Loot drops, itemization, and being bored...

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:

"

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.

bump

I would not want something like this:
Play for 1 hour, have one garantueed perfectly suited unique for my character at my level.
(that's what diablo 3 does, right?)

I actually want 99% of the items to suck, even 99% of the rare items and uniques.
To get the feeling of reward, you need shitty items and affixes to be the majority, you need upgrades to be a rare occasion.
And I don't want to be "auto rewarded", I wanna have the feeling of "Wow, I was lucky" or "Ha! I worked for this, I deserve this".

However, in PoE, it is a little too extreme.

1. The gap between good and bad items is huge.
In example a weapon without 3 affixes attackspeed, inc. % damage, increased flat damage is just shit. The combination of these 3 affix classes is extremly rare, and I'm not even speaking about "highlevel attackspeed, %damage, flat damage".

I don't get the idea behind this.

99,5% of lategame rare onehanders I find do like 100 DpS.
0,4% go up to ~150.
0,09% go up to ~200 (which is kinda the "starting point" to be considered useful)
0,01% has 200+ (and can be considered a real lategame weapon).

(numbers completly made up of course)

I'd like to see the base damage of every weapon almost doubled up, but cut the bonus damage in half. So that I don't feel like I am fighting with a toothpick unless I use a "1 in 10000" weapon. Getting the 3 affixes would still be rare, gg and superior, but a weapon with only 1-2 affixes would actually kill monsters.

2. Lowlevel affixes on high tier items suck.
Can't there be a mechanic like this:
Items roll affixes with level in the interval [itemlevel x 0,5 ; itemlevel] or [Squareroot(itemlevel) ; itemlevel]?

In other games I played it was luckbased too, but with a 90% chance to get an appropriate affix tier, and only 10% fail.

Overall, I shouldn't have to shop items just to progress, I should only have to shop if I want to completly dominate the content.

"

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)

Tradecore without a decent trading system is shit. I don't complain about PoEs difficulty level (it's fine) but I hate the fact that trading and RMT are far superior to grinding for getting the items you need. If we are forced to trade then we should get fast and easy to use trading system. I want to kill stuff, not stare trade chat or some 3rd party web site.

I think they should just remove all items but those end-game uniques, every item that drops should be a tabula rasa, Kaom's, BOR or Mahori.

Everyone would be happy then. Also make it so every mob you kill drop 60 - 100 exalted orbs.



This will fix EVERYTHING.


GGG you can pay be in btc.

"

f3rret wrote:

I think they should just remove all items but those end-game uniques, every item that drops should be a tabula rasa, Kaom's, BOR or Mahori.

Everyone would be happy then. Also make it so every mob you kill drop 60 - 100 exalted orbs.



This will fix EVERYTHING.


GGG you can pay be in btc.

"This profile has been set to private"

Much credit.

"

profeetta wrote:

"

f3rret wrote:

flamebait

"This profile has been set to private" Much credit.

He is trying to derail, dont feed the troll.

@Topic: PoE suffers from lack of diversity. Yes You heard right I said "lack of diversity". Now before quoting this and spitting some nerdrage, just DO READ the rest of this post.

Item diversity would be the case if there were 30+ mods I would welcome on my GG items, and upgrade would work by min/maxing and selecting. However for each build there is only 4-5 welcome mods and some are same for all. Pool of mods for loot if quite huge, but %95 is junk. Therefore %99.9 drops are junk.

Good games with well balanced item diversity does not dictate quality of items be design; it is upto players to do so. In PoE by design choice (making majority of mod rolls junk), game dictates the quality item pool to a very limited one.

"

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?

agreed

I have given up on finding any useful items. Because that is what I expect from an action game. It is almost impossible to progress the way things are now. It's frustrating because I really liked this game and want to but launching it now makes me literally cringe.

/uninstall

"

Jojas wrote:

"

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.

Sadly, this sums up the whole of the problem. IF you actually do find that one specific item that makes you want to make a build around, you will still have to find a whole bunch of secondary items AND have enough orbs to socket and link them properly and give them the right colours. So basically the mechanics are saying, 'Nah, we don't want you to make new, inspired, exciting builds, we want you to trudge along in same old, same old ...'

don't forget that by the time you achieve all of that painstaking and countless hours of play a new patch comes out to completely ruin it.

What this game needs is for item levels to be tied to items. What this would do is make high level monsters unable to drop low level items. Problem solved.

Oh, and add a damn filter for shitty white items (less than 4 linked sockets or something like that) so I don't have to see them when I'm scouring the ground for loot.