Don't Remove MF from the Game; Just Cut it in Half

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exit_zero wrote:

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B2BigAl wrote:

As for OP's suggestion, I'd like to give that a big hell yeah. MF should be a bonus, not a requirement. It might be fun to actually play the game and get *gasp* loot!

But you're getting loot, you're getting more loot than you can carry when playing solo with zero MF even.

What you're actually complaining about here is the quality (or maybe better put: usefulness) of said loot, and that doesn't really change with high MF, 99.999% of it is still completely useless regardless of it being blue, yellow or orange. With high MF you're just bruteforcing a really poor system that should be changed altogether.

So perhaps the real underlying issue here is the very nature of PoE's RNG, how affixes are assigned to loot, how crafting works, combined with the overall availability of orbs, and pretty much everything else related to itemization in the game. And that won't and can't be fixed by tweaking two stats.

This is a game where gear better than your current gear is an upgrade, and gear worse than that is tradebait at best and vendor fodder at worst.

Which means no shit 99.999% of it is going to be "worthless" no matter what you do. The difference is that the MF-stacking standard for a good item becomes much higher alarmingly fast. It's the absolute quality of the 0.001% that matters here; those without MF are forced into using gear no self-respecting MFer would find acceptable.

Well that, and the huge advantage MFers have with the Chaos Orb vendor formula, and general Alts/hour. Those "worthless" items do add up to something in large enough quantities.

Scrotie, I am really liking your contributions to the PoE idea/discussion pool!

-I do think that IIQ/IIR mechanics and single-player mechanics need to be scrutinized.
-Maybe halving IIQ/IIR is a good idea. I can't really comment because I have never stacked either one.
-Personally, I would like to see item rewards associated with achievement, not gambling.

-AI that analysis certain characteristics of one's characters and uses the collected data/information to bias item drop types and modifiers towards you character's 'build' would be welcome by me as well. I know there is an AI specialist on the GGG squad. *cough cough*

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

This is a game where gear better than your current gear is an upgrade, and gear worse than that is tradebait at best and vendor fodder at worst.

Which means no shit 99.999% of it is going to be "worthless" no matter what you do.

Yeah, I get your point regarding upgrades, but it's not only worthless to your character. It's not even only worthless to most characters of your level. It's just plain worthless to everyone in the entire game. This is what I'd consider a major problem.

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The difference is that the MF-stacking standard for a good item becomes much higher alarmingly fast. It's the absolute quality of the 0.001% that matters here; those without MF are forced into using gear no self-respecting MFer would find acceptable.

This doesn't have much to do with MF, but the overall loot/trading system. Look at this:

"those who don't trade are forced into using gear no self-respecting trader would find acceptable"
"those who don't RMT are forced into using gear no self-respecting RMTer would find acceptable"
"those who don't play in a party are forced into using gear no self-respecting party player would find acceptable"

And so on. It's a part of a larger issue.

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Well that, and the huge advantage MFers have with the Chaos Orb vendor formula, and general Alts/hour. Those "worthless" items do add up to something in large enough quantities.

Yes, this is exactly what I meant by "bruteforcing a poorly designed system". It's not much of a consolation to be able to farm alts a bit faster though - this only really helps in lower levels in which you usually don't have very high MF in the first place (Chaos recipe is still highly dependent on RNG for the most rare ingredients - rings/amulets) and doesn't matter that much at endgame.

In any case, any character who gets in a party with a high MF character gets every single benefit the high MF character has, with no drawbacks. So this is primarily a solo issue (and not the biggest one either).

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exit_zero wrote:

Yeah, I get your point regarding upgrades, but it's not only worthless to your character. It's not even only worthless to most characters of your level. It's just plain worthless to everyone in the entire game. This is what I'd consider a major problem.

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exit_zero wrote:

this is exactly what I meant by "bruteforcing a poorly designed system". It's not much of a consolation to be able to farm alts a bit faster though - this only really helps in lower levels in which you usually don't have very high MF in the first place (Chaos recipe is still highly dependent on RNG for the most rare ingredients - rings/amulets) and doesn't matter that much at endgame.

You can't seriously expect your average run to net a usable item; the game would get power-creeped out in no time flat. Making use of Alterations and the Chaos formula is what people do to get some form of steady progress; MFers are more efficient both at this and at finding actual usable/tradeable gear. What we don't have, don't need and actually cannot have is a system where you can sell all the crap you find for convenience to some low bidder; that would be a Diablo 3 system and would destroy itself if we attempted it.

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exit_zero wrote:

This doesn't have much to do with MF, but the overall loot/trading system. Look at this:

"those who don't trade are forced into using gear no self-respecting trader would find acceptable"
"those who don't RMT are forced into using gear no self-respecting RMTer would find acceptable"
"those who don't play in a party are forced into using gear no self-respecting party player would find acceptable"

And so on. It's a part of a larger issue.

In any case, any character who gets in a party with a high MF character gets every single benefit the high MF character has, with no drawbacks. So this is primarily a solo issue (and not the biggest one either).[/quote]I agree that it's primarily a solo issue, which is why my fix is actually targetted at solo players (just read the OP). But I disagree that it isn't the largest issue solo players face; I think it clearly is. I don't know how you can go on so much about how overpowered trading is while simultaneously admitting how rarely a tradeable item drops; trade is mostly used for currency conversion and acquiring drop-only gems (or lazily acquiring quest gems), since those kinds of trades are simple while upgrade-location is difficult (even with tools like poe.xyz.is). RMT is cheating; I think that's all I have to say on that subject. And the party advantage in maps is largely due to the existence of MF, and the ability to share it with the group via Culling. Some reasonable changes to how MF works are the first logical step in improving the solo experience.

I think the idea of getting MF after a certain level as a passive type thing or even actual passives is superb.

I also like everything the OP wrote

off topic:


Yet another edit: I also love the idea of rewarding players for their achievements and time played.

Saying trading gives you less of an advantage than farming with MF is wrong. Trading is still way more efficient.

The idea can be summarized to "increase base drop rate, reduce MF on items, making it harder(=less efficient) to stack". To be honest this is just a half-assed approach and is more of band-aid for a way bigger problem. It doesn't really try to solve the many problems MF as an item stat has and reminds me a lot of how blizzard implements new balance changes to SC2.

So... sure do it, as a band-aid is better than nothing, but I'd much rather prefer to see a solution for the bigger problem - getting rid of MF as an item stat (and find a better way to implement it).

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Novalisk wrote:

Having a 135% and 160% base seems un-intuitive to me, and while I'm glad you took my suggestion of halving MF values on gear, it might not be technologically feasible. GGG tends to have difficulties changing stats on existing items, and this takes it to a whole new level.

There are ways of halving MF gear effectiveness without nerfing the gear outright. As I've written in the main thread:

1. Make IIQ from maps Additive with gear instead of Multiplicative.

2. Buff IIQ from maps by 50%

3. Make rare maps have IIR as well as IIQ.

According to my rough estimates, this makes MF gear half as effective due to diminishing returns.

Re-posting just to add something.

There's no reason to nerf IIQ + IIR pre-maps. Before reaching maps, you should either be focused on leveling or on getting map gear, so it's best to just make maps significantly more rewarding to players who have little to no MF gear.

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Novalisk wrote:

There's no reason to nerf IIQ + IIR pre-maps. Before reaching maps, you should either be focused on leveling or on getting map gear, so it's best to just make maps significantly more rewarding to players who have little to no MF gear.

Perhaps Merciless Docks is the one place where MF needs to be nerfed the most; players are stacking MF and farming that at the exclusion of running maps.

+1

As always, ScrotieMcB has another well thought out and incredibly useful suggestion. Should probably be in the suggestions section, but it does get more views here.

Really hope they do something about MF, because the game lacks diversity. It's just about how high you can get your MF and still be able to do maps. Which really excludes any builds that are item dependent (attacks). Builds that use combinations of uniques that don't have MF are hit even harder (facebreaker).

Even D3 saw how bad the MF mechanic is and that wasn't nearly as bad as this, due to the multiplication of IIQ and IIR.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Well that, and the huge advantage MFers have with the Chaos Orb vendor formula, and general Alts/hour. Those "worthless" items do add up to something in large enough quantities.

The trade off is the MFers with the "huge advantage" in alts/hour is that they get severely limited when it comes to performance in other areas. You say that people who aren't MF can't upgrade their gear. Guess what I can't do on my sporker? Upgrade my gear until I come in to 60 exalts or so to buy a 6L shavronne because it's mandatory for my build. Kaom's heart sure doesn't go for 60 exalted. Guess what else this means? I can't do anything except for farm lunaris 3 or pray that there are no chaos mobs on the maps I roll. Oh, and it's not like my MF only affects me. When I join a lunaris 3/piety run and am culling everything with 80/400 I don't automatically get assigned all the drops that are due to my MF.

You know how many times i've been doing runs and come out with 5 rares and a couple augments while the other guys in my group scoop up 7 chaos orbs, a divine, and the 2 uniques that dropped and got assigned to someone besides me? A lot.

Edit: Every single ARPG/loot based game has the exact same end game. You try to maximize your farm potential vs your fun potential. My sporker has 1k dps on her totems and it takes forever to run around solo. Got a discharger who explodes full screens of mobs every 2 seconds? Or the various other builds that are sporting 20k+ dps on top of great survivability? They're mowing through a lot more content than I am. That = a lot more potential exp, potential maps, potential loot and potential fun because at the end of the day this style of game is all about mowing down hordes of demons/zombies/animals/etc.