The Diablo Formula and how Diablo 3 falls short

[MMAgCh]

The loot system is part of the problem, at the very least. It's one thing to have gear requirements imposed by the various difficulty levels/acts, but when drops are as unvaried and generally unrewarding as they currently are, it shouldn't come to anyone's surprise that farming for gear (particularly, D3's implementation of farming) becomes even less desirable to many players than it already is, and that they unsurprisingly and understandably turn to the AH instead.

Diablo 1 and 2 also used this kind of randomization in loot, right? The overwhelming majority of drops I recall in both games were not only garbage for my current class, but for any class. There was nothing stopping the game from generating worthless combinations of affixes.

I very specifically made no mention of the quality of the loot as such. That most drops will be junk is to be expected (although I feel that certain item types might be inclined to be a little too junky), but it's boring junk at that. This is, in no small part, because blues and yellows are pretty much all you can expect to find; nothing else that could, at least in theory, be deemed "shiny" – sets, legendaries, artisan plans – will drop with even remotely the kind of regularity needed to feel rewarding, provide variety, and reinforce the desire to keep hunting for items. For me, at any rate, a more prominent smattering of green and brown (still think that was an unfortunate, if oddly appropriate choice of colour ) among all the blue and yellow loot would surely do its part to make putting up with the prospect of farming items seem a little more worthwhile and entertaining.

That the aforementioned extremely rare items, even if they were to drop more frequently, would still be almost universally awful is, of course, an issue as well, but word has it Blizzard are actually going to address this. (I'm not really holding my breath, but we'll see.)

Diablo 2 eventually introduced quite a lot of sets and uniques that were pretty good, but most of those were from later patches, no?

Again, whether or not a given item is "good" per se isn't even my primary concern, though of course I'd prefer useful items to useless ones. Still, D2 managed to deliver on both accounts either immediately or eventually, which means there's even less of an excuse for D3 to be falling behind, really. It was something of a different story with D2/LoD because set items as a whole, and various other aspects of their itemisation, were fairly new concepts at the time, but even 1.10 was released in 2003 – whether the additional content was part of an expansion pack or not, I expect a game not to regress pretty much all the way back to square zero compared to its decade-old precursor.