If Significant Respec Costs Existed in D3

[Skelos-2150]

@MicroRNA-1507

Free respecs and appropriate progression

Which is the same as free respecs with loot penalty equating progression X. Those who don’t free respec have better drop rates again equating progression X.

X should be then tuned in such a way to result in highest player’s participation. This is achieved by creating a satisfying MTBU curve for the majority of players keeping them active throughout the Season.

@Skelos-2150

I’ll quote a guy from reddit touching on this topic regarding to D3:
In this game, there's a metric I like to refer to as Mean Time Between Upgrades, or MTBU. When you first hit 70, your MTBU is pretty low, every single legendary is an upgrade, but legendaries don't drop all that often. It stays pretty steady at that low rate for quite awhile: fewer legendaries you get are upgrades, but your difficulty is higher so you're getting more legendaries. Eventually, your MTBU starts to increase: you're getting even more legendaries, but you have all the peices for your build, so you're waiting on ancients or better rolls. The important part is next: each person has a different MTBU threshold where they're no longer engaged enough to continue playing in the same loop. When players meet their MTBU threshold, they will either change builds, change roles, change classes, or change games entirely.

The trick is to make the game engaging enough and tweak that stat so that players, on average, stay long enough before reaching their MTBU threshold to feel satisfied, so they leave the game with a 'ok that was fun' instead of a 'well that was a waste of time'. Because of course it was a waste of time, the whole thing is just a big slot machine feeding endorphines into your brain. And it's awesome.

The MTBU threshold is reached way later in PoE than in D3 resulting in far greater player engagement.

Theoretically, the optimal scenario would be the aRPG game to offer the regular player the ability to progress his character for 90% of the Seasonal time. In the last 10% of Season, when the player’s MTBU is very high and the grind is practically pointless, the player should be able to free respec in order to experiment with stuff and experience new gameplay, as well as to participate in the competition.

The above principle applied to D3 would render the optimal duration of D3 Seasons to be no more than a month. The logical follow-up is that you have to have longer character progression in D4 in order to have longer Seasons with optimal player engagement.