Given it looks like I just lost all my online characters with the latest server crash (2x level 75 sorcs, plus a few other lower level chars that were mules for the ton of awesome uniques/sets/runes I’d found), I’m curious if anyone else has seen a difference in item drop quantity/quality for local games. I only play solo/self-found, but I stuck with online since I found a ton more good loot online than local (point of comparison - by level 22 my online char had found a couple of uniques, a few set items, and a few good yellows, but by the same level my local character only found a few blue items).
So I’m curious - was that a fluke, or did they set it up so you only get the good loot if you play online? Curious what other folks are seeing (if anything) in that regard.
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You haven’t lost your characters. THe server is down and it goes automatically to “offline tab” all characters are store server side so you have to click “online” but it wont connect to bnet so you wont see them.
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Yes, I have offline chars so I noticed that - it was more the fact it would let me log in without errors but shows an empty char list. Not super worried since I know they can always roll back. I was more asking if there’s any point to playing online at all if you never plan on partying up or trading? I noticed a significant difference in item quality drop between offline and online, and was curious if anyone else was seeing that or if it was just a run of bad luck on my end. If it ended up being pretty much the same play experience overall, I’d probably just nix online play completely given how often the servers fall over.
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since they couldn’t put in any decent social features in to their game online seems pointless
even more so when you consider in offline you can increase difficulty and improve loot drops with /players
AFAIK, there are supposed to be certain features that are “online-only”, like world events, etc. Also from what I can tell from the confirmation dialog that appears when Deckard Cain ID’s your stuff, drops and identification of items is confirmed against the server, so it’s possible a different loot engine or RNG is being used.
I only have a fuzzy intuition for how all of the RNG stuff works out, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the fact that thousands of people are using the same randomness sources on the servers mean that your experience of drop distributions actually feels more balanced/smoothed out. IIUC, because clustering is not only natural, but expected in RNGs, when playing solo you would need to exhaust the entirety of a cluster of bad rolls yourself, while online there are lots of other events happening simultaneously that do so. Basically it comes down to the facts that generating & storing true randomness is hard and that human brains are notoriously bad at intuiting source distributions from a series of events.
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Yeah, interesting point and super-awesome thoughtful analysis. I definitely saw clusters of good/bad drops online (play for a few hours and get nothing, then drop a bunch of uniques from random mobs in a single 10 minute span). I’ll play a bit more offline and see if I notice anything.
It’s just your perception.Offline solo self found is the best for drops since you have the option of doing /players #. The only thing online has on it is the very piss poor trading system.
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Assuming that’s just adding /playersX (no space) in the game settings/additional command line options)?