Loot drops, itemization, and being bored...

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morbo wrote:

Its a tradecore game. Looting must individually suck, so that trading comes to the rescue.

For those of us who refuse this GGG vision of playing ARPGs, the gameplay revolves around what you find, not what you could buy. You start with a cheap generic build, and then rerol a specific one, if you find specific items.

A targeted looting option (where the player would have the control to skew loot toward some item type), would fix this problem. But GGG doesn’t think there is a problem with the loot hunt (because everything drops in town)

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morbo wrote:

Its a tradecore game. Looting must individually suck, so that trading comes to the rescue.

For those of us who refuse this GGG vision of playing ARPGs, the gameplay revolves around what you find, not what you could buy. You start with a cheap generic build, and then rerol a specific one, if you find specific items.

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zythyl wrote:

Everything drops in town? Tradecore? PoE has no trade market, and relies on spammed chat channels and third-parties for trade to flow properly in (and in some cases outside) of the game. There is no way the game is tradecore. The attitudes of the players, sure; that's tradecore. The game itself is terribly designed for trade.

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Why exaclty do we need to have a sink thing system? WHy do you want to destroy 6Ls exactly? Go tell me. And as another player have said: we have the chaos recipe, let's just make another one.

This is a good question. For the long answer (and potential solutions), read here. In short it is this: The game is most addicting (and pleasurable) when players are periodically (although not necessarily regularly) finding items of interest/value/use. I believe that's a conclusion from the 2nd link you posted. Read on for more elaboration.

Trade has an interesting effect on the above in that it increases the rate at which useful (read: for you or someone else) items are found. It essentially catalyzes this period and catapults everyone forward. This subject is discussed at length in the D3 Dev article you referenced. From an individual perspective trade imparts value onto otherwise useless or uninteresting items. It also serves as an alternative avenue for item acquisition and wealth creation. Following so far?


Unfortunately, trade is a double edged sword, and after the initial burst of item acquisition it leaves players with giant durations between finding useful items. This decidedly frustrates players. Contrary to what GGG says, drop rates are balanced with botting and trading in mind. As a result, even if you play solo self-found, you are affected by the realities of the trade economy. GGG can't improve solo drop rates without ruining the trade economy (well they could add SFL but for some reason they don't want to do that). Either way, even if they did add a SFL it would only compartmentalize the problem to individual players, who eventually would also meet the "bad loot syndrome."

What do you think happens when that duration between finding good items gets unbearably long? People get frustrated, not just people but entire leagues. They make threads titled "BAD LOOT WTF", "DIABLO 3 LOOT WTF," "QUITTING HERES Y." Are you still with me?

Ok. Obviously the quality of items dropping hasn't changed. It's not as if GGG disables good items after a few months in every league. So what has changed? The relative quality of the items everyone has collectively accumulated has changed. After a few months the collective return on farming or crafting is so [relatively] bad that players become frustrated, even with the low drop rates that are presumably meant to inhibit this accumulation. In reality these low drop rates make players feel forced to trade (which is partly true) and causes frustration itself.

So what is the real underlying problem? It's item accumulation. Nobody wants these items because they already have them, or they can't do anything with them (and the items they're using are already better). Queue Vaal Orb, enter stage right. The Vaal Orb counteracts this item accumulation by giving those items an additional value - the value of potentially beneficial corruption. At the same time, the Vaal Orb has a chance of rerolling the item, for all intents and purposes this mostly renders the item useless and can be thought of as item destruction. So the Vaal Orb imparts value on otherwise worthless items and consumes such items. I'm sure you've heard of supply and demand. Well, the demand of such items goes up while the supply goes down, meaning the value increases. That's good because it means players who find those items will feel like they found something of value (because they did).

Now we've (at least partially) addressed the root problem of item accumulation. But what does that even mean? It means the duration between players finding good (interesting/valuable/useful) items has diminished. It means less "WTF BAD LOOT" threads, because players are finding things of value (either to replace their gear or trade). And for solo self found players it means GGG can turn up drop rates because the trade economy won't spiral out of control, ruining the experience of everyone who does trade.

With a perfect item sink, the satisfaction chart would look consistent, like this:


Ok maybe that answer wasn't so short.

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D3 guys kept saying to the community we know what is fun and what is good.. until D3 became what it became.

I'm not a game developer but I am a financial analyst and this is a financial problem. It appears to me they failed to consider as much and did not come to any remedial conclusion. By the looks of it GGG at least tried but even the Vaal Orb is not a perfect item sink. Eventually item accumulation will be too great and the "bad loot" will triumph. That's likely the case in the legacy leagues.

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Here's the post by the D3 dev I was referring to:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QyiamXP026gJ:www.alexc.me/why-diablo-3-is-less-addictive-blizzard-responds/441/+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Key part:

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d3 dev wrote:

All of our items are randomly generated, and so follow a distribution curve in power. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you were to somehow distill an item down to it’s “power level” and created a distribution graph of drop rate vs. power level. This graph would probably be normally distributed with outliers at high power levels dropping at a lower rate.

Looking at this graph, an average item drops every 5 minutes, a higher power item drops every 15 minutes, even higher power drops every hour. etc. As you move up the curve to ever more powerful items, the amount of time it takes to find such an item increases. This is what makes certain items more desirable, this is how things worked in D2.

What happens for a standard player who is playing solo when they first hit level 60 is they see an item upgrade every 30 minutes or so. Pretty quickly it becomes every hour, then every 2 hours. The higher the power level of your gear, the longer it takes to find your next upgrade, that’s just the underlying math of this distribution. It’s not really anything we set either. If we magically made all drops rates 10x higher, all it would do is shift the power curve left or right, it would not change the fundamental property that the higher up in power you go, the longer (statistically) it is going to take until you find your next drop.

So there we go, increasing drop rates wouldn't actually make the game anymore satisfying, at least in the end game. But what I think you may be referring to the is the drop rate during progression i.e. how often you acquire upgrades when new base items and item levels are introduced. That's a bit of a different subject and has its own concerns (partly to do with monster balance). I can't say I'm against making progression upgrades more frequent, I've often thought the same, frankly.

It's likely Diablo 3, with all the Blizzard dollars behind it, has done a better job in regards to progression-based loot. After all that's a question of fine tuning, not game design. Now, that isn't to say it's a better game but it might mean it's more engaging during your first play through. But we've all known that was the case for a few years now, what's important is the end game and replay value, where POE decidedly wins.

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Veta321 wrote:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/812958/page/8#p7097551

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zythyl wrote:

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Veta321 wrote:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/812958/page/8#p7097551

As I've stated, I've played the four month leagues before and PoE since OB. I've also played a myriad of other ARPGs. And PoE's drop / loot system or frequency / quality algorithms are just abysmal. 90% of what I see is utter horse turd. 5% of that would be currency items, then 3% probably items for a friend or something and the remaining 2% would be an upgrading.

This is the feeling I'm getting, and I've always got whilst playing PoE. Very rarely past level 30 have I seen an item drop that I shout out and praise as an "upgrade". I either trade (read: spend my found currency) or use orbs to craft something.

It's horrible for a game in a genre that's so focused on loot.

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Veta321 wrote:

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zythyl wrote:

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Veta321 wrote:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/812958/page/8#p7097551

As I've stated, I've played the four month leagues before and PoE since OB. I've also played a myriad of other ARPGs. And PoE's drop / loot system or frequency / quality algorithms are just abysmal. 90% of what I see is utter horse turd. 5% of that would be currency items, then 3% probably items for a friend or something and the remaining 2% would be an upgrading.

This is the feeling I'm getting, and I've always got whilst playing PoE. Very rarely past level 30 have I seen an item drop that I shout out and praise as an "upgrade". I either trade (read: spend my found currency) or use orbs to craft something.

It's horrible for a game in a genre that's so focused on loot.

I don't exactly agree with GGG's approach - but you read that post and understand why things are the way they are, right?

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zythyl wrote:

Anyone else utterly disappointed with the amount of loot that drops for your characters? Well not such the AMOUNT... but the QUALITY.

I've played PoE since Beta and the loot drop system is just disappointing. I usually end up spending my currency to create new yellows to equip, purely because hardly any yellows drop as it is or because of the god-awful chances of hitting those select few stats that would be useful to your character.

No one dislikes comparing two games on a forum more than me, but I can't help but cite Diablo 3's recent Loot 2.0 patch and how satisfying it is, with the amount of equipable items that drop from monsters...

Is anyone else feeling as if the item / loot / drop system in PoE is sluggish, underwhelming, and tedious?