D3 Challenge Rifts truly are terrible

[Kokolums]

You know, I had an idea 20 years ago for ghost races like in Super Mario Kart but applied to Diablo. I still think it would be a great idea. The concept is players could record their best runs in a dungeon and share them among friends or the public. You'd then enter the dungeon and a shimmering white ghost of the recorded player would be going along doing their run and you'd try to keep up if you can. The ENTIRE POINT would be to help give the COMMUNITY things to do, to socialize, you'd have to generally TALK to people and say "hey, wanna race my ghost time?" This BUILDS the community, gets people talking, sharing, being interactive. I'd implement a method of people watching others try the run in observer mode, with a chat enabled so people can comment.

And so they actually kinda implement this system with Challenge rifts, but in the MOST ANTISOCIAL way possible. They just basically make it a queue like an automated match maker. Here, try to beat someone's time. You get 1 per week randomized. So it takes ANY SENSE of talking, communicating, building friendship, and just strips it out of the concept.

Oh, Blizzard....

[Biomega]

Your idea looks fun in theory, but in practice, anything that is reliant on the community instead of being automated to some degree is just not going to fly in 2018.

It was the same argument SWTOR made way back when they decided not to have a "dungeon finder" auto-queue system. Promote community interaction, forge social bonds, make players help each other, all that. Great on paper. Horrible in practice.

A lot of people simply aren't interested in putting the work in for a community. Many will join, and participate in something that comes up - but tell them "here you go, have the tools, now go create!" then 95% of them will do nothing and wait for 5% to come up with something that they will then either use, abuse, or berate. That's just how things have evolved in a world of internet anonymity and ready-made, bite-sized content.

Gaming has become a lot more widespread, but as a result, it's also become somewhat more casual. People for the most part aren't looking for massive, dedicated time sinks. They're not interested in spending countless hours on one game, investing time to make it fun. They want it to already BE fun when they hop in, play for an hour, then hop into some other game, or do something else. They don't want to have to maintain social relationships in games. They want a system that simulates social relationships, without having to do the work. And if that's not as good as it would be if they put in the hours, that's still fine. If the choice is 90% effort for 100% result, or 10% effort for 50% result, the pick is clear.

[Kokolums]

Your idea looks fun in theory, but in practice, anything that is reliant on the community instead of being automated to some degree is just not going to fly in 2018.

I never like those "doesn't work in current year" arguments. People are people. They don't change. People find social interaction incredibly compelling. Always have and always will.

[Biomega]

I never like those "doesn't work in current year" arguments. People are people. They don't change. People find social interaction incredibly compelling. Always have and always will.

Which is why I'm glad I never claimed otherwise. People WANT to be part of communities in some way. They just don't want to put in work to do so.

Besides, "social interaction" is a very broad term, and it's about the details, not the broad strokes. It's not like Challenge Rifts have no social interaction. You're still competing against other people. You're literally playing a rift someone else played. Boom. "Social interaction" right there. It's never been about some dichotomy of social interaction vs. no social interaction, it's about the DEGREES of social interaction.

[Coldkil]

I criticize GRs not much because htey're automated and not player-controlled, but because they have no sense to exist at all.

Most if not all runs are basically mid-range easy clears with half-geared, half-build characters. Unfortunately that's only because people don't need to build anything different since everything is going around sets and the same 3-4 builds. Challenge rifts won't ever be something worth since they add nothing to the game at all.

[Kokolums]

Which is why I'm glad I never claimed otherwise. People WANT to be part of communities in some way. They just don't want to put in work to do so.

They certainly put in the work. Blizzard around 2008-2010 set to work tearing down all the communities established in the 1990s on battle.net. They were met with waves of complaints about it all on the forums and never responded. Eventually, people put the work in to rebuild them, they just did it on Discord and Twitch because Blizzard would't let them do it inside the games themselves.

Discord is more or less what Blizzard was 20 years ago. Starcraft had observer games where people could fight each other and the other 6 games slots could be taken by observers to watch the fun and comment in chat. That's basically Twitch. And it was happening in the 1990s. Think about that. In 1998, you could login to bnet and have Twitch. It was actually more advanced in a way because observers could actually click on units and buildings and see whats going on.

[Biomega]

Why am I being JP'ed here?

I'm saying, people by and large are lazy and don't want to have to do things themselves. They want pre-made, ready-made systems that facilitate the community interactions for them. Even if that comes at the expense of some interaction.

That doesn't mean there are no communities.

That doesn't mean there aren't people who want to put in the work.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to create community content anymore.

It just means what I said: people in general are lazy and don't want to have to do everything themselves. And that's why Blizzard makes systems that facilitate these things. Why we have communities in the D3 client rather than telling people to just organize themselves. Why we have CRs where you get served a finished product every week and join with one click.