Loot -- Be Careful of What You Wish For

[Archon_Wing]

Or, "The Diablo 2 Everyone Remembers"

If Blizzard concedes to the majority of gripes that are on the battle.net forums, the game will fall apart.

Wait, that's not news. Don't go yet! The main problem isn't that, it's that a great deal of the online thoughts concerning Diablo 3 are based on Diablo 2 multiplayer. This is not to say they're all magically invalid, but it can be built on a unstable premise when they reminiscence about godly items falling from the sky. Because they didn't. Diablo 2 had crappy drop values for really rare things too! You can't really take posts seriously when they say Harlequin's Crest is an entry level item, can you?

The thing is that like it or not, Diablo 2 Multiplayer was almost always tainted by cheating. Thus, using that economy model would be somewhat pointless, as it was basically run on a bunch of counterfeit bills. Then again, D3 isn't exploit and bot free at all, but that can be another issue. Well, they've partially stemmed the tide, though it'll be a ongoing fight.

Eventually, Blizzard would try to release the counterfeit SOJs with Uber Diablo, but since that was clearly a feature that only works if you get your hands dirty, here's an example of something that just caters effectively to cheating. It's not really an economy I have much nostalgia about.

In the end, I don't have a problem with the top of the line items being impossible to drop. But there must be ways to increase the niches for items and not have 95% of items not looked at. One could have say, Low Level PvP, and increase the amount of character slots for this purpose. This would open a new market all of a sudden for top-tier low level items. Or bring back a socketing option, with blue items getting more sockets for it; etc. Gem rerolling would be really nice in Diablo 3. Imagine; the better the gem you toss in with an item, the better item your blacksmith makes. Or even better yet, rerolling a high end gem with an item can create affixes/prefixes normally impossible on items depending on what it rolls. Or guarantee sockets. Isn't that way more exciting than just slightly higher stats?

For this reason, I actually wouldn't mind if level 10 items dropped in inferno, if they had a purpose. But "godly" level 10 items.

Or create new "ladder characters". The ladder system would only last like 3 months, but one could use their regular gold to buy items on the ladder. However, any gold collected on the ladder can't be transferred back. Items can when it ends, and of course there would be ladder only items. Then in a month... whoa gold sink. Promise special prizes and honors to the top folks that clear inferno on the ladder, etc. Raise the cap to level 63 (ladder only) but make it near impossible to attain so we can determine ladder ranking. Once again we'd need more ladder slots.

People can and will throw away tons of gold for vanity. I can foresee players tossing millions just to get ahead a bit, and meanwhile that AH fee will remove gold. Even there were inane features like say, pay 10 million regular gold and start your ladder character in act 2, people would do it just because they can.

Even a feature such as putting your name on an item would eat up some gold.

This isn't something blindly increasing drop rates can fix. But the number of people that are reaching 60 and getting into Inferno are increasing each day, so we must take heed of that.