My thoughts about personal vs shared loot

FFA loot killed Diablo 2 stop kidding your selves! This debate goes back to the very begging of this game! For years people wanted there own loot because it caused so much toxicity and even Davis Brevik said he wished he could have had that in the game but it was 2000ish and coding was hard enough! The people who wanted ffa loot won! This 60K player base world wide yayy then and the millions got royalties screwed l!! it was the wrong choice then like it is now! We would have gotten a remaster plus an expansion or two of everyone got loot instead of FFA! The same thing will happen and history will repeat! We only had ffa loot due to the software and programming of the time it’s kinda sad how this game will maybe last a week or two before people go yep thst was fun time for refund

No want ploot for da game

LMAO what? Killed Diablo 2? This is honestly comment of the year :rofl:

You talk about FFA loot as its end of the world. I dont remember people on bn crying about it so much when I was there, I guess times change and kids want everything easy these days.

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personal loot should work exactly like diablo 3, whats on the floor is mine not yours. Im not sure what positive emotional moment anyone has from diablo 2, losing every good drop to pickit, being punished for playing the game while everyone else leeches because participating might make them miss a valuable drop? Being forced to play a high mobility class to ensure you have a shot at grabbing loot, it was not a core mechanic of diablo 2, it was a forced mechanic due to limitations of 1999. The developers didnt even want it. I played for 8 years, tens of thousands of hours, and every character i ever built was 99% traded for gear, i rarely if ever found a piece that I needed, thats a poorly balanced system. Drop rates need to go way up, to a point where there is a reasonable chance to hunt for an item you want, trading should be a second path to gear, not the only.

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That’s nearly 7 hours a day, on average. At least. Might be exaggerating slightly :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: but yes…we all played a little too much probably.

they just dont want to have to compete with cheaters/leechers/cheese mobility characters just to have a shot at getting drops. Can we stop pretending d2 was perfect, it failed in 1999, lets not pretend it was a shining example of success.

Personal loot has already been done in the Diablo franchise (D3). Everything is Bind on Account. There’s no community visibility and engagement like in D2 because of that (nevermind the auto-matching system for joining/creating games). Personal loot has no place in D2, and yes it’s frustrating to feel like “you never get to snatch anything because something something etc.”. Buuuuuut THAT’S a huge defining chcaracteristic of Diablo. Controlling loot drops was done with WoW. Aside from wiping, the need for guild structured raids exists because of shared loot. Can you imagine if everyone got their own personal full raid drop in WoW? Dead economy, dead community. Making a multiplayer game that rewards solo-play as equally as group play is a waste of time and totally counterproductive.

D2’s drop rates are fine as is (YES, high runes are omg rare and yes, most elite set/uniques that are necessary are rare), but everyone being able to farm up all their own crap whether grouped or solo like in D3 will kill D2:R. Perhaps not instantaneously, but it’ll certainly relegate the appeal of D2 to the likes of some old retro novelty found in 1980’s era arcades.

[south park reference]
"Hey D2:R is here! :smiley: …aaaaand it’s gone. :"

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Absolutely correct. It likely does mean that a potential change is under consideration.

Agree with both of you. I’m not xenephobic toward differing opinions that I disagree with to whatever degree, and it’s important to have everyone inclined to share their opinion and idea be voiced. I would hate to see only my ideas get respected, and then see the game fail because my good idea was crap. The only way to really get a feel for how something MIGHT pan out is to consider how many agree/disagree with this or that. Popular opinion isn’t always the sure bet, either. Not satisfying a 75% of players desires on a certain thing could end up shocking them all with how great the game is by NOT giving into their desired design requests.

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“Back in my day we didn’t have technology for personal loot so if someone stole your item that was the end of it. It sucked for me and now it has to suck for all of you because #nochanges”

Honestly just create a personal loot method that works and make it an option. We have the tech to give both players that want things the same old and players that don’t want archaeic systems what they want. Just do both

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Get off my lawn, and stop mocking the glorious legacy of the D2 days of yore. puckers mouth, shakes fist at you with one hand while steadying on a wooden cane in the other :wink:

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Most of the people wanting things such as instanced loot, rebalanced skills, immunity designs looked at, etc HAVE played the game already, and have been looking at most of these changes since 2003/2004. Only the ones about stacking items, charm inventories, loot filters etc have come from the mods or D3, and even then, most of those people have already played the game.

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This is going to be going on even when the game is released…

It’s a little ridiculous to me…people in the D3 forums have asked for FFA loot for years. Now people want personal-loot in … D2. Let it be. There is no right side or wrong side as far as which is “better” or more “fun”. Your guys’ opinion is not the same as mine and probably most people, for that matter. It’s pointless to try to point out “pros” and “cons”. Personal-loot simply isn’t a thing in D2 and personal-loot isn’t an objectively “better” replacement. I continuously see people trying to make it seem otherwise though.

What it’s come down to and what I’m seeing the discussion … evolve into is that people at least want the option of personal loot (as if it’s just some minor little thing) and those of us that want loot to remain the same are preventing that, somehow. It’s an…odd stance to have, if you as me; perhaps fitting for the times. Everybody wants all these “little changes”, well, all these “little changes” will add up and fundamentally change the D2 experience. You can’t always have everything tailored to your, um… wants, in this case. Unless you can present something that is objectively better and/or that an overwhelming majority agree with I don’t think change is warranted. It also seems fairly reasonable to keep personal-loot in D3 and FFA loot in D2.

I’d be pretty shocked if Blizzard made a change on this one. With that said, I really need to stop giving these topics any more attention :pensive:

I am a regular on the D3 forums for a long time. I can not recall thee being much support or threads asking for FFA loot in D3. Can you use the forum search function and pull up some of those supposed requests? If they exist, there are few and far between.

Since there is no right answer and it is a matter of preference where more respondents in the reddit poll preferred personal loot options (49%)) to FFA only (395%), Blizzard should offer both options and be doe with it.

I would be less surprising now that Blizzard has specifically asked the players interest in having personal loot instead of FFA loot at D2R launch.

Pretty sure the game creator wishes he could have added personal loot but due to software issues in 2000 and yes the mass exodus was due to ffa loot it was everywhere back then your clearly lying hard!!! Your mad because you know deep down this killed your game

Being forced to FFA loot was the best disappointment that could have ever happened then. If it wasn’t for FFA, D2 would have died before Blizzard North was even closed. FFA loot didn’t kill D2. TPPK, Farcast and Pickit (all hacks) did. Maphack is cheaty-faced and proliferated like forest fire in a drought and was one of the most targeted hacks by Blizzard as well as the most controversial among community discussions, but the silent creeping death was the 3 I already mentioned. The D2 loot system is rock solid. :wink:

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There definitely are though

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That entire post wasn’t directed at you, specifically, by the way… just the first tid-bit. Thought it might come off like that.

Maybe not outright ask, but I’m 100% sure when I was visiting the forums people frequently made comparisons to D2 often citing things like PVP, trading, and FFA loot being reasons the game was better to them. Sometimes developers don’t need people specifically asking for changes, complaints can get that job done as well.

Looks like 36% say “yes” and 39% say “no”. You can easily see the 13% as “yes”, but it’s a huge possibility Blizzard wouldn’t make such a trade-off, so you can see that as “no” just as easily. I mean, I might even say “yes” to personal-loot with some extreme caveats. And I’m glad you brought that up. Those polls don’t necessarily prove anything. And actually I think they are pretty terrible sometimes. People literally just said “yes” to almost everything, obviously without much thought about how it will affect the game/balance. It’s apparent that whatever sounded “nice” was an immediate “yes” for many pollees. I think people do this in general. The mere fact that so many other things were overwhelmingly “yes” compared to FFA vs Personal-loot, I think says a lot, on a poll with a bunch of “yes” men… and of course any random people who haven’t played the game.

Can you show me where they said this? Blizzard is always open to input/feedback, I mean, they can’t really say they aren’t without backlash. I’ve visited the WoW forums for… over a decade on and off and Blizzard does follow player feedback for sure. Still, changing loot is a big one. Probably the most divisive Diablo topic. Any changes will have big ramifications, even a mere option for personal-loot. How would that work? Technically they could probably allow people with different loot options to play together, but more than likely people would then just choose personal-loot and it’ll be less of an option (people will debate this but it’s simply the reality) or it’d be different games/server, and the player-base will be further divided. I also guess most people would just choose personal-loot either way knowing that other people have it “easier”. Once again, people will disagree but this is the truth. It’s like the flying vs anti-flying folk on WoW; the people who want flying tell the people against flying mounts just not to use them which is totally unrealistic. Not many people will intentionally handicap themselves. You guys may be thinking “not our problem”, but it’s really not that simple. I’m obviously for FFA loot and to be 100% honest with you guys, and I am being honest, if there is a loot option and personal-loot is better/more advantageous then I’ll have to pick personal-loot. It is a loot-hunt game, after all. I just don’t see it, not without fundamentally changing the game somehow. I really don’t want D2 to feel like what D3 is to me.

Just my two cents.

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See the link below that has screenshots of Blizzard survey sent out in the past week. Check screenshot #6 in particular. Also 7 and 8 are interesting.

Screenshot of Blizzard Survey - Diablo II: Resurrected / General Discussion - Diablo 3 Forums

Wow, you’re right. Thanks for the link…very interesting. I was really under the impression this would be a mostly strict remake with some possible QoL changes (like shared stash). I’m actually open to changes, just taking a hard line on loot.