Loot Filter should be higher priority

Feedback and Suggestions
34

I also find it funny that of all the people here demanding a loot filter, you single me out, and I said that it isn’t top priority. I would much rather have all the classes in the game.

So commending on your reply to my post is now singling you out? I am confused here. I just simply replied to your comment that i think its little bit ridiculous that people are demanding a loot filter when there is large parts of the game missing that are higher priority.

If you really wanted to get down to priorities, the dev team has already shown they are okay with QoL. The entire rework of MoF was QoL.

Where did I say the developers aren’t interested in QoL changes? They have done QoL changes throughout patches all the time. That isn’t my argument, I am saying they are lower priority, as they should be and players should be more patient because for example, working on stuff like releasing a smooth Multiplayer system this year system is extremely more pressing. Also I don’t think MoF actually qualifies for QoL. It was a massive endgame expansion with unqiue rewards, bosses, unique zones, time lines and story.

35

BAZINGA!

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36

So I’ve thought through this a few times and here perhaps would be my rebuttal -

The monolith and arena and essentially a story mode/game in of themselves. The story of monolith is twofold - complete all bosses/empowered timelines and then eventually push lvl 100 timelines as deep as possible. That’s a story of your mastery of mechanics and character build. This story/game at minimum is like 50-200 hours with a loot filter the average classic D2 veteran could spend spend and enjoy doing with the essential archtypal variety of talent personalization and gearing options available.

The second end-game story/game within the game is pushing arena. Mostly same value propoisition and structure as the former game Again another probably 20-50 hours for the average player.

The third story/game within the game is playing through the mainline story, which took me I think about 8-10 hours.

What’s going to have the biggest impact on the funding and success of this game is a consistently engaged playerbase that is always trusting of the developers to prioritize features well and few periods in which any one of these stories is rolled out hapharzardly in way where completeing them does not worth it. That’s all there is to it. They rolled out the foundation of an entirely new game-mode which sets up big expectations and is very hard to smoothly release out the door and I’m not up and arms about the fact they messed up not including a loot filter but it was a mistake and a deperature from the otherwise smooth expansionary modules they have made to the story in my experience.

So far the primary story of the game as they have rolled it out was fun to play through and they have done a good job of expanding it over time, I look forward to all acts being finished, but in the nature they have managed delievering it I have absolutely no issue. On the otherhand they are asking people to test an end-game system which is not a self-contained “complete” module in the sense that every veteran has come to associate a loot filter at minimum a nessecary component to accomplish the 50 hour baseline end-game story in a way that is fun and feels worth it.

So that’s the rub. This is why in the OP I tried to really focus the issue of the loot filter timeline an issue with the monolith system rollout, these really should of been a package deal and everybody would of been over the moon happy. I would of much preferred hearing of the monolith news a month later, coming to test the game, and be playing through a stage 40 timeline but nobody is perfect and my only hope is that they see this thread and learn from this rollout.

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37

I have to disagree. No, they would not have been over the moon, they would just have another thing to complain about and ragequit over because it doesn’t work exactly as their vision of it You end up with 50 versions of a moon and 37 ways to travel over it.

There were issues with the monolith implementation which took a couple of hotfixes to address and we still have boss mechanic issues.

Adding in a loot filter at the same time would have been a nightmare to implement.

Imagine all the comments about “this loot filter is s**t” … “I’m quitting until it’s the same as PoE” … “LE sux coz of filta” etc … etc … etc … all this completely overshadowing the efforts the devs put in with monoliths. Oh the whinging and the whining!

As an aside and an example, here is a joke …

There was an old bull and a young bull in a field on a hill, overlooking a whole field of cows.
“Let’s run down there and f…k a cow” the young bull says.
“No”, says the old bull “… let’s walk down and f…k them all”.

38

Well I feel like I laid at a cogent criticism, not really too encouraged to entertain a disagreement based on “No” and the expectation that whatever loot filter they would of released with the monolith expectingly would of been bad? If what you say was true then why bother releasing anything.

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39

First off, none of this is personally directed at you :slight_smile:

It happens quite often that game developers try to do too much at once, try to release to a sales department deadline etc or some other arbitrary factor … has to be released by xmas … needs to be released to coincide with sports event xyz.

Trying to get too much done at once can lead to major problems later … and staged releases help mitigate this. It happens all the time and many failed games succumb to trying too hard to please everyone and then fail to satisfy the majority.

Road Map to 1.0

Why didn’t the devs just wait 4 months and release monoliths, loot filter, shiny sparklers, 14 new character types and models, 317 new unique items, an overhaul in crafting etc etc and do them all in one release? If they can release 2 things at once (monoliths and loot filter) why not release 43 things at once?

Everything the devs release is laid bare to both fair and unfair criticism by people who have no idea of a development process. This is a general thing across many, many games. People with little or no knowledge overestimate their abilities.

My point was not to attack you or your cogent criticism … but to point out that adding a loot filter at the same time as new monoliths would not have made people over the moon happy and would just give the idiots something else to pick apart and moan about because no matter how it is implemented, there will be those who it doesn’t satisfy and “think they know better” because they are under-informed, over-confident in their viewpoint, think a bit of scripting is “creative development” and have been allowed unfettered access to a keyboard without adult supervision. (harsh - yes, cruel - yes … but true).

cf Dunning-Kruger Effect.

More (quantity) does not equal better (quality).

We may get the most perfect loot filter in the world (in the devs view) and be utterly pants for players … or the opposite - trying to satisfy loot filter shenanigans and the personal visions of players causes delays and knock-on effects for other areas of the game.

Delayed gratification - hence the bull joke.

40

This is a really good suggestion and would help a lot. Far too much loot drops and far too much of it is very low level.

Make less loot drop overall and make the loot base types that do drop much closer to the characters level.

41

definitely.

Or… they colored tier 6’s and 7’s purple. How much coding would be required to color any item with a tier 5 on it different shade of yellow? How much coding would be required to color any item that drops with a rare affix a different shade of blue?

That would certainly reduce my troubles and definitely hold me over until their more “robust” loot filter is ready.

2 Likes
42

Maybe we just don’t see eye to eye and how rediculously easy it is to make a basic loot filter. I’m a developer, you can do it in a simple callback from the item stream, conditional check on the affixes you desire to be selected against the random generator results and pipe the output after. If we wanted to be really lazy we could also just highlight the color of the dropped text to be a desired item filter color rather than hiding non-match item drops and it could be done in 30 minutes. The whole point of modern development is rapid iterative process of putting whatever they have out there, we pick it apart, and they revise - rather than the previous development model where they sit in an ivory tower creating what they think is perfect and end up missing the mark substantially because the feedback loop is nonexistant - it’s simply I like this and I’m releasing it. Not asking for perfect I’m asking for a starkly missing component that prevents me from testing a recently released gameplay mode with some degree of fun.

This is a highly controlled early access context, if you were that concerned about reception put an experimental flag in the options with a long disclaimer about how this is something of the most basic sort until the real loot filter is introduced later in the development process. Make it a footnote in the release notes rather than something you hype up to manage expectations so we can actually play the gameplay mode that was just released without scanning junk for 95% of the time if one was playing idiomatic to design.

2 Likes
43

What may seem “basic, simple and modern” to you may not be so in the developers’ eyes.

If it really is that easy then I’m sure you could knock up the code in 30 mins and email it to them - we could have full implementation by 17:00

44

Yeah that would certainly help to see what might be worth picking up. I’m no developer so have no clue what is involved in doing something like that. Hopefully there might be something the devs could do that is a pretty straightforward change to make just to keep players happy until a proper loot filter can be included.

1 Like
45

I’d much rather they waited and implemented it properly, rather than a quick-and-dirty placeholder.

The positive feedback the devs have got from their Road to 1.0 post is a strong signal that - for the most part - players are willing to wait a bit longer for something better rather than rush things.

Delayed gratification, again!

46

The monolith rework was content, them then changing what happens when you die (only getting pushed back a few timelines) was patched in 0.7.9d.

I think the rework of the monolith its shifting of the player base to running monoliths and hunting for loot (dare I say, farming) has made the need for a loot filter more pressing. I’m sure the devs are now aware of it & hopefully they are trying to bring it forward.

I think removing the lower levelled bases would help but trimming too much loot from the game wouldn’t feel great.

47

I’m pretty happy as things are to be honest and I’m happy to wait as long as it takes. I was thinking more for some of the people posting in this thread that say they would like something to improve things now, even if it’s not a loot filter.

Yeah, it would need to be balanced around quality/quantity. We don’t want PoE level’s of trash loot where pressing ALT can crash the game but on the other hand it needs to be enough of a lootsplosion to keep you interested.

48

The reason I said MoF was a QoL update is because the MoF already existed prior to the rework. Just think about that. They are reworking existing systems in the game before even putting in things that are currently missing from the game. (Classes and the remaining Chapters)

Another example of QoL that was almost universally praised was the stash implementation. This was 100% not necessary at the time it was done, but it sure got people’s attention.

I don’t know a lot about coding, but it also seems on the surface that a functional loot filter would take much less time than a lot of the extra content they are adding to the game. Maybe the issue isn’t so much the difficulty of the task, but who would do it and what task they would be redirected from to do it.

It is when you start to criticize me having an opinion as if my opinion is worth less than anyone else’s. I also didn’t mean to respond directly to you in that initial post. I just hit the wrong reply button.

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49

It’s not what makes them the same that matters. It’s what makes them different. I have faith in you Llama…

50

Honestly I am ok waiting with a Loot Filter, but I will definitely play waaaaaaaay more when one comes out. As someone who doesn’t have the best eyesight, scanning all the items on the ground is a large visual strain. That’s why I spend most of my time hunting for bugs and errors rather than pushing chars.

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51

So because roulette is different to a slot machine it’s not gambling? Or like FIFA Ultimate Team packs “aren’t gambling” because they can’t be redeemed for anything of monetary value despite pulling all the same psychological levers that gambling does?

52

Something I just thought about and involve loot after a MoF.

I think it would be much better to have a massive Chest after a Quest Echo only (Or even every 5 echos) instead of 1 every echo.

I played enough echoes to realize than most of the chests are quite disappointing, the loot explosion is annoying to look at, and inspecting everything is not a option for me anymore. I even start to stop opening it.

But I only feel that way because it happen way too often.

If it would be a (larger) chest after a quest echo (every 5 to 10) I’ll probably be Ok to look at every items drop.

53

It is when you start to criticize me having an opinion as if my opinion is worth less than anyone else’s. I also didn’t mean to respond directly to you in that initial post. I just hit the wrong reply button.

No, I am throwing out there that there might be a reason why your opinion might be worth less while providing a valid statement behind it. That is not called singling you out, it’s called having a discussion. If you don’t agree with me, that is perfectly fine by me but to be clear if you assume some weird hostile intent to my statement it doesn’t exist.

QoL changes are like fixing character pathing or making objects drag more smoothly. MoF doesn’t fall under this umbrella because it was a massive update that added a massive about of content. MoF is supposed to be one of the end game features; i don’t know if it was just me but what they had before felt like a place holder till they were able to work on it to meet their desired outcome.