The cooperative aspect of Diablo II was ever the highlight of the multiplayer experience. Unfortunately, many players who joined 8-player games usually opted to go off on their own adventures without the companionship of the other players within the same session. They would often go off on their own, killing Mephisto, Pindleskin or some other boss. The simple presence of these other players within the same game session served only to bolster the XP and loot rewards from killing these tough bosses single-handedly, and did not encourage cooperative gameplay.
With the exception of a few tough bosses, a well equipped player would almost always be better off without the support of other players, even in an eight-player game.
As many players see this as a serious problem with the game, those concerned put forth a number of suggestions (such as a distance limitation) on how to remedy the issue, and directed the question to Blizzard, whose community manager, Bashiok, answered in depth:
The distance limitation you're speaking of in being considered an active participant already exists in the game.
The item benefit of playing together is due partly to the per-player item drops, but also increase in items-per-minute ratio due to groups killing faster than a single player. The amount of items dropping with each additional player is slightly higher than if those players were to just play in their own games. Now, that's slightly deceiving because we're talking about the entire pool of drops, but actually each player sees and receives an equal portion, so in this case we're looking at the drops as if they were shared completely freely within the group. This may not be the case for all items or groups.
Still, if you have three friends and you're all buddy-buddy with each other and sharing everything, the benefit of playing together for item drops is noticeable. If you're all being very stingy and not sharing anything, or just throwing out the crap, you'll still see a slight increase just from killing speed.
But anyway, with all that in mind, there is already of course a distance limit in which you'll be considered an active participant in a monster kill to be able to receive a drop from it. If you're out of range and someone in your party kills something, you don't get a drop from it. It's a very obvious solution to deal with a very obvious issue. The range is fairly forgiving.
So instead our focus turns to helping groups help themselves through various mechanics to keep everyone together. But those are specifics for another time though.
Forced Teamwork
When one player suggested that Blizzard ought to force teamwork and cooperation by making it so that players who don't deal damage don't get loot, Bashiok responded:
If you did need to damage every enemy in order to get a drop from it we would essentially be requiring all players who wanted to play in groups build their characters for AoE damage. It would then be enforcing the exact opposite of teamwork. Everyone would be going crazy trying to do as much damage to as much as possible so they could try to get a drop off of it. We could then rename the game to Antithesis of Fun.
Power Leveling
Some players also raised the issue of stronger players 'power leveling' their buddies. Bashiok responded:
There's nothing wrong with the idea of friends running other friends through the game. Have a friend with a higher level character? Cool, have him help you through the game if you want. That doesn't mean we won't have some limitations or slight impedances, for instance we probably wouldn't want it to figure out to be the best way to level, but the general idea of friends helping friends is a positive aspect and something we want to retain as best as possible.
Moderation Tools
Finally, when players asked if Blizzard had any plans to implement options to allow public game creators to moderate their sessions, Bashiok justified that such tools could in turn be used to cause grief to players, more so than anything else.
Players joining your games that do something to annoy you will always be a problem as long as you allow them to. So really the simple solution here is to not play in publicly open games.
But, from a game feature side, it sounds like what you're actually asking for are game moderation options. Such as the ability for the game creator or game participants to kick, ban, squelch, etc. And maybe those are some possibilities, maybe, but they themselves could easily be turned around and used as griefing tools themselves.
There are solutions. I don't think it's a problem that warrants a lot of time at the moment though.
It is the desire of most fans for Blizzard to make cooperative gameplay a cohesive, if not key element of the game. With good design, Diablo III's endgame will consist of more than monotonous loot and experience runs.
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