggins, you might recognize me. I answered your question on how Runic's insight on working toward a Torchlight MMO had changed.
I've been going through the official forums for *both* TL2 and D3, and I can assure you that the D3 forums were *much* worse off than TL2's. The sheer number of posts adressing problems in D3 was *huge* with several flame wars, and when people reported their accounts hacked they were pretty much called conspiracy theorists and quacks... leastways until it was found that Blizzard's database was, indeed, hacked on August 4th, and they hadn't announced it on their public facebook page until some days afterwards. What made *that* worse was that the devs publicly announced *how* they encrypted their data... This in combination with their *low* password security turned out horribly. I actually informed a friend of mine shortly after I found out, and I convinced him to change his password. Shortly afterward, he found that his email had been changed and his authenitcator removed (how I'm not sure), and he had to change everything via security questions. After all was done, he still retained most of his items and called me up to thank me, but I digress...
What's *actually* happening in the forums is in stark contrast to what you point out. There's actually very little fracturing. There *are*, however a few branches of people. There are those that have been spamming the forums for closed servers, with one particular group being infamous for it known as D2JSP. There are the 'White Knights', or purists that believe nothing should be done, that respec shouldn't exist in *any* form, and are usually the ones that, annoyingly, debate or troll against the ones that cry for closed forums.
These two groups are in the *minority*. Yes, the minority. In most of the threads involving these groups, the same handful of names pop up to actually 'contribute' to the thread. It's usually trolling, with most closed server posts equating to 'This is why D3 is better', and most modding posts being 'This is why TL2 is better'. Apart from that, from what I've actually read through in the past few months (I frequent the forums often), most everyone else is playing and enjoying the game, experimenting with new builds and reporting bugs.
Most any of the 'personal attacks' are done in flame-bait threads... Although, I still don't like it, it's not actually as horrible as you make it out to be, and I thought I'd point that out.
You also mentioned the lack of a full respec in the game. This was a design choice based on the *majority* player feedback that they received from those that played through beta.
Some wanted the ability to respec your points in *any* way, while others wanted to make more meaningful decisions with no respec at all. Runic provided a very convenient compromise. They put in a feature that allows you to respec the last 3 points that you have spent in your skills. This way, a person could try a skill or two out before they decided that it was a good addition to their playstyle. As for the abillity to respec via their console, they didn't have to keep it in, but it helps when you're developing content for a mod or wanting to test out the capabilities on a 'test' character. That's what the console is for: Testing Purposes.
This feature also kept decisions meaningful by not allowing people to just save up enough points for a single tier just to respec the skill because they didn't like the tier addition itself, and not the skill. The tiers to the skills are additions that you have to commit to, and the tooltip keeps descriptions *very* clear on what they do. On top of this, the Tier bonuses are intuitive enough to minimally impact gameplay, while still providing a significant boost to the skill. There are only, perhaps, 1 or 2 skills in the *entire* game that would be exceptions, but only vaguely...
This allows people to tool around with builds *and* the full gameplay experience with said build. This includes how it would fare while leveling up and at endgame. That way each character is meaningful and has a personality, instead of every person only needing 1 of each character and just switching out their skills and further removing from the 'individuality' aspect of the game. This is something that the game, Rift, suffers from in a sense in combination with only a couple of starting zones.
I don't know about you, but I'd actually like to play through the builds I think of from start to finish and actually know whether it'd be truly good throughout, instead of a boring slog through lower levels and amazing at later levels. I've even messed up a couple of my builds, but still had enough points to throw around to make adjustments. I do believe we get around 132 total points.
To be honest, I'd give your complaint on the respec part of the game more credence if it was solely based on the inability to respec at least 5 of your Attribute points. This would allow a bit of leeway for when people find that bit of gear that just needs a few more points in a stat that they don't normally pump straight up, so they could use it earlier.
As for your point on multiplayer, I believe having the option to kick someone out of your *own* game is a smart move. It gives freedom, and if a voting system is used, a griefer could cause more harm in the time it takes. It's best for the owner of the module to be able to deal with problems quickly.
Having a bit of extensive experience with the multiplayer aspect, I can say that people usually only kick on sight under a few circumstances.
-The person joining has a red (!) and they jump the gun in kicking without asking or inspecting the person.
-The person joining is of higher level than the rest of the group, thus having the capability to doom the party due to the way the maps balance with character number and level.
-The creator of the module forgot to put the 'Friends Only' tag or password when creating their game and is too lazy to correct it.
There are some outliers, but those are the most common I've found.
I *do* have good news, however. It seems that they're focused on streamlining the skeleton that is their multiplayer lobby/system, and are going to flesh it out more.
Runic also seems focused on having mod segregation for servers, as well as Private servers for players to govern as they wish. This would allow players to set up an economy if they wanted, but it's not foolproof, seeing as how even closed servers for D2 had botting, duping, and a broken economy. Although, I *really* do wish they'd add something like runewords... those were fun...
Anyways, with modding segregated servers, you could choose whether you wanted a Modded or Vanilla server, and if you wanted mods, you'd be able to selected which ones were allowed, seeing as how other players' mods would most likely have to sync with your own.
Now, as a final note. Runic *never* called those that use the console 'cheaters.' They specifically said that the red flag system was currently a warning type system that's meant to point out that a person has made *any* type of modification to their character data via unorthodox methods. This happens to include the console, which was left in the game in order to have test characters to help create content for mods or to test out certain builds for those theorycrafters out there.
People really only started labeling people 'cheaters' when using the console due to people coming into games, hardcore and softcore, and immediately spawning tons of high level mobs to grief. By consequence, the console was removed from Multiplayer.
As an added note of my own. People have already made a few mods for TL2 without using the TorchED tools that will be provided. One of said mods actually allows you to respec your Attribute points to an extent by paying 3000 gold for an in-game potion. It gives back 5 of each stat for a total of 20 and can be taken multiple times, provided you have the gold.
When the TorchED tools come out, mods will become a *huge* part of the game. Runic has announced that the modding tools they're releasing are almost exactly the same ones that they used to create the game. Almost every aspect of the game could be changed with them. That'll be pretty interesting to see.
Happy Gaming!
P.S. Pardon the short ramble at the beginning. My friend and I were a bit shocked about the whole affair, and it kind of struck a chord after having seen Blizzard dismiss many as if they were blithering morons.