Diablo IV: Hardcore Take 2 & Game Economics

My hardcore Diablo journey continues...

Fortunately it is definitely losing its edge and I should be able to break away to more productive things quite soon. Then again I did have quite a few interesting ideas while playing the game, much of which revolves around game economies and how to stop the Sybil attack. Although I'll probably have to save that for another post.

Although I guess I could do a brief rundown right now just to organize my thoughts on the issue. The main problem with gaming economies is that all the scarcity is artificial and can easily be exploited by bots. Now that AI is ramping up to the Nth degree the problem can certainly only get worse. It's bad enough a bot being able to mindlessly farm a certain area 24/7 and flood the auction house with ill-gotten goods, but what happens when the AI can play the game better than 99.9% of people? Yikes!

There's also another problem as well.

Here in the real world raw materials are quite universal and the actual quality of items comes from the person that created it (or in these days of industrial mass production the machines that made them). This can't be reflected in a video game, as the actual production of the item in a game is again completely artificial. You click a button and all of a sudden the thing exists. It would be quite difficult to create a simulation that mimicked how it actually works in the non-digital world.

So games often get around this problem by changing the materials required to build the item. In World of Warcraft there are half a dozen different types of cloth, starting at linen and into wool and silk and mooncloth and whatever else. The better items require the higher level cloth that drops from higher level mobs. I have some ideas about how such things could be avoided but again it would take too long to do it all here.

The digital world has no logistics.

Moving product from one location to another is not a problem within the digital realm. If we want the game to mimic real-world problems we have to build in the problems into the simulation on purpose. Imagine that! Creating problems on purpose. Games do it all the time. Every quest in every RPG is a problem that was created on purpose for the player to solve. Puzzles are the same way.

This is a post about hardcore Dibalo IV anyway...

Enough about economics! Check out my poor dead sorceresses in the hall of fallen heroes. Very sad. I died 3 times already, one of which was simply walking into a high level zone on accident and dying instantly to a one shot death. I guess they don't give a warning for that sort of thing!

The worst death was that level 24 where I died to the dreaded "Butcher" that they keep bringing back from the very first game. In D4 the Butcher randomly spawns in random dungeons and runs you down. He's got two or three different kinds of stuns and if you don't know what you're doing he takes you out pretty fast. Fun story... I thought having teleport would save me but ironically it's what got me killed because being too far away triggers his charge/stun... so that's fun.

Long story short you want to stay at midrange from him because if you're far away he charges you and stuns you and if you're up close and personal he headbutts you and stuns you. The fight itself is a bit of a tanking checkpoint as he's going to do quite a bit of damage no matter what. I suggest you run unless you're in a safe location (with a potion well nearby) or if you've got a scroll of escape which starts dropping at level 20.

What's new?

There are a few things different about hardcore mode over regular mode in D4. First they have these scrolls of escape which are crazy useful as they instantly teleport you to town at any time. You can also bind them to a key without wasting a skill slot using the "wheel" selections reserved for emotes and console integration.

There's also an Elixir of Death Evasion that allows the player to become invulnerable for 2 seconds when they take lethal damage. Combined with the scroll of escape this somewhat creates a mechanic in which a player will never die as long as they use a scroll of escape during the 2 seconds they are invulnerable from taking lethal damage... which in theory is problematic but meh whatever.

PvP in D4 is also just as brutal as it sounds: if you die you're dead forever. Reminds me of doing just that in D2 back in the days with lower level twinked out characters. So many ears. So much rage. Ah the good ol' PKK days.

Of course there is no advantage for doing PvP in hardcore mode so the PvP zone is a barren wasteland. I went in there a few times today and didn't even see a single person in the safe zone town. Not a single one. Ever. I consider that a missed opportunity because if it where up to me there'd be some huge bonuses for risking it all. Of course that would probably just get exploited by clans and the cheat deaths and the scrolls of escape so maybe that's a terrible idea. Yep, it is. Still if you die in HC mode all your gear should drop... it's annoying that this has never been the case in any one of the four games (three considering D1 didn't have hardcore).

From normal mode (carryover)

There are even two things that get grandfathered in from the normal mode of the game into hardcore. The first of which being the mount... which is very nice being able to have a horse at level 1 and not having to run around on foot everywhere.

The second thing is the ability to "Skip Campaign". If you beat the game on normal and move into hardcore like I did this option is still available and you can skip the entire main questline and just wonder off doing whatever you want. In addition there are random "Tree of Whispers" quests all over the place that reset every hour or so making it easier to level and get gear.

Tree of Whispers

Yeah those aren't Christmas Lights... those are human heads.

One of the creepier things in this universe is that there is an almost all-knowing magic tree that is constantly trying to learn more. How does it know so much? How does it learn more? Well if you make a deal with it for information... then when you die you owe it your head and it gets added to the tree for all eternity. So that's fun. Definitely one of the most creepy things I've ever seen in Sanctuary.

Of course it's not as creepy as that cutscene of three wolves eating a monk alive while the big baddies are casually carrying on a conversation. I must admit I've never wanted to look away from the screen before while playing a game... so that's a first. It's all very Game of Thrones... except even worse and somehow even more graphic and disturbing than GOT. Top notch stuff really from the lords of hell.

Let's see what else...

Ah right I've been taking my own advice and farming every single alter of Lilith because it permanently makes every hardcore character on my account more powerful. I just finished that today, and tomorrow I'll rehash the map of how to get them all because I swear to god I looked at over a dozen maps and they were all quite bad.

Here's an example of one of the best maps I found for one of the five zones. This one is nice because the custom marker being used here pinpoints the exact location at the tip of the icon... but still it wasn't trivially easy to find them all and a little bit of searching had to be done on around 20% of them... which is a bit annoying when you think you're being given the exact coordinates and end up looking for 5 minutes. Turns out all these zoomed out maps with icons hiding the terrain is kind of noobish... wouldn't have thought taking a screenshot would be hard but guess I was wrong. I'll fix it tomorrow.

In any case now all my characters get +68 points to all stats and +10 skills at level 1... which is a massive bonus that should make leveling a new character into the 30 >> 40 >> 50 levels quite easy... especially with the option to skip the campaign and deck them out with the items I've been saving from my main character. Good ol Shiv.

Conclusion

This game has forced me to think a lot about how much different WEB2 is from WEB3 and how the solutions that we build will also have to be completely different to account for that. One of the biggest questions that needs answering is when assets should be artificially scarce and if we can build assets that are actually scarce and require real work to get done in order for them to exist. All in good time I suppose. The grind continues.