When we propose the drop rate remain the same, we mean it stays the same.
As it is now, you kill a monster, an item drops. First to pick it up gets it. Under the proposed personal loot system, you kill a monster, an item drops. A random roll determines who can pick it up. Same amount of loot.
Thanks for the summarised version!
Hmmm, that sounds reasonable! I wouldn’t mind such a change, however I reckon devs wouldn’t want to make such a drastic mechanical change to the game, not at the initial release. Same goes for the charm inventory etc. If you look at the interviews they are very reserved whenever such topics are brought up. Visual changes are easier to fulfil as there is more freedom.
I agree, this version of pLoot wouldn’t damage the game.
They are reserved; however after the alpha and Blizzard’s two D2R surveys, they discovered that the playerbase supported the changes already introduced and wanted more.
How Diablo 2 Is Changing on Its Path to Resurrection… While Staying True to Its Roots - IGN
The quote below is from this article.
The team also wanted to gauge the fanbase’s reaction to some of the small quality of life changes that had been implemented, such as automatic gold pick-up. “For the most part people really liked them,” Gallerani says. “In fact they want to see more. The game is still a work in progress - this was a tech alpha - so even from the design side we have a lot of thoughts about [additional] quality of life updates and ways we can make them better.”
“A lot of the feedback has been specific, low level, little things across the board,” Gallerani continues. “The community has been amazing, we have sites of people putting together surveys and PowerPoints for us. It’s awesome to see them share how they feel about it.”
“We can’t promise that we can or will change everything,” Lead Artist Chris Amaral adds. “But when there are things we agree with, we can push them a little further.”
Thanks for taking the time to align on this topic.
Unfortunately it is full of misunderstandings (which the post history shows).
I think, the frequent posters here (Orrion, MicroRNA, me) all agree on the same points:
So now we have another name who agrees with these statements (i assume).
There are some minor differences (e.g. pLoot stays private vs becomes public, pLoot is visible vs invisible to other players) that even we disagree on though. But i think no matter which of these minor points would be chosen, we would still be fine with it.
The hard part is to come up with a good rule to check for the “participation” and what is actually a “fair share”.
In my view the hardest condition should be the damage dealt. Because that is what is the main denominator of speed.
I dont think that we can include non-damage play like tping to baal room sufficiently in automated rules. So those things would be a blindspot still, unless anybody has a good idea about it.
Let’s say, we link the drop-portion of each player directly to his damage ratio. (the loot percentages can be read as Chance to receive a loot item per loot drop of the measured monster)
E.g. “service player game”:
damage 90%x1 player, 10%x7 player → 1 player gets 90% of the drops, 7 players get 10/7% of the drops each.
E.g. “even leveled CS/Baal run”:
damage 12,5%x8 player → Each player gets 12,5% of the loot
E.g. “even CS/Baal run with 2 leechers”:
damage 16%x6 player, 4%x 1 player 0%x 1 player → 6 players gets 16% of the loot, 1 player gets 4% of the loot, 1 player gets nothing.
To me these numbers look already pretty fair. I dont even think, we need to calculate activity and distance into them. Distance might complicate things (what is my distance if the enemy/my hero teleports during the fight?). Activity is hard to measure (but what about players who go afk until the boss spawns? Is a teleport sorx eligible for more loot because she participates earlier? What about shrine scouts? What about that guy who goes for mephi for 8ppl loot, while the sorx is teleporting for the entire team? Should he receive the same loot as the sorx?).
In the end, the important part is that you bring your damage to the books, right? What do you guys think?
Also, how would we deal with situations where there are multiple monsters? E.g. the throne room or baal clones. Should the damage on a baal clone or a tentacle enable a player to receive baal loot? Is he eligible for the loot or is he focusing on the wrong enemy?
What about the throne room? Let’s say a cold sorx kills all mummies, but a skeleton drops a zod rune. Would she be elegible for the rune drop because she actively participated in its vicinity or not because she did 0 damage to the cold immune enemy?
Ideally, yes, but I’m not sure that’s possible or feasible.
This is why I tend to think that shouldn’t be messed with. At the point you use damage done to determine loot, you start moving the game away from the player being able to choose what they want to play. One of the reasons I dislike FFA is because characters at range have a disadvantage, meaning what you choose to play has an effect on your ability to claim loot. The same would be true if you make loot distribution influenced by damage done - except it would be far worse, especially if you didn’t choose a build that absolutely excelled at AoE.
Fair point. But isnt damage dealt the most important factor for fast runs? (counter examples like a bo barb or a teleport sorx come to mind)
So let’s assume you do 100 damage and i do 90 damage . Wouldnt it be fair for you to get slightly more loot? Afterall, i am benefitting from your greater damage and you are benefitting from my damage, so we split based on that ratio.
What characters would benefit too much from a system like that and which characters would lose?
In my experience every class has multiple playable styles which all are pretty suitable to dish out their fair share of damage (~12,5%) - to a single enemy (static field might be too easy to get a high ratio though, but then again without static field it would take longer). If you deal more damage, you effectively help everbody else move faster, thus increasing their loot indirectly. Still you are giving them their fair share.
What builds would lose in such system?
Yes, dealing with multiple enemies is a topic i tried to avoid in my examples for the sake of giving an example that we can already identify some inherent problems with.
I personally think when it comes to multiple enemies, it should depend on damage dealt in “the same room” or something similar. So even a player with less aoe could hold their ground.
And regarding aoe, i am not sure how to deal with that. Certainly a javazone or a orb sorx can deal more damage to a crowd than an amok barbarian. Still the amok barbarian is taking down a pesky *high-hp monster and tanking damage.
Maybe there is a way to factor those things in.
Ideally, yes… but given that characters are capable of soloing the 8 player mode, if you put 8 people in the group the damage won’t be broken down evenly even if all 8 are equally capable.
Let’s take D3. I can log onto my Wizard who is perfectly capable of soloing a 100+ GR easily and dishing out trillions in damage… but if you put that Wizard in Torment 16 with a GoD DH, I’m probably not going to do much damage.
I couldn’t say, offhand. It’s been too long and I wasn’t a D2 build expert anyway.
Maybe there is. I’m just not sure it’s worth it.
I wouldn’t be opposed to bonus drops awarded based on factors like that, but that does technically change the drop rates and while I wouldn’t mind a slight increase there are some people that would.
Hey, speak for yourself.
Have you heard the saying “negative publicity is better than no publicity”? Many of us would prefer the “negative” aspects of FFA loot over the dryness of playing together with personal-loot. Some people may enjoy the thrill of it, the edge or brings, if you will. Anyway, I don’t think it’s that simple to define a positive interaction…In many games people are competing.
Also, you guys should stop making FFA sound so terrible, because myself and many others don’t remember it that way. D2 is a much beloved game…for all that it was. People make it sound so bad that even I start to become skeptical myself, then I go “Let me think back to MY experience… nope, not as bad as they make it sound”. I can remember my worst experiences in D2. It wasn’t being hostiled or having loot stolen, I don’t even remember having loot stolen… to be honest. It was getting scammed (got scammed bad once, I was young and naïve), being afraid of buying duped gear to have it disappear, being impatient to trade my gear and making bad trades, being POPPED, which happened at least once to me, leaving loot I need to transfer in random games to have them end, etc. Diablo 2 was never fair. Did you ever PVP/PK? No balance. Man, I loved it though. Maybe that is what made it great.
True; however, D2R represents an oppportunity to make optional changes that remedies “negatives” in the original. I want to stress the optional part (you play either FFA only or personal loot only games. If you like FFA, nothing changees for you). Alot of people want to keep D2R FFA loot only. Alot of people want to add a personal loot option. If the reddit poll is representative, at least a 1/3 are in each camp where more want personal loot options. If you like competition and the “negatives” of FFA loot, you still play games with only FFA loot.
D2 was my favorite game at that time. I was not young when it released. I hade 20 years of playing video games at home by that time (Pong, then original atari, and then PC games and then console games). At that time, many of us complained about FFA loot as well as other aspects of the original. Time moves on. It has been 20 years. It is not a bad thing to incorporate optional changes based on modern preferences and technological advances.
I think games are better with balance. If players are at a competitive disadvantage in relation to each other, it does remove some of the joy to me.
But isnt the DH in your example faster than the wizard? Or do you think that the dh being quicker at groups and the wiz being quicker at bosses (or vice versa) evens out in the end?
Yes, it is hard. I found my own counterexamples now.
Service Player game with sorx participant. Sorx deals 75% dmg to boss, service player deals 25%. Sorx gets 75% dmg. Is it justified, because she saved the service player time or not?
Another counter example: Lower resist necro with sorx.
Without the necro, the sorx deals ~100 dmg and 0 dmg to immunes. With the necro she deals ~200 dmg and 100 dmg to immunes. The necro plays curse only. So should the sorx get 100% of the loot or the necro get 50% or some other ratio?
Same with auras from paladin, shouts from barb, spirits from druid, etc.
So yes, you are right, it is alot harder to measure participation than just using the damage dealt.
But that would leave us with plain 1/8 split (including activity check). Which might also have its disadvantages.
There have been drops where i have not even seen an item on the screen:
diablo loses last hp, lag, floor is cleaned spotless, some player drops an el rune
So you are saying this never happened to you? Lucky you.
Close this topic please, I’m getting sick of all these same threads all over again.
Faster, yes, but not necessarily capable of dealing more damage, which was the criterion you wanted to go by. It’s just that under certain circumstances the Wizard might not be able to deal the damage.
I’d take that, though.
Nobody is forcing you to read any thread. Stop clicking on the ones you don’t want to read.
This is a forum, you will find every kind of stuff below. It’s not easy to not read what people make as a thread. Even if you do not click on a thread, you still see what is written.
#close topic
If merely seeing a thread title on the front page bothers you then you’re screwed, dude. You’ve got 2 choices: Get over it or stop visiting forums.
bound to account items are the worst thing to ever happen to a video game. all it does is make the game not let u trade anything. then items have no value and the game has no end game currency based of items or runes. if the game doesnt have PUBLIC loot it will change the game to much. and it will also ruin it. one of the only reasons the game has lasted 20 years is the games end game item currency system. if blizzard wants to control all 3rd party items being sold. then maybe blizzard should DO THAT??? makes sense IMO. in diablo 3 they tried so hard to understand this and made the RMAH the worst thing ever. this time just control all items if u wanna have a perfect BOTD rune word then pay blizzard 20$ for it
problem solved. just learn from diablo 2 LoD 20 years STRONG. and still going. make diablo 4 the world of diablo we want and deserve. thank you blizzard.
Since personal loot does not mean account bound, I do not know why you bring this up.
As an example, D3 has been instanced/personal loot throughout its history. In D3 early days, items were tradeable and there was even an auction house. Later and currently, trading was restricted to players in your party when the item dropped.
Since we are asking for optional personal loot at either game or character creation, if you want FFA loot nothing will change for you as you will only play multiplayer games with FFA loot.
Personal loot =/= account bound. We are not asking to remove trading from the game.
You can have trading wiithout a auction house. We are not asking for an auction house.
Part of the reasons that the same things get said repeatedly is to clarify that personal loot does not mean account bound or 8x total drops. To date, I bet the over/under for these two misperceptions are in the hundreds. Once this is remedied, many are far more favorable to optional personal loot. Also, some incorrectly claim that we want personal loot to replace FFA loot which again is inaccurate as we want both as options. Some claim that no one wants personal loot options, and then we show them the data from the reddit survey that demonstrates otherwise. Once the facts are recognized and accepted then it is much easier to discuss merits and pros/cons.
Exactly.
It’s not as if we were not trying to come up with our own Cons. Actually, i am a bit distraught after coming up with several cons on my own suggestion myself. 
But that’s what a nice debate should have. A back and fourth and a constructive direction.
Literally everytime somebody opens the door of this thread, he says the exact words that microRNA has just listed. They are Cons that maybe count as opinions but not as a counter argument on a conceptual level. It would be nice to have some more of those.
Imagine you were the meanest cheater in the world. How would you abuse the pLoot? Let’s see if you can destroy our suggestion.
(just keep these points in mind:
I would have loved to keep the activity check on that list, but after the recent brianstorm, i dont know what a fair way to detect activity would be.
People should just click faster if they want loot. SMH.
D2R will have global servers (and have gotten rid of regions).
Hypothetically speaking:
My game latency is 50 msec, since I live close to the host server. Your latency is 200 msec. You click faster than me by 50 msec. With everything else being equal who gets the loot?
Well, if this is anything like WoW where I get sub-40 MS thanks to fiber internet and being close to the server… good luck on you clicking fast enough to beat me.
Good thing nobody is asking for BoA items, then, isn’t it?