Monday, 25 October 2021

The Diablo Clone event needs updates



I've been a part of two Dclone walks in D2R so far.

  1. It's still IP-based
  2. Walkers need to use third party tools to check their connected game IP, the game doesn't show your IP
  3. You also benefit from using firewall rules to try to force yourself onto hot IP blocks. You want the client to give you connection errors so it's faster to try for games.
  4. The only strategy after that is to just keep remaking games until you hit the hot IP. And more than 500+ people for some walks are trying to hit the IP.
  5. Even though the game is split into regions (Americas, EU, Asia), there are actually hidden sub-regions that you connect to based on ping, like western or eastern Americas server groups. This makes some walkers just very bad at connecting to the target IP even if they are coordinating with each other. These players make new games for hours to try to get in.
  6. Because of the above, the event is also basically impossible on consoles.

Essentially, the event encourages us to DDoS the D2R servers. This isn't good design. It's archaic and overly technical. D2R needs to change how spawning Diablo Clone works. We're actively making the server issues worse.

The original implementation of the event was targeted at cleaning up the massive amount of duped SoJs in legacy D2. We don't currently have that problem.

Some suggestions on how to modernize it:
  • Make it like single player, 1 SoJ → 1 Dclone in your individual Bnet game
  • Make it smaller but still co-operative, players need to sell 8 SoJs in a single game and then perhaps Dclone drops some number of charms depending on player count.
  • Change the event to selling 1000 unique rings and make it spawn Dclone region-wide
  • Make it a series of challenging cube recipes and fights like Ubers to receive 1 charm

Just something other than IP-based spawning, please.