Is it time to address divergent PvP rules/settings?

[Marine X]

I went to PVP zones pretty regularly on Live ( Virtue ) and had a pretty good experience with it till almost every time I set foot there solo a Team would swoop in and it was over in a few minutes. When you could take a team there and set up matches, which I think America's Angel still does, PVP can be a lot of fun. When it's a mugging, not so much. Haven't even seen a player in any of the PVP Zones in the 5+ years of Homecoming, so I think this isn't really necessary. I like keeping the basic parts of the game as they are now.

[ForeverLaxx]

On 10/10/2025 at 6:28 PM, Scarlet Shocker said:

 

There's a lot in this that I don't understand but sounds awful. 

It sounds worse than it was because it's colored by his own personal issues with the system that he never bothered to learn despite adamantly hating it.

 

For context, Diablo 2 is an old BNet-style game where any game launched as "public" would be put on a list that anyone could join, sort of like a "server list." You could title these whatever you wanted (like, 'finishing Act 3 boss' or 'trading -insert item-'), but you could only see games your character could join so Hardcore characters could only join Hardcore games (Hardcore being the mode with permaDeath). If you didn't include a password for your game, then anyone at your difficulty setting could join it. Most players aren't interested in PvP so this is usually not a problem.

 

However, D2's PvP system was pretty unique. In the menu that showed the players in the game, there's a button to flag yourself as "Hostile" next to the names of each player. You could theoretically only choose to be hostile to specific players rather than everyone in the game, but if the player you decide to be hostile towards is in a party, you become hostile to everyone in that party (and if you were in that party yourself, you're kicked out of the party immediately). There are important safeguards to this system that he failed to mention or outright misunderstood because he doesn't like any form of PvP, such as:

• You must go to Town (the "safe zone") to set yourself as Hostile. You cannot flag yourself while standing next to the people you intend to fight while out in the world.
• You cannot use any Portal that belongs to the player or party you're Hostile to. A Portal is an object spawned by a player that lets them immediately return to town (and back again) when interacted with.
• When you "go Hostile," any Portal that you've spawned is immediately despawned, so you can't teleport back to town, turn Hostile, then instantly come back to kill a player. You must get back to their location "the slow way."
• "The Slow Way" is most often accomplished by using the game's Waypoint system. These are permanent teleport locations, generally 1 per major area, that let you travel between other waypoints you've discovered and there is one located in town so a Hostile player could use this to quickly get back to the person they intend to PK. However...
• There is an 8 second lockout that prevents the use of these waypoints for a player who "goes Hostile," preventing them from quickly returning even if they know exactly where you are or are even standing on a waypoint at the time yourself.
• There is ample time to teleport yourself back to town, or simply quit the game, when a player goes Hostile towards you and you're not interested in fighting them. It's annoying to have to "start the level over," but it's way better than dying considering death in Hardcore is permanent. You could also simply set a trap for them if you want to fight since you know they're coming and where from (though often PKers are built to fight players, and if you aren't, this can be ill-advised unless you're in a group).

As you can see, it's not nearly the problem he claims it to be, and while he's well within his preferences to not have to deal with it at all, it doesn't help that "anti-PvP" people tend to have a warped view/memory of how things worked and will often mischaracterize these systems in a way that paints them as poorly as possible. The fact you can password-protect your games, even in Hardcore, to only play with people you trust and he still chose to play in public games anyway means he accepted those risks and didn't like how it panned out, blamed the game for it, then started hating PvP wholesale as a result.

 

EDIT: To the topic at hand, I think the current PvP systems are too entrenched to be modified much, especially by a volunteer dev team. While I personally prefer PvP and PvE systems to be as close to each other as possible, there's always going to be modifications required when facing players as player damage and health values are balanced around PvE primarily. Having enhancements that do completely different things in PvP vs PvE should probably never have happened and they should have just stuck with direct modifications to player-specific targets. This way, a player going for a Warburg Nuke or Shivan Shard would be able to fight the PvE enemies as expected, but if they're attacking/attacked by a player, things are adjusted so that the fight is more "even."

 

I concede that that's hard to do, though, and the effort involved may not be worth it considering the small PvP playerbase, especially as that playerbase is used to how things currently function. PvPvE areas are notoriously hard to pin down correctly.

Edited 25 minutes ago by ForeverLaxx
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