D3 Developer Reddit Chat.

[Arromir]

Some pretty good information for those who are interested to read through all of it.

Link to it can be found *here*.

I'll quote a couple of answers that I think most people will find illuminating.


There seem to be a lot of misunderstandings and conspiracy theories from people who believe drop rates are directly influenced by the AH (if an item is common on the AH its drop rates will be lowered in-game). That doesn't really make any sense, but maybe can you lay this notion to rest?

It IS, however, reasonable that drop rates would be designed with the AH in mind, to avoid flooding the economy with powerful items. How did you approach this as a design challenge during development, especially without a working economy to test on? 3 weeks after launch, are the economy and player's gear roughly where you were expecting?

[COLOR="DimGray"][COLOR="LightBlue"]Wyatt Cheng: The auction house has absolutely no effect on drop rates. There are conspiracy theories and misunderstandings but I do want to re-iterate, the is NO interaction whatsoever. Bashiok mentioned earlier that we took the AH into account, so let me expand a little bit on that.

The drop rates were tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House. For the majority of internal development we didn't have an Auction House, we all played using our own drops only. I've personally leveled multiple characters from 1 to 60 internally before the game came out using only drops that I found - we all did.

When we say we "took the AH into account" that means it's one of many factors. ie. some players will choose to play without trading, some players would play in a group of 4 where they share drops among each other, and some (as it turns out, many) players would use the AH.

Three weeks after launch player's gear is much higher than what we were expecting. When I killed the Butcher on Inferno for the first time I was using a weapon with 492 DPS. There are also certain passives which are much more powerful than they were during internal development. One With Everything, for example, was basically never used internally because we didn't have an auction House. With the auction house, it feels like a mandatory passive. In retrospect we should have seen it coming. In the game's current state though, it's a powerful Monk ability that gives Monks a big survivability boost and has some interesting (some would argue fun, others would argue negative) effects on gearing.

I consider playing without the Auction House to be a very fun way to play the game. I'm personally planning on rolling some new characters that I'll set aside to be "no-AH/no-twink" characters. Much like in D2 when I would make a new character with a friend and we'd agree with each other not to twink our characters out.[/COLOR][/COLOR]


Have you seen the article at: http://www.alexc.me/a-scientific-explana...blo-2/417/ (Article is on drops, answer doesn't really require reading it.)

If so, what do you think of it?

[COLOR="LightBlue"]Wyatt Cheng: Alright so I'm going to take a stab at this question.

As mentioned in a different thread, the drop rates were carefully tuned for a single player playing through from 1 to 60 without ever using the AH.

All of our items are randomly generated, and so follow a distribution curve in power. Let's say for the sake of argument that you were to somehow distill an item down to it's "power level" and created a distribution graph of drop rate vs. power level. This graph would probably be normally distributed with outliers at high power levels dropping at a lower rate.

Looking at this graph, an average item drops every 5 minutes, a higher power item drops every 15 minutes, even higher power drops every hour. etc. As you move up the curve to ever more powerful items, the amount of time it takes to find such an item increases. This is what makes certain items more desirable, this is how things worked in D2.

What happens for a standard player who is playing solo when they first hit level 60 is they see an item upgrade every 30 minutes or so. Pretty quickly it becomes every hour, then every 2 hours. The higher the power level of your gear, the longer it takes to find your next upgrade, that's just the underlying math of this distribution. It's not really anything we set either. If we magically made all drops rates 10x higher, all it would do is shift the power curve left or right, it would not change the fundamental property that the higher up in power you go, the longer (statistically) it is going to take until you find your next drop.

So then let's say you visit the Auction House and get infusion of power that hurls you forward on that power curve. So whereas at one point your gear may be at a point that you are statistically speaking probably going to get an upgrade every 2 hours. After visiting the Auction House you hurl yourself forward on the power curve so far that now you are statistically going to get a drop every 8 hours.

To further illustrate the point, let's talk about the coming changes in 1.0.3. In 1.0.3 we're going to start dropping level 63 items in Act I of Inferno. We're also reducing incoming damage. What do I expect to happen? I expect that there will be a rapid increase in power across the entire community as all of these items become more widely accessible. It's like we took the distribution curve of items and made everything drop more. That item that used to take 10 hours to find is now a 2 hour item. An item that used to be a 2 day item is now an 8 hour item. After the initial frenzy of power increase, things are just going to settle again. People who think drop rates are too low now will probably still think drop rates are too low a week later when they move to the new point on the curve. I've spent a long time on this question so I'm going to move on but hopefully somebody who gets what I'm saying will be able to expand on it more, maybe draw some graphs to better illustrate the point.

tl;dr we could make drops 100x what they are now and it would just cause everybody to settle at a new equilibrium point. Anything you can farm in a few hours you'll already have, anything that takes longer you'll wish you could get faster.
[/COLOR]

In Diablo 2, from my understanding, magic find took the base item of a predetermined loot table, and gave you a higher chance of rolling a higher quality version of that item. In Diablo 3, this no longer seems to be the case and with loot tables being so vast now, magic find seems almost too arbitrary, it just doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. Could you explain exactly how magic find affects item drops in Diablo 3, as a lot of people seem to be unsure how the mechanic has changed from Diablo 2?

[COLOR="LightBlue"]Jay P Wilson: The mechanic is exactly the same as Diablo 2, and as you describe it hear.

And the loot tables are not more vast than D2 because we don't allow items to drop below level 50 in Inferno.[/COLOR]


I must say, between this, and the Patch 1.03 Preview, I think they are going in the right direction, and hopefully they'll only continue to do so.

[Gustaran]

I think this guy is giving us a lot of BS. Either, you "take the AH into account" or you balance the droprates around players not using the AH. You can't do both at the same time.
Added to this, Bashiok clearly stated that droprates were created with the AH in mind, but I guess the Activision PR team made them backpedal.

[Arromir]

Either, you "take the AH into account" or you balance the droprates around players not using the AH. You can't do both at the same time.

I'm surprised people have such a hard time reconciling the two. Unless one is completely certain there is a conspiracy going on, there is no reason both statements can't be true. Let's say there was no AH in the game, only an easy-to-use trading interface. Would people be jumping to the same conclusion? Perhaps, but regardless of what trading method Blizzard had chosen to include it would have had to be considered a factor in the grand scheme of things.

I see no reason to think they are lying about the fact they went through most of development without the AH, and given Blizzard's experience with the rampant trading people were doing in D2, I don't really begrudge them the chance to monetize and control it. Was the game released with perfect itemization, in terms of legendary items in particular? No, but Blizzard has acknowledged it, and is moving in the right direction (in my opinion at least) to fixing it.

Perhaps I'm just too naive, but as long as I'm enjoying the game I won't waste too much time worrying about making a tin-foil hat.

[Gustaran]

it would have had to be considered a factor in the grand scheme of things.

How exactly would it be considered? What are the ramifications? To say you have considered something doesn't mean a thing.

The discussion was about the probability of high quality loot. There are three possibilities:

a) The game is balanced around the AH. That means it is too difficult for people who reject the AH.
b) The game is balanced around playing without the AH. That means it is too easy for AH users.
c) The game is balanced around a point somewhere between AH users and non AH users. That means it is somewhat too easy for AH users and somewhat too hard for non users.

Now Bashiok wrote - quite understandably - that the droprates were adapted to the AH (as anyone would have probably guessed, because if you wouldn't do that, you couldn't earn money with your integrated RMAH). So people complained about two things:

1) A minority of players rejects the AH altogether and criticize that the balance is off for so called "pure" play.
2) The seemingly majority of players accepts the AH, but starts to notice that at the moment it almost completely replaces loot drops before Act 3/4 Inferno, taking a lot of fun out of the game (this will be changed in 1.03 but leaves the question of drops in Normal/Nightmare).

And now suddenly that Chen dude shows up and tells us that Blizzard somehow magically kept everything in mind and testers never had any sort of items available other than what dropped for them and would never think about balancing around the AH, yet still consider the AH...

And I am saying this is PR nonsense.

[uberfish]

Apart from legendary/set items being too rare, I don't think there's anything wrong with the drop rates pre-Inferno. (and Inferno is really a problem of DPS on enemies being out of line.)

[Tyrmith]

Added to this, Bashiok clearly stated that droprates were created with the AH in mind, but I guess the Activision PR team made them backpedal.

Why would activision PR care about a bunch of people who already bought the game. I'm pretty sure they have bigger fish to fry then something as minute as that.

[Tyrmith]

They answered another question from reddit they didn't have time to answer originally, and gave a (long) but very interesting response to.

Posted by Adamant
Can you please explain/reconcile the disparity between melee and ranged in this game?

I'll state up front that I do think there's a disparity between melee and ranged, and I would like to see that closed. I feel like if I talk a lot about thought processes and design philosophy and don't state this up front people will lose the forest for the trees and conclude we think everything is fine. So I'll say it again: melee vs. ranged disparity is not fine, changes are being made, and even if you disagree with the approach outlined below we can hopefully have the common ground that the current situation needs improvement.

It may not look like it on the surface, but a large number of the changes in 1.0.3 are actually targeted at closing the melee/ranged gap. Let me go through some of them.

Hardcore
I'm going to use Hardcore as a starting point. In Hardcore, there's actually a reasonable distribution of classes, and I don't think the melee vs. ranged disparity is as large. There are a lot of Hardcore players of every class in Inferno without a huge disparity. Why is this important? It's because a significant portion of the melee/ranged disparity is related to a ranged character's ability to progress even while dying. A melee player can throw themselves at a monster and die, doing almost no damage to an elite enemy. A ranged player can do a huge amount of damage to an elite enemy, die, respawn, and basically attrition the enemy down with repeated deaths. In the Hardcore environment where a single bad Mortar, Vortex, Jailer, or Reflects Damage will kill a glass cannon-ranged character, the disparity between ranged and melee is an order of magnitude less.

Repair Costs
One of the more controversial changes in 1.0.3 is the increased repair costs. The design intent of these increased repair costs is to make death more meaningful. One of the top arguments we see against the increased repair costs is "I'm already dying dozens of times to make any progress in Inferno. Don't you see this is going to make this impossible?" This concern is most often brought up by ranged glass cannons. Many melee players respond "increased repair costs seem fine" because they haven't been using death-zerging as a tactic. Melee can't easily death-zerg an enemy down, but ranged can. I don't think the answer is to make death-zerging more attractive for melee; I'd rather make death-zerging a less profitable strategy for ranged.

Enemy Health and Damage
We're also looking to adjust the damage and health of enemies in Inferno Acts II, III, and IV. This is another change that is primarily for melee with secondary benefits for ranged. A lot of ranged are building glass cannon with the mentality "well, I'll just try not to get hit at all." So, reducing incoming damage when they weren't taking any before isn't significant for them, whereas reducing incoming damage for the melee is a big deal. For the ranged classes, I'm hoping that the incoming damage reduction will make some survival stats more appealing to ranged classes. While before the damage was so large it just felt pointless to try and mitigate any of it at all, after the change hopefully ranged classes will think "well, if I just put on a modest amount of survivability, I don't get 1-shot, so that's worth it." There are some ranged players who are already doing this -- stacking survivability so they don’t have to endlessly kite -- and it just feels like the minimum amount of survivability to avoid the 1-shot is so large it's unattainable. That's one of the things 1.0.3 seeks to address.

Damage Reduction in Co-op
Another change which is targeted at improving life for melee is the reduction in co-op damage. Again, since many ranged players just build glass cannon and avoid damage completely, they didn't really care if incoming damage went up as other players entered the game, but the melee characters really noticed. It was very easy for your life-on-hit to have you at a steady equilibrium, but as soon as another player entered the game your life-on-hit was no longer covering the incoming damage and death became imminent.

Additional Changes
And finally, there are always minor polish adjustments designed to help melee -- such as the AI on some monsters (BEES!!!) being tweaked to run away less often, which again helps melee more than ranged. I actually spent some extra time the other day to make sure if a Sand Wasp runs away from you, and you start chasing the wasp, it doesn't turn and shoot 4 bees in your face (hopefully that makes 1.0.3). I'm also working with one of our gameplay engineers to make it so if you sidestep the Dark Berserker’s power hit (where he brings his giant mace down), he doesn’t turn to track you as he swings (though that change probably won't make 1.0.3). These kind of AI adjustments are things ranged players don’t even notice, but are huge for melee.

Another adjustment being made is increasing both the maximum range and the dead zone of Mortar. Mortar was specifically designed to be an anti-range affix, but many ranged players would just stand even farther away, whereas melee would sometimes get caught in the cross-fire of two Mortars. Increasing the maximum range and the dead zone helps with both of these.

[haphazard1]

Thanks, Tyrmith! It is good to hear that melee characters are being thought about and will get a little help here and there.