Q: Mules, 'one player boss HP' exploit, improvements to loading, and asynchronous races

Kicking things off with four relatively simple questions.

Will the current option to create a second character for purely gem/wisdom scroll-ferrying purposes be allowed in the foreseeable future? I suppose the argument could be that it might be a too advantageous ~2min sacrifice (three wisdom scrolls, two gems, increased chance at getting 10%ms boots at the start), and the counterargument being that it allows more diverse transitions for something like an ice nova templar to ele cleave.

With regards to the party exploit where everyone remains in town until one player initializes the boss to avoid the per-player boss HP multiplier; is this going to be fixed or left alone?

For those like myself who have Pentium D toaster machines, I'd like to know if there will soonish be optimizations for zone loading. It takes my modest 240GT/3GB RAM on the lower-end to load into each zone, which is about 10-20 seconds each--it quickly adds up compared to someone running an SSD or ramdisk. I am getting closer to my goal of always placing into the top 100 in solos, but obviously beyond personal skill there are hardware hardcaps. And of course by no means would I want my own conditions negatively affecting other racers.

Lastly, has there been any consideration in implementing asynchronous races--by that, meaning races that can be run any time of the day to the participant's choosing which would still be subject to all of the normal race conditions like timers and being unable to Some folks can't make it to races due to timezone and wonky brackets.


Thanks GGG--things have been fun so far!

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Will the current option to create a second character for purely gem/wisdom scroll-ferrying purposes be allowed in the foreseeable future? I suppose the argument could be that it might be a too advantageous ~2min sacrifice (three wisdom scrolls, two gems, increased chance at getting 10%ms boots at the start), and the counterargument being that it allows more diverse transitions for something like an ice nova templar to ele cleave.

It's an obvious tradeoff. They spend time with that other character so they can get those extra scrolls + gem. In short races every minute counts.

I don't see how you can get rid of the muling, everyone does it. M included starting off with another coral ring is nice. Plus most races I play a templar and have zero chance as a templar at Hillock first, but when I mule a shadow, I have a really high % on getting Hillock first. So my mule is also there for the extra 2 race points.

Another question. How about progression race? It can be much more fun than level-based race.

We don't currently plan to prevent muling, but it has caused us to look at opening skill gem rewards and passive trees. We don't want to make changes solely for races, but it will be a consideration as these systems get reviewed.

Boss/party number exploits: we want to look at how we handle XP and item rewards for parties vs solo play. There are great many things this affects, and it is very easy to unintended consequences when we change these systems.

So there will be changes, but only when we are sure we have the right ones.

The toaster problem - people playing on toasters will do worse at races. We do want to make sure we can do what we can to improve load times for all players. As these thing get optimised and improved, it will be good for toasters, and it will be even better for better built systems on better connections.

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qasub wrote:

It's an obvious tradeoff. They spend time with that other character so they can get those extra scrolls + gem. In short races every minute counts.

Yeah I suppose, although in some cases (especially in flavour races like no projectiles) it is definitely mandatory. I would argue that it might be too appealing in 2-3+ hour races, though.

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Qarl wrote:

Boss/party number exploits: we want to look at how we handle XP and item rewards for parties vs solo play. There are great many things this affects, and it is very easy to unintended consequences when we change these systems.

So there will be changes, but only when we are sure we have the right ones.

I'm sorry if the point in my post was confusions; I'll use a direct example. A party of six players goes to Brutus' chamber and opens a portal inside the room, and everyone but one person leaves for town. That one person initiates and hits Brutus which sets the boss' HP to be for a single player, then everyone comes back and kills Brutus extremely quickly because his HP is not multiplied in compensation of the extra players.

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Qarl wrote:

The toaster problem - people playing on toasters will do worse at races. We do want to make sure we can do what we can to improve load times for all players. As these thing get optimised and improved, it will be good for toasters, and it will be even better for better built systems on better connections.

I understand the question cannot be answered in any absolute sense, but relatively how soon can we expect these optimizations so transitions into significantly different tilesets like Rocky Climb into Prison, or Prisoners Gate into Ghostship Graveyard won't take ~15 seconds to load (and even so town loading doesn't take ~10 seconds)?


Thanks for the replies.

I even do it on 1h races just because I have a chance of the Hillockreward and I won it 3 or 4 times already in OB.