Over on the battle.net forums, senior technical designer Wyatt Cheng took to assuaging player concerns over the current state of Diablo III’s co-op. At the moment, it appears that adding more players to assist in resource farming slows everything down to the point where it’s actually less productive to work together. Sounds… counterintuitive to say the least. Luckily, an upcoming patch, currently known as 1.0.8, will be debuting in the near future and looks to rectify the situation.
“We are looking to improve co-op farming efficiency in 1.0.8. Co-op play in general is a big focus of the 1.0.8 patch and efficiency is definitely one component of that. Co-op is already more efficient for some players, but this is the exception rather than the norm,” Cheng told the board. “The degree of co-op efficiency depends heavily on the co-ordination of the party, skill builds, and the relative gear level of the teammates. Since launch we’ve made some modest changes to encourage co-op play but there’s still room to go farther. At the same time, we don’t want to go so far as to make multiplayer feel ‘mandatory’ for those who prefer to play solo, but we still want to err on the side of being co-op favorable.
There’s also a number of hurdles to co-op play beyond raw efficiency, so we’ll be looking to alleviate/solve some of those hurdles too. The Identify All feature in 1.0.8 is an example of this. Sometimes the trip back to town to sort through a bag of gear is enough of a hurdle to make somebody feel playing co-op isn’t worth it. Nobody wants to be in the dungeon fighting monsters while your teammate is off in town identifying a full inventory.”
Blizzard has yet to announce a firm release date for when update 1.0.8 will take effect. Hopefully it’s sooner rather than later, as discouraging cooperative, multiplayer experiences is a big no-no in this day and age. It probably doesn’t help that players are already ornery over the fact that PS3 and PS4 users will get to enjoy Diablo III‘s single-player from the comfort of their non-internet-connected consoles, so at this point any issue with the game is just fuel to an already towering inferno.
Do you folks have any noticeable problems with Diablo III when attempting to work together in groups? Or are you more single-player oriented, leaving everyone else to tend to their own affairs while you play all on your own? Let us know in the comments below.