Remove MF completely from game

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iamstryker wrote:

I do not recall Diablo 1 having any magic find.

You are correct.

I was confident enough to not feel like actually investigating. However its been so long since I have played that I felt like my memories might be fuzzy and thus I could end up wrong so I better not test my luck.

Anyway, I did enjoy how everyone in Diablo 1 was on even footing. You just slayed monsters as fast as you could and that was it. You used the gear that made you the most powerful and that was it. No need to have a seperate character for magic find.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Was just having a cigarette when this idea came to me: If MF affixes feel so much like "+% increased all damage dealt"... wouldn't the solution be to keep MF affixes, but make them more build-dependent?

This is exactly the way it is done with Magic Find (or Detect Hidden) in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The best description I can give is something like Professions in your typical MMO games. You just have them on top of your build as additional independent system.

I can only add that reflecting all these thing to Path of Exile, Magic Find is actually the same. It is really the alternative to pretty much everything else. There are only two problems here that I see. First, you are actively loosing immediate character power, making your play less fun. Second, everything else to loose in PoE's case is really a lot. So many options are to be sacrificed only in MF's favor. I don't like that, and I feel it's just bad.


Actually I want to also respond to all this "Not everyone is playing for maximum effectiveness" talking, that gets brought into the discussion every 3-5 pages.
- If you are not concerned with what you are playing, just spending time having fun with friends, I don't see how all this Magic Find problems could affect you. Your gameplay will be barely changed, and even if it will you will barely notice that - just because you are not concerned with what you are playing in the first place.
- If you play solo just to have fun with the slaying monster game, I am afraid it's actually a dead end for you. It's very rewarding when you finally nailed your perfect build, mastered it, and finally have a breeze at maps. But after seeing no upgrades for like 20+ levels, having very little amount of currencies (except jewellers/fusings - there are tons of them in high levels of play), your killing spree begins to fade as you no longer feel rewarded for your playing. This culminates in inability to sustain maps. I personally have seen this, and I feel this needs to change. MF removal will definitely be a solution.
- If you used to play in a group with a dedicated MF culling striker (you are not being him), MF removal will actually benefit you as well. Without having to stop dps at low percentages of rare monsters is significant enough quality of life change to make you happy.
- If you are actually playing an MF-stacked character, you are actually lying to yourself saying that, as you are actively maximizing your effectiveness in the form of finding as much loot as possible. I totally understand it is very cool to feel being a special snowflake while playing a very boring build to just have better looting chances and grief other players who want to have fun slaying monsters. It's just not healthy for the game. If MF is removed, you could stop being a tool and finally have fun slaying monsters too, you know?


In my opinion, the "options" the game forces you to make is not so cool at end game content. The basic algorithm for you is something like:
1. Get to endgame. At this point you pretty much already know what works for you, what doesn't. You have at least an above-average knowledge of passive skillbalalaika tree.
2. If you are playing non-MF build, you need to find 4 other players and 1 MF-stacked player to be able to continue playing the game to feel rewarded.
3. If you intend to play solo at the expense of everything else, you need to stack MF whether you want it or not. Otherwise you won't be able to gear yourself up for higher level maps, or be left with no such maps. At this point you might need to reevaluate all the knowledge of point 1 and most certainly need to start over correcting your build.

This is what bothers me the most with Magic Find. I want to play solo and not use Magic Find? I am fucked. Purchasing all my gear from Magic Finders plus no more high level maps at level 87, purchasing them as well? This really makes me think about the point I am playing for.

Magic Find is only limiting the pool of builds I will be considering playing when the game is released. Playing fun builds that are unrewarding or playing boring builds that deliver? It certainly can be viewed as a great balance just as in between eating a delicious apple you know you will have a diarrhea from and eating a rotten one for a most likely instant puke. Stick to your choice or mix well, and... Bon appetite!

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iamstryker wrote:

Anyway, I did enjoy how everyone in Diablo 1 was on even footing. You just slayed monsters as fast as you could and that was it. You used the gear that made you the most powerful and that was it. No need to have a seperate character for magic find.

This makes me wonder: was Diablo 2 the first RPG to have a "magic find" modifier? Pretty sure it was, although it's difficult to prove a negative (that no one did it previously).

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timtwins wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

MF is good on uniques when balanced with drawbacks; using MF gear should mean really gimping yourself somehow, similar to how Kaom's gimps you socket-wise.

MF is awesome on maps, and actually needs to be used more aggressively to make players actually try the difficult mods.

MF has no place on rare items, as a support gem, or as an intrinsic mod whatsoever.

I couldn't agree more. Except for the part where you insinuate Kaom's is okay. Nerf that shit to 750 life pls.

id rather like to see it at 500 :p

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Schnupfndrache7 wrote:

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timtwins wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

MF is good on uniques when balanced with drawbacks; using MF gear should mean really gimping yourself somehow, similar to how Kaom's gimps you socket-wise.

MF is awesome on maps, and actually needs to be used more aggressively to make players actually try the difficult mods.

MF has no place on rare items, as a support gem, or as an intrinsic mod whatsoever.

I couldn't agree more. Except for the part where you insinuate Kaom's is okay. Nerf that shit to 750 life pls.

id rather like to see it at 500 :p

CI is nerfed on down after being boosted and Life still has that OP piece of gear. The never be stunned, frozen, shocked, chilled, piece of gear since your life is high enough to ignore all those effects. Your life regeneration can be INSANE enough to counter most chaos and burning effects. The only downside is that you loose sockets in your chest? Meh. Have enough 4 links in boots, gloves, head, and if you have one of those you can have a 5-6 link 2 hander.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Thus, unlike the chicken and the egg, we know which comes first here: expectations.

Incorrect. Motivation comes first, THEN expectations, although I will admit they are very closely linked.

e.g. As in WHY am I playing this game in the first place? I am motivated to have fun, not be bored, to acquire virtual wealth, etc.

As an counter-example / experiment trying watching two movies:

- one without any expectations
- one with expectations

The first is enjoying the journey.
The second is focusing on the destination.

Now make a note of which ones you enjoyed more?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

As a game designer, isn't it one's job to harmonize these two objectives, such that the player isn't torn between the decision to do the fun thing and go unrewarded, or do the rewarding thing and have no fun?

1. That gamer designer has failed to understand one of _key_ points about game design as stated so eloquently & succinctly stated by Sid Meier:
-> Give players interesting choices! <-

2. You are conflating fun and reward. Fun can be in and of itself a fulfilling reward. Please go read the excellent Raph Koster's "Theory of Fun" :-)

The job of the game designer is to make sure the player is having fun at all times. In movie terminology it would be called "pacing" and "tension." Is the audience getting bored? Are we building enough conflict? Are we releasing enough tension? etc. The parallels to sex & gaming should be obvious.

This is the _primary_ motivation: Players want to have fun.

Now a certain paradox / dilema appears because not all players find the same _activities_ fun! Some like virtual fishing, some don't. Some like virtual killing, some don't. As a game designer you need to be aware of the TYPEs of players. You goal then is two-fold:

* If players find this fun, how can we make this more interesting?
* If players don't find this fun, is there anything we could do to make it fun?

Some players find MF fun. Some don't. Some could care less.

Which is the "right" answer?

ALL OF THEM.

Truth is not limited to dualistic thinking. Truth is relative to each player, AS IS the concept of FUN.

As a famous man once said "You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all the people all the time."

That said, that does not negate the fact that designers choses to focus on certain themes / genres / etc. When there are tradeoffs between choices, such as DPS vs MF, that is an interesting choice. "Should I as a player focus on the short-term survivability or on the long-term wealth acquisition"? THAT is why MF persists in ARPGs. It gives the player an interesting choice.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

You said "You are letting your greed dictate how you play the game instead of the other way around." But what I'm asking here is: Why must these two desires be in opposition?

Because you are not understanding control & mastery of self. In the former you are giving your power away; in the second you are keeping it.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

please don't try to stop us from properly balancing a game where the decisions actually matter to us.

Please define "properly balancing" ?

Players play RPGs because they have the false allusion of wanting power. i.e. "I want phat loot so I can kill more powerful things faster to get phat loot repeat ad nausea."

If the journey along the way isn't fun along the way the game design has failed. You can have a fun game WITH or WITH OUT magic find. Saying it needs to be "balanced" is demonstrating one does not understand the fundamental problem.

There is only one game that I am aware of that solves the root problem; Team Fortress 2 solved (solves?) the MF problem differently:

Instead of a MF deciding what drops, they decide when it drops.

Because at the end of the day that is all that matters about wealth is this: Time = Money. Players quite naturally buy into the expectation 'The player who puts in more time will tend to have more wealth.' The game is perceived as being unfair if this isn't true.

I don't play TF to get hats, er, "phat loot". My motivation is to have fun on my server with my friends learning to practice communication, strategy, tactics. All the nifty items are just a bonus that ADD TO the _existing_ fun.

This entire discussion about "Yay, remove MF" or "Nay, remove MF" is a red herring IMO for the aforementioned reasons.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

This makes me wonder: was Diablo 2 the first RPG to have a "magic find" modifier? Pretty sure it was, although it's difficult to prove a negative (that no one did it previously).

D2 was the first to "formalize" it as a separate, player visible and "semi-controlled" stat as far anyone knows. (Never seen any prior art nor couter-examples from personal experience nor from others.)

It grew out of early RPGs (such as Wizardy Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord ) having a "Luck" primary stat which was kind of a "catch-all". Blizzard North's brilliant insight was to give players direct influence in the "slot machine's RNG" lever.

Time will tell if this helped or hindered the ARPG genre.

MF is so trivial in this game because of all the shitty uniques that give tons of rarity like andvarius and wanderlust.
Almost everybody can get and equip them and go farm.
Nerf those shits.

But to actually try to get a quantity in the 160-180 range and rarity at like 250+ and to make a char viable endgame with max resists and good dps is extremely hard to do. extremely hard.
Only those who tried it know this.

I've been reading this thread for a while but never wanted to say much until now. I think this problem of whether MF should or shouldn't be in the game is not cut and dry as some are trying to make it be. The biggest issues I see with MF in this game are actually not the stat itself, but other things like:

1. Boring gear
2. Orbs tied to Quantity
3. Lack of orbs dropping
4. Poor crafting system

There are a few others, but to me those are the big ones and I'm sure someone else will add their take on it as the topic keeps going since it doesn't look like it'll lose steam anytime soon. For now, let me expand upon each point one by one with my take on why I think MF doesn't need to be removed from the game, but rather making changes to other issues in the game will help make the game overall better and in turn hopefully cut down on the reliance of MF.

1. Boring Gear - Like it or hate it, the gear in this game for the most part is VERY, VERY similar to the equally boring gear in Diablo III. Most people look for the same stats on gear, which are: Life/ES, %Armor/Evasion/ES, Resists, IAS, damage, Crit/Crit Multiplier,+Skill, and that's mostly the big ones. If you know what people look for in gear in Diablo III you're going to realize that PoE is extremely similar to that, and that's a problem. Because gear is so boring in that regard, and right now the only saving grace are the uniques, it's no surprise that people are using MF so they can get more chances at improving what they have even if by miniscule amounts, and it's really the only way to go about it for most if you're not swimming in currency. That and uniques seem to have far more MF on them than just regular gear and the drawbacks to them (following the whole design that GGG had for them) don't seem to be stopping players from piling the MF on as much as possible in some cases.

2. Orbs Tied to Quantity - This is a problem because of how valuable currency is in this game and if you want any real hope of getting a decent amount of it you need Quantity so more stuff drops. It reminds me of Diablo II and High Runes, but Blizzard did something smart here...they DID NOT TIE HIGH RUNE DROPS TO MF and instead gave them independent drop rates. The only really good ways that I recall to get them were either to farm 'super chests', farm The Countess (even if she didn't drop high runes) or to kill a lot of stuff in high level areas and hope for the best. This meant that if you wanted to rune farm you didn't have to have any MF gear and could simply use your standard gear and in some cases it might've been better to do so.

As it stands now, because orbs are tied to Quantity and because they are the currency of this game, it makes MF even more profitable since even if you don't find rares/uniques, you're going to get more currency that you can use to trade for other things. I don't think I need to explain it, but this makes MF quite desirable and it shows that currency/crafting orbs should be separated completely from the MF bonuses. This also allows the devs more fine-tuning with how orbs drop in terms of frequency and if they wanted to increase it later on (as I personally believe orb drop rates are too low) then they could and MF users wouldn't gain an advantage in that regard. And this leads perfectly into my 3rd point...

3. Lack of Orbs Dropping - Pretty much covered it above but again, because of currency/crafting orbs being tied to MF it makes the stat even stronger. That and because of how much orbs are used for currency...well...yeah...those who can afford good MF gear and run setups that take advantage of it...license to 'print orbs' some might say. Separating orbs from MF mechanics and allowing them drop in higher quantities (and a few other tweaks like say...not having Exalted Orbs or what not drop until the later acts of Merciless when you'd actually need them) would be a start and keeping MF for gear drops only, which to me is what it should be for. Of course, this is also something that is a multi-pronged problem, but removing the MF dependency would be a very good start.

4. Poor Crafting System - This has been said more than once but the crafting system in this game relies a bit too much on RNG and offers little in terms of reward-to-investment. Couple that with the fact that Exalted Orbs amongst others are just too rare and because of that you can't use them for their main purpose which is to try and add affixes onto armor/weapons. I'm not saying they need to drop like candy, but given the pools of affixes that things like jewelry and weapons have to pull from and you praying that you get the stat you want is already a big enough gamble and with how rare Exalted Orbs are, it's almost never worth using them for their intended function but instead to save them up as the defacto trade currency to get something that you want. This in turn means that the orbs aren't being used up, leaving the economy, and instead continuously get passed around and of course that leads to more and more inflation, but that's just one of the issues.

The main thing is that because the crafting system has all of these problems it drives players away from it and towards wanting to use MF (RMT as well, but not the focus here) to get the orbs/currency and then buy what they desire. There's a bit too much RNG in the system and not guaranteed recipes like there were in Diablo II where if you crafted 'Hitpower Gloves' you were always going to get Knockback amongst other things and a few random stats that you gambled on. This is also true of say...High Runes in that there were crafting recipes added in that guaranteed you could get them so long as you worked for them since you could upgrade lower tier runes to higher tier ones. Again, it could take a while, but there was a reachable goal and a path to take that didn't throw RNG in your face aside from drop rates, but even then you had 'The Countess' and other things to help you out. In PoE, you don't get those little 'luxuries' and instead the RNG is piled on a bit too thick and well...I can see how it drives people to MF the easiest way possible.


...I probably rambled on a bit too much, but I hope some people stuck through it and read what I wrote even if they may not agree with it. In short, I think there are problems that need to be corrected and tweaked first and foremost before anything 'drastic' is done to MF, though I don't doubt that even those changes there will be some tweaking done to MF as well.