Demi shackling

[yune]

May we please have demi shackling back? Not sure why it was removed.

[Deleted]

I am against this 100%. Sorry Yune.

[boroie]

Why? (to both previous responses)

[Deleted]

More power = more Demi iterations = more difficult spawns for the party. This is as it should be.

Demi shackling strictly enables players to determine when they want to leverage that power while reaping the rewards of the XP and loot earned along the way. Don’t do the runs if you don’t want to bother with the “penalty” of progression.

It’s different than lowbie shackling which allows toons to do stuff they otherwise couldn’t. The Demi toons can still do the content either way. Players are wanting to leverage their souped up toons and then minimize the threats and risks for an easier time and to push the pace of their runs for more reward per hour.

I get it. 100%. The solution to me though isn’t to avoid runs. The solution isn’t to mitigate shackling. The system shouldn’t be setup such that it becomes a penalty to get “more” or to progress. That is where the problem lies.

If it’s more beneficial to not progress toons, and I understand that with shackling you’re forfeiting those bonuses, why does that system even exist to begin with then?

The brass tax of the situation HG is in is it’s sustained by lifers who grind runs for loot. And make new toons to test and try for loot. So everything comes down to insert drop per hour. The highest difficulties should over equal ratios. Not higher. Or jack up the rewards for higher Demi parties to justify the output. Except therein lies another problem. Players don’t like spending hours and hours doing runs because it doesn’t fit living life.

These all bleed into fundamental system issues which all impact significant topics such as time and compensation. Unlikely anything happens here given that and the current production climate (just the reality).

[chirality]

Well, this one's mighty tempting, but I'll defer to the Staff and Developers. After all, I've already spammed far more than my monthly allotment of stuff that's squarely in the purview of team members.

I am curious, though: what is your context for demi shackling? What's the motivation for the "necro"ing? In this case, it's probably safe to guess that asking for it back is motivated by some positive goal. What are you hoping that the results or impact would be, were demi shackling to be re-introduced?

If you didn't play back then, I assume you learned about it through reading old forums (or old discord?) stuff, or from more recent word-of-mouth (was there fond memories from people? serious question). In either case, it's odd that the story about it being a thing wasn't accompanied by the story about it being removed. (Or maybe there's more people that played back then and mentioned it once existing, that still are in the dark about it? If so, this thread will be a revelation for them also, I suppose...)

[woqued]

The system was very problematic. The optimal way to play the game was always to shackle, often all the way to 0x unless you specifically wanted paragon loot. There was also a problem with shackling at 0x would still retain demi stats (iirc); among other issues. Doing the monkey dance of demi shackling every time before a Limbo run felt incredibly silly, but not doing it felt like nerfing yourself so it was just a bad situation. Granted, paragon mobs have been nerfed, their drops improved and limbo yields in general *vastly* improved so the end rewards aren't as huge a portion of the total rewards and the overall "abuse positive" of demi shackling has thus been reduced.

I'm not sure (frankly I've completely forgotten if I ever really knew) what the final reason was to pull the system back, but all in all my impression was that it was not worth the trouble to try to make it work. The biggest "positive" of the system to me was allowing new players/characters a better experience in modern parties where demicount was on average rather high so constantly fighting paragon mobs on the new characters can be painful, but the net negative of abusing the system far outweighed the positives.

--

Before making a request/opening a discussion to have something done, try to always include WHY you'd like that to happen.

[chirality]

^ I always took it for granted that the system was pulled back as a result of what seemed to be abuse of the system, but I think woqued is being more accurate and fair when he says that he wasn't sure what the final reasoning was. I probably should have went with wording that hewed closer to "maybe it was this/it seemed like this" rather than sneakily saying "it was obviously this."

Just as an aside, this wasn't a legacy mechanic like the OG level shackling (which had been in place for longer than most players remember). It was introduced in 2016, directly after/as part II of, one of the biggest "relatively-recent memory" heavy-impact changes of the past decade. These changes had shockwaves both in terms of new content (limbo was released and demi shackling was added ~week later--as well as run itself tweaked per player feedback, as woqued mentioned), and new paradigms.

These mod-wide paradigm shifts included some things that had enormous implications for building and dramatically changed the meta overnight: weapon update package, spell ped unlock, poison imm added to a hefty list of hell mobs, rg/fiss nerf, dom nerf, phane nerf, immute nerf; and some other things that overall made progression a bit easier in some ways: easing of prince fight formation/initiation, dead/conf toons still getting tags, deadly poisons going to venom damage from instakill.

Another big factor that played into both the climate of the day when demi shackling was introduced, and which I'm preeeeetty sure played at least "some" role in its eventual demise, was the advent of multiboxing army troopers becoming much more of a common sight/accepted run-formation-ingredient, than the rarity/oddity that it was for most of the previous decade.

It's through the multiple lenses of these things that demi shackling should be viewed, if I were to humbly opine.

Finally, keep in mind that the entire thing was kind of a big experiment. It was removed in 2018, by which point the impact of having people largely abuse the system for two years apparently became too difficult to ignore. I think as woqued said, the impression most of us had was that the potential benefits (the "community-improving" aspects behind the concept in the first place, afaik/iirc) were largely outweighed by the negatives (aka, people gaming the system to optimize their efficiency and time/difficulty:return ratio to a level never before possible).

The removal itself may have been because there simply wasn't a reasonably-implementable solution to somehow make it work better (with issues like the demigod attribute bonuses, the fact that you could still use asmo gear, etc), or maybe it was ultimately deemed just too hot to handle.

So again, I probably shouldn't have made it seem like "oh we all knew it was because X thing, that's what Funky said, duhrr," but there was definitely a bit of drama and discussion at the time centered upon how the system merely existing led to a new meta of people taking advantage of it (not necessarily to "abuse" something for the sake of abusing it, but simply because as powergamers, we maximize and optimize everything possible as default behavior).

RIP me deferring another wall, eh?

[boroie]

@prepared thanks for the insight, appreciate your reasoning. 

chirality I've seen it referenced in limbo threads and was wondering about it myself. What you and woqued say regarding the difficulty and potential for abuse makes sense. The context I read was that casters should shackle to demi 0x to lower total demi count (thus spawns). Seems a bit like a system that was introduced for that purpose and ripe for abuse that way. As such, given that spawns in limbo are tied to cano drops, it seems self regulating to an extent? I'm not surprised that it was removed, but I am surprised it was introduced in the first place. 

RIP me deferring another wall, eh?

lol

[woqued]

Sept 8, 2021 18:57:31 GMT boroie said:

Seems a bit like a system that was introduced for that purpose and ripe for abuse that way. As such, given that spawns in limbo are tied to cano drops, it seems self regulating to an extent? I'm not surprised that it was removed, but I am surprised it was introduced in the first place. 

You have to understand that the game and climate were vastly different back then. Limbo was *far* harder than now, rewards far lower, XR weapons didn't exist and when someone got it they weren't craftable; people didn't know the run, etc. There was valid reason why it would be a good idea for people to be able to calibrate demicount power to somewhat lower levels to deal with the hardness of Limbo without being penalized so roughly by paragon monsters - I remember some talk of "the run is already so hard, do we need to fight so many paragons too? We don't even have paragon tier gear yet, and only upon entering we keep facing superior/elite paragon monsters"...

Then there's Acaos that likes to implement cool systems and stuff. If someone asks, and there isn't enough obvious reason as to why not, he might go for it just because it sounds fun to do and see how it plays out. It's not quite as simple a process as I make it out to be, but still - I wouldn't be that surprised if it was just a cool thing to try out and pull out if it ends up having negative consequences, and if no then great. 


Some problems exacerbate only upon players making "the most" of it - aka could be anything from clever use of game mechanics to borderline abuse or straight up glaringly massive abuse or a completely unintended use of a mechanic.  

[Deleted]

The Mechanus drop will be different then Limbo ever was due to the prevalence of XR loot, subraces, craftability of weapons and just the general knowledge and awareness of “end game”. Woqued expanded on a lot of the “why” there which are all heavily negated or entirely nullified moving forward.

A lot of these benefits in my opinion negate the need for Demi shackling entirely. The driving purpose behind Demi shackling is hyper efficiency with run time. As I mentioned in my original post the sensitive to run time should be factored into run creation.

Target times should be built around “farm” content versus learning where there are too many variables to account for on how long people will do it in. It’s a piece that needs heavy consideration moving forward and with that being a viable component in the conversations all but eliminates the need for Demi shackling.

[starcore]

For me, it's really just that the power bumps for hell layers 3,4,5,6 don't correspond to the difficulty increase the demi count bump gives...

This means all my toons are stopping at 2x demi and avoiding hells runs.

If instead, they were to tweak the difficulty increases to match the power increases, I think it would be a little better balanced...

Currently only 5 layers contribute to difficulty increase... so if they were to rework it to 2x bump for 1st Hell win, 2x bump for  2nd Hell win, and 1x for 7th, then I think progression would be encouraged, rather than discouraged.

[woqued]

Sept 8, 2021 21:50:23 GMT starcore said:

For me, it's really just that the power bumps for hell layers 3,4,5,6 don't correspond to the difficulty increase the demi count bump gives...

This means all my toons are stopping at 2x demi and avoiding hells runs.

If instead, they were to tweak the difficulty increases to match the power increases, I think it would be a little better balanced...

Currently only 5 layers contribute to difficulty increase... so if they were to rework it to 2x bump for 1st Hell win, 2x bump for  2nd Hell win, and 1x for 7th, then I think progression would be encouraged, rather than discouraged.

I agree, and that's (to me) a more reasonable discussion. Should the power scale be different now, with hell/abyss tagging reworked in recent years (post-demi shackling); should it be about power scale, or just how demi count is calculated? The way demicount is calculated has already been changed to a seemingly more sensible system than what it used to be (where level played no part; despite paragon levels providing immense power). 

[Deleted]

Starcore, start a new topic with that as the premise and let’s roll with that. Love it. And core to the issue.

[yune]

Star gave my reason for wanting shackling exactly - your toon becomes weaker if you go beyond 2x demi and there's no way to fix it, so we actively avoid runs.

[chirality]

I find this feedback to be fascinating, considering the hell/abyss demi swaparoo and pens system rework.

Hearing fresh thoughts on the longstanding issues of minmaxing demicount and cost:benefit ratio of demicount past 2 would be very interesting. I'd like to line up old posts (dredged some of those threads before commenting here today so I already have some in mind huehue) with newer thoughts that come from the players and environment of today and see how feedback compares with the discussions of older times/circumstances.