Gradual Reduction in MF Effectiveness

[Ruvanal]

What was Blizzard's aim with Diablo 2 v1.10? To make things harder. Things got a lot harder, if only temporarily. It's actually hardest when you have crappy items.

For dealing with the combat of monsters, yes they moved to making the game harder. But as far as general item generation goes they changed it so that it easier overall to get 'better' (unique, set, rare, magic) items than you were in the earlier patch due to how they changed the values for ALL checks in itemratio.txt. To give a rough idea these changes to the values, it makes it about 25% more likely you will get a unique item from ANY of the monster than you would have in the v1.09 game using the same amount of magic find (if you had say a 2% chance of the item being a unique in v1.09; it would be about a 2.5% chance in v1.10). This is points to their awareness that the item finding is noted as something that the players want and need, not something that they are really trying to discourge.

Blizzard has made bosses drop well the first time, and poorly afterward (but still good, in most cases).

This is not an accurate assessment of the quest to non-quest drops as they are listed in the game files. The non-quest drops in v1.10 are set up exactly the same as they are in the v1.09 version. So they cannot really be considered 'poor' ar all compared to how they were in v1.09. In fact due to the changes that I noted in the itemratio.txt file they will actually be somewhat better due the globally enhanced chances of getting uniques, sets and rares (these drops are already forced to magical quality as a minimum). It is the quest quality drop that has been added at an even better than normal chance of better quality of base items (no gold or 'junk' items will be picked) and the enhancements to the unique, set and rare* chances have been increased. (* Rares are the minimum quality that should be dropped by checks, but you may get some magic quality due to their being failed set checks.)

So it would be more accurate to say that the quest drops (supposedly first time drops) are 'uber' and then they drop down to the 'normal' good drops that used to get from the act end bosses.

Blizzard has made Pindleskin (arguably the easiest to boss to reach) drop good things less frequently.

Actually he drops just as well as any of the other boss monsters that are mlvl=86 using the "Act 5 (H) Super C" TC for their drops. Due to the way the game handles the drop checking, the "Act 5 (H) Super Cx" TC that is given to Pindleskin has exactly the same chance of dropping items (and quality) as the "Act 5 (H) Super C" TC that is given to many other boss monsters through out the act 5 hell area. Only his mlvl is slightly lower than you can find if you travel to some of the level 84 and 85 areas (giving you mlvl 87 and 88 bosses). Considering the ease of getting to him, he is probably still one of the better 'item farming' choices, even if he can't drop a handful of the uniques requiring the highest ilvls to spawn.

Blizzard made the Durance level 2 massive in order to slow Mephisto runners (I assume, there isn't any other reason for it). Blizzard made the tower bigger, presumably to slow Countess runners.

These cases were probably done as much for server stability than as to slow down the 'farming' of two of the "cheesier" monster for item farming (Mephisto for the bulk of unique and set items and the Countess for the runes). Having many very short duration games being created and destroyed on the servers (max of 128 per server) can be a bit of CPU and memory overhead to be allocating and then de-allocated. If enough of this is happening in a short amout of time you might even be able to generate fragmented memory in the RAM similar to what happens on hard drives that decreases their performance. True the modern set of computers are less susceptible to this than the older models that I first saw this happening on (a virus in an earlier type of computer intentionally did this to crash the system), but they are not immune if they do not have an opportunity to cleanup their memory allocation usage (done during lower activity levels typically). Doing things that discourage rapid game creation can solve most of this problem (like the realm down situations due to logging into and out of games too quickly).

So yes, some of what we as runners are experiencing is psychological. I concede that one. But that's not to say that it isn't happening. Technically, there is no degredation of MF, but I highly doubt that these results are simply statistical. When drops have the perceived curve that we are experiencing, you know it isn't just the law of averages working itself out. There is very possibly a hidden mechanism causing this behaviour.

I would say mostof it is psychological, since I have never seen one of these claims ever get supported by some solid statistical evidence. In fact the few cases that I have seen someone really gather solid statistical evidence; it ended up matching the derived values to 3 significant figures or better each time. All I have seen from your statements and other agreeing with you is that is some "percieved" thing that you seem to be noteing, which is a situation that can be very much influnced by the psychological factors that other such as whereagles or Professor Frink noted earlier.

Personaly I find that 99+% of people recollection is rather flawed even over only a few minutes unless they are doing something to accurately record what is going on the whole time (like carefully noting all the particulars of every item that a boss would drop for every run). In the past every time that I cornerd someone about having had impossible items drop from chests, they quickly recanted because in fact they had not really been making sure that what they faound had actually come from a chest in the first place. But they sure felt special when they were claiming something that went 'against the expert knowledge'. This is a decidedly psychological trap the most people actually like to fall into; yet more of the psychology problem of only having ones memory as the only real record keeping of an event. I'll take some hard evidence over ten eywitness any time, just look at what magicians do to the audience in performance to see why.

You know, the Blizzard developers are quite talented. Diablo II is a very complicated game. They could have come up with something very ingenious to achieve this "midly annoying" feature. It's not necessarily someplace you've looked before. After all, you haven't really taken a long hard look at the game code this time around, so it's quite possible you could have missed it.

Jarulf is not the only one that has been looking into the code. There are many over at Phrozen Keep that are doing this type of digging. As of yet I have not heard of single instance of their being any spot in the item generation routines that would allow the insertion of extra parameters that would do the types of effects that would be required to achieve the types of results that you claim are happening. On the other hand, using the Occams Razor principle, the easier explanation is that of a psychological answer. What you are percieving is just that; a perception sitiuation, not a real effect.