The Personal Loot Pretzel

General Discussion
1

To start I am against personal loot in D2 for personal reasons, but I want to further explain why you shouldn’t really believe some of the myths a lot of the posters on here are feeding you regarding the topic. I get that Personal loot was implemented fine in other games. These opinions are why it would not work in D2 which already has an expected distribution of items and playstyles.

The most common personal loot I see pushed is this concept where loot is either instanced or dropped and only seen/picked up by one player. Whether instanced or only visible/picked up the total amount of loot drops would not change between shared loot and personal loot. With this theory many suggest players should be indifferent. The problem is, most likely scenario they won’t be.

Here’s the issue. Loot dropped in an 8 player game is less than 8x the loot dropped in a single player game. If there is a situation where a player is only limited to their personal drops in multiplayer they will get less total drops in multiplayer runs than they would if they just played by themselves. Although this penalty ALWAYS existed in this game you see more drops in a multiplayer game so you don’t “feel” this experience happening. Essentially an 8 player game in current Diablo is each player gives up ~24% of their drops to be able to steal the loot of 7 others with the sacrifice they can have their own stolen. Personal Loot would just have you take the 24% hit with the benefit of faster clears and more xp. This is why many experienced players will explain to you its not smart to MF in public games. When it comes to high valued items you are ALWAYS taking the base hit since everyone in game is looking to steal it. You are LITERALLY betting on your chance to steal it from someone else.

Once players “feel” that they are getting less drops, they will do what players do, complain. To say this system will work you have to trust that the playerbase won’t push for more drops. I don’t have that trust and I expect we would see calls to reduce the 24% hit under the banner of “encouraging multiplayer play”.

Here’s why that can’t happen. If you have a situation where a player can buy 8 individual games and run them in the same game and have a better result than running them in separate games you have an issue. You will get players who buy 8 games to increase their drop chances. Here is the further issue, you don’t even have to have Players 8 = 8x drops for this to happen. If you have any situation where the players individual MF is used to calculate their personal drops this will be encouraged. Players will create an account to clear and then 7 accounts head to toe in MF so these additional accounts have their rolls calculated on their own MF (players will leech themselves). I know this sounds ridiculous, but people did this in D3 already and would have 4 characters running the same game to increase drops.

The most likely scenario with personal loot is it either creates an even more negative multiplayer experience, or it inflates drops. I haven’t seen a convincing experience that fights that. Timed loot would work though since it protects high tier drops, but allows sharing of other items.

But that goes to the next point, personal loot also does not stop leeching or ninjaing, it Automates it. A player can only “steal” an item from you if he was near the kill and in position to steal. This would mean he would also be able to be assigned personal loot. Rather than him having to outclick you for it, assuming you did all the work, now all he must do is stand there and the game gives it to him. In the 12.5% chance the game assigned it to you he cannot take it, which I guess is a win. Seen another way now you would get 12.5% of any of the best drops you ever seen in an 8 player game, that’s all that personal loot ensures you.

Finally, the pretzel. Players say this can be optional, but this only works in a situation where loot drops are never increased. If loot drops are ever increased and it is not carried over to shared loot the “choice” is eliminated. If you carry it to shared loot, you will then have solo players now upset for the punishment they receive depending on the size of the buff. If you buff single player as well, you start the problem all over again(single player > multiplayer). All that in mind, any increase to drop rates in any scenario opens its own can of worms.

TLDR:

The most likely scenario with personal loot is it either creates an even more negative multiplayer experience, or it inflates drops with the exception of timed loot.

If you read all of this in aggregate you will see personal loot disincentivizes someone better geared than you to help you out. Even in a rush, one of the best protections of someone taking good drops was they were too low to effectively loot monsters while you kill things. Now they will just follow you around and safely pick up their share as you clear. D2 has many features to boot these players out of games, but no one uses them because these people have no impact on your game since they cant even loot the monsters without dying. A large playerbase and personal loot will cause level restrictions on most games. You have enough players who want to join your game to meet the XP requirement so a player who cant help clear content is useless.

There are some idealistically thoughts out there that this will encourage undergeared character players to band together and beat the game as it should be played. This is possible but I have my doubts. Most good players know how to beat the game on their own. The players who would need this the most are the ones least likely to be geared or understand how to play the game. I don’t feel like I would want to join a gaggle of them to help them out and take a 24% loot penalty to do so.

2

Make it tied to being in a party. Other players don’t see loot if they are not in the party. Game already works somewhat similar anyways with the multiplayer bonuses differing whether or not you are in a party where party is near (same screen or whatever distance). Would have to balance how loot is seen when a non party member kills enemies on screen though.

I hear a lot about trust when this conversation comes up, and to be honest, the state of the world over the last year has waned by own personal trust in people. Gamers are a different breed, but if this game sells well, and an influx of new players come in, they might not play by the same rules or mindset of the “core” Diablo 2 crowd.

A lot of issues and stories about bots too when tied to this discussion. I don’t feel the bots are as big of a concern when it comes to general play, but more in Baal runs, which puts the more purist crowd into believing they are just leeches themselves. However, Baal is the xp run for the game, has been since 1.10, and thus is run the most to where this is most apparent.

It is too early to tell how newer players will affect the game as a whole for those that have ate, slept, lived D2 as their primary form of entertainment for the last 17-18 years (since the 1.10 patch that has alienated a good portion of launch D2 fans). I would see how the game launches. Devs have already stated that they would be open to balance changes down the line and more modern crowd implementations. As long as they keep what they launch as it’s own fork, I see no problem with that. On a global server, with the potential amount this game could have in sales, I don’t see an issue with splitting player bases.

I think a lot is going to tie to how players react to the technical alpha and I hope that the TA will include players getting a chance to test the game on a controller, and see just how viable it would be on unrestricted FFA loot; ie if it is on level playing field with mouse and keyboard. I would not expect to see any different loot system at launch unless that was the deciding factor.

3

I don’t think I see how the party function matters to what I said?

Personal loot if you can only see and pick up your own drops is significantly less drops than single player. Thats just really is it. People who advocate for it assume people will not complain about that. I doubt it.

The next axe is will Blizzard do something about the complaints that come… who knows?

It just becomes hard to understand what those preaching for it are trying to accomplish. The things they say it will solve it doesn’t do a good job of. The only thing they have me on are bots that pick up items, but thats a hack/botting issue.

4

I was responding mostly to the concern of leeching. As to the actual amount of loot, there has been fluctuating numbers posted too often to really keep track of. The only two that even make sense to me are a) Game offers about 6 players worth of loot to an 8 player party - each instance offers that 6 players worth, or b) game splits that 6 players worth to the party which is equivalent to 1.33 players of loot.

I’m not a mathematician nor game developer, but since the loot mechanism seems to be a fairly standard one in modern games, I’m sure it could be made to work. I think everyone needs to stop trying to argue circles at this point , and let the game release before unleashing the rage again (both from the pro and con side).

5

Lots of assumptions. More negative multiplayer experience? WHAT multiplayer experience? The system as it is now encourages nothing but solo play, in your own slot machine bubbles. May as well put up a password, that way someone won’t kill the boss you are heading to and take your slot machine winnings. You could have a system where items are randomly generated at the exact same rate but then are scrambled between the number of players in the game for them to see only. So much more fair and encouraging of players playing the multiplayer game together.

Each enemy that dies is a pull of the slot machine, problem is, if a rat-weasel is close when it drops he/she can pick up the item, even if you killed the enemy from a distance. Up close greedy people can just steal everything, and they do. Or teleport to the items and snatch them up. It’s ridiculous and ruins playing with strangers, completely. It’s disgusting what this incentivizes and disturbing how strongly it discourages playing with other people.

6

What assumptions besides the one I explicitly said were assumptions?

Personal loot with no drop increases still encourages solo play. It seems that’s what you wrote also, so I don’t get your disagreement?

I am then saying if you make anything where you improve personal loot drop rates to compete with solo loot you run into the problems I spoke of. Thats not an assumption.

7

Playing alone would guarantee all the drops you get; however, if you play in a group you could very well kill much faster thereby overriding the reduced rate received with many many more pulls of the slot machine. I believe the original creators of the game intended people to roam around murdering things together, paladins reducing resist with necromancer curse and sorcerers of different elements, all playing together. Never happened because of shared loot. However, if it is implemented correctly it could be absolutely amazing. Why would you play alone when you can crush enemies with other people way faster? Yes, this would mean more people playing together and more efficiently gearing in a more fairly distributed manner, it would affect the “market” but killing stuff together and getting items together was the original spirit I believe. People are just too greedy for that to ever work spontaneously, without actual relationships that have consequences it just would never ever happen with human beings, ever.

8

If this game was brand new without how much people know about this game, this would have a lot of merit as a response.

The problem is many people know how to create a character that gets so little benefit as far as kill speed from the party, that this doesn’t hold.

9

Well, when you’re God-level like that you’re going to breeze through things no matter what. At least let the lower level chumps get a couple items as you swoop around like a nuclear vacuum haha. Not very many players get to that level, compared to the player base a whole.

10

If this “penalty ALWAYS existed”, it has nothing to do with personal loot. It has nothing to do with FFA, either. It has everything to do with how D2 currently calculates drop in single versus multiplayer game.

You are ignoring kill efficiency in single versus multiplayer game. Monsters in an 8 player game do not have 8X the hp but 450%. The total drops from monsters in game is much more complex.

"When more players are in the game, monsters have more hit points, do more damage, are worth more experience, and are more likely to drop items. The game calculates these figures when the monster is spawned; when a player moves near enough the monster that it is calculated into existence. Once spawned, monsters retain their initial values whether more players enter or leave the game.

In patch v1.10 and later, experience and hit points are calculated by the same formula:

  • Hit Points/Experience = X * (n + 1) / 2"

For Total Item drops
" Drops, however, are not the same. When you kill a monster in a multiplayer game, the game calculates a number to use as the nodrop exponent. This is not simply N.

  • It counts 1 for you, the killing player.
  • It counts 1 more for each player that is (a) partied with you and (b) within two screens of you.
  • It counts 0.5 for each other player, either unpartied or far away.
  • It rounds the final total down.

So, if you sneak into a full public game on the realms and don’t party up but go MFing on your own, you actually only get a nodrop exponent of 4 (1 for you, 3 for the 7 unpartied players rounded down), while the other partied guys are getting an exponent of 7 (7 people in their party, and you rounded down to 0). Even though all of you are killing p8 monsters with their 4.5x HP. It is one of Blizzard’s many measures to encourage party play."

11

I’m not sure where I ignore killing efficiency when I specifically mention faster clears.

I’m not sure exactly how what you’re saying refutes anything I’m saying exactly…

I did not say the penalty has anything to do with personal loot VS FFA loot. I am saying there’s an additional benefit to it with personal loot which is taking items from others loot pools.

I am saying personal loot from a loot perspective has no benefit to a player who can clear the content on their own. You would need ensure a party can clear at a speed that makes up for that difference. This would again get back to not wanting players in party who can’t carry their weight.

12

No one likes when people “leech”. That is regardless of how loot is distributed.