The genre direction is called ‘diablo-clone’ since it became huge because of that game. Which is similar to calling a sidescroller platforming game with progression to unlock new areas as well as backtracking ‘Metroidvania’ for example, coming from the game ‘Metroid’ as a starting point… which also nowadays have not all too much in common anymore often.
And Castlevania? Otherwise, where does the “vania” come from in Metroidvania?
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They were awesome indeed. And actually kinda still are. After looking for a place to download the community patch I stumbled upon a documentary about the “Magic of Sacred” made this year. Haven’t watched it yet, but gonna do so probably soon.
The devs really shaped the community I think. I was honestly too young back then to really care and I’m not sure I remember everything correctly when stuff was going wrong with S2, but some of my foundest video game related memories were made with peeps from the closed net in S1. Was part of a guild and everything. Good times.
And the gravestones were absolutely awesome. I think I’ve read every single one of them I came across.
That’s the whole point: it doesn’t happen anymore, really, or at least much less and much later than it used to.
Because “small” drops have been made so common they have become completely uninteresting. The “pleasure of finding meaningful things” has been reduced to high end items, while all low level progress is being made more and more trivial in each patch.
I play almost only fresh starters, SCF if you will, because I enjoy looking for my first few items, materials, uniques, and slowly improving my character. To me, instantly crushing everything with strong leveling items is utterly boring.
In all my previous characters, I had to be careful what to craft early on, because shards were rare early. Now we are spammed with lizards and nemesis, basic crafting stuff has lost all meaning (except the end-game super rare shards, of course, just all the early stuff like resistance or life or damage that used to be interesting to find and craft).
One of the strongest items in SCF is the rune of ascendance. Extremely valuable to get build-enabling uniques. Used to be really rare early on. My new character, at the beginning of chapter 8, already has 7, all coming from lizards. All my old characters would have none, maybe one if very lucky, at this stage.
Not that it really matters, anyway: with the nemesis being in each and every map and having a guaranteed unique, I have already found a while ago what I needed, hours earlier than my luckiest pre-launch characters. No more hunting nor pleasure of a lucky drop. And as a cherry on top, a bunch of legendaries/exalted, to make sure all rare drops now look dull…
So, in conclusion:
Not really.
The pleasure each person takes in what kind of drop is a personal issue, different for everyone. I agree that all these hugely negative points for me can be positive for other players, this is where the perception thing comes in.
But it is an objective fact that the value of each drop has been very much reduced in each patch since launch, due to an over abondance of all starter things (shards, runes, basic uniques, rares, exalted). The hunt and the pleasure of the drop is now reserved for endgame top-end items, and I find it sad.
Errrr, duh?
This is what pretty much every game does, and yes it is a great, very rewarding system. Of course we could imagine a completely different game from nowadays LE…
But all I was saying was that, within the existing system, the often-heard argument “we need high uniques drops to increase the chance of finding LP” is not true.
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All this, as always, is my opinion.
You have the mindset of a D2 player. You are eager to get the occasional unique item drop and excited to see what it is, whatever it is, and you are willing to alter your build concept or plan for an alt based upon what dropped.
The market has a different mindset. Modern Diablo-like players often come to the game with a build in mind that they want to play. Of course it’s a powerful build, and that build typically requires several uniques to even get started. To have players be able to get started with their target build prior to getting bored and quitting, they either have to have a large drop rate, or a market place.
That EHG built a loot filter into the game early in EA, prior to the market, should tell you where their head is at.
I don’t think you are wrong for what you like, I just don’t think that is the game that EHG is building.
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Actually, pretty much everything in LE seems to be targetted at altoholics. They didn’t even really want to add trade (even though it was in their kickstarter).
There’s too many prefixes and suffixes for them to do that. If anything, it needs to be higher, so we can actually find the items for our builds that we need eventually.
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What do you think my point was? You are making me think (realize?) that I’m a really horrible writer.
My point was - EHG isn’t going to reduce the drop rate of uniques. It’s not happening.
Edit: No. I changed my mind. Are you high this morning? What are you reading? Are the voices in your head especially loud?
Read this! It’s me saying, ‘EHG isn’t changing the drop rate’.
Very insightful. This is exactly how I usually play season-based games. 
One very “generic” season starter who doesn’t require any unique, then 1-2 more characters depending on the best / most exciting drops the first guy gets. I usually don’t know in advance what my next character is going to be, I follow the guidance of the mighty RNG.
I wasn’t disputing that point. I was disputing the point that EHG is making a game that isn’t focused on Houlala’s playstyle. I feel it’s quite the opposite. They are making a game where you get excited by the drops which aren’t even for your class and you go and make a new character. That seems to be the primary focus of most of their systems.
You said:
Which implied that this is EHG’s mindset, when they never really wanted a market place. Gifting was their “trade system”, except the community wouldn’t have it.
The reason I love LE (and I’m sure that’s the case for Houlala as well, and it’s why he’s complaining about easy drops now) is that it brought back that D2 feeling of drops being exciting and a reason to make alts.
Which, to be fair, seems to have been diluted with 1.1 and the new stuff for the event.
I still enjoy it as is, but I’m not as “extreme” in my gameplay as he is (I use uniques to level alts).
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Vaguely related to the discussion, I finally finished the campaign and joined CoF.
To my surprise, every time a set item drops, I now get the whole set instead, all in one go…
I think it had a small chance to happen in 1.0 at high CoF level, now it is all the time, at low level.
WHY???
The sole reason why diablo-likes introduced sets in the first place was to give players something to chase and collect…
(I know, sets are not really useful at this point, so noone was going to chase them anyway. Still, the decision doesn’t make sense.)
It used to be at rank 10 and now it’s at a lower rank. It was always a 100% chance. The reason why it happens like that (at least for now) is because sets are in a bad place right now.
You rarely use them, unless you’re just experimenting and trying to have fun with them, which is totally valid, but it does make them a sort of undesired item (as can be seen by the post complaining about a set loot lizard). At least this way it might encourage some people to try and use them.
Ah, thanks, I didn’t reach rank 10 in 1.0, I thought it used to be a lower chance.
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Well then you should respond to him, not me, because he explicitly states this;
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To be specific… there are no small drops available anymore when you reach Monoliths commonly. At best you get your helmet and chest to 4 T5 with a or 2 rare affixes on it since you lacked them beforehand. Outside of that? Commonly 4 T5 is really really easy, you got that handled before empowered monoliths surprisingly often.
And the upgrade to a good base with a fitting exalted item is several magnitudes more… not ‘a bit more’ but each one nearly put together the same amount of time investment as your whole friggin outfit put together at once. And the next stage once again… the same amount of time cumulative put together to achieve it.
That’s a major issue because there is no ‘small’ in LE anymore, no goals to achieve which feel ‘just around the corner’. All is ‘you’ll eventually get it’ and that feels fairly much like crap for a lot of people 
Yes, because it is sad.
Instead of adjusting mechanics to have a lifespan beyond a singular update which causes power-creep it after all… becomes nonsensical far too early.
It’s not all too well designed. Sure, you can go and focus on collecting affixes, but they’re useless majorly besides the rare ones, and even those you won’t need a lot… even in SSF since you get them thrown at you in utter mass amounts.
Absolutely not, it’s the exception actually, not the norm.
It was more of a norm in older days, which I agree with… felt better. But with modern diablo-clones it’s everything but.
Look at D4, D3, PoE, Torchlight Infinite… they all shove uniques down your throat until you feel sick of em.
First of all… ‘gifting’ is not a ‘trade’ system, it’s a mess for everything beyond ‘we play in a group long-term’, so obviously not a viable option to use with some random person, and not even remotely going with the times.
Secondly, ‘a large drop rate’ was also mentioned… which we actually have! We have a really high unique-item drop rate, which was why LP was implemented since you got swamped with uniques and they felt worthless hence… and now that led to being swamped with uniques, them being worthless and only searching for high LP items.
It hasn’t really gotten better, the premise wasn’t changed, just a bit of shifted goalposts which they caught up to again to a large degree because of changes in 1.0
Because sets are utterly worthless in the game, so EHG decided to swamp us with trash rather then adjusting them accordingly to make something ‘nice’ out of them… or simply remove this mess.
And they failed in nigh every single game and were a detriment since either a) they were the best option to go for and you couldn’t use any variance in your build or b) they were worthless and utterly ignored.
We got b) here.
You are better than this. You know the intention is to make sets better, but not by simply slapping LP on them
Knowing that, you know that EHG did this (that CoT tier) in anticipation of sets being worthwhile.
What is fair to say is, “EHG slammed sets into the game waaaayyy before they were ready for them, and they have let them languish far too long, but they have a plan”.
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The right choice is to do it the other way around though.
First fix the sets, then give us ways to acquire them more reliable.
As it’s done now it’s just nonsensical. ‘Shower is with garbage’ and then maybe fix it? We don’t even know the direction EHG wants to take them in, or if it’s a success. It’s putting the cart before the horse.
I don’t disagree. I just don’t think the tone or the malice attributed to EHG is warranted.
Clearly they could have done better. New team, way too much on their plates, yada yada yada. Maybe step away from LE for awhile.
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They are more then 5 years in early access, they are not new.
Also they released, scrutiny is coming according to the state of the game. You release with a plan and a method. Release was too early and the reason plainly spoken doesn’t matter, for me as a customer I hence expect the respective quality which isn’t given in several places (MG is non-functional long-term. Campaign incomplete… and I’m not talking about the performance issues since I’m closing both eyes to let them pass already… but you can only let ‘so much’ pass in so many categories.)
And I mean don’t get me wrong, I get it right? The number of uniques / set items in this game is unreal and not necessarily a good thing. But reducing the drop rate is not going to help. Some of them are already so massively rare that you have to play hundreds of hours to force them to drop once. (I played over 600 hours and still didn’t see many of these, granted not on high corruption.) Reducing the drop rate would only make the problem worse.
If anything there should probably be a crafting / token system that allows you to make more of these items or at least a boss challenging system where the ones that really matter for a given build drop, as a good number of them already happen to.
I’m older now and because of that, I’m starting to value my time more. So to me, playing 100+ hours to see content in an ARPG is starting to look like an obscene waste of time. I think you could condense that down to about 40 hours per build if there was enough content in the game that more bored / obsessed people wouldn’t run out of things to do. The question I can’t stop asking myself is why should anyone play 200 hours just to confirm their theory about a build they want to play? Seems crazy to me.
The question for all ARPG’s going forward is, how perpetually bogged down in your game do you need an individual player to be to turn a profit? I think a good value assessment would be to say that the closer that amount of time is to about a 40 hour shift (a week of work at a regular job) per build, the less padding the game is engaging in and therefore, the more value / enjoyment per unit of time invested by the player.
Additional thought: It’s also interesting to consider that this could be used as a metric for determining if a particular build or ability needs some help. If it can’t theoretically create a 40 hour trip through main content / to max level, then it is underperforming. Would be interesting to see that philosophy implemented in a game like this.
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