I disagree. I really like gambler when it comes to getting the base I want with 2 stats I need for my build so I don’t run into a boss and get 1 shot. It helps with so much randomness in the game when it comes to gearing. I just don’t think getting uniques and set items should be allowed to get just rares/blues/normal bases.
I hope they make him burn in the story when loot filter releases.
Not without fixing loot tables to actually drop good things reliably first.
Make it so we can choose a quote of his as our commentary of choice during the event.
Gambler is a symptom, not the cause.
The issue is that loot that drops is bad, buff the base item of loot drops to around the area level so that people NEVER find good affixes on bad bases.
Allow ways to effect base/affix drops in monolith(maybe slotting a single gear piece into monolith so that the base and affixes then drop 5 times more often).
Also loot filter is needed. Further more we need more bosses to have boss specific uniques, preferably at least one per boss.
Also make the normal shop better, no-one is going to use it if half of its’ stuff is commons of low level bases. People only care about rares or uniques if they are going to buy them.
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This leads to another issue. Look at D3 when they finaly made good loot drop that isn’t (in most cases) totaly useless for your class. When a new season starts you have you gear in 2h and then you are just looking for upgrades.
If LE offers meaningfull loot with the crafting system in place itemisation will be a joke or Diabloesk so to speak ^^.
I didn’t really care about the gambler until reading the replies here, and now I don’t want him around either 
Problems that the gambler addresses:
- we have gold in our pocket just waiting to be spent (we need a gold sink)
- we need to get better items, incrementally
Problems the gambler creates:
- hours lost in gambling (if you have the gold and playtime) – did I buy a gambling game, or an arpg? The auction house had the same issue in d3… (different solution to the same problem).
- once your pass a threshold with your character, gambling has diminishing returns (the better your current item, the more you’ll have to gamble to get an upgrade)
Solutions that don’t require a gambler:
- other forms of gold sinks
- buy help: blessings, hire some minions, etc
- buy crafting mats: affixes, base items
- buy custom skills (maybe some generic skill that each class can use, or something that interacts with other hirable things like blessing?)
- incremental growth when the user has bad luck (or doesn’t know what items to get)
- buying crafting mats would address this, same with buying things like blessings and minions
- buying only base items limits how powerful these items can get, so dropped loot is still required for high level characters
Thoughts?
…Just like loot drops. In fact, it can be arguesd that this is a characteristic of every ARPG out there, this negative feedback loop, where the longer you play, the less likely it becomes that you can improve any aspect of your character.
Same can be said about crafting. ‘Did I buy a blacksmith simulator, or an ARPG?’. The keyword is ‘lost’, I think. What you consider a waste of time, is what someone else considers a fullfilling and enjoyable activity. There are plenty of people who consider playing a game where you ‘chase better loot to kill the same monster again, but slightly faster in order to chase more loot’ a senseless waste of time, but we, the ARPG fans disagree 
The keyword is “agency” and “meaning”!
It feels and is far less rewarding to gamble your items than to find them off the ground & craft on them. Having a narrow end result oriented perspective in video games is a very bad idea as then we could minimize the whole game down to - “Well in the end it’s just waste of time anyways so who gives a h*ck”.
In conjunction to the rest of the opportunities of reward which the game has to offer; gambling is simply better and makes the game as a whole less meaningful. I observed this phenomena with myself in another game which I played a few hours - Chronicon.
In Chronicon you can simply collect gold and not pick up the hoards of loot during mapping because you can just “gamble” hundreds of rare / unique items in the city and simply choose the best one out of them when you’re doing it. Obviously the game became flaccid for me pretty quick.
Another concern for me is that how would the brain reward systems react to being in a constant state of anticipation and nothing else for a extended periods?
I agree with the fire paragraph in your post though and I would extend it past ARPGs to everything in our lives.
You could say that if there were slot machines then these too would solve the problem of getting better items than the gambler’s, incrementally.
The Gambler looks necessary as you drop so many items (useless most of the time), it s a way to catch a certain type what u re looking for.
When the trading will be implemented will help the economy, but I m still frustrated by unique items most of the time in build you see rare items . I would appreciate unique items supporting build like D2
Agree about crafting, not so much about finding it on the ground. The (random) loot on the ground is not much different than the random loot gotten from gambling (for me). Both these random finding systems have their appeal though, that’s why I’d not want to get rid of gambling.
There would be more agency in dropped loot, if it were a bit more deterministic (like in the ‘old days’, where skeletons had a bigger chance to drop blunt weapons, and cold monsters a bigger chance to drop cold-related items). Then I’d feel agency. Now it’s just “grind and hope for the random number generator to reward you, maybe”.
Also agree, that it is less satisfying to buy something with a currency than it is to find/craft something. That is why, I find no satisfaction is trading using a currency and games where it pays better to just only loot currency and buy the stuff you want (like POE).
Good points
I don’t usually consider killing monsters a waste of time, because even if I don’t find better loot I can still get other things: levels, gold, affixes, blessings, and the experience that my character survived.
With gambling, I get…affixes if I don’t find a better item. It just seems less rewarding. But, if others find it rewarding then I guess we should keep it.
How do you balance out the rewards for gambling so its not required, but still fun for players? Maybe the right answer is the loot filter?
As long as it’s a viable alternative to trade or loot drops or whatever else, it’s ok. You can balance this (i.e. keep it an alternative) with probability of getting a good item or the gamble cost (vs time cost spent looting gold and the chance to find loot via drops).
I don’t believe that. In fact, a game where a loot filter is necessary (like POE) is a sign of bad design in my opinion. A loot filter is an OPTIMIZATION of your time/effort spent vs end result (the item you are looking for). The rummaging through a pile of loot in order to find something worthy, is in fact part of the fun / treasure hunt! Reducing this to a ‘ping me when the rng decides to give me the thing I want’ is detrimental to this fun I think.
A better solution is to have fewer items drop, but increase the chance of the drop to be good - end result is the chance to find a good item is the same as now, and you still have fun with checking out the loot, plus it costs much less development time and is simpler for all players.
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I haven’t gone through this thread to see if someone already said this but;
You can play the game the way you want to, which means if you don’t want to gamble you don’t have to. Gambling is something a lot of people enjoy in ARPGs and it shouldn’t be removed from LE just because someone else thinks everyone shouldn’t be able to gamble. Furthermore, gambling in LE rarely leads to obtaining a best in slot piece of gear, or at least from what I’ve seen.
Gambling was also in Diablo 2, which was literally the game that changed the industry and spawned hundreds (if not thousands) of “diablo clones”.
I also think LE needs more gold sink options even with the gambler being in it anyways.
I’d like to ask too; How would you feel if one of the main reasons you bought LE was because it had a gambler and then the gambler got removed from the game because someone else didn’t like gambling and felt no one else should be able to gamble either?
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@FriendlyGamerGuy i chose the name of thread to generate some feedback and it seemed to work
I don’t actually have a problem with gambler being in the game. What i do have a problem with is that i am FORCED to use the gambler in order to get anything resembling decent gear (T14 - T 16 gear) since loot drops are such garbage at moment. Loots drops in game are only useful for shattering with only a small fraction of percent being a useful base item (useful being 2-3 correct stats on a high level item with all T3+ rolls)
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i’m going to play this game solo . so for me the gambler is a way to get the desired uniques considering the fact there is no trade in solo
i am only interested in normal items to use a base to craft from since Uniques are mostly trash and i am happy to gamble for the few (Orian’s Eye, Ashen Crown etc) which are build defining. The need for many normal crafting base items is huge when you factor in the probability of fracturing items above T14
Based on the things you’ve been saying in this thread I’m sure generating feedback was not the only reason you chose the name for this thread that you did.
fair point
The gambler itself is an ok addition however it costs way way too low to actually gamble en-masse. I had 1.4million gold in LE, I remember one night I gambled for Orians Eye and took 45ish amulets to get it, I was willing to spend 1 million gold but got it much much sooner, I also gambled upgrades on 5 slots on my Decay Lich and spent maybe 300k
Diablo 3 had blood shards, you would get after a rift - cant remember exact numbers it was around 50-200? depending on difficulty and your shards capped at 1000? so you had to spend them after a while but each item cost 25-75
Maybe EHG could remove the gambler and incredibly buff the reward chest at the completion of a monolith - I dont know how their coding works but maybe something similair to how you receive a blessing from a Monolith, before you open a chest you could choose ‘More Gloves’ and the game would attempt to give you ‘xx number of Gloves of XX quality.’ Quality being better base type ie Engraved Gauntlets
This means you would get a free ‘gamble’ every monolith for an item type of your choice
Gamlber at the moment is completely overpowered and needs to be changed, theres 3 things EHG can do -
- Leave it in place and ruin a fundamental aspect of the game
- Increase the cost substantially and leaving it how it is
- Remove them entirely replaced with better loot - which cannot be done without a loot filter and some kind of change
My gameplay loop in LE when I started was buying Shattering runes EVERY monolith until I had either no money/lots of them. Proceeded to smash affixes such as Glancing Blow
Now ALL I do is loot Obscuring/Leviathan/Endless/Purifiers set affix gear and I hover over Uniques to replace with better ones, and I glance at T6+ incase its any good, and I check some Idols. I know most of the affix names now and most stuff I just skip - its too mentally taxing to play a game like this for a few hours scanning loot piles