Taking the following excerpt from one of Travis Day’s postings:
We added a system in the expansion that tracks the amount of time you spend fighting creatures without finding a legendary and after a certain period of time will slowly start increasing the legendary drop rate. Once a legendary drops for you, actual item not crafting recipe or material, we reset that timer. This is meant to be a safety net so that the random can never be too extreme to the negative end.
In my recent rant, I noted that the acquisition of rewards should be naturally derived. But I didn’t really detail what I meant by that. A straightforward timer (which I’m not sure if the above is or if its part of a larger algorithm) is something that is ultimately going to feel contrived. Why? While I understand such a system is meant to provide a safety net from RNG, if that system ultimately always rewards the player with a legendary every 60-90 minutes (whatever they end up deciding on), it’s going to feel contrived. Such a system has to take into account things like difficulty, effort, exploration of that world, etc. and not just the amount of time spent fighting those monsters. Thus ones drop rate period should have some variance and be faster or slower depending on a combination of factors.
What is not going to change is the RNG in terms of what drops. It’s a given for example that set items will be the hardest to complete and that certain select legendary items will be extremely rare (like how Mempo’s are compared to Andy’s).
I’ve also only talked about the word “reward” in the sense of item drops only. Rewards at least to me, can refer to the outcome of crafting, gold, gems, crafting materials, recipes, bonus experience, and other useful effects (Blood Shards are a perfect example but should also be relevant for more than just gambling).
I’ve mentioned in the past I wouldn’t mind very rare type of unique rewards (like an imbue reward that works by rare collecting materials that are scattered all over the world as a way to encourage the exploration/adventure portion). Another example is that many were disappointed there weren’t any new wings offered as part of the Digital Deluxe/CE. This where they could create a very complicated puzzle (think more in-depth version of all the stuff that needed to be collected to make a Staff of Herding) of artifacts that one has to acquire in order to make some demonic wings. The point is that some folks will want them and will go through the effort in order to acquire that reward.
Thus legendary drops is something I only considered as one part of the rewards which the game offers but also a very important one since gear defines the larger part of our characters. But the game itself could be far more rewarding if it did offer more in the types of rewards that are actually offered. Still, it will be interesting to see if they find a bug in their timer logic since it doesn’t seem to be working for many.
