I still believe they are missing the point about the random nature of Diablo; yes, there were some very rare items in the loot tables for D2 that some of us never saw drop; but there were more than enough other unique items that did drop which were highly usable and scaled. The objective was to also get those uniques with the best/perfect rolls (that was far more difficult trying to get such drops).
This is a contrast to the current bind-on-pickup/restrictive trading design which is still balanced around the notion that such items can be freely traded (the games core design was based on that ability either via the trade window and/or the auction houses). And
this prior topic shows the developers are okay with this unbalanced approach where it really is left up to luck with only a few ways to counter it (like Kadala).
This is why I didn’t want to quickly jump on the “make this anniversary buff permanent” band wagon either based on just one or two days worth of game play. You can buff the AMOUNT that drops all you want to, but there will always be good/bad luck streaks where some players will feel the rate has been nerfed. And given the current system, most players will only see more junk dropping just like how it was in vanilla when one had higher magic find. The other reason I didn’t quickly jump on the “permanent buff” bandwagon quickly either is that it does NOT address the root cause issue with the above line of thinking.
If the game has this amount of soul binding and restrictive trading abilities for those items, the core design has to have multiple mechanisms in place to balance out not just drop quantity, but also the ability for players to somehow target certain items beyond another system (Kadala) with the same layers of RNG tied into it. This can involve game play metrics including but not limited to efficiency (efficiency right now, will have only an impact on quantity per hour – the quality of those drops are still left up to a wide random variance).
For those who don’t remember, the game during it’s initial conception was being considered for bind-on-equip for the best items. Jay Wilson interview from Blizzcon 2009 where high end items were originally going to be bind on equip:
Wilson: We have no “Soulbound” or bind-on-pickup, except for quest items. We do have bind-on-equip for the highest end items in the game. We targeted, roughly, any item above level 85. These we will do as bind-on-equip. The reason for this is that we want people to be able to trade them, but we also want to remove the high-end items from the economy. One of the greatest ways that you can do that is with bind-on-equip. What we don’t want is to have a situation where you find something on the ground like, “Oh, man. This would be a perfect weapon for my Monk. Oh, but I just picked it up and now it’s on the wrong character.” We don’t want that at all. Most of our focus on Diablo is as a trading game. So, if you take trading out of the item space, you ruin the core of the game. Finding a really great item that is not for you is still a great event because it means you have a bartering tool to get the item that you do want. We definitely want to make sure that that still exists.
They came to a different decision though; April 2011 interview with Wilson:
Jay Wilson: I’m happy to announce that we recently decided there will be no binding of items in Diablo III. They will be freely traded for the life of the item. The only way we are going to do any kind of binding would be for things that are not progression-sensitive. Like we might say…a quest item. We don’t want you to be able to give to other player to short circuit a quest, but if you find a sword, piece of armor, or gem….anything that you find in the ground, once you pick it up, you can freely trade it…forever.
And they’ve now gone to the current more restrictive bind-on-pickup model. Increasing drop rate quantity only masks the flaws in the core design which does allow for extreme cases of bad luck when it comes to BOTH drop rate quantity AND the quality of what does drop (both of these are the biggest complaints that those with lower than average luck, have had).
I’ve already experienced on day 2 of the anniversary buff that even with a double legendary drop chance in effect, that there can be cases where you get zilch. In the short term, having this become the permanent drop rate, will make it feel about right especially if you are experiencing the average drop rate quantity. But it also does not address the fact that there will always be a sub set of players, who will fall on the extreme bad luck ends of the spectrum, where both their quantity and quality of drops, will be on that minimal end.
On the quantity side, they were compelled enough to put in a safety net algorithm. Doesn’t that tell anyone how huge a flaw that is? If the core design was developed around the aspect of rewarding players for their actual efforts, you would not need this kind of code/logic in place to begin with. Why? Because players playing the game and slaying actual monsters, would have a more weighted bearing on how much and what type of loot can potentially drop.
A more appropriate solution is addressing the core design where maybe your actual game play effectiveness/performance, can at least have some impact on the quality level of an item. Blizzard logs a lot of statistics and data, but does very little with that information because it takes engineering resources and programming effort to design a system that factors these variables into the algorithm for determining how and what actually rolls when a legendary item is dropped (where it would feel organic/non-contrived at the player level).
So long as the bandaid approach is taken, there will always be cases like this where some players will see nothing wrong, while others are wondering what it is they are doing wrong. The problem isn’t with the players, it’s with the core design that is leading to this wide variation in game play experience.
