1.0.3 Coming Changes

[FireIceTalon]

The gold sink will NOT fix the inflation, and will almost certainly be completely ineffective - mark my words. The fact of the matter is, you can put all the gold sinks in the world there, and the people who control the games economy laugh, and laugh, and laugh some more, because there is no "regulation" on what they can charge. Do you really honestly believe gold sinks are going to deter, much less fix inflation? Lets get serious here, it aint gonna happen.

[Elric of Grans]

To be honest, I think they are making gem upgrades WAY too cheap now. I found Square a little over-priced, and Perfect Square WAY over-priced, but those below were fine. At those prices, they may as well bring back the Horadric Cube and make them free! Two gems for an upgrade seems needless too; I have no shortage of gems to upgrade, just cash to upgrade them with (I have three or four dozen Square gems of every colour because I cannot afford to upgrade them).

The `fixes' to drops do not seem right either. They are only `fixing' Inferno, and they are only making a token improvement. There is absolutely no reason why ilvl30-odd items should drop in Hell; ilvl40-odd should not drop past Act I. From these changes, the overwhelming majority of drops in Inferno will still be FAR below an acceptable ilvl. You already have bad odds of getting the item base-type you want, followed by the modifiers you want, followed by the magnitudes you want: they do not need to artificially soil the water by making the majority of items automatically useless. People would still use the Action House to get perfect equipment, even if the drops were consistently rock solid.

[Roland]

Health link is a joke. All it means is if you focus-fire one mob down slowly enough you essentially kill the whole pack. Mind, I'm not against the ability - as a Demon Hunter I enjoy it, actually - but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it truly adds any challenge. Maybe melee characters fare a bit worse, but I doubt that.

I can tell you play a ranged class.

When a champ pack is sighted, my goal as a Barbarian is to blow every cooldown I have to try to kill one member of that pack as quickly as possible. Once the number of champions gets reduced, the fight becomes substantially easier. Health Link prevents that, and guarantees that all 3 (or 4) members of the pack will be beating on me for the entire encounter. It's just another of the myriad of "screw you melee" boss abilities out there, which I loathe, just as you would loathe Vortex and Mortar. I laugh at Mortar. Vortex is an issue for melee only if it's combined with Freeze or Arcane.

Ok, perhaps I'm brushing this off a little too lightly by saying positioning should still be a priority for a melee character (just like it was in D1). Does that mean endlessly kiting? No. Does it mean having to separate an elite pack down a bit? Yes, sometimes. That said, I can see how Health Link would prove dangerous to melee, what with keeping the pack around longer. However, if you can target one mob continuously it will, with a bit of time, drag the entire pack down, thus making the fight end more quickly than another pack. Again, though, maybe I'm asking too much of melee. OTOH, if you want to see what it's like on the other side of the coin just ask to play my Demon Hunter.

To be honest, I think they are making gem upgrades WAY too cheap now. I found Square a little over-priced, and Perfect Square WAY over-priced, but those below were fine. At those prices, they may as well bring back the Horadric Cube and make them free! Two gems for an upgrade seems needless too; I have no shortage of gems to upgrade, just cash to upgrade them with (I have three or four dozen Square gems of every colour because I cannot afford to upgrade them).

When you can buy them on the AH for about 1/10th the cost of crafting them up, yes - they're too expensive. Of course, that's because supply outstrips demand by a fair margin, and if you progress quickly enough through the Acts / difficulties you'll be swimming in higher tier gems so fast you'll be vendoring the lower tier ones just to free up the stash space. Do I think it was too costly before? Yes. Do I think the changes they're making are going to fix that? Probably not completely, given the supply of them from drops. We'll see though. I'm not concerned about gems. The Blacksmith is a much bigger initial gold sink when raising. Top-tier crafting could maybe use a cost reduction of about 10% or so, but beyond that it's mostly just leveling him up that's a huge gold sink - with no payout.

[Trevan]

To be honest, I think they are making gem upgrades WAY too cheap now. I found Square a little over-priced, and Perfect Square WAY over-priced, but those below were fine. At those prices, they may as well bring back the Horadric Cube and make them free! Two gems for an upgrade seems needless too; I have no shortage of gems to upgrade, just cash to upgrade them with (I have three or four dozen Square gems of every colour because I cannot afford to upgrade them).

I believe the reason for it is because the ones they are discounting are the highest that drop, and thus are absolutely atrociously dirt cheap on the ah. In fact, I'd almost argue that it's cheaper to just vendor your gem drops and buy any you need off the ah currently, assuming you use the ah.

Of course, this removes another (albeit ineffectual for most people) gold sink from the game.

[MonTy]

tacking this on here. Jay Wilson and Wyatt Cheng answer a bunch of questions on reddit. There are some good questions & answers:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/...s_and_jay/

[ViralSpiral]

Why don't bosses guarantee decent drops on your first kill in Nightmare or Hell? This leaves 30-60 feeing VERY dull and boring because you're not getting your loot fix. It's not a question of how do I gear up, but a statement in that beating a boss that drops two bad blues is very disheartening and is a very NEGATIVE reinforcement for continued play.
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[–]JayPWilson 265 points 2 hours ago
This was my decision, and I'll start by saying that Wyatt and Andrew have talked me out of it. In a future patch (not 1.0.3) we'll add this.
But so you know my reasoning I think this just moves the problem. Design intent is that at end-game we want you to stack NV and 'then' kill bosses to make farming loot more interesting. To facilitate this bosses have to stop dropping tons of rares 'at some point'.
My worry was that if it was at Inferno everyone would be like 'WTF why Inferno hardest difficulty with worst loot!?!??!' instead of the current complaint.
The reason I've decided my decision was wrong is the gap that exists between Normal first time drops and the NV farming of Inferno.

Progress is being made. This'll be one of the benefits to not having the game immediately.

[Archon_Wing]

I really think the AH needs some regulation, the inflation is out of control. Just like in real life, we got a few wealthy dikheads that think money (or gold in this case) grows on trees and they can charge w/e they want.

Lol, no thanks. I'll charge 50k for my cracked sash. If someone wants to buy it that's their prerogative. If people learn a bit more about prices (which they will) or spend a few more minutes browsing. You can't protect people from themselves.

There's a ton of stupidly overpriced items in the AH right now. Which is why I go to page 6 and buy something a little worse for 1/5 the price. It's all good! If anything, it's way easier for everyone to get to hell now since you can buy that kind of gear for dirt cheap, which helps mitigate the crappy drops in Nightmare-hell

As for the changes, I like the increased repair costs and making inferno easier. The challenge will be more fair, but death will be more than just a slap on the wrist. I mean really, sometimes, I'd rather just die then waste more potions.

[ViralSpiral]

Have you seen the article at: http://www.alexc.me/a-scientific-explana...blo-2/417/
If so, what do you think of it?
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[spoiler][–]wyattcheng[S] 135 points 1 hour ago
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.[/spoiler]

Really long answer. Bolded the most important part, regarding 1.0.3 changes. Or tried to bold, anyhow. Except tags don't work the way I think they do.

[MongoJerry]

The gold sink will NOT fix the inflation, and will almost certainly be completely ineffective - mark my words. The fact of the matter is, you can put all the gold sinks in the world there, and the people who control the games economy laugh, and laugh, and laugh some more, because there is no "regulation" on what they can charge. Do you really honestly believe gold sinks are going to deter, much less fix inflation? Lets get serious here, it aint gonna happen.

OK, so you're not really interested in inflation. What you want is for the rich players to be taxed at a higher rate than poorer players, I guess? Take away gold from players, but not mine, right?

In-game inflation is caused by more money going into the economy than is going out. That why the game needs more money sinks to prevent inflation. If properly done, 1g should buy you about the same amount of goods three months from now as 1g does now. Right now, however, people are earning gold quickly and there isn't much to spend it on -- except for sending it to other players in exchange for items. Thus, except for the 15% AH cut, the gold doesn't disappear. If the situation continues, gold will eventually become as worthless as it was in D2, which I think would be a shame.

Now, none of this has to do with the stuff you're railing about. If someone puts up an item for what you consider to be an outrageous price and someone actually buys it, then that means that someone out there was able to scrape up that outrageous amount of money at a quick enough rate that it was worth spending that money on that item. That's not the seller's fault. After all, the seller is merely selling at a price that he or she thinks he or she can get. The issues are first that someone was able to accumulate that gold at a rate so fast in the first place and second that the accumulated gold was worth so little intrinsically that it was worthwhile to just shovel it all over for one item.

If there were more valuable gold sinks in the game, however, then someone might pause to consider whether shoveling all that gold over would be a good idea.

[ViralSpiral]

We keep mentioning there need to be more gold sinks - what sorts do we suggest?

A few ideas -
1) Gold to re-roll one or more attributes on an item (a LARGE amount of gold - this could eventually create a "perfect" item if there's no cap to how many times a given attribute can be re-rolled.)

2) Gold to unlock special skill runes. (Related to non-survival-related aspects of the game, like gold find, magic find, crafting material find, et cetera.)

3) Increased stash size. (Who won't throw as much gold at that as can be thrown at it?)

4) Gambling - so long as there's stuff worth gambling for. It mostly worked in D2, pre-expansion. Although it still wasn't good enough, as gold was almost never used as player currency.

5) Adding socket(s) to items.

[RTM]

A few ideas -
1) Gold to re-roll one or more attributes on an item (a LARGE amount of gold - this could eventually create a "perfect" item if there's no cap to how many times a given attribute can be re-rolled.)

This, in addition to being able to "lock in" an attribute on a crafted item, are probably one of the better possible gold sinks. I can see it leading to mostly homogenized gear (everyone sporting LoH/IAS/All res/vit/prime stat), but it is something that people would definitely spend gold on.

[ima_nerd]

The gold sink will NOT fix the inflation, and will almost certainly be completely ineffective - mark my words. The fact of the matter is, you can put all the gold sinks in the world there, and the people who control the games economy laugh, and laugh, and laugh some more, because there is no "regulation" on what they can charge. Do you really honestly believe gold sinks are going to deter, much less fix inflation? Lets get serious here, it aint gonna happen.

You have an annoying habit of attempting to rebut someone's post with absolutely NO logical or rational statements. If you remove currency from the economy, inflation will at LEAST slow down or, depending on the magnitude of gold sinks, reverse. I somehow have the feeling that you aren't a capitalist ( ) but the basics hold true here: if someone is charging so much for an item that no one can afford it, it won't sell and the seller will be forced to lower their prices. It's a really simple system. Changes will take a little while to shake through the system and let everything settle out but the ridiculous prices WILL come down.

You talk about regulating prices a lot but have yet to actually propose even the basic outline of how to implement such a system. Have you even thought about how one would go about it? My guess is no.

[kandrathe]

You talk about regulating prices a lot but have yet to actually propose even the basic outline of how to implement such a system. Have you even thought about how one would go about it? My guess is no.

Lol. I know. All rare and above items would go to a massive communal stash, and everyone could search and choose one reward item per day according to their level.

[MMAgCh]

We keep mentioning there need to be more gold sinks - what sorts do we suggest?

Make a given item's repair cost increase each time it is repaired. This would both improve the role of repairing as a gold sink and, perhaps more importantly, cause items to go out of circulation in the long run (i.e. when they simply become too expensive to repair even for "rich" players), which should benefit the economy as a whole.

Granted, you probably wouldn't want to implement this without adjusting various other aspects of the item system as well, but still!

[ViralSpiral]

Yeah, and my first question would be - is this like D2's durability system where ranged characters practically never lose durability but melee is hammered by it?

[kandrathe]

We keep mentioning there need to be more gold sinks - what sorts do we suggest?

A few ideas -
1) Gold to re-roll one or more attributes on an item (a LARGE amount of gold - this could eventually create a "perfect" item if there's no cap to how many times a given attribute can be re-rolled.)

2) Gold to unlock special skill runes. (Related to non-survival-related aspects of the game, like gold find, magic find, crafting material find, et cetera.)

3) Increased stash size. (Who won't throw as much gold at that as can be thrown at it?)

4) Gambling - so long as there's stuff worth gambling for. It mostly worked in D2, pre-expansion. Although it still wasn't good enough, as gold was almost never used as player currency.

5) Adding socket(s) to items.

I concur with them all. For #1, I think you could safely also just make it change one at random. This would give you a bigger sink, and would allow people to take items that are mostly good and improve them, but also risk making them mostly bad as well.

[Trevan]

4) Gambling - so long as there's stuff worth gambling for. It mostly worked in D2, pre-expansion. Although it still wasn't good enough, as gold was almost never used as player currency.

I feel the need to mention that crafting is essentially gambling.

[ViralSpiral]

Yeah, but crafting is limited by reagents, as I understand it, whereas gambling would have no limit except gold itself.

Granted, the difference may be next-to-nothing once commodities are available via AH again, (aside from not being based on the level of an NPC, unless they gave a gambling NPC levels) so it's not original, but it -is- a gold sink, which is what I was looking for.

Of course I was also hoping for another ten or twelve ideas so we could go throw a list on the official site, along with reasoning as to why more gold sinks are needed. I mean, do we know if anyone from Blizzard still swings by here? I remember way back when Peter Hu and Max Schaefer did, but I don't rightly know if Hu's with the company anymore and I know Schaefer isn't. Goodness knows I was helping him with Mythos before that got scrapped.

[Concillian]

4) Gambling - so long as there's stuff worth gambling for. It mostly worked in D2, pre-expansion. Although it still wasn't good enough, as gold was almost never used as player currency.

I feel the need to mention that crafting is essentially gambling.

Gambling that is more limited by the materials required than by gold, and therefore not a very good gold sink.

[Kevin]

We keep mentioning there need to be more gold sinks - what sorts do we suggest?

I haven't really thought down this path too much but I'm wondering what reducing gold drop values and increasing the sell price of blues/rares would do. I'm talking tipping it so that most of the gold you get is from selling stuff not from picking up gold, which was more like the D2 model, where you could sell items for 50K (I think that was the final cap) but piles were still only in the hundreds. I'm not talking about giving items sell values like that. Just treating all item drops as gold, and changing the balance so that the same amount of "gold" drops but that most of it from items. Right now items sell for about as much as a pile from the same mob though I'm going from memory not from any data on that.

You'd have to drop the mat costs for crafts because mats suddenly have more value, but assuming crafts are desirable still it would seem that doing this would at least slow the flow of money into the game which would make current sinks more effective.

Again I haven't given this anymore thought than just posting it. Which is why I'm interested in the discussion.