Rare items should be good, and rare.

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007Bistromath wrote:

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Tombstoner wrote:

Trade is very bad for the health of this game.

trade is why I still play it

To have fun you need gear. To get gear you need trade. this repeats the D3 AH experience.

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Tombstoner wrote:

Now imagine what that screen looks like without the loot filter. GGG is trying to fix a problem brought on by the existence of trade. The player base relies to heavily on trade for upgrades, but players are forced into that situation by design.

Trade allows players to pool drops into one collective whole. This funnels orbs up into the hands of players who get the mandatory build enabling items not needed by other players. they can then farm and populate the trade house. However this time GGG fubared loot generation and under cut the trade system.

Trade is very bad for the health of this game.

Trade has nothing to do with it. Items in this game are generated randomly from a pool of affixes so freakishly large that the combinatorial explosion they create makes finding good items so rare as to almost be statistical noise.

As long as GGG refuses to implement any kind of smart loot generation, loot on the ground will continue to be useless past the very start of the game.

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Tombstoner wrote:

To have fun you need gear. To get gear you need trade. this repeats the D3 AH experience.

It does no such thing. The problem with D3's AH was that you could put real money in it, and Blizz tried to shove their fingers too far in the pie, hopelessly polluting the market. Everything in the trade manifesto about how trade needs to be slow and clunky or else everyone will play Hideout Hero all day long is just a bunch of excuses Chris made up to not build a modern trade system, because if GGG had built one, people who can't understand what Blizzard did to theirs would riot. We basically have one now, with only the extra step of copying messages from your browser to remind you that Chris is still convinced you need to be annoyed into killing monsters for some reason.

I played D2 basically SSF for years. It became much more fun when I stopped doing that, because suddenly amazing drops for characters you couldn't pay me to play meant something to me: progress towards the stuff I actually wanted that dropped about as often as the million things I didn't.

I get that lots of people aren't interested in testing their business acumen when they want to sit down and wreck face. Certainly there are days when I look at my dump tabs and decide it's a good time for a nap. The fact remains: this whole damn genre is your playground if you only ever want to play SSF. This game does not and will not focus on that.

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Walkiry wrote:

Trade has nothing to do with it. Items in this game are generated randomly from a pool of affixes so freakishly large that the combinatorial explosion they create makes finding good items so rare as to almost be statistical noise.

As long as GGG refuses to implement any kind of smart loot generation, loot on the ground will continue to be useless past the very start of the game.

Smart loot makes trade completely unnecessary. It is pointless to make a game with both unless the smart loot system is only in SSF, and they'd have to remake SSF as a completely separate mode instead of just a flag you can lose like hardcore.

The main thing that could be done to solve the carpets of garbage is to drop all items identified, and let people tune their filters so they can pretend the game only drops armor with tier 1 life.

I have an alternate solution, though: just pick up garbage. Yeah, if you're playing at a high level, getting deep into the endgame, it makes sense to ignore almost everything that drops. Opportunity cost, right. Here's the thing: if you're not there yet, and you're probably not or else you'd feel successful and wouldn't be complaining on the forums about what's holding you back, that strategy actually doesn't make as much sense as most people say.

Those guys grinding juiced up T16s are only interested in the best stuff because 1) there's barely anything left to improve about their character 2) that stuff is worth lots more currency than regular junk. But there's a major part of this that everyone misses when they talk about how you need a super-strict loot filter to avoid wasting your time: the currency that amazing stuff is worth has to come from somewhere. If somebody isn't picking it up or pulling it out of vendors, they can't sell their perfect roll Buttlord-influenced helmets for it. That's what it means to participate in a market.

I'm a slow player. I would be even if I played meta builds. That's just how I am. But I can still get to the late endgame most leagues if I really try, because I'm good at running the dollar store, allowing me to eventually buy some nice stuff from the people with Neversink on max. A market has many different niches. If trade isn't satisfying for you, the most likely explanation is that you're using it in a way that fits somebody else's playstyle better than yours.

I ve seen this discussion before.

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007Bistromath wrote:

Smart loot makes trade completely unnecessary.

No it doesn't. Smart loot doesn't have to mean every single item is 100% perfect for you, just that there is less garbage. Because that's what rare item drops are, complete and utter garbage.

By the time you're in maps, getting a top end item (meaning five or six T2+ modifiers) means, in many cases, having to go through literally billions of items and identifying them. There's a reason the endgame consists of chase uniques and crafted items, and why so many players were completely disillusioned with the nerfs to harvest. The combinatorial explosion of possible rares is absolutely insane, there's simply way, way, way too many modifiers.

You can cut 99.99% of the rare items on the ground by implementing some sort of biased smart loot and the player would still have to go through massive piles of items to find the very good ones. That's how bad it is right now.

EDIT:

Let me put this in perspective. Let's say you're looking for a 2H axe for your build and you have some modest requirements. You want to have:

- Flat cold damage for your skill of choice (could be a different element or even plain phys, doesn't matter for the odds but just for the sake of argument), at least T4.
- A % of increased damage. Either flat, or hybrid with accuracy, of at least 80%.
- A T4 crit multiplier suffix.
- Either T4 accuracy or T4 attack speed.

So a 4-mod weapon that's T4 or better.

Craft of Exile tells us that you'd have to go through ~30,000 items to find one that'll fit the bill.

Doesn't sound too bad, right? I mean, with how big the userbase is, someone will find that item and put it up for trade, surely. Of course there's the problem that they, too, have their own item needs with similar low odds, so finding items like that for everyone means everyone will have to go through thousands of items that will fit the bill for someone else to use.

But of course it gets worse.

If you want to use a staff, for some reason (and there's many valid ones), the odds of getting that exact same combination of modifiers is one in ~440,000.

That's not so rosy.

The best part? Those T4 modifiers have a minimum item level of 52 at the highest (for the flat cold damage). The T4 suffixes are item level 30+. You find level 30 mobs as early as Act 3.

Not exactly an endgame item, is it?

If you up the requirements to T2 (still only four modifiers), the odds of finding that 2H axe is one in FIVE MILLION. Make it a staff and it's one in 75 million.

And it only gets worse from there.

Some items are less bad. Body armor, for example, is much easier to find if you have similarly modest 4-mod requirements. So are basic boots. But a lot of items have such ridiculously diluted modifier pools that picking them up is a complete and utter waste of time.

So no, trade won't be made obsolete by having smarter loot. Not with those odds.

None of that actually refutes my point. You can have both trade and smart loot. As you say, it doesn't have to be 100%. The thing is that if trade still matters, it's because the smart loot doesn't.

If they actually made SSF completely separate and unconvertible to trade league, putting 100% smart loot on that would make sense. In fact, it's probably what they should do, but for some reason they care more about avoiding fragmentation. (Probably just code for cutting corners, really.)

Putting smart loot in trade won't fix the thing that you think needs fixing. Either it's so weak it changes nothing, or it makes trade much less useful.

If you just don't want to trade at all, play a game with real support and balance for SSF. If you don't mind trading in principle, but you just get bummed out about your drops, you're not using trade correctly. You don't have to appraise every piece of junk. The junk goes in the chaos recipe, so you have some guaranteed progress when you're finished with your dump tabs. If you just appraise the items left over when you run out of a piece for the recipe, you still have a chance of finding those god rolls, but you've got more out of most of your haul than any of it was likely to sell for.

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007Bistromath wrote:

None of that actually refutes my point.

It does, you just don't like it.

I don't like or dislike it. Nothing about adding smart loot would break the game. It is simply a fact that it serves the same purpose as trade. Whichever system has a greater influence tends to replace the other in players' strategies, rather than them being able to work in tandem.

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007Bistromath wrote:

It is simply a fact that it serves the same purpose as trade.

No, it's not a "fact". It's an assertion you're making, and a nonsensical one at that.

Top items have literally no chance to drop. The entire playerbase could be identifying thousands of items a day and still never find the items with the one in a billion or one in a trillion chances in an entire league. So where do they come from?

Crafting.

Which, ironically, is a "smart loot" system - as smart as the players who manage to figure out how to use it. So there's already a system in place that generates good items at a rate that drops on the ground will never be able to reach. Even the most basic understanding of crafting will net you items you simply won't see from drops.

Trade is useless without a supply of items to trade. If you want to see what the world would be like if "trade" was the main source of item acquisition based on drops as they are, look no further than talismans. They're so utterly useless pretty much every item filter in the world tosses them out.

And you're asserting - and claiming as fact, no less - that increasing the supply of commodities in high demand in a way that also increases the number of participants in the market (since grabbing things from the ground is much more accessible than advanced crafting) will somehow kill trade.

Not even avowed Marxists are this economically illiterate. Get a clue.