Why dont we the community present a draft of what we would like to have customized for d2r. Let us help the devs with tangeable solutions to this needed feature.
Something along the lines to what Raxx did for D3. Sometimes some wishes do come true.
Remember they are not mind readers.
One, those in the forums only represent a small fraction of the player community. It is likely a decent sample size though.
Two, because we the fraction of the community rarely agree on anything. There’s too many different factions; No change, a little change, some change, a lot of change, and given an inch/take a mile change. All of the factions are unified on one major flaw… Lack of compromise.
Just like a committee, the house of representatives or the senate, if there isn’t a majority vote in favor for a change, the status quo remains.
A good example of an overwhelmingly positive viewpoint the community had which resulted in a change was allowing the secret cow level to be opened after killing the king, which is something that has been requested for a very long time.
Big agree on the game needing a loot filter in some way shape or form.
Another thing that bugs me about not having a loot filter is that it takes away from enjoying the graphics of the game, being able to appreciate a remaster of a classic visually would be nice.
Well what I have seen work in the past was when a major streamer like Raxx worked with other top streamers to draft an in depth report that represents the most wanted features. Presented them to Blizzard with back and forth communication to deliver what the fans want.
Starting with lootfilters would be a safe bet as even hard core antichange streamer like sweet phil champions this addition.
Blizzard already admitted that if they are going to introduce loot filters, they want to do it the right way, and that would take a lot of development time. Well, they didn’t release anything significant last patch. So perhaps they have been working on it on the side but they needed a little bit more time in the oven.
While I don’t watch his streams, I do occasionally watch his Youtube content, and from what I have seen, he primarily plays Offline and thus has access Loot Filters anyways. I still don’t agree that Loot Filters are in the spirit of the current multiplayer loot, but I believe Dark Jedi has mentioned a few times about just changing the priority of loot displays to always highlight the rarer items first.
With that said, I did fire up the game recently to do a few runs, and the way display labels are fairly solid does interfere a bit with movement, especially on a melee character. This is increasingly jarring as I spent most of my Diablo time this year between D3 and D4, where display labels are cleaner.
I was hoping they’d release patch info today, but if we get nothing by Thursday, kiss any hope of anything more than a handful of new runewords and bug fixes good-bye (not that I had much hope anyways) since any chance of a PTR beyond a 2-3 day test smushed next week between D3 Season Closing (Sunday) and probably Season Start (Friday) would be slim considering expected reset is near end of this month.
To solve any fairness issue regarding multiplayer loot competition, any “official” loot filter game option could be simply restricted to solo play.
It’s a touchy subject for many.
And that is my stance as well. From Phil’s video, really the only point I agreed with was currency tab. He mentioned as his third point a trade message board in the lobby, but that feels amateur. If they did an in game trade platform, it would need to be a fully functioning market board. List your item, list your price, have some sort of cooldown time for pulling a listed item off after the first 5 minutes or something to limit underpricing wars. Would go great with a currency tab. Could even get under control the massive botting/rmt issues if they changed player to player direct trade to D3s system, and did instanced loot. A pipedream for sure, but the botting/rmt is here to stay.
I do hope they get out of the slump of the lackluster patches of late. I’ve realized that I’m more interested in the seasonal play model than I was a couple of years ago, and love the idea of rolling a character or two in each Diablo game season to keep things fresh and to keep from burning out like I did with D2R. After a 77 and 53 on Eternal (FF16 was a week break) and two 100s on S1, I need the break on D4. If Season 5 is a dud again with D2R, may just end up trying the D3 season, even though SSF I don’t find interesting…or just fool around on Non Season hunting runes in D2R.
While I’d like to see an in-game trade platform, I’m not counting on it happening either. A monumental hurdle they’d have to jump over is to make it easier than what the 3rd party facilitators do. However they have a leg up on the race, because the player wouldn’t have to leave the game. What’s lacking is the motivation for Blizzard to do it. You know as well as I, if the suits don’t see a money making opportunity from a proposed project, they’ll snub it and go right to whatever is next on the list.
I think it is partly due to the suits, and partly due to being afraid to make more considerable updates. It’s funny though, we have had some clashing thought process from the devs and Pez. That one livestream Rob did awhile back for some school, said that nothing was a sacred cow, and Pez stated on Twitter sometime last year to complaints about D2R changing too much that the original was still up, and that D2R was about a different experience. Then Pez stated before Season 2 that Season 1 was the big hurrah, but it could be debated he meant only on class/skill balance changes.
The following ideas could improve the situation with or without a loot filter:
I feel the need for some kind of help only in a few specific areas (cows, arcane sanctuary chests, gold piles on tower level 5, etc…). If they added a loot filter I’d like to have an additional hotkey for filtered labels: Alt=original_unfiltered_labels, AnotherHotkey=filtered_labels
I’m the same way but I do manage to resist small juvies once I have a belt full of Full Rejuvies. Full Rejuvies are harder for me to resist, usually I keep quite a few in Inv as “back up” also, but do leave some on the ground once I have a full belt + backup. I play SC though so I probably put less importance on them than HC players.
I also like to grab every gem to cube up, and most low runes to either sell in bulk, cube up, or just convenience of having them when I need them.
I definitely pickup TP and ID scrolls to keep my tomes topped off, but once I’m at 20/20 I leave them.
Heck I even pick up lots of elite armor bases to sell for 35k gold…
Good plan for sure - give people options to configure and make it simple enough everyone can do it so no one complains about “unfair advantages”.
I like the mock up, but might suggest a “select/de-select all” option for each sub category to speed up the configuration option. Also it should probably be clearly stated if checking shows it vs. filters it.
I also recall some discussion at the time where they looked at things like that reasonably objectively, and if the community had found work arounds (like having alt/lowbie in pubby game open it) to get past the restriction, then the actual game state wasn’t really changing, so they could chalk it up to reasonable QoL.
As long as this was customizable so you could change it if you were looking for bases, say. Although most bases are big enough you may be able to simply hover over the ground to see them.
I assume this is something more based on the D2 code than a limitation that was set due to screen space, but if it’s possible to do with the D2 file structure then a great idea also.
This is a neat idea too, but I could see some complaining that it erodes game knowledge and reduces the “edge” of a pro player - someone who knows they have to chug pots/pick up gold in order to see more. I’m personally all for it.
The thing for me though is if you’re above that 32 item limit and now forced to chug pots or something, it’s not really the same “race to click the best loot first” anymore.
One thing i like to point out is that for me, gems and potions as well as gold stick out nicely on the floor. I often times manually pick them up by clicking on the graphical representation as opposed to searching for the heading in between 30+ lines of jumbled text.
In my humble opinion, the biggest impact they can make serviced is to remove gold headings from piles because they take up to 50% of the real estate on the screen.
Big disagreement with this request again. There are several reasons for it to remain unchanged :
An ecosystem
Physical Immersion
Tedium play a role in video games, the first of them is immersion. There are physical rules that rule the world such as gravity, or the simple fact that everyone can see the same things dropping on the floor.
People react in the chat to drops that make the social experience in connection with the drops : when 5 scrolls drop from Duriel for example and express their surprise/disappointment/laughing.
Playing online is accepting other players as both an opportunity and a threat. No player nor friends is invisible to you and they’ve always been able to play with others, fill the screen of items right before baalkill or next to your corpse.
The game must be recognizable from their pairs, whether on YT, twitch, first time players, anywhere. We should not wonder if it’s another mod.
Gameplay
Competitiveness is part of the multiplayer experience. Being able to spot an item faster than your party is part of a challenge on its own. Other players can be better in other areas: spot farming, moving faster, clicking faster, better at trading or social. It’s a (small) layer of the game but one nonetheless.
Succeeding or failing at picking quickly a valuable item among other many objects is an experience that has quality. (From a game design perspective — As opposed to no experience)
D2 has plenty of those experiences which is why it is unique. When you start removing a layer, you never know when you’ll stop. Many games thought tedium should be removed every time it’s possible, most end up bland games.
There are reasons why the player feels connected to the character. D2’s art is linked to the game mechanics to make it feel raw. Literally, without filter.
Several good points mentioned. There’s nothing wrong with coveting the game as it has been. However… Whether or not the game is “raw” enough, cluttering the screen with too many labels is a flaw, and something needs to be done about it.
A couple of simple things that could be done without a loot filter that would improve the item label clutter:
1: Item label prioritization. A unique item label will have priority over the label for a quiver of arrows for example. Once that unique item is picked up, then the label for the quiver of arrows will show up.
2: Label stacking for identical common items. If there are 5x Super Healing Potions, instead of showing:
Super Healing Potion
Super Healing Potion
Super Healing Potion
Super Healing Potion
Super Healing Potion
It will instead show:
Super Healing Potion (5)
Hi Olbat, I am not understanding how adding an optional loot filter will affect any of your argued point. Each player can customize how they want to focus their farming and this to me is a great feature to have.
Op has adressed a major issue about the current way loot is presented that, in my opion outways any and all benefits of keeping it the way it is. An optional loot filter if done well is a great solution to the current problem with loot presentation.
I think many people will like it and for those that dont want to use it, they can keep everything off to show all loot drops squished together. Everyone wins.
This notion that anything has value in the economy is simply not true. Most of the items only have any use at all early in the game. Nobody is going to trade you a one socket weapon or a pair of normal heavy gloves, it’s simply not useful.
And this isn’t about the competition with other players, this is about making the looting experience less tedious. Plus, the competition is more meaningful if all players have a loot filter, rather than just the guy using a loot filter mod (whether it’s allowed or not).
Simply put, I’d rather waste less time checking all item labels to make sure I’m not missing a required base for a runeword, a charm, a good rare, etc… Especially, I’d rather not have to worry about the risk that I am missing something useful when I’m not removing the clutter by chugging potions or other consumables on the floor (it’s not that rare to find out you were going to miss a drop you needed just because the clutter made it hard to distinguish).
It’s very easy to know where this slippery slope ends : it ends at loot filters, because there is nothing beyond that.
We could split the “normal” category in my original list into “socketed”, “superior”, “ethereal” and “normal”. Even the original D2 design found socketed items to be important enough to give them a colour code.
The biggest offenders in the game are the normal (white) items that have the lowest priority on the list so I’m not sure about the necessity of a customisable priority list. The high priority categories (unique/set/etc) usually don’t drop often enough to cause serious issues. Certain special items like runes and quest items would have the highest priority, the game already colours their labels to show their importance. Here is the updated priority list:
Crafted items (orange label and gemmed/runed items) “drop” very rarely and only in town in “free items” games so that is a niche use case that doesn’t affect looters. Donated Runewords are grabbed immediately so I’d put them above uniques but treating them as simple socketed items is also acceptable considering how niche this use case is. I’ve seen people dropping orange items only a couple times or so, large batches of bad rolls/leftovers, mostly Charsi material like most other items in those “free items” games.
Unfortunately D2R is unlikely to be actively maintained so feature requests will probably be rejected (especially the complicated ones). My assumption is that this game will never get a highly customisable loot filter because item density is a big issue only a in a few areas. This is why I tried to keep my ideas simple/stupid.
Biggest gripe with all your points is not all items show up once the cap is reached. It becomes less skill and more RNG for who spots the Ber in the garbage pile. I applaud your effort at writing that up defending not having a loot filter though lmao holy damn. Would you also like to see auto-gold pickup reverted to LOD too?
Drawing labels for the better/rarer items first can solve that problem without a loot filter.
… Yes but that’s also a loot filter, just a different approach. I’m all for any sort of improvement to what we have now.