I disagree - Honoring the player’s effort and making sure the game rewards you for time spent is what is most important. Making sure that is fairly linear to avoid creating schedules of reinforcement and addictive behavior is also important, which no developer or creative who works on these games is currently willing to acknowledge.
There is an attitude that hard loot and thousand hour grinds weed out the normies, or something, but I’m not sure that’s an attitude that fosters a better community. Creating a game that is fun that people want to play is what fosters a better community. It attracts the most creative and enthusiastic people to pay attention to it.
Keep in mind that the game is intended to have trade as well, base items drops are already skewed to your class. Having this also affect uniques would be detrimental to both trading metas and alternate character farming / build idea provoking.
Say sentinels get a higher chance to get a bastion of honor dropped. The meta would be to level a sentinel so you can get the shield dropped then switch to the character that is using it (your spellblade). It would be just another step in the “Get this before you start farming” and would force the player to use a build they might not like while doing it.
You’re talking here about a pity system, like what the Gacha games have. These are predatory and sick. One of the things that makes RNG such an unforgiving mistress is the LACK of a pity system. With pity systems everyone has min/maxed endgame toons as long as they no-life the game and that is a really really bad standard to set.
So min-maxing a build sooner because of a pity system is bad but min-maxing a build “eventually” (within months or years) due to a lack of pity system and a brutal rng system, that’s totally fine…
I have played tons of games with both.
The reason I hate pity systems is that they are inevitably tied to microtransactions and predatory monetization schemes. They are the primary reason I will no longer play ANY game that is F2P.
Yes, pure RNG has issues. Yes, pure RNG means some players will have bad luck, get angry over said luck, and quit said game.
However, MANY MANY more people will simply refuse to play at all if there are pity systems.
I strongly believe that the Merchant Guild systems that are soon to be implemented will help with RNG issues – and you’ll have your choice of buying some endgame pieces from the market or chasing RNGesus with added bonuses.
