Cursed Chest Event

Following is my response in someones thread asking others how they felt about the Cursed Chest Event.

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This is why they held off on Nephalem Trials….  the idea was good, but the implementation would’ve been half-baked as shown by the few Cursed Chest events they put in.  Thus what Lylirra mentioned should now make sense:

Source: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/10491039663#7

They do want to implement an actual tracking system because I believe (my opinion) they want to make the whole notion of Trials (challenges), as part of an actual PvM/EvP sort of system with tracking that goes on a ladder of sorts (the competitive angle).  The rewards also need to be re-thought because it’s an understatement to say that this current sampling is underwhelming.

This actually leads to a much larger observation; this team seems to have a very difficult time finding a balance when it comes to the notion of rewards.  It’s like they always err towards the side of no carrot and a broken/lost stick.  That also isn’t to say that quality loot should be raining from the sky (console loot for example); I’m talking about a balance where it is neither feast or famine but that occasional dopamine fix; where you actually find something and go wow.  And with the large number of legendaries that are being re-worked (taken along with the whole rationale for going down the soul binding route in the first place), it shouldn’t be that huge of a problem to find an algorithm where players will be able to get that occasional ding.  That could also be tied into the challenges/risk angle.  But from play testing so far, I’m just not getting that feeling.  Don’t get me wrong; I still find the 2.0.1 systems an improvement; but part of it also still has this hollow feeling.

Thus I can’t but help bring up this 2006 talk by Bill Roper about finding a way to reward players for their efforts.  This ingrained philosophy is one of the biggest things that was lost when these folks left Blizzard (I’m not talking about the individuals; I’m talking about the entire studio which together as a whole, brought various ideas and design philosophies to actual fruition – since not one person can do it all or be responsible for all the design decisions).  This is nearly 50 minutes but it explains some of the intangibles about loot in Diablo II versus Diablo III.

Thus to answer the question, while I do grok the whole aspect of the Cursed Chest events, the way they’ve been patched into the game, feels badly grafted and really needs to be better fleshed out with how they are implemented and the kind of challenges/rewards they offer to where it’s something that players will feel compelled to search out and find.

Note:  I need to qualify the above a bit further when I mentioned “hollow feeling”.  I did touch on the loot aspect in some other blog post… basically, it is what it is since they decided not to re-design the underlying core systems.  And to move beyond focusing on trifecta, that’s where other item affixes like cooldown and resource reduction comes into play as an example.

Majority of items though are still relatively bland, and the whole concept of rewards is still mostly in the “here’s some gold and experience” vein (thus that “hollow feeling” that I mentioned).  Yes, I do realize that Reaper of Souls offers additional rewards (Blood Shards and Horadric Caches); it’s part of the upsell for the expansion.  At it’s core though (regardless of vanilla or expansion),  I still believe the game should offer some very rare/unique rewards;  one simple example is something like an imbue recipe which now makes even more sense with soul binding – as I’d like to be able to imbue an item with my character name (thus something like a Mempo of Twilight would turn into Murasama’s Mempo of Twilight) while also giving it some interesting property that works only on the character which performed the imbuing.

This is a separate issue from my thoughts about my finding item upgrades while leveling; that system in terms of targeted drops and upgrades works remarkably well.  And yes, some legendaries do have interesting properties that can make them fun to use.  But I didn’t put all of that into proper context either when it came to “wow”/dopamine fix factor.  Interesting and fun properties yes, but I do still realize it’s mostly a facade where the bulk of the upgrade is due to main stat+vitality range inflation (and there is a ceiling on that which anyone who plays long enough, will hit).  It’s basically a stat stick which explains that hollow under tone (and nothing will change that without a complete overhaul of the underlying design; something that makes no sense at this juncture).

The longer term issue is providing systems that allows players to put their characters to actual tests beyond PvM (and that is what Nephalem Trials was supposed to offer in terms of PvMvP and/or self-challenges).  Brawling is what it is. The devs have telegraphed that arena style PvP isn’t a good fit for the way the game is designed, but are more receptive to the idea of PvM/EvP; for the acronym challenged, that is Player  versus Monster/Environment versus Player (where you have these kind of timed/wave of monster challenges where your score determines your placing on a realm wide ladder – but it needs a very good/optimized tracking system in order to keep tabs of players progress on that seasonal scoring ladder; basically a separate server sort of like achievements to handle that aspect as well as a UI that works inside and outside of Clans).   The Cursed Chest events brought some of that content into the current game world, but as mentioned, feels poorly implemented and offers lackluster rewards.