MF culling exploits - The current drop philosophy

As you have probably heard by now the expected has come to fruition. With the implementation of drop overwrite AN modifiers to make hard AN mods more rewarding the door was thrown open to the MF culler service.

In short, you can now quite easily got to TFT and request an MF culler to join your game to kill certain mobs. These players will kill your Touched rare monster and turn what would have been 10c had you killed the mob yourself in to 10 divines in exchange for 1/3rd of the loot from that mob.

I could go in to detail on why this is a terrible evolution but I think the devs at GGG are smart enough to know what the negative implementations are here. I just want to keep this to the point; unmudied by strong opinions so will keep those to myself. Instead lets focus on why this is possible and possible ways to fix it.

Personally I feel like the following changes would remove the viability of MF cullers for hire by reducing the expected return so that the effort isn't worth the squeeze without removing the use of mf culling or stacking mf in general :

1. Remove the loot override mechanic and implement an additive system.

The override mechanic is the main issue here. This makes certain modifiers overly valuable and makes some the opposite while others add difficulty but do not add good enough rewards. Nothing is worse than meeting a strong mob, taking a long time to kill it just so you can get a bunch of flasks or whetstones or even worse, nothing at all. The bad override mechanics are just an insult to players and go directly against the difficulty vs reward balance and just lead to more skipped rare monsters. The opposite of a meaningful encounter. The good ones are easily exploitable by MF cullers for hire. You basically just take the drops that used to be so well spread out in poe and pump them into a handful of piñatas.

Instead implement an additive system where a mod adds a guaranteed amount of something to drop. Rather than solaris touched overriding all drops add 5 guaranteed currency to the drop pool of that monster.

Good mods would still be exciting but potential upside of an mf culler is greatly reduced which will reduce the opportunity cost of not going to tft for the culler. No more overriding of potentially valuable drops with useless flasks and scraps and more diverse drops from mobs.

2. Extend the dedicated drop pool to all AN mechanics and scale for rarity and difficulty.

Give all AN mods a dedicated loot bonus based on how rare and difficult they are similar to the specific rewards they had in 3.17. This will compensate for the lost drops from the extremely rare in the long run and make rares in general feel more rewarding and less centered around specific modifiers. For example Gargantuan could add one basic currency to the drop pool on a rare mob. Toxic adds a gem.. etc. Now if you meet a rare with gargantuan, Juggernaut and something that adds resistance to what damage you are doing you will at least be rewarded for it. That currently for many players is a skipped rare mob because the time required to kill it does not match the potential rewards.

The result would be that it is still possible for a rare mob to have 10 basic currency drops for example if it has 4 mods that add currency but it would be more rare than just a single touched mob. To compensate a lot of rare mobs that currently have no currency rewards would have 1 or 2. You basically take the currency fountain and spread it out more evenly across all rare mobs. The same goes for the other drop types.

This together would make mf investment worthwhile as you still get on average a similar amount of dedicated drops and would still allow party play with mf cullers to be worthwhile but would make finding a culler for specific modifiers less worthwhile as the culler may not want to take the time to join for just the 5 currency from the solaris touched. Yes some combinations would still be worth it but those would be outliers rather than commonplace.

If the above two are implemented the core philosophy is kept intact; drops become more evenly spread out and exploits become harder. All rares become a potential payday rather than only the ones with good mods.

as long as ur only trying to get rid of the cringe exploity behavior then +1

its giving real cullers a bad name who don't play to exploit, i play a pretty high end culler some patches and when im in a rando party i just make the drops better and thats the joy for me.

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SilentSymphony wrote:

as long as ur only trying to get rid of the cringe exploity behavior then +1

its giving real cullers a bad name who don't play to exploit, i play a pretty high end culler some patches and when im in a rando party i just make the drops better and thats the joy for me.

I took care to consider dedicated cullers and party play. In theory the changes should be zero sum across enough maps so a culler in party should be just as valuable. Actually hiring a culler just for the one modifier becomes less profitable.

Just spread the drops that are now bunched together over more rare monsters. Flatten the spikes as you will.

Edit : you could solve the problem by nerfing mf culling specifically but that is exactly what I wanted to avoid. I think the exploit is the result of the loot system rather than a problem with mf culling as a tactic.

I don't get this outrage over mf cull.

THis has been a thing since ARPG's have been a thing.

Even d2 had it, where you would do baal/diablo runs, get to the boss, and swap out to mf gear.

You might not remember this, but when ACT 3 was the endgame, this was in POE also, where you would Dominus runs, and swap out to mf gear to kill dominus for the divine orbs.

You might no know this, but this is a think in 3.19 too. You wanna farm divines? Go MF dominus in act 3.

You want Exalts? go MF in The harvest.

ALWAYS has been a thing, just not popular.

You need to curb your outrage. No nerfs will ever make EVERYONE happy. A way forward would be to keep what is in the game, then add more stuff.

RAther than keep 1 Atlas, make multiple. Make Shapers atlas, where I can enjoy my Elder Rings. Make conqs, where people can play conqs. Make Mavens atlas, where you can enjoy Maven ETC.

The main issue is that mapping keeps getting ruined with the "additive" mods (shit ones at that) for rares and magic mobs.

I remmeber doing Shaper with 20k dps. And it was fun. Now I had to have 1 mil single target dps, just to leave tier 1 maps. This vision of the game is not for everyone, and it looks like it's not for the top tiers in the game either.

Anyway peace out. I just lol when I see MF culling EXPLOIT. It's literally been in the game since the game was a thing.



EDIT: also as a side note. You don't need TFT. you need 5 friends, and you have a full party. YOU can make your own MF. YOU and your 5 friends can each make 1 MF each.

Not sure what part of my post can be considered an "outrage" but ok.

I have no issues with full party farming with dedicated cullers. They still need to wade through all the rares that drop nothing in comparison. The issue and "exploit" here is that because of how the game has concentraded drops around certain modifiers in an extremely predictable manner they have created a secondary market for MF culling services that give a significant advantage to those using it when compared to others. Even worse is that the drops in general are being deemed fine and okay because of the potential drops from enemies killed this way.

If you want to go through the effort to switch all your gear to mf gear to cull a certain mod that is your perogative but I would argue that a game mechanic that makes this kind of stuff feel obligatory if you want to reap the benefits isn't great design. It is tedious at best, frustrating in general.

D2's system isn't even comparable. Most people would maybe use an mf switch to kill a boss. Worst case people would cube switch some gear but that dissappeared as the game progressed because over long runs of mfing the time investment didn't outweigh the benefits. The same is true here for most content except these specific modifiers.

Imo any game design that makes it more rewarding to spend time on a discord server or in your stash switching gear than killing more monsters is bad game design. It should always be more rewarding to play the actual game. My personal opinion.

Again, The culling isn't the problem but a symptom. I don't want to fix mf culling or mf stacking but the way the game is currently designed is unhealthy in my opinion. People are just optimizing their drops and to me this just shows that how loot is dropped in this patch is broken.

TFT magic find culling service...

@OP:
While I agree to a certain extent (I hate all things TFT, 3rd Party, etc.), I have to agree with a lot of the "downvoters" if you will.

MF is a thing. IIQ/IIR is a thing. It always has been, it always will be. It's a thing in every arpg I have ever played, it has been a thing in PoE since the very beginning.

MF cullers have gotten a lot of popularity NOW, but that doesn't mean they weren't a thing before and it certainly doesn't mean they, or iiq/iir in general, didn't give you an extreme advantage in all previous leagues and previous loot drops.

Running a quant character almost guaranteed twice as many drops, if not MORE than that. Twice as much currency, twice as much chance to drop something good, etc. That is an ABSURD advantage. Something that might take you a month to save for, would take you 15 days or LESS with a MF geared character.

It is no more "necessary" now than it was "necessary" to run IIQ/IIR before. It just FEELS like it is because other common drop-related content has been changed. But OVERALL, I would bet some real cashmoney that the AVERAGE loot a single player finds using a culler vs a player not using a culler works out to be quite similar to how IIQ/IIR already worked...perhaps its a bit overtuned at the moment, but that will almost certainly be nerfed. Not all pinatas are dropping 50 divines even with culling...

I will say that there is a huge problem with item rarity and THEN currency conversion. It has NEVER worked that way in the past and for good reason, currency was always "immune" to rarity to avoid these piles of divines/exalts and things. Definitely something mishandled and overlooked

It's funny to see how many RMT trolls came here to poop.
No offense, it's your bread guys I got it.

IIQ/IIR have always been a factor, but there are ways for them to be more or less of a factor and the current culling meta makes it MUCH more of one. In addition to the numerical amount, the condensing of a large portion of average loot value into very rare (unless you exploit for them) super-loot-mobs means that every time you kill one with a non-loot-optimized build, the game is actively rubbing in your face how much value you are losing.

In previous leagues, if you weren't IIQ optimized, yeah you got less loot, but it was more of a distributed thing you wouldn't really notice rather than the game slapping you over the face every so often saying "this could have been a massive payday if you were playing a janky gimmick playstyle instead of the way you enjoy".

The solution to this problem is to remove ALL IIQ and rarity from gems/gear/flasks.