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TLDR: Time!
(Audio Version)
Hello all,
It will soon be close to a year since I last wrote my The case for always going untwinked post. This will be a shorter post talking about the other side of the coin. Why would you always go twinked? Of course the first time you start a character it will have to be untwinked, but once that first character is up and running, you basically have someone that can essentially provide unlimited resources to the rest of your new characters. Let’s dig a little deeper into this topic.
Introduction / Context
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been playing Diablo II since Ladder 1 of Patch 1.10 back in 2003 (on Battle.net at the time, I’m exclusively Single Player now, and stopped playing Battle.net around Ladder 2 of 1.11b). Given that I didn’t have any pre-existing knowledge of Diablo at the time, I was fully "raised" in the 1.10 Battle.net culture of the time. Both in Softcore and Hardcore. This means that cooperative play to power level your character to the highest levels possible, within the shortest amount of time, was critical. At least power leveling until you got tired of leveling up due to the introduction of exponentially decreasing diminishing returns which were introduced in 1.10. In 1.10, power leveling in the usual zones below was the standard:
But I digress, it’s hard not to go deep down memory lane when speaking about all of this Diablo II stuff since the 2003-2005 era was pretty crazy and cool and it is all interconnected. The point is, collecting gear and sharing this gear with your characters to try and min/max them was the point. The point back then wasn’t really to "beat the game by yourself and only live of the gear that single character found". It was always more about build possibilities and build combinations. Essentially, I looked at (and I still do at the fundamental level) the game more like a Trading Card Game, like Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, or Yu-Gi-Oh, where your character was essentially a Deck, and all of your equipment, whether equipment you found, were stored in your mules, were traded, or were freely given to you, was just a bunch of cards in which you can theorycraft on and make your 40-60 card deck (the character). If you screwed up a character build, you would just have a friend to rush you to hell and power level you so that you can have accurate stats (since no re-spec existed in 1.10 - I still prefer the game to not have respecs. For newer games I’m ok with a limited / and costly respec system. But ultimately decisions should matter and they should be more or less permanent). So, since I look at the game ultimately as just a card game (with booster and expansion packs being either LOD, or just the whole slot machine system of killing a monster, and seeing if the "booster pack" has one of those nice hollow / 1st edition cards you were desperately looking for), and not necessarily as a RPG, you can see why it would be easy to expand on that philosophy by having:
It was good times overall. Although I obviously don’t use maphack or bot anymore (this was back 20 years ago lol), since that would defeat the purpose of the hardwork that I’m putting into the game to work within the limitations, time constraints, etc, it was nevertheless an interesting experience which I don’t regret. A lot of all of that messing around ended up influencing me in reverse engineering (including me trying to work around MapleStory’s GameGuard anti-cheat system. Anyone remember hosting a local server with an out-dated version of GameGuard, and then having MapleStory work off of that? Haha good times).
With all of that said and setting that type of cultural context, if we look at some reasons why we want to twink all the time, we can see that this boils down to the following categories:
Since we are all getting older, we have less and less time, so it makes sense that we may not want to start completely untwinked for every single character. As you all know, I time travel within a lot of different versions and between both Classic and LOD modes for these versions, without forwarding items, and as of recently, I haven’t even been twinking items across characters. It’s very time consuming to re-start all over again with nothing, even though it’s a hell of an experience. Time is the most precious and limited resource we have so even with everything I’ve said before, the reality is that your time in your one life that you know you have should take precedence. Your happiness on this planet should superseed everything as long as your happiness isn’t hurting anyone else (including not hurting yourself). So if you want to play the game a certain way, mod it, or play a different game, do it. At the end of the day your goals and your happiness are your own and no one else’s. Learn what you like and what you don’t like and adjust course.
Useful and Useless Items
As you play the game, you’ll notice that there are a lot of cool items that you end up finding, and while playing untwinked means that you will find all sorts of items that may not be specific for your character, but will still be some what useful because your character is broke, eventually your character’s equipment will balance out and you’ll end up finding a lot of cool items (or Cards if we looking at it as a Trading Card Game), that may not be the most useful for your current character, but will be amazing for bringing up a new character since it could be a useful low level item, or it could just be an item that’s powerful for another class. Given the low drop rates of the game, it is also unreasonable to try and find the same low probability item on multiple characters. If you were playing 1.08 let’s say (which has broken MF but working TC), and you found a WF on a Barbarian, it would be illogical (especially from a time perspective) to force your Amazon to find its own 1.08 WF. 1.08 (and 1.07) are extreme examples due to the bug, but this still applies even with working MF/TC. Your limited time is everything.
Build Possibilities / Combinations
Similar to the item scenario above, but for the character template itself. If you look at the character as just a deck of cards (or an empty deck), the character is just holding the gear you want it to use (cards in the deck). Once you are playing the game, you are testing out those build combinations and seeing what works and what doesn’t, adjusting your deck of cards accordingly with new cards that are found from the booster and expansion packs (killing monsters and them dropping gear / mfing / or purchasing LOD and having more content available). You could say the character itself doesn’t necessarily have any value. Although I think the truth is obviously somewhere in the middle and it depends on what your intention and goal for your run with that character is. When playing HC, the character means a lot more than just a template. Although HC characters are not excluded from the next point.
Respecing / Shared Stash
Regardless of whether or not you are using a SC or HC character, you will eventually notice that you messed up and you need to fix it. Without a respec option, you are forced to just accept your fate. I think not having respec is fine, and releveling another character could be the solution to this since having a respec option completely changes the dynamics of the core game, and makes a lot of decisions either meaningless, or you lose a sense of permanence. However, just because you messed up your character (most likely your first untwinked character which you struggled with a lot given you were broke and had nothing), you wouldn’t want to struggle the same way on your second playthrough. That’s where the Shared Stash comes into play. Let the memory of your previous character affect the future state and journeys of your new characters, for the previous generations struggles will hopefully provide a better future for the next generation. Similar to wanting your kids to have a better world and a better life than you lol. This is what I described as "Player-based SSF" as opposed to "Character-based SSF" in my Twink, Untwinked, and "Live of the Land" post. On a related note, Torchlight 1 actually had a "Retirement System" where you could pass down a single weapon to a new character, in exchange for sacrificing the retired character completely. This is a pretty cool concept since it fundamentally boils down what I just said. Even a single weapon for a new character could completely ease the pain of starting from scratch, and in a way it’s a fun motivator to re-experience the game from a different (twinked) perspective (although I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my whole character lol). Of course sometimes we need to "reduce" the pain because of potential negative/positive game design decisions (depending on your perspective), but I would argue that those same decisions are what made the game the way it is, and we should enjoy both aspects of the game, and maybe work around anything we think is negative, in a fun way.
Like I said before, your time is limited and you need to prioritize yourself, and your own happiness. A game is designed to be enjoyed in whatever way you want to enjoy it, not necessarily only in the way the original developer’s envisioned it. Of course I think we should try and experience the game the way the developer’s originally envisioned it, but after playing it for 20 years, you kinda need to find your own enjoyment with the game if you want to keep playing it
. I do believe that games should still retain their difficulty and not just try to make everything go fast paced, and paid to win. Since I’m looking at the game from a pure enjoyment perspective, I don’t want my games to have any MTX and want it to just be a set boxed price. We live in a different world now but you already know that I’m not buying any games with DRM / Online DRM / Steam or anything like that and stick to older platforms like Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10 (Dark Mode). So my options are continuing to purchase games on GoG, and support companies like CD Projekt Red and Larian Studios since Baldur’s Gate 3, Divinity Series, Cyberpunk, Witcher III, etc, all have no DRM, Online Requirements, and don’t have any MTX from my experience with them. I can pay for the game once, and enjoy the game to its fullest potential all within the game itself, and don’t have to feel bad that I’m missing out because I’m not paying more money for something that’s being held back from me. It’s a beautiful experience to have the game actually made and designed to be played independent of additional costs.
With that said, Have fun,
fearedbliss
(Audio Version)
Hello all,
It will soon be close to a year since I last wrote my The case for always going untwinked post. This will be a shorter post talking about the other side of the coin. Why would you always go twinked? Of course the first time you start a character it will have to be untwinked, but once that first character is up and running, you basically have someone that can essentially provide unlimited resources to the rest of your new characters. Let’s dig a little deeper into this topic.
Introduction / Context
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been playing Diablo II since Ladder 1 of Patch 1.10 back in 2003 (on Battle.net at the time, I’m exclusively Single Player now, and stopped playing Battle.net around Ladder 2 of 1.11b). Given that I didn’t have any pre-existing knowledge of Diablo at the time, I was fully "raised" in the 1.10 Battle.net culture of the time. Both in Softcore and Hardcore. This means that cooperative play to power level your character to the highest levels possible, within the shortest amount of time, was critical. At least power leveling until you got tired of leveling up due to the introduction of exponentially decreasing diminishing returns which were introduced in 1.10. In 1.10, power leveling in the usual zones below was the standard:
- Levels 1-15: Tristram
- Levels 15-20: Tombs
- Levels 20-25: Cows
- Levels 25-50: Normal Baal
- Levels 50-70: NM Baal
- Levels 70-99: Hell Baal
- Diablo II
- Counter Strike 1.5 (and then 1.6 when Steam came out. fy_iceworld was a very popular map in addition to the standard maps of de_aztec, cs_assault, de_dust, de_dust2, and later on I got into knifing maps like 35_hp, 35_hp2, scoutzknivez).
- Risk Your Life
- Warcraft III (and Custom Games)
- MU Online (played primarily by the Chinese folks since MU was in Chinese)
- World of Warcraft and Guild Wars came a bit later although I couldn’t really play Classic WoW when it released since I was 14 at the time, had no money, and it required a monthly subscription.. so I remember just looking at the Classic WoW box and then looking at Guild Wars which required no monthly subscription, guess which one I ended up going with eventually? Although by the time Burning Crusade came out, I did end up getting it and played it for about a month when it released IIRC. Both Blood Elf and Draenei starting worlds were beautiful! I definitely have a lot of good memories of my limited 1 month of playing WoW back then.
- MapleStory (Original US Beta, and Maple SEA)
But I digress, it’s hard not to go deep down memory lane when speaking about all of this Diablo II stuff since the 2003-2005 era was pretty crazy and cool and it is all interconnected. The point is, collecting gear and sharing this gear with your characters to try and min/max them was the point. The point back then wasn’t really to "beat the game by yourself and only live of the gear that single character found". It was always more about build possibilities and build combinations. Essentially, I looked at (and I still do at the fundamental level) the game more like a Trading Card Game, like Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, or Yu-Gi-Oh, where your character was essentially a Deck, and all of your equipment, whether equipment you found, were stored in your mules, were traded, or were freely given to you, was just a bunch of cards in which you can theorycraft on and make your 40-60 card deck (the character). If you screwed up a character build, you would just have a friend to rush you to hell and power level you so that you can have accurate stats (since no re-spec existed in 1.10 - I still prefer the game to not have respecs. For newer games I’m ok with a limited / and costly respec system. But ultimately decisions should matter and they should be more or less permanent). So, since I look at the game ultimately as just a card game (with booster and expansion packs being either LOD, or just the whole slot machine system of killing a monster, and seeing if the "booster pack" has one of those nice hollow / 1st edition cards you were desperately looking for), and not necessarily as a RPG, you can see why it would be easy to expand on that philosophy by having:
- Shared Stash
- Power Leveling / Rushing
- Enchanters (Primarily in HC to quickly power level new characters after they died. You get a chant from soneone (or a Chant Bot) and then go find and kill super uniques since SU mobs - and not just the SU monster itself, would give a lot of exp in 1.10, SU mobs didn’t give additional exp in 1.09 and below).
- Anything else that you could do to make the game easier and faster for yourself, and for many of us at the time, that also included Botting, Maphack (C3PO on 1.10, Mousepad on 1.09 / 1.10, Chicken for HC, Etc).
It was good times overall. Although I obviously don’t use maphack or bot anymore (this was back 20 years ago lol), since that would defeat the purpose of the hardwork that I’m putting into the game to work within the limitations, time constraints, etc, it was nevertheless an interesting experience which I don’t regret. A lot of all of that messing around ended up influencing me in reverse engineering (including me trying to work around MapleStory’s GameGuard anti-cheat system. Anyone remember hosting a local server with an out-dated version of GameGuard, and then having MapleStory work off of that? Haha good times).
With all of that said and setting that type of cultural context, if we look at some reasons why we want to twink all the time, we can see that this boils down to the following categories:
- Time Constraints
- Useful and Useless Items
- Build Possibilities / Combinations
- Respecing / Shared Stash
Since we are all getting older, we have less and less time, so it makes sense that we may not want to start completely untwinked for every single character. As you all know, I time travel within a lot of different versions and between both Classic and LOD modes for these versions, without forwarding items, and as of recently, I haven’t even been twinking items across characters. It’s very time consuming to re-start all over again with nothing, even though it’s a hell of an experience. Time is the most precious and limited resource we have so even with everything I’ve said before, the reality is that your time in your one life that you know you have should take precedence. Your happiness on this planet should superseed everything as long as your happiness isn’t hurting anyone else (including not hurting yourself). So if you want to play the game a certain way, mod it, or play a different game, do it. At the end of the day your goals and your happiness are your own and no one else’s. Learn what you like and what you don’t like and adjust course.
Useful and Useless Items
As you play the game, you’ll notice that there are a lot of cool items that you end up finding, and while playing untwinked means that you will find all sorts of items that may not be specific for your character, but will still be some what useful because your character is broke, eventually your character’s equipment will balance out and you’ll end up finding a lot of cool items (or Cards if we looking at it as a Trading Card Game), that may not be the most useful for your current character, but will be amazing for bringing up a new character since it could be a useful low level item, or it could just be an item that’s powerful for another class. Given the low drop rates of the game, it is also unreasonable to try and find the same low probability item on multiple characters. If you were playing 1.08 let’s say (which has broken MF but working TC), and you found a WF on a Barbarian, it would be illogical (especially from a time perspective) to force your Amazon to find its own 1.08 WF. 1.08 (and 1.07) are extreme examples due to the bug, but this still applies even with working MF/TC. Your limited time is everything.
Build Possibilities / Combinations
Similar to the item scenario above, but for the character template itself. If you look at the character as just a deck of cards (or an empty deck), the character is just holding the gear you want it to use (cards in the deck). Once you are playing the game, you are testing out those build combinations and seeing what works and what doesn’t, adjusting your deck of cards accordingly with new cards that are found from the booster and expansion packs (killing monsters and them dropping gear / mfing / or purchasing LOD and having more content available). You could say the character itself doesn’t necessarily have any value. Although I think the truth is obviously somewhere in the middle and it depends on what your intention and goal for your run with that character is. When playing HC, the character means a lot more than just a template. Although HC characters are not excluded from the next point.
Respecing / Shared Stash
Regardless of whether or not you are using a SC or HC character, you will eventually notice that you messed up and you need to fix it. Without a respec option, you are forced to just accept your fate. I think not having respec is fine, and releveling another character could be the solution to this since having a respec option completely changes the dynamics of the core game, and makes a lot of decisions either meaningless, or you lose a sense of permanence. However, just because you messed up your character (most likely your first untwinked character which you struggled with a lot given you were broke and had nothing), you wouldn’t want to struggle the same way on your second playthrough. That’s where the Shared Stash comes into play. Let the memory of your previous character affect the future state and journeys of your new characters, for the previous generations struggles will hopefully provide a better future for the next generation. Similar to wanting your kids to have a better world and a better life than you lol. This is what I described as "Player-based SSF" as opposed to "Character-based SSF" in my Twink, Untwinked, and "Live of the Land" post. On a related note, Torchlight 1 actually had a "Retirement System" where you could pass down a single weapon to a new character, in exchange for sacrificing the retired character completely. This is a pretty cool concept since it fundamentally boils down what I just said. Even a single weapon for a new character could completely ease the pain of starting from scratch, and in a way it’s a fun motivator to re-experience the game from a different (twinked) perspective (although I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my whole character lol). Of course sometimes we need to "reduce" the pain because of potential negative/positive game design decisions (depending on your perspective), but I would argue that those same decisions are what made the game the way it is, and we should enjoy both aspects of the game, and maybe work around anything we think is negative, in a fun way.
Like I said before, your time is limited and you need to prioritize yourself, and your own happiness. A game is designed to be enjoyed in whatever way you want to enjoy it, not necessarily only in the way the original developer’s envisioned it. Of course I think we should try and experience the game the way the developer’s originally envisioned it, but after playing it for 20 years, you kinda need to find your own enjoyment with the game if you want to keep playing it
. I do believe that games should still retain their difficulty and not just try to make everything go fast paced, and paid to win. Since I’m looking at the game from a pure enjoyment perspective, I don’t want my games to have any MTX and want it to just be a set boxed price. We live in a different world now but you already know that I’m not buying any games with DRM / Online DRM / Steam or anything like that and stick to older platforms like Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10 (Dark Mode). So my options are continuing to purchase games on GoG, and support companies like CD Projekt Red and Larian Studios since Baldur’s Gate 3, Divinity Series, Cyberpunk, Witcher III, etc, all have no DRM, Online Requirements, and don’t have any MTX from my experience with them. I can pay for the game once, and enjoy the game to its fullest potential all within the game itself, and don’t have to feel bad that I’m missing out because I’m not paying more money for something that’s being held back from me. It’s a beautiful experience to have the game actually made and designed to be played independent of additional costs.With that said, Have fun,
fearedbliss
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