This made me all butthurt...

[Demetrium]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

I think we all need to remember two things:

1. D2 items were rarer than you think. A lot of people have been discussing this already --- zods, sacred armor, etc. I've played this game through tons of times and done tons and tons of MF/Countress runs and there are plenty of items I've never seen, not once. If you're curious look up TCs, especially the TC90 table.

2. They stated there will be many, many more items in D3.

 

[Nimbostratus]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

I don't really mind the rarity of high-end items, but it's the quality difference that bugs me. Over time, people are going to build up a collection of powerful, hard to get items. That's fine for them; two problems, though. 1- everyone starts thinking the game is too easy (well it is, when everyone is geared like a god), and 2- it raises the standard of what's considered good or even just practical. That, in turn, makes the game (or parts of it) seem very inaccessible to somebody just starting out.

"Oh, you made a barb? Okay, go make a sorc and do Meph runs until you have all the items on this list. Then trade those items for these items, and then trade some more until you have these runewords." What the heck ever happened to being able to get through the game with what you find (and not getting laughed at by your party)?

It's even worse when you think about PVP- in D2, PVP is extremely inaccessible until you have some pretty damn good items. Just look at all the guides that list Enigma as a flat-out requirement. True, an experienced player can win even with bad items available. But... where do you get that experience? Fighting and losing round after round doesn't get you experience, it gets you discouraged.



I don't want everybody having everything. I just want everybody having something reasonable without having to do mindless MF runs.


EDIT: Lemme toss out a few numbers to explain what I mean. Suppose "Some MFing" gets you the standard gear, which we'll say has an effectiveness rating of 100. And yes, these "effectiveness rating" numbers are very rough and pretty much pulled out of nowhere.

What D2's drops' effectiveness was like:

• Single pass: 20
• Some MFing: 100
• Absolute Best: 500

What drops' effectiveness should be like in D3:

• Single pass: 85
• Some MFing: 100
• Absolute Best: 200

 

[In the name of Zod]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

Reducing astronomic odds is not the same thing as saying everyone will get everything. And with the almost certain increase in number of items and randomness of the mods in D3, I dare you to try and make a full collection of game items if instead of one zod dropping every billionth of a times, it now drops every millionth of the times.

Give me a break!

Well I guess we will just see what is actually made super rare in D3. Personally I thought making runes like zod super rare was quite pointless due to it's limited advantages. One thing though that should be pointed out by now is that the rarity of an item should be measured [in part] by the advantages it offers. There is really little point to making powerful items easy to obtain and like powerful items impossible. So on that note I change my opinion about people playing the game just to get all the best gear since if that were true little of us would probably still be playing d2.

 

[AniMe]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

Wow, that's alot of replies...

Okay so one argument was "when you collect all the items in the game, the game is over"..

1) Most players don't care about collecting every item in the game. Arctic set? Who gives? It's about having the most powerful items!

2) You have the best gear in the game? The fun is not over as long as there is leveling to be done and a ladder to compete in! Doubt that since people want level 99 to be a day's work.

We have PvP; the one with the better equipment should have an edge! Of course thanks to DUPING Enigma and such has become standard but if I, say have grinded 12 hours a day for half a year in a dupe free environment and gotten legit Enigma and whatnot, of course I should own the shizzle out of a casual player who's best item is a Tal Rasha's Guardianship.. Same should go for D3! These games are not FPS games, the RPG aspect and it's part in PvP is what makes it sooo much fun!

I've played the game since June 2000 and I still haven't found several items and the highest rune I've found is an Ohm rune but I don't think they should make the higher runes more accessible. The ultra rarity of these items, which effectively SHOULD mean that only one person on a realm should have a Breath Of The Dying etc is a tremendously energizing prospect!

Of course no one can see what will happen in D3 but the thing is;

A) They make high end items easier to find; the game will die more rapidly since all features will be alot easier to access and logically exhausted faster.

B) Items are as hard or harder to find; the game will survive longer, couple this with the quote that there will be much more items in D3; everyone will get their fair share of items but the end game content will not be available the first week.

C) ???

I'd hope for B or C.

 

[5zigen]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

I wonder how many of you actually understand how rare items were in D3, or how much the bots have actually affected the market.

I am confident in saying that, even if most of us played constantly in d2, most everyone in this thread, if not in the entire forums, would never have seen a Zod drop.

The astronomically low drop rate of these items, along with Cham and anything up there in a similar level was just not particularly fun. pre-1.10 playing legit meant essentially playing without even considering any of the high runes, or high runewords. Now, almost no one plays legit anymore with every other person having an enigma. An item that, under real circumstances, maybe a handful of people would have.

Drop rates of a large number of items were simply ridiculous, and it became so cliche to never see griz shield, griz weapon, nat wpn, ik armor etc ever drop, because they were really THAT rare.

One of the main problems in diablo 2 is that there was very little separating our perception of semi rare from extremely rare items. That is largely due to the TC system and the way bosses dropped items. Because the normal difficulty, and nm diff items would all drop from bosses into hell, their rarity was extremly diminished, while other items would only drop from a handful of bosses, maybe 1 or 2 super uniques, and a couple other enemies in specific places.

In reality, the games economy would be much much better if there were more items with roughly the same utility and a drop rate closer to harlequin crest than demon limb, than going the other way around and making everything super common and super trashy, and having the good items be in rarity brackets like tyraels might, azurewrath, deaths fathom, deaths web etc.

It's more fun to play for items that you can get than items you know you will never be able to get.

 

[Ishtor]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

To me there is a differnece in an item that never drops. Highest rune i have found is a gul rune, legitlly how man people can say they found a rune of higher rarity. hacking/duping ruined D2, and made such powerful weapons so easy to have and make. Runewords would have been more balanced if runes were not mass produced by duping.

down side for not having such rare weapons will be it will be easier to get the best gear, why that a down side, because if it is easier for you and easier for everyone.

upside, duping wont be as bad, (cross my fingers) the dishonest people will have to rely to scamming. I have played with both honestly (not cheating or scamming) and dishonestly (duping, hacking, bot running and ect...) on D2, and even though playing dishonestly had it moments, play honestly to me is more fun. hopefully this will reduce this.


items will still be rare and hard to find, and luck will still be a huge variable, as long as they dont switch to WOW style of looting where "diablo" for example only drops certian items, that would be dumb.

 

[Nimbostratus]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

"They make high end items easier to find; the game will die more rapidly since all features will be alot easier to access and logically exhausted faster."

They keep high end items very difficult to find; the game will die more rapidly since many features will be too hard to access and logically given up on faster. Seriously, look at any thread where somebody wants to know how to find high runes- the default response is along the lines of "Don't bother trying to find them. Just go trade for (duped) high runes if you really want them." Do you really think it adds anything to the game to have content that all players except for the most hardcore ones completely dismiss due to rarity alone? High runes don't seem to be quite such a "tremendously energizing prospect."

Also... didn't duping make high-end features easier to access? D2 certainly doesn't seem dead.



"We have PvP; the one with the better equipment should have an edge!"

Yes, I agree. But that edge should be only that- it should not be the primary factor except in extreme cases. If gear matters too much in PVP, most players can't even think of joining a PVP game until they've done thousands of MF runs- this is most definitely a problem. You end up with people that want to PVP, but simply can't participate due to equipment requirements* alone. Many of these players end up never even playing a single PVP round because they know they have no hope of winning. And no, "go make a league that doesn't use x item" isn't a viable solution- why force people to make up their own rules instead of actually balancing things correctly?

*"equipment requirements" as in "you need items at least this powerful to stand a chance," not "this item requires 54 strength." Just for clarification.

 

[Edairu]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

items will still be rare and hard to find, and luck will still be a huge variable, as long as they dont switch to WOW style of looting where "diablo" for example only drops certian items, that would be dumb.

This.

Diablo 3 is not an MMO, so I'm really hoping they stick with the "Any monster X level, can drop any item X level or lower. So you don't have to go farming on a single monster to find the sweet loot only he can drop.

And about high runes. I never saw the point of them, whoever said that through legit means, nobody on these forums would ever find a Zod is totally right. So what's the point? Why even bother wasting time making these absolutely insane runewords that no one can ever acquire?

I'm not sure people realize what a massive impact duping had on Battle.net. Half of the items used for PvP wouldn't even exist if they had to be found by actually playing the game, without bots.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying drop rates should be increased so after a month everybody has any item they want. But I just don't see the point of those runes that only endgame bosses in hell can drop, making them next to non-existent.

 

[Knight_Wolf]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

Diablo 3 is not an MMO, so I'm really hoping they stick with the "Any monster X level, can drop any item X level or lower. So you don't have to go farming on a single monster to find the sweet loot only he can drop.

Indeed, that's how it should be done, any other way will ruin the end game.

And about high runes. I never saw the point of them, whoever said that through legit means, nobody on these forums would ever find a Zod is totally right. So what's the point? Why even bother wasting time making these absolutely insane runewords that no one can ever acquire?

Personally i think it's very bad game design to make game content that nobody gets to see at all ... if it was an Easter egg it wouldn't have been a problem .. but making items that are powerful extremely rare to the point of not being obtainable by legal means is just awful.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying drop rates should be increased so after a month everybody has any item they want. But I just don't see the point of those runes that only endgame bosses in hell can drop, making them next to non-existent.

Spreading the chance of rare item drops among all high lv. monsters in the game will make thing a lot better indeed .. and actually will make rare items obtainable without enabling anyone to hunt for a specific item because he knows that Boss (X) drops that specific super rare item if you run him 2000 times, making hunting for a specific item much harder and in turn encourage trade greatly.

Hope Blizz listen .. i don't want D3 to be infested with Baal runs.

 

[stillman]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

You all seem to think Blizzard intended us individuals to all find or not find a zod. That's likely not what Blizzard had in mind. No, we were meant to trade for the zod. Sure, the chances of one person ever finding one in ten years is a billion to one or w/e, but the odds get better for one droping when there are 30,000 people playing everyday. We were likely meant to trade a ton of godly items to whoever was lucky enough to find the zod.

(It's like palying the lotto in America. You can play all your life and not win a million dollars. But with thousands of people palying, people are going to win. It's not designed so that everyone has a good chance to win. Zods work the same way.)

I don't see this as much different than let's say a perfect death's fathom droping. You would never get one even after ten years of playing. So what do you do? You trade for one. So are most of you saying there should be no death's fathoms either, or the death's fathom should have static mods?

Does it really hurt casual gamers to have zods in there? Let's say with no duping d3 bnet ends up having 6 guys out of 50,000 who have a BotD equivalent. Are these 6 guys going to totally ruin your PvP experience? No. You might encounter all 6, no one can kill them let's say, you know their names now, so you join and duel with the other 50,000 guys who don't have BotD. What's the problem?

No one is ever going to have the best of everything anyway. D3 promises to have a near endless stream of items to find.

 

[NASE]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

Okay so one argument was "when you collect all the items in the game, the game is over"..

1) Most players don't care about collecting every item in the game. Arctic set? Who gives? It's about having the most powerful items!

2) You have the best gear in the game? The fun is not over as long as there is leveling to be done and a ladder to compete in! Doubt that since people want level 99 to be a day's work.

You are forgetting the single most important reason to keep on playing, even after you have found all the items.
The fun isn't over as long as there are different build to experiment with and to optimalise. For me, that's were the life time of the game is. Items help because they enforce you to make different builds (to run different places, to utilise that one item you found etc.) That's the function of items, it's not the finding it self, it's what you can do with it (else, you can make artic set as rare as a zod, it wouldn't matter).

And therefore, finding items and making them unfindable (for me) shouldn't be a key aspect of the game.

 

[AniMe]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

One argument here that really probed me in the keester was this one;

items with roughly the same utility and a drop rate closer to harlequin crest

A Harlequin Crest went 13 on a dozen. Last ladder season I played for around a month. I played crap and died with 8 characters between level 70-90. I still managed to find 6 Harlequin Crests. Along with that 4 Stormshields, 3 Tal Rasha's Guardianships et cetera. This is no bragging lines. This simply goes to show that if you play more than 3 hours a day in Hell games, these items will drop so often that you're not excited about finding them anymore. Instead you think "Grr, need to mule next game"...

Now the bottom line here is this, and I will bold it because people continously ignore it; Casual players want access to all items, all game content, the highest levels with simply playing 4-6 hours every weekend.

While I agree to some extent that the game shouldn't cater exclusively to power gamers one must understand that there should be an advantage to play 60 hours a week compared to 4 hours a week. In items, levels, skill.

It's like saying "I want to be able to compete on the highest level of the Warcraft III ladder but I don't wanna play more than a few hours a week, I just don't have the time."

There was a player saying that D2 is not near dead. He's right, because casual players is the majority of the playerbase. Most powergamers join a reset til;

A) a big dupe = they quit
B) they reach level 99 = they quit
C) they got the best items = they quit (mostly thanks to A)
D) they go heavy PvP and quit after a while

When these players leave no one notices since we're just a few % of the playerbase. But one must also acknowledge the importance of such players.

Bottom line; while content should be accessible to everyone, there must be an advantage to playing more in terms of items, levels and skill..

 

[NASE]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

When these players leave no one notices since we're just a few % of the playerbase. But one must also acknowledge the importance of such players.

One should not overestimate their importance either.

 

[Nukeman8]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

.

Now the bottom line here is this, and I will bold it because people continously ignore it; Casual players want access to all items, all game content, the highest levels with simply playing 4-6 hours every weekend.

While I agree to some extent that the game shouldn't cater exclusively to power gamers one must understand that there should be an advantage to play 60 hours a week compared to 4 hours a week. In items, levels, skill.

Depends what kind of advantage your talking about for power gamers, vast majority of people cant play 40 hours a week, like you said every is going to wait to have access to all the content in the game.

On the whole zod debate thingy, what about each other account having a quest that guarantees a high level rune/item whatever but only 1 per account.
Sure it would promote multi accounts but if power leveling wont be as bad in d3 then it shouldnt be an issue

 

[AniMe]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

Of course not NASE; there is a balance to be found. But there are those who play even less than 4 hours a week and still want access to everything the game has to offer in matter of weeks...

Nukeman8; even if there was no rushing in Diablo 2 that strategy would mean that the high runes would not be worth anything.

Many of my friends made it so that they did Hellforge rushes and got those 96 Gul's needed for Enigma in a matter of weeks. So while most people will not get an Enigma legitimately, those runes are not as rare as people make them out to be

"Only duped runes makes up Enigmas"

It's mostly true but I know plenty (6, but that's also 6 players out of the 25 of my then active friendlist) of legitimate ones made as well.

Guaranteeing the highest of runes by the means of two hours of effective playing time (assuming power leveling was made 20 times harder) would be devastating But since rune words won't be an issue in Diablo 3 it's a moot point really

 

[nicro tower]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

The chances of finding the really rare items is rediculously low. Here's some examples pulled from the drop calculator from ATMA, all these are on /p8 and 8-person party, which at least doubles the chance of an item dropping and 300 mf

Zod Rune:
1 : 2099563 Hephasto The Armorer - [H] River of Flame - {mlvl **}

Ber Rune:
1 : 334484 Duriel - [H] Tal Rasha's Chamber - {mlvl **}

Jah Rune:
1 : 399953 Izual - [H] Plains of Despair - {mlvl 86}

Tyrael's Might:
1 : 173709 Baal - [H] The WorldStone Chamber - {mlvl 99}

As you can see, some of these drop rates are ridiculous. If we were to follow those drop rates without duping, only ~10-50 or so people on B.Net would have any one of these items. And you don't even want to think about the drop rate for a good rare item. The drop rate for, say an Arachnid's Mesh is much more reasonable, it is a very powerful item, but it's drop rate is still about 1:1200 from it's best chance. The Stone of Jordan, one of our forms of currency has a droprate of 1:1337. This is much more reasonable droprate than 1 in a million, as it's still less than 1% droprate.

I think in D3 we should raise the drop rate by quite a bit. So that the average uniques have about a 0.5%-1% chance to drop, and the better ones have at least a 0.01% chance of dropping, or something like that, so it is feasible to get at least 1 piece of good gear for your character by just playing him/her.

 

[GoldenBird]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

To me the whole point of playing and keeping a character is to finish them with the perfect items. Really, if it weren't for the items there wouldn't be much of a point... and I'm pretty sure a fair few people few the same way.

And what's the fun if we can find everything in a couple of weeks? Searching for the most uber gear possible, that's the fun once you complete the game with your char.

I have to agree though, I don't want anything rare as a zod... that was just insane.

 

[Krugar]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

Here's a few thoughts, some already addressed by you fine folks...

1. D3 will surely present players with a much wider array of uniques while at the same time offering a more complex list of item modifiers for rares. In the context of a bigger poll of items to draw from, there must be a need to increase drop rates, or one risks making D3 even harder to find goodly equipment than D2 already was. It stands to reason than if one increases the pool of available equipment, one is lowering the odds of a specific equipment being found. So drop rates need to be altered.

2. However that speaks nothing on how easier godly equipment will be to find. My reasoning (and shared by a few in here) is that a considerable increase in odds can still make these items very difficult to find. This is very obvious to anyone who consistently played single player for a number of years. D2 drop rates on the most rare of items was simply astronomical. Out of this world. A whole community of Single-players on the SPF (Single-Player forum) cannot all together show right now more than a couple of zods after years and years of playing.

3. This is not however to say, drop rates would need to be changed at the middle-level. I'm pretty sure Blizzard is not going to be dumb enough to create a game where everything eventually finds its way to the player after 1 or 2 years of play. It's the extremely rare odds that need to be addressed. Not anything else. I'm not shocked personally at seeing equipment with odds on the hundredth thousand mark, like the Tyrael's above. I do believe some equipment deserves that distinction. But anything above that really needs to be reviewed.

4. Odds of finding an equipment speaks little on how easy that equipment will really be to find. If you think carefully, a Baal run is a completely different affair from a Pindle run. The same drop rate on both monsters would have drastically different results in terms of finds within a given amount of time. To that we must add other aspects like the needed equipment to successfully run a monster continuously. A Baal run requirements in terms of equipment are vastly different from a Pindle run. Only once a player gets to that threshold will they start considering collecting items from Baal.

5. My -- i'm sorry to say, vast -- experience with dropping mechanisms of this nature due to over 15 years of MUDs playing and administering doesn't lead me to believe in any way that players opt out when they find all equipment in the game. This may be so for a few cases. But I must say it's the exact opposite for the majority of cases. The success rate of a player has a big weight on their decision to stay around and keep playing. And that level of success is a very strong ego drug that glues many players to the game. Naturally, if everybody else has reached that level too, then that's when you have a problem. But can we safely say that is going to happen? We know nothing of the degree of the intended changes to drop rates. Neither of their consequences. These are in fact relatively easy to predict and project in time using all sorts statistical methods. A task that Blizzard is highly qualified for.

6. Consider that D3 will show players many new ways of customizing and personalizing their equipment. We know nothing of the details yet. But this has been officially mentioned on a few occasions already. It's quite plausible at this moment to expect that, contrary to D2, when I find a a unique on D3 I will be able to modify it in more meaningful ways. I'd expect more variety to items even when they carry the same name. This effectively generates all sorts of equipment that help boost an in-game economy and "force" players to always wanting to find things. Even if trying to find another Azurewrath because they want to customize it differently to the one they already have.

 

[In the name of Zod]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

Well the point I made remains, if the drop rates don't match the rewards then it won't matter how rare something is as no one will want it anyhow. And with a game like diablo that contains so many variables it will be impossible to make sure of unless the best items are truely godly and truely nigh impossible to get. Afterall, millions of people play the lotto everyday and they don't give up just because the odd's are a little crazy.

 

[Krugar]

Re: This made me all butthurt...

Afterall, millions of people play the lotto everyday and they don't give up just because the odd's are a little crazy.

Hehe. Cheesy comparison, but nice nonetheless. :wink2:
I'd argue around it. But it doesn't remove you have a valid point too. I'm just unsure if it's strong enough to offset everything else. Diablo's Zod Drama bothers me particularly for instance. It's just a damn binary representation of a rune on my computer. Not my ability to buy a condominium in Bora Bora and provide for my family for the rest of my life.