Let’s talk about ARPGs and a core problem in those without infinite* scaling. That’s the grand majority of them. We’re going to call it the 90% problem for ease but it has other references like the Infinity +1 Sword trope. We shall lay it out like this:
McPlayer is trying to perfect their character and they have the best gear they can get without being pinnacle gear. According to their spreadsheets they have 90% efficiency. McPlayer has been playing for 40 hours and has achieved this state, but what McPlayer doesn’t internalize is that the difficulty between the 90% state and the 100% perfected state is exponential in scale. They cannot conceptualize this. They “know” this through some form of consideration and logic but it doesn’t click and thus the emotional connection to the quest goes sour.
McPlayer is upset that 400 hours have passed since that 90% mark and they have achieved perhaps an increase of .1%, they can’t seem to upgrade their gear any further for their goals because the gear that would be the upgrade is incredibly rare in alignments. This is because at the 90% efficiency mark less than 1% of the gear will align to be a better fit no matter how much stuff drops.
This creates a problem for McPlayer who feels that they can’t progress any further (which is correct, by definition it’s so rare and hard to do so that it is effectively pointless) but also is playing the game to progress further so nothing is good because nothing fits their build even if the loot itself is not objectively bad. The drop tables fundamentally go to zero for them and nothing good ever drops even if the good stuff drops all the time; they could be inundated with legendaries (or whatever the best drop class is in said game) and feel like nothing is dropping at all.
So this occurs very quickly in D4, and slower in other games of the genre, but it always occurs. This is actually the end of the game, or character, or whatever because other than the deterministic elements there’s just nothing you can do about it and it becomes a matter of winning the lottery if you’re playing alone. You do have better odds of being struck by lightning than going from even 95% to 96% efficiency. The point of this is two fold:
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You’re not crazy when you say that the loot is no longer good. It isn’t. You can’t do better. After the 90% mark you have to go to the market to leverage the drops of the other players to progress with any meaningful amount of speed. So the emotional reaction that things suck is right, it does, but it does in all games of this type and it always happens; there’s not really a way to get around it and once you finish, you finish, but in D4 in particular you finish so quickly it’s not satisfying. Pun intended.
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You’re objectively wrong about the drop rates. They do not need to be higher. The odds that something you want happens should not be mistaken for the odds that something in general should happen. I think this is an emotional problem that cannot be fixed with a technical approach; in theory, no matter the game, you will get bored of the chase once you get a certain point and randomization feels like it makes it illusive.
I do think that D4 does something strange though in this regard. Not only is it quick to hit the 90% mark, which is unhealthy really because it’s far less than 40 hours, about 10 if you skip the campaign and are being lackadaisical, and it is an extremely streamlined game, but there’s also this weird phenomenon that I can’t quit understand: the pools are nice and tidy really; what I mean by this is the confusing presentation of “always good gear”, or the ability to get something that almost always helps you get to that 90% mark.
In other games for instance you might get gauntlets that have high armor but none of the affixes you want because the pool is 60 large and the odds of those aligning is low and many are niche or extremely situationally sensitive. D4 cut all of those out. You have a pool of 20 for your gauntlets let’s say, and of those 14 will improve any damage you do whether it be through increasing damage directly, giving crit chance, crit damage, etc. and of those 20 you get to roll 3 and none of them are duplicates so you’re really cutting out a lot of the potential fluff very, very quickly.
I’ve never seen it before in any other games and it’s a great lesson for the future developers in the genre: DO NOT DO THIS! If every drop is incrementally better up until the threshold where nothing is incrementally better the player never realizes the journey from 0 to 90 which means that they only experience the 90 to 100 which feels like a total slog. Now of course please disagree with me but I think that is technically bad game design. I think the major failure of D4 is that it erases an important part of the emotional vestment in the genre; you can’t fix this with loot, or end game activities, or anything else because as a technical flaw even if they did roll back to a point where they had more affixes they’ve kind of dug the grave.
Anyway, point is, the 90% problem will always exist so when complain about it, I get it, but it’s not something that can be fixed through technical application. You cannot get rid of it in any game. You can merely prolong the inevitable. The journey from 0 to 90 is what makes most finite ARPGs work and “fun” but after 90 they all stall out and throwing a bone at the system through maps or portals or end-game X or Y will just be a matter of personal flavor versus a technical solution to the problem.
*Infinite scaling ARPGs exist and they basically increase the numbers as you go down and through the dungeon as far as you can both on acquirable gear and the monster stats. These games are immune to this effect because, as you figured by now, you can always add +1 to a stat in those games and the monsters never quit getting stronger. The two, finite and infinite, are typically separate games; end-game activities don’t exist in infinite dungeons though so it’s not like “maps” or whatever after the campaign as the dungeon’s nature of being infinite simply is the campaign.
