Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
Nintendo ID: Incindium
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Idx86Long days and pleasant nights.Registered Userregular
All I know is that having 550% would be positively mystifying. I wonder how effectively you could farm with that level MF.
2008, 2012, 2014 D&D "Rare With No Sauce" League Fantasy Football Champion!
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
Ok, fair enough. I can't think of a lot of other very fair ways to get item sinks into the game, aside from maybe some system of destroying items to turn them into materials for short term buff consumables. At least not off the top of my head in 5 minutes.
Point stands, game needs gear sinks. People running around with massive hundreds of % MF and improved drops, the market will eventually bloat.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
Ok, fair enough. I can't think of a lot of other very fair ways to get item sinks into the game, aside from maybe some system of destroying items to turn them into materials for short term buff consumables. At least not off the top of my head in 5 minutes.
Point stands, game needs gear sinks. People running around with massive hundreds of % MF and improved drops, the market will eventually bloat.
What bad things do you see happening when the market bloats? People start collecting multiple sets of awesome gear instead of just the one, and playing on MP10 instead of MP8? I don't really see how it's a problem for a game like this.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
Ok, fair enough. I can't think of a lot of other very fair ways to get item sinks into the game, aside from maybe some system of destroying items to turn them into materials for short term buff consumables. At least not off the top of my head in 5 minutes.
Point stands, game needs gear sinks. People running around with massive hundreds of % MF and improved drops, the market will eventually bloat.
What bad things do you see happening when the market bloats? People start collecting multiple sets of awesome gear instead of just the one, and playing on MP10 instead of MP8? I don't really see how it's a problem for a game like this.
99% of gear goes for 16% over vendor price and 1% of gear commands millions upon millions of gold.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
Ok, fair enough. I can't think of a lot of other very fair ways to get item sinks into the game, aside from maybe some system of destroying items to turn them into materials for short term buff consumables. At least not off the top of my head in 5 minutes.
Point stands, game needs gear sinks. People running around with massive hundreds of % MF and improved drops, the market will eventually bloat.
What bad things do you see happening when the market bloats? People start collecting multiple sets of awesome gear instead of just the one, and playing on MP10 instead of MP8? I don't really see how it's a problem for a game like this.
99% of gear goes for 16% over vendor price and 1% of gear commands millions upon millions of gold.
Well obviously there has to be a gradient between those two, but yeah, pretty much. I just don't think that's a bad thing - what I'm seeing is more build variety and a lower barrier of entry. For people who want the game to be easy, it's easy(farming Inferno at MP1 is already no big deal). If they want it to be hard, MP10 is designed to demand statistical perfection so it won't ever be trivial. For people who really feel strongly about item scarcity, there's always Hardcore which has a built in gear sink.
It's true that it will become increasingly difficult to find gear that's worth auctioning, but conversely that means the gold drops you find are more valuable and you can buy stuff with them fairly easily.
Lower barrier of entry is well and good, but you will also reach a point where there is NO barrier of entry and you can gear yourself to the 98th percentile for chump change. Moments after you hit 60, you can take a few k gold to the AH and be decked out, and start grinding through the new and improved yet still useless drops hoping for that one in a million drop that will sell for 100 million.
I'd just like to make sure some scale of value is retained. Obviously this is a fatalistic view of things and it would take some time for the economy to devolve to this point, but it's possible to see everyone buying near perfectly tuned rares for a pittance just so they can farm for skorns the second they hit 60. I just don't want it to get to that point, and a solid item sink would help keep some value in mid tier gear.
It's true that it will become increasingly difficult to find gear that's worth auctioning, but conversely that means the gold drops you find are more valuable and you can buy stuff with them fairly easily.
But Diablo isn't supposed to be about farming gold.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
Ok, fair enough. I can't think of a lot of other very fair ways to get item sinks into the game, aside from maybe some system of destroying items to turn them into materials for short term buff consumables. At least not off the top of my head in 5 minutes.
Point stands, game needs gear sinks. People running around with massive hundreds of % MF and improved drops, the market will eventually bloat.
What bad things do you see happening when the market bloats? People start collecting multiple sets of awesome gear instead of just the one, and playing on MP10 instead of MP8? I don't really see how it's a problem for a game like this.
99% of gear goes for 16% over vendor price and 1% of gear commands millions upon millions of gold.
Well obviously there has to be a gradient between those two, but yeah, pretty much. I just don't think that's a bad thing - what I'm seeing is more build variety and a lower barrier of entry. For people who want the game to be easy, it's easy(farming Inferno at MP1 is already no big deal). If they want it to be hard, MP10 is designed to demand statistical perfection so it won't ever be trivial. For people who really feel strongly about item scarcity, there's always Hardcore which has a built in gear sink.
It's true that it will become increasingly difficult to find gear that's worth auctioning, but conversely that means the gold drops you find are more valuable and you can buy stuff with them fairly easily.
You've made some excellent points. And I agree completely with your outlook for the game. However, I disagree on a few things:
First, if the economy does become bloated to the point where it makes more sense to farm gold than gear, I do not believe that is a healthy state for the game. The game is about farming items. If farming items is no longer as profitable as simply farming gold, I think interest in the game will decline. Although, I don't think Blizzard will let it get to this point.
Second, there's not much benefit to farming multiple sets of gear. The stats are rather vertical in this game, which diminishes the impact that gear diversity could have in generating different builds. If Blizzard were to add some additional gear affixes targeting certain types of damage or skill sets, I could see this point becoming valid.
Lastly, Monster Power doesn't affect the difficulty as much as it afffects the time investment of killing a particular enemy. By the game's very nature, once you have stablized an encounter, increasing the time by a factor of 10 or 20 doesn't make the game that much more challenging, it just slows down its overall pace.
Also, @_J_ Longterm, the biggest problem I see is the gear floor rising to the point where farming becomes impractical. I'm not sure of what a timeline for that would look like, but it's probably not wrong to assume that eventually the gear will saturate the market to the point where the amount of time it takes to find an item worth selling is so large that farming is no longer worthwhile.
Persons will continue to farm gear so long as there is better gear to be obtained. I doubt that the AH will ever have 300+ perfect Andariel's Visages listed. Saturation will happen with low and middle range gear. I doubt it will happen at the best-in-slot level.
Another thing to take into account is the frequency with which Blizzard adds new items to the game. If we get new item tiers every six months that can reset the gear saturation levels, so to speak. Look what happened when we got new legendaries. And factor in people's predictions about what will happen when we get the new monster level gear.
The game, itself, does not need a gear sink so long as player's preferences can function as a gear sink. Item-X doesn't need to be removed from the game if Blizzard removes player's desires for Item-X.
The game, itself, does not need a gear sink so long as player's preferences can function as a gear sink. Item-X doesn't need to be removed from the game if Blizzard removes player's desires for Item-X.
That will just increase the proliferation of items viewed as shit drops, something that already rubs people the wrong way.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
One of the problems with D2 was that persons could not unsocket gems / runes. Diablo 3 fixed that problem by allowing persons to unsocket gems.
I'm not sure why persons would want the gem / item to be destroyed. You spend $20 on a ruby and $60 on a helm. Who would want to lose either the gem or the helm in the process of unsocketing?
There's no need to have gear sinks in the game, or to destroy gems / items after they are used. There also isn't a need to make items BoE.
If you want that shit then go play WoW.
What, exactly, is the problem with the current ability to unsocket equipment? I cannot discern an actual problem. I buy one ruby and continue to move that ruby to new helms as I acquire them.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
One of the problems with D2 was that persons could not unsocket gems / runes. Diablo 3 fixed that problem by allowing persons to unsocket gems.
I'm not sure why persons would want the gem / item to be destroyed. You spend $20 on a ruby and $60 on a helm. Who would want to lose either the gem or the helm in the process of unsocketing?
There's no need to have gear sinks in the game, or to destroy gems / items after they are used. There also isn't a need to make items BoE.
If you want that shit then go play WoW.
What, exactly, is the problem with the current ability to unsocket equipment? I cannot discern an actual problem. I buy one ruby and continue to move that ruby to new helms as I acquire them.
Whence the problem?
Bah, I forgot to account for the RMAH. You win this round, _J_.
Finally got a chance to try out PTR and I stand corrected @Zek the difficulty does become the same across all acts with monster power on. I did some runs in act2 and act3 at various MP levels and logged my xp gains. By far the most efficient method turned out to be buttraping the cake-easy MP 0 in act3 at almost 35m/hr (without item ID). The higher the MP the slower the xp, at MP 5 I stopped logging because it turned into a slog.
First, if the economy does become bloated to the point where it makes more sense to farm gold than gear, I do not believe that is a healthy state for the game. The game is about farming items. If farming items is no longer as profitable as simply farming gold, I think interest in the game will decline. Although, I don't think Blizzard will let it get to this point.
Your strong bifurcation between "farming items" and "farming gold" is nonsense. The two farming methods are the same: kill mobs. As far as I can tell there is no way to only farm items, or only farm gold.
A player can intend to only acquire gold but the monsters still drop items.
So, I'm not sure what you're talking about. As long as players still need to acquire something they will continue to farm. Farming involves killing mobs. So...they'll keep doing shit.
I mean, unless I've missed something. Is there a mob-farming method by which persons only acquire gold, or only acquire items?
The game, itself, does not need a gear sink so long as player's preferences can function as a gear sink. Item-X doesn't need to be removed from the game if Blizzard removes player's desires for Item-X.
That will just increase the proliferation of items viewed as shit drops, something that already rubs people the wrong way.
Well, they can get over that.
Not every drop can be exceptional, given what "exceptional" means.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
One of the problems with D2 was that persons could not unsocket gems / runes. Diablo 3 fixed that problem by allowing persons to unsocket gems.
I'm not sure why persons would want the gem / item to be destroyed. You spend $20 on a ruby and $60 on a helm. Who would want to lose either the gem or the helm in the process of unsocketing?
There's no need to have gear sinks in the game, or to destroy gems / items after they are used. There also isn't a need to make items BoE.
If you want that shit then go play WoW.
What, exactly, is the problem with the current ability to unsocket equipment? I cannot discern an actual problem. I buy one ruby and continue to move that ruby to new helms as I acquire them.
Whence the problem?
Bah, I forgot to account for the RMAH. You win this round, _J_.
Yeah. Blizzard would be fucked if they structured the game to destroy items that persons bought for $250.
The game, itself, does not need a gear sink so long as player's preferences can function as a gear sink. Item-X doesn't need to be removed from the game if Blizzard removes player's desires for Item-X.
That will just increase the proliferation of items viewed as shit drops, something that already rubs people the wrong way.
Well, they can get over that.
Not every drop can be exceptional, given what "exceptional" means.
Of course not every drop can be but how do you suspect blizard would remove desire for item-x and redirect desire to item-y? I'm guessing higher affix caps, which puts an ever increasing amount of items wearable at level 60 in an "undesirable" category of lower affixes, and a smaller and smaller percent of items in a "desirable" category of the highest affixes.
If the level cap remains the same, the ratio of "good" items to "bad" items would continue to get worse and worse to the point where you could farm for days or weeks before you see an item worth selling. That sounds stupid and boring. It would benefit the game for SOME of the crap that nobody fucking wants in any way whatsoever to come out of circulation, or at least to stop dropping.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
Ok, fair enough. I can't think of a lot of other very fair ways to get item sinks into the game, aside from maybe some system of destroying items to turn them into materials for short term buff consumables. At least not off the top of my head in 5 minutes.
Point stands, game needs gear sinks. People running around with massive hundreds of % MF and improved drops, the market will eventually bloat.
What bad things do you see happening when the market bloats? People start collecting multiple sets of awesome gear instead of just the one, and playing on MP10 instead of MP8? I don't really see how it's a problem for a game like this.
99% of gear goes for 16% over vendor price and 1% of gear commands millions upon millions of gold.
Well obviously there has to be a gradient between those two, but yeah, pretty much. I just don't think that's a bad thing - what I'm seeing is more build variety and a lower barrier of entry. For people who want the game to be easy, it's easy(farming Inferno at MP1 is already no big deal). If they want it to be hard, MP10 is designed to demand statistical perfection so it won't ever be trivial. For people who really feel strongly about item scarcity, there's always Hardcore which has a built in gear sink.
It's true that it will become increasingly difficult to find gear that's worth auctioning, but conversely that means the gold drops you find are more valuable and you can buy stuff with them fairly easily.
You've made some excellent points. And I agree completely with your outlook for the game. However, I disagree on a few things:
First, if the economy does become bloated to the point where it makes more sense to farm gold than gear, I do not believe that is a healthy state for the game. The game is about farming items. If farming items is no longer as profitable as simply farming gold, I think interest in the game will decline. Although, I don't think Blizzard will let it get to this point.
Second, there's not much benefit to farming multiple sets of gear. The stats are rather vertical in this game, which diminishes the impact that gear diversity could have in generating different builds. If Blizzard were to add some additional gear affixes targeting certain types of damage or skill sets, I could see this point becoming valid.
Lastly, Monster Power doesn't affect the difficulty as much as it afffects the time investment of killing a particular enemy. By the game's very nature, once you have stablized an encounter, increasing the time by a factor of 10 or 20 doesn't make the game that much more challenging, it just slows down its overall pace.
- I agree that farming gold isn't very glamorous, it's definitely preferable to be more interested in the items. I think though that an inherent property of this type of game is the notion of diminishing returns. Singleplayer Diablo with no AH has the same problem: the better your gear gets the fewer and further apart your upgrades become. The AH expands this to a global scale but the principle is the same, as the economy itself progresses in a similar way. The main difference is that people joining in late can skip to a fairly late phase of progression and immediately get both the benefits and the drawbacks. On one hand I think that's unfortunate, but I also think it's good that people can get caught up to the current "typical" level of progression their friends(and PvP) are at without playing for months.
- I definitely agree Blizzard needs to add more interesting affixes one way or another. If nothing else though you can gear up all 5 classes and get a handful of interesting legendaries for each(like the throwing barb spear, etc).
- MP does increase damage to some extent I believe, but stabilizing the encounter is most of what difficulty is in Diablo. At lower difficulties you can just gear up and kill shit faster than it can kill you. Higher difficulty is when that doesn't work anymore and you need a solid tactic that's well executed, which can be very challenging with all the different affixes there are. Sure you can play a facetank Monk/Barb, but having any DPS like that is definitely a 1% gear accomplishment.
The main difference is that people joining in late can skip to a fairly late phase of progression and immediately get both the benefits and the drawbacks. On one hand I think that's unfortunate, but I also think it's good that people can get caught up to the current "typical" level of progression their friends(and PvP) are at without playing for months.
In a perfect world, the player would police their own rate of advancement via the auction house and decide if and when they wanted/needed a boost or if they wanted to slog it out themselves, amish style. To that end, making inferno more accessable but adding the MP option is a great benefit.
The problem is the internet, rather than being a perfect world, is a wasteland of "gimme-mine" grabassery and the vast majority of players are likely going to ding 60, load up at the auction house, hardly ever see any gear they can sell or use, decide that they're bored and this game sucks, and quit playing.
Also, @_J_ Longterm, the biggest problem I see is the gear floor rising to the point where farming becomes impractical. I'm not sure of what a timeline for that would look like, but it's probably not wrong to assume that eventually the gear will saturate the market to the point where the amount of time it takes to find an item worth selling is so large that farming is no longer worthwhile.
Persons will continue to farm gear so long as there is better gear to be obtained. I doubt that the AH will ever have 300+ perfect Andariel's Visages listed. Saturation will happen with low and middle range gear. I doubt it will happen at the best-in-slot level.
Another thing to take into account is the frequency with which Blizzard adds new items to the game. If we get new item tiers every six months that can reset the gear saturation levels, so to speak. Look what happened when we got new legendaries. And factor in people's predictions about what will happen when we get the new monster level gear.
The game, itself, does not need a gear sink so long as player's preferences can function as a gear sink. Item-X doesn't need to be removed from the game if Blizzard removes player's desires for Item-X.
That is one possible solution, and one which has proven to work for other games in the past. This would be a perfectly reasonable way of preventing item saturation, without involving gear sinks. Ladder season would be another. Allowing you to convert high-end items into a useable currency or crafting material of some kind that could augment already strong gear would be another option. The solutions are there, and I don't honestly think that Blizzard would let the game deteriorate to an end-state where high end items are largely worthless.
I think what would be really cool is if there was some sort of value-determining algorithm for gear that was used for crafting and salvaging. So the most popular affixes(primary stats, all resist, crit) are recognized as being more valuable, and if you salvage an item you get materials based on that value. And then in turn you could hand-craft items of similar value using that number of mats. That would both fix crafting and allow you to completely avoid the AH without wasting valuable items.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Your strong bifurcation between "farming items" and "farming gold" is nonsense. The two farming methods are the same: kill mobs. As far as I can tell there is no way to only farm items, or only farm gold.
A player can intend to only acquire gold but the monsters still drop items.
So, I'm not sure what you're talking about. As long as players still need to acquire something they will continue to farm. Farming involves killing mobs. So...they'll keep doing shit.
I mean, unless I've missed something. Is there a mob-farming method by which persons only acquire gold, or only acquire items?
@_J_, I think at some point you have to admit that your brain just doesn't work the same as most other people's... :P We all agree with you in that money and goods are interchangeable, and that theoretically, they should be equivalent in value. The problem is that psychologically, this just isn't true. Particularly when we talk about the mechanics of the game, which are akin to a giant Skinner box.
There "shouldn't" be a difference between item drops and gold drops, particularly if you can exchange one for the other easily. However, for people playing the game, having more gold or more items drop has a direct effect on their experience, particularly with respect to how they are psychologically "rewarded". This is an empirically proven fact. It might not make sense from certain logical or theoretical perspectives, but people aren't perfectly rational beings to begin with.
Going to work for an hour so I can afford to buy a video game is a lot fucking less exciting than participating in a one hour contest where I win one at the end.
Farming gold so I can go to the auction house and buy a piece of equipment is a lot fucking less exciting than having something awesome drop for me.
The farming methods may be the same, but the psychological payoff of farming gold really blows compared to that of farming items.
First, if the economy does become bloated to the point where it makes more sense to farm gold than gear, I do not believe that is a healthy state for the game. The game is about farming items. If farming items is no longer as profitable as simply farming gold, I think interest in the game will decline. Although, I don't think Blizzard will let it get to this point.
Your strong bifurcation between "farming items" and "farming gold" is nonsense. The two farming methods are the same: kill mobs. As far as I can tell there is no way to only farm items, or only farm gold.
A player can intend to only acquire gold but the monsters still drop items.
So, I'm not sure what you're talking about. As long as players still need to acquire something they will continue to farm. Farming involves killing mobs. So...they'll keep doing shit.
I mean, unless I've missed something. Is there a mob-farming method by which persons only acquire gold, or only acquire items?
I can see where my post caused that misunderstanding. Though, I wish you had given me some amount of intellectual charity, in this regard :P. I'm not suggesting that one can choose to farm gold or gear; obviously, those are inseperable things.
What I am suggesting is that the focus of why a player farms could change. If it takes weeks or months to find an item worth selling for anything above pittance, why wouldn't you alter your farming to bring in as much gold as possible? If anything outside of near perfection can obtained for marginal amounts of gold, does it not make sense to focus primarily on maximizing your gold acquisition?
This would have ramifications on how players engage with the game, such as devauling MF and bolstering GF, or making it worthwhile to pickup and sell every blue item you come across. It would probably also make the game less exciting, as the payoffs in gear would be fewer and far between, while gold accumulation would be steady and roughly guarenteed.
Now, I don't think this fatalist, heat-death type situation will come to pass. As you've stated, there are a myriad of solutions they would implement long before this would happen. But if no action were taken, this is what I could envision happening to the end game.
Can someone give me a legitimately compelling explanation for why unsocketing equipment does not destroy either the gem or the item? Cause that'd solve the fuck out of a lot of problems.
Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
Ok, fair enough. I can't think of a lot of other very fair ways to get item sinks into the game, aside from maybe some system of destroying items to turn them into materials for short term buff consumables. At least not off the top of my head in 5 minutes.
Point stands, game needs gear sinks. People running around with massive hundreds of % MF and improved drops, the market will eventually bloat.
What bad things do you see happening when the market bloats? People start collecting multiple sets of awesome gear instead of just the one, and playing on MP10 instead of MP8? I don't really see how it's a problem for a game like this.
99% of gear goes for 16% over vendor price and 1% of gear commands millions upon millions of gold.
Well obviously there has to be a gradient between those two, but yeah, pretty much. I just don't think that's a bad thing - what I'm seeing is more build variety and a lower barrier of entry. For people who want the game to be easy, it's easy(farming Inferno at MP1 is already no big deal). If they want it to be hard, MP10 is designed to demand statistical perfection so it won't ever be trivial. For people who really feel strongly about item scarcity, there's always Hardcore which has a built in gear sink.
It's true that it will become increasingly difficult to find gear that's worth auctioning, but conversely that means the gold drops you find are more valuable and you can buy stuff with them fairly easily.
You've made some excellent points. And I agree completely with your outlook for the game. However, I disagree on a few things:
First, if the economy does become bloated to the point where it makes more sense to farm gold than gear, I do not believe that is a healthy state for the game. The game is about farming items. If farming items is no longer as profitable as simply farming gold, I think interest in the game will decline. Although, I don't think Blizzard will let it get to this point.
Second, there's not much benefit to farming multiple sets of gear. The stats are rather vertical in this game, which diminishes the impact that gear diversity could have in generating different builds. If Blizzard were to add some additional gear affixes targeting certain types of damage or skill sets, I could see this point becoming valid.
Lastly, Monster Power doesn't affect the difficulty as much as it afffects the time investment of killing a particular enemy. By the game's very nature, once you have stablized an encounter, increasing the time by a factor of 10 or 20 doesn't make the game that much more challenging, it just slows down its overall pace.
- I agree that farming gold isn't very glamorous, it's definitely preferable to be more interested in the items. I think though that an inherent property of this type of game is the notion of diminishing returns. Singleplayer Diablo with no AH has the same problem: the better your gear gets the fewer and further apart your upgrades become. The AH expands this to a global scale but the principle is the same, as the economy itself progresses in a similar way. The main difference is that people joining in late can skip to a fairly late phase of progression and immediately get both the benefits and the drawbacks. On one hand I think that's unfortunate, but I also think it's good that people can get caught up to the current "typical" level of progression their friends(and PvP) are at without playing for months.
- I definitely agree Blizzard needs to add more interesting affixes one way or another. If nothing else though you can gear up all 5 classes and get a handful of interesting legendaries for each(like the throwing barb spear, etc).
- MP does increase damage to some extent I believe, but stabilizing the encounter is most of what difficulty is in Diablo. At lower difficulties you can just gear up and kill shit faster than it can kill you. Higher difficulty is when that doesn't work anymore and you need a solid tactic that's well executed, which can be very challenging with all the different affixes there are. Sure you can play a facetank Monk/Barb, but having any DPS like that is definitely a 1% gear accomplishment.
Going to work for an hour so I can afford to buy a video game is a lot fucking less exciting than participating in a one hour contest where I win one at the end.
Farming gold so I can go to the auction house and buy a piece of equipment is a lot fucking less exciting than having something awesome drop for me.
The farming methods may be the same, but the psychological payoff of farming gold really blows compared to that of farming items.
Especially when "farming gold" adds up to *maybe* 200K over a typical hour (and that includes vendor-ing blues and non-sellable yellows). And that's pretty consistent. You aren't going to get appreciably more than that. Farming items, though, means checking for the Legendary/Set items that sell for MILLIONS of gold. Once you find and sell your first big ticket legendary, farming for gold feels ridiculous.
(speaking as someone who found their first semi-big item, a set armor piece, last week and got 70M on the AH for it)
Blizzard have shown that they are capable of supporting D3 well, I'm not unduly worried about how things'll play out (in massive contrast to my posts a couple of months ago :oops: ).
Gold farming doesn't do it for me at all; I don't pick up piles unless they're 1k or more, and even then it's usually too much of a hassle to double back as I've no pickup radius. I don't see gold farming ever overtaking item farming - I see a legendary every run or two, while I make around... 300k a run? And a good chunk of that is from vending trash yellows, which would be fewer in number if I was in GF gear.
Blizzard have shown that they are capable of supporting D3 well, I'm not unduly worried about how things'll play out (in massive contrast to my posts a couple of months ago :oops: ).
Gold farming doesn't do it for me at all; I don't pick up piles unless they're 1k or more, and even then it's usually too much of a hassle to double back as I've no pickup radius. I don't see gold farming ever overtaking item farming - I see a legendary every run or two, while I make around... 300k a run? And a good chunk of that is from vending trash yellows, which would be fewer in number if I was in GF gear.
Item finding will always be the main draw of a game like this. Gold farming is just drab by comparison.
And my hats off to Blizzard on the patches. They've done a very good job of supporting the game and learning from their mistakes (the most recent item change for example resembles the old D2 loot system pretty well). I'm positive they won't ever the let the game deteriorate to a primarily gold farming state.
In fact, I'm really looking forward to their solution for item inflation. The fact that they've increased the strength of the item pool by a factor of five, is a pretty good indicator I think, that they feel they have a solution not too far off.
Another day, another crappy legendary. Why can't items lower than 61 roll anything good? Magefist, Frostburn, Bul-Kathos's Wedding Band and so forth are automatic vendor trash because their max ranges can't beat those of higher levels. Even yellows. It's baffling.
Another day, another crappy legendary. Why can't items lower than 61 roll anything good? Magefist, Frostburn, Bul-Kathos's Wedding Band and so forth are automatic vendor trash because their max ranges can't beat those of higher levels. Even yellows. It's baffling.
I don't know how it will affect legendaries but that's exactly what 1.0.5 is fixing.
Another day, another crappy legendary. Why can't items lower than 61 roll anything good? Magefist, Frostburn, Bul-Kathos's Wedding Band and so forth are automatic vendor trash because their max ranges can't beat those of higher levels. Even yellows. It's baffling.
I don't know how it will affect legendaries but that's exactly what 1.0.5 is fixing.
Presumeably, any of the static mods would stay static. But the random affixes should take the mLvL of the mob, unless this is another exception.
Your strong bifurcation between "farming items" and "farming gold" is nonsense. The two farming methods are the same: kill mobs. As far as I can tell there is no way to only farm items, or only farm gold.
A player can intend to only acquire gold but the monsters still drop items.
So, I'm not sure what you're talking about. As long as players still need to acquire something they will continue to farm. Farming involves killing mobs. So...they'll keep doing shit.
I mean, unless I've missed something. Is there a mob-farming method by which persons only acquire gold, or only acquire items?
@_J_, I think at some point you have to admit that your brain just doesn't work the same as most other people's... :P We all agree with you in that money and goods are interchangeable, and that theoretically, they should be equivalent in value. The problem is that psychologically, this just isn't true. Particularly when we talk about the mechanics of the game, which are akin to a giant Skinner box.
There "shouldn't" be a difference between item drops and gold drops, particularly if you can exchange one for the other easily. However, for people playing the game, having more gold or more items drop has a direct effect on their experience, particularly with respect to how they are psychologically "rewarded". This is an empirically proven fact. It might not make sense from certain logical or theoretical perspectives, but people aren't perfectly rational beings to begin with.
Is your point:
1) If persons feel like they cannot acquire items through gameplay, and can only acquire items off the AH with the gold they farm, then they will stop playing.
2) If persons feel like they cannot acquire items through gameplay, then they will refocus upon only obtaining gold through gameplay.
My post was about #2, and how that's a silly notion since they will be farming both gold and items.
If you guys were talking about #1, then we weren't talking about the same thing.
The game, itself, does not need a gear sink so long as player's preferences can function as a gear sink. Item-X doesn't need to be removed from the game if Blizzard removes player's desires for Item-X.
That will just increase the proliferation of items viewed as shit drops, something that already rubs people the wrong way.
Well, they can get over that.
Not every drop can be exceptional, given what "exceptional" means.
Of course not every drop can be but how do you suspect blizard would remove desire for item-x and redirect desire to item-y? I'm guessing higher affix caps, which puts an ever increasing amount of items wearable at level 60 in an "undesirable" category of lower affixes, and a smaller and smaller percent of items in a "desirable" category of the highest affixes.
If the level cap remains the same, the ratio of "good" items to "bad" items would continue to get worse and worse to the point where you could farm for days or weeks before you see an item worth selling. That sounds stupid and boring. It would benefit the game for SOME of the crap that nobody fucking wants in any way whatsoever to come out of circulation, or at least to stop dropping.
They would need to increase the cap and the floor for items at the same time. Instead of an ever increasing gap of ilvl 55 - 63 in Act 1 Inferno, then 55 - 67 in Act 1, then 55 - 72, they could continually increase both numbers. So imagine that 6 months from now Act 1 Inferno drops ilvl 65 - 68 items.
It's like WoW's itemization. Every expansion replaces purples with greens. Then throughout the progress of the expansion Blizz releases higher tier gear.
Seems like that would be a way to maintain the item search game. Blizz has said in the past that they don't want to have to keep churning out new content, but Blizzard tends to go back on their word and change their mind.
Remember how Inferno was supposed to be for 1% of the playerbase, and it would be super-hard, and all of that other shit they're currently undermining?
Remember how Inferno was supposed to be for 1% of the playerbase, and it would be super-hard, and all of that other shit they're currently undermining?
You see how this was nonsense from the get go though. They were always going to tweak inferno for a viable playerbase. The reason they dumbed down inferno was they wanted to bring more people in. This is a rational business decision.
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius
The game, itself, does not need a gear sink so long as player's preferences can function as a gear sink. Item-X doesn't need to be removed from the game if Blizzard removes player's desires for Item-X.
That will just increase the proliferation of items viewed as shit drops, something that already rubs people the wrong way.
Well, they can get over that.
Not every drop can be exceptional, given what "exceptional" means.
Of course not every drop can be but how do you suspect blizard would remove desire for item-x and redirect desire to item-y? I'm guessing higher affix caps, which puts an ever increasing amount of items wearable at level 60 in an "undesirable" category of lower affixes, and a smaller and smaller percent of items in a "desirable" category of the highest affixes.
If the level cap remains the same, the ratio of "good" items to "bad" items would continue to get worse and worse to the point where you could farm for days or weeks before you see an item worth selling. That sounds stupid and boring. It would benefit the game for SOME of the crap that nobody fucking wants in any way whatsoever to come out of circulation, or at least to stop dropping.
They would need to increase the cap and the floor for items at the same time. Instead of an ever increasing gap of ilvl 55 - 63 in Act 1 Inferno, then 55 - 67 in Act 1, then 55 - 72, they could continually increase both numbers. So imagine that 6 months from now Act 1 Inferno drops ilvl 65 - 68 items.
It's like WoW's itemization. Every expansion replaces purples with greens. Then throughout the progress of the expansion Blizz releases higher tier gear.
Seems like that would be a way to maintain the item search game. Blizz has said in the past that they don't want to have to keep churning out new content, but Blizzard tends to go back on their word and change their mind.
Remember how Inferno was supposed to be for 1% of the playerbase, and it would be super-hard, and all of that other shit they're currently undermining?
No way are they going to put out whole new acts for free, or continuously retune the level of existing acts. That's what expansions are for, and that's when they'll do new tiers of gear.
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Not sure it would make much difference... There really isn't a whole lot of unsocketing going once you get up to Inferno anyway... I did upgraded to a Star Gem in my helm but I could have just as easily destroyed the old one in there without really mattering... Tiers of gems above Star generally aren't worth the cost for the increase of stats you get from them.
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Ok, fair enough. I can't think of a lot of other very fair ways to get item sinks into the game, aside from maybe some system of destroying items to turn them into materials for short term buff consumables. At least not off the top of my head in 5 minutes.
Point stands, game needs gear sinks. People running around with massive hundreds of % MF and improved drops, the market will eventually bloat.
What bad things do you see happening when the market bloats? People start collecting multiple sets of awesome gear instead of just the one, and playing on MP10 instead of MP8? I don't really see how it's a problem for a game like this.
99% of gear goes for 16% over vendor price and 1% of gear commands millions upon millions of gold.
Well obviously there has to be a gradient between those two, but yeah, pretty much. I just don't think that's a bad thing - what I'm seeing is more build variety and a lower barrier of entry. For people who want the game to be easy, it's easy(farming Inferno at MP1 is already no big deal). If they want it to be hard, MP10 is designed to demand statistical perfection so it won't ever be trivial. For people who really feel strongly about item scarcity, there's always Hardcore which has a built in gear sink.
It's true that it will become increasingly difficult to find gear that's worth auctioning, but conversely that means the gold drops you find are more valuable and you can buy stuff with them fairly easily.
I'd just like to make sure some scale of value is retained. Obviously this is a fatalistic view of things and it would take some time for the economy to devolve to this point, but it's possible to see everyone buying near perfectly tuned rares for a pittance just so they can farm for skorns the second they hit 60. I just don't want it to get to that point, and a solid item sink would help keep some value in mid tier gear.
But Diablo isn't supposed to be about farming gold.
You've made some excellent points. And I agree completely with your outlook for the game. However, I disagree on a few things:
First, if the economy does become bloated to the point where it makes more sense to farm gold than gear, I do not believe that is a healthy state for the game. The game is about farming items. If farming items is no longer as profitable as simply farming gold, I think interest in the game will decline. Although, I don't think Blizzard will let it get to this point.
Second, there's not much benefit to farming multiple sets of gear. The stats are rather vertical in this game, which diminishes the impact that gear diversity could have in generating different builds. If Blizzard were to add some additional gear affixes targeting certain types of damage or skill sets, I could see this point becoming valid.
Lastly, Monster Power doesn't affect the difficulty as much as it afffects the time investment of killing a particular enemy. By the game's very nature, once you have stablized an encounter, increasing the time by a factor of 10 or 20 doesn't make the game that much more challenging, it just slows down its overall pace.
Persons will continue to farm gear so long as there is better gear to be obtained. I doubt that the AH will ever have 300+ perfect Andariel's Visages listed. Saturation will happen with low and middle range gear. I doubt it will happen at the best-in-slot level.
Another thing to take into account is the frequency with which Blizzard adds new items to the game. If we get new item tiers every six months that can reset the gear saturation levels, so to speak. Look what happened when we got new legendaries. And factor in people's predictions about what will happen when we get the new monster level gear.
The game, itself, does not need a gear sink so long as player's preferences can function as a gear sink. Item-X doesn't need to be removed from the game if Blizzard removes player's desires for Item-X.
That will just increase the proliferation of items viewed as shit drops, something that already rubs people the wrong way.
One of the problems with D2 was that persons could not unsocket gems / runes. Diablo 3 fixed that problem by allowing persons to unsocket gems.
I'm not sure why persons would want the gem / item to be destroyed. You spend $20 on a ruby and $60 on a helm. Who would want to lose either the gem or the helm in the process of unsocketing?
There's no need to have gear sinks in the game, or to destroy gems / items after they are used. There also isn't a need to make items BoE.
If you want that shit then go play WoW.
What, exactly, is the problem with the current ability to unsocket equipment? I cannot discern an actual problem. I buy one ruby and continue to move that ruby to new helms as I acquire them.
Whence the problem?
Bah, I forgot to account for the RMAH. You win this round, _J_.
Your strong bifurcation between "farming items" and "farming gold" is nonsense. The two farming methods are the same: kill mobs. As far as I can tell there is no way to only farm items, or only farm gold.
A player can intend to only acquire gold but the monsters still drop items.
So, I'm not sure what you're talking about. As long as players still need to acquire something they will continue to farm. Farming involves killing mobs. So...they'll keep doing shit.
I mean, unless I've missed something. Is there a mob-farming method by which persons only acquire gold, or only acquire items?
Well, they can get over that.
Not every drop can be exceptional, given what "exceptional" means.
Yeah. Blizzard would be fucked if they structured the game to destroy items that persons bought for $250.
Of course not every drop can be but how do you suspect blizard would remove desire for item-x and redirect desire to item-y? I'm guessing higher affix caps, which puts an ever increasing amount of items wearable at level 60 in an "undesirable" category of lower affixes, and a smaller and smaller percent of items in a "desirable" category of the highest affixes.
If the level cap remains the same, the ratio of "good" items to "bad" items would continue to get worse and worse to the point where you could farm for days or weeks before you see an item worth selling. That sounds stupid and boring. It would benefit the game for SOME of the crap that nobody fucking wants in any way whatsoever to come out of circulation, or at least to stop dropping.
- I agree that farming gold isn't very glamorous, it's definitely preferable to be more interested in the items. I think though that an inherent property of this type of game is the notion of diminishing returns. Singleplayer Diablo with no AH has the same problem: the better your gear gets the fewer and further apart your upgrades become. The AH expands this to a global scale but the principle is the same, as the economy itself progresses in a similar way. The main difference is that people joining in late can skip to a fairly late phase of progression and immediately get both the benefits and the drawbacks. On one hand I think that's unfortunate, but I also think it's good that people can get caught up to the current "typical" level of progression their friends(and PvP) are at without playing for months.
- I definitely agree Blizzard needs to add more interesting affixes one way or another. If nothing else though you can gear up all 5 classes and get a handful of interesting legendaries for each(like the throwing barb spear, etc).
- MP does increase damage to some extent I believe, but stabilizing the encounter is most of what difficulty is in Diablo. At lower difficulties you can just gear up and kill shit faster than it can kill you. Higher difficulty is when that doesn't work anymore and you need a solid tactic that's well executed, which can be very challenging with all the different affixes there are. Sure you can play a facetank Monk/Barb, but having any DPS like that is definitely a 1% gear accomplishment.
In a perfect world, the player would police their own rate of advancement via the auction house and decide if and when they wanted/needed a boost or if they wanted to slog it out themselves, amish style. To that end, making inferno more accessable but adding the MP option is a great benefit.
The problem is the internet, rather than being a perfect world, is a wasteland of "gimme-mine" grabassery and the vast majority of players are likely going to ding 60, load up at the auction house, hardly ever see any gear they can sell or use, decide that they're bored and this game sucks, and quit playing.
That is one possible solution, and one which has proven to work for other games in the past. This would be a perfectly reasonable way of preventing item saturation, without involving gear sinks. Ladder season would be another. Allowing you to convert high-end items into a useable currency or crafting material of some kind that could augment already strong gear would be another option. The solutions are there, and I don't honestly think that Blizzard would let the game deteriorate to an end-state where high end items are largely worthless.
@_J_, I think at some point you have to admit that your brain just doesn't work the same as most other people's... :P We all agree with you in that money and goods are interchangeable, and that theoretically, they should be equivalent in value. The problem is that psychologically, this just isn't true. Particularly when we talk about the mechanics of the game, which are akin to a giant Skinner box.
There "shouldn't" be a difference between item drops and gold drops, particularly if you can exchange one for the other easily. However, for people playing the game, having more gold or more items drop has a direct effect on their experience, particularly with respect to how they are psychologically "rewarded". This is an empirically proven fact. It might not make sense from certain logical or theoretical perspectives, but people aren't perfectly rational beings to begin with.
Farming gold so I can go to the auction house and buy a piece of equipment is a lot fucking less exciting than having something awesome drop for me.
The farming methods may be the same, but the psychological payoff of farming gold really blows compared to that of farming items.
I can see where my post caused that misunderstanding. Though, I wish you had given me some amount of intellectual charity, in this regard :P. I'm not suggesting that one can choose to farm gold or gear; obviously, those are inseperable things.
What I am suggesting is that the focus of why a player farms could change. If it takes weeks or months to find an item worth selling for anything above pittance, why wouldn't you alter your farming to bring in as much gold as possible? If anything outside of near perfection can obtained for marginal amounts of gold, does it not make sense to focus primarily on maximizing your gold acquisition?
This would have ramifications on how players engage with the game, such as devauling MF and bolstering GF, or making it worthwhile to pickup and sell every blue item you come across. It would probably also make the game less exciting, as the payoffs in gear would be fewer and far between, while gold accumulation would be steady and roughly guarenteed.
Now, I don't think this fatalist, heat-death type situation will come to pass. As you've stated, there are a myriad of solutions they would implement long before this would happen. But if no action were taken, this is what I could envision happening to the end game.
Excellent points all around.
Especially when "farming gold" adds up to *maybe* 200K over a typical hour (and that includes vendor-ing blues and non-sellable yellows). And that's pretty consistent. You aren't going to get appreciably more than that. Farming items, though, means checking for the Legendary/Set items that sell for MILLIONS of gold. Once you find and sell your first big ticket legendary, farming for gold feels ridiculous.
(speaking as someone who found their first semi-big item, a set armor piece, last week and got 70M on the AH for it)
Gold farming doesn't do it for me at all; I don't pick up piles unless they're 1k or more, and even then it's usually too much of a hassle to double back as I've no pickup radius. I don't see gold farming ever overtaking item farming - I see a legendary every run or two, while I make around... 300k a run? And a good chunk of that is from vending trash yellows, which would be fewer in number if I was in GF gear.
Item finding will always be the main draw of a game like this. Gold farming is just drab by comparison.
And my hats off to Blizzard on the patches. They've done a very good job of supporting the game and learning from their mistakes (the most recent item change for example resembles the old D2 loot system pretty well). I'm positive they won't ever the let the game deteriorate to a primarily gold farming state.
In fact, I'm really looking forward to their solution for item inflation. The fact that they've increased the strength of the item pool by a factor of five, is a pretty good indicator I think, that they feel they have a solution not too far off.
I don't know how it will affect legendaries but that's exactly what 1.0.5 is fixing.
So you could theoretically double(triple, quadruple) up on runes on skills.
Presumeably, any of the static mods would stay static. But the random affixes should take the mLvL of the mob, unless this is another exception.
Is your point:
1) If persons feel like they cannot acquire items through gameplay, and can only acquire items off the AH with the gold they farm, then they will stop playing.
2) If persons feel like they cannot acquire items through gameplay, then they will refocus upon only obtaining gold through gameplay.
My post was about #2, and how that's a silly notion since they will be farming both gold and items.
If you guys were talking about #1, then we weren't talking about the same thing.
They would need to increase the cap and the floor for items at the same time. Instead of an ever increasing gap of ilvl 55 - 63 in Act 1 Inferno, then 55 - 67 in Act 1, then 55 - 72, they could continually increase both numbers. So imagine that 6 months from now Act 1 Inferno drops ilvl 65 - 68 items.
It's like WoW's itemization. Every expansion replaces purples with greens. Then throughout the progress of the expansion Blizz releases higher tier gear.
Seems like that would be a way to maintain the item search game. Blizz has said in the past that they don't want to have to keep churning out new content, but Blizzard tends to go back on their word and change their mind.
Remember how Inferno was supposed to be for 1% of the playerbase, and it would be super-hard, and all of that other shit they're currently undermining?
You see how this was nonsense from the get go though. They were always going to tweak inferno for a viable playerbase. The reason they dumbed down inferno was they wanted to bring more people in. This is a rational business decision.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
No way are they going to put out whole new acts for free, or continuously retune the level of existing acts. That's what expansions are for, and that's when they'll do new tiers of gear.