Thought I'd attempt to get some feedback from a constructive community, :-)
Like many folks playing from launch, I've been in the Auction House. I used it in small dribs and drabs to get one character (my Wizard) to level 60 before Paragon levels were patched into the game in August (thank you, DiabloFans.com for posting the timeline, I hadn't remembered when that happened exactly). At least for a while, I saw the AH as the only endgame. That I would travel around, kill monsters, sell some things, and either buy gear infinitely or until it got boring and quit.
Sounds a bit dramatic, but it's true...if they hadn't announced Paragon levels when they did, I may not have had the interest left in me to keep playing. Then again, I likely would've quit outright and not hung around on the forums whining endlessly, but that's another issue for another day. Anyways, enough backstory...
After seeing some people post in the Battle.net forums about only using gear they found (before crafting really made a huge jump in 1.0.7, though I'm sure some folks used it then, too), it really inspired me to step my game up and go without the Auction House as much as I could. And since then, I've seen more and more people use the term "self-found." So, I would occasionally call my approach "self-found," as ALL my characters (SC and HC) are using gear I found mySELF, or crafted mySELF. In other words, I didn't have anyone in my games with me to carry me through and get insane legendaries and sets to drop, I made them drop myself, solo. If my Monk found pieces for my WD or Barb or anyone else (which has happened a lot lately), in my eyes, that still counted because I found those gear pieces mySELF.
However, it dawned on me that certain charcters are sometimes PLAYED "self-found." That started to clue me in that maybe "self-found" didn't mean JUST finding gear. It could also mean that a character is only using gear that specific character found. As in, no hand-me-downs, no "I'm using my high Paragon level to benefit all other characters on the account." ONLY what THAT character finds and that's it.
When this occurred to me, I changed my classification and instead refer to my playstyle as "found and crafted." All the gear on all my characters is either crafted by me, or found by one or another of my characters. I refuse to call myself something I'm not, and I want to be as accurate, honest and fair about my progress as possible.
So, what do you all think?
Does/should "self-found" just mean gearing with anything you find yourself? Or does it mean a character geared with only things that particular character finds? Personally, I'm fine with being a "found and crafted" player in Diablo 3, if self-found means the latter. It still takes work, it still takes effort, smart choices, time, and even if it's not the longest possible way around, it still has no guarantee whatsoever that I'll ever have godly gear like I could get spending gold in the AH.
I still leave my characters' strength or weakness up the almighty RNG, what gear I get from drops I get, and that's that. Granted, having a Plvl 51 Monk now, even without the Anniversary Buff we got this week, I'm still seing far more sets and legendaries drop...but as I said, no guarantee any of them will be super epic enough to allow me to faceroll MP10 in one single equip.
Before and now, I consider "self-found" to be any item that you find in-game by any character on your account. No player-to-player trades. No auction house of any sort. Crafting always counted toward self-found.
There is a shared stash after all... unless for serious, serious, serious "self-found" (per character only) players wish to have an option to disable access to the AH/RMAH and also sharing the stash amongst all characters.
Anyway, I'm a stats monkey, so I never had the patience to grind forever to find what I want. My goal is simply maximizing my main character's potential and I'll do whatever it takes (within reason) to do so.
...I may consider my personal "self-found" philosophy as hunting down items via DiabloProgress, friends list, d2jsp, etc. (I "found" the item/discovered the item's existence myself :P) It's getting ridiculously tough for me to find items that I can actually trade for to upgrade my wizard.
It depends. If you play self-found on all of your characters, it makes sense to be able to trade stuff between them and still call yourself self-found. If you spend a bunch of gold gearing up one character on the AH and use that one to farm gear for another character, I'd say you don't get to call the second one self-found, despite it technically being true. Crafted = found to me though so long as you found all of the mats and gold yourself on self-found characters. Heck, I'm ok if you got the gold from selling on the AH since you've still got to find all the mats, tomes, etc. yourself.
Really, it's a bit moot to me though. People ought to play however they find the most enjoyment. All defining this stuff is really good for imho is looking down on other people's playstyles if they aren't "pure" enough (says the guys who buys on the RMAH).
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...and if you disagree with me, you're probably <insert random ad hominem attack here>.
That definition of self-found sounds a bit harsh to me. So, if your wizard finds an awesome Manticore with max DPS, two sockets and 100% CD, what do you do? AH is not an option, trading to your DH would violate this definition of "self-found", so you just salvage a game changing item for a brimstone?
In my opinion, self-found implies everything you found with any of your characters. I say this despite being a "one class only player" (I have a WD and barb but both stuck at p10 as wizard is the only class I'm interested in). You can always come up with your own definition of anything, like to only wear items whose names start with the letter "D" or refuse to repair any item ever. To each his own; some people even go for the MP10 HC "naked" Iron Man. But that definition of self-found is new to me and sounds a bit detrimental to the fun of the game. (Btw, in my personal definition of "fun" I'm even fine with trading with friends for self-found - it's by far not the same as having access to the unlimited demand&supply at the AH.)
Imo, sharing items between your characters are perfectly fine in self-found, as long as all the characters who participate in the sharing are also self-found.
If you have a non-self-found character on your account, then that character can never share items (or gold for that matter) with your self-found characters, otherwise they would not be self-found anymore.
Obviously you can't get items etc from any other sources. And of course you can never play with others who are not playing self-found.
I guess some might even argue you cant play with others at all, since they affect your "self-foundness" (which is now a word!) just by playing with you, but that seems too harsh tbh.
It's necessary to remind you that if you have one character not self-found and you sell something in the AH for gold, then all of your characters become not self-found, for obvious reasons.
Self found to me is using gear found or crafted by any of my characters.
I levelled all 10 of them at the same time, in SP mode.
No gear from friends, not even for free.
No item from the AH, obviously.
This way suits me the best.
And that's why I think there should have been three types of characters: SC, HC and "no AH" (edit: "self found" may be a better definition) .
This is an interesting discussion; it's cool to see what each person's different definition of "self-found" is, and also to hear about some of the methods for playing that way (nice post, Laevus!).
Here's a question for you all: what label would you apply to D2 characters? Even though it was fairly easy to move items between your own characters in that game, there wasn't any explicitly built-in functionality for it, and there was no shared stash. Would that make all D2 characters (who don't trade items with other players) "Ironborn"?
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i would choose my own religion and worship my own spirit, but if he ever preached to me i wouldn't want to hear it. i'd drop him, a forgotten god, languishing in shame; and then if i hit stormy seas, i'd have myself to blame.
It's necessary to remind you that if you have one character not self-found and you sell something in the AH for gold, then all of your characters become not self-found, for obvious reasons.
Technically one could keep check of exactly how much gold belonged to each group of characters, but it would be kinda hard.
If Blizzard added an actual self-found option, everything would really have to be kept 100% separate. Like HC.
It's necessary to remind you that if you have one character not self-found and you sell something in the AH for gold, then all of your characters become not self-found, for obvious reasons.
By that logic you can't be self-found, ever, unless your first toon was self-found.
Why? Essentially you're saying that if you, in any way, affect any shared resource with a non-self-found character that immediately invalidates the self-found status of all the other characters. I understand what you're saying, but I find that to be inherently extreme. Leveling up your crafters with another toon doesn't violate self-found play, not in a game where the crafters are tied to the account. All it does is create an impossible-to-win situation for most players.
Being that technical about things means that muling items in D2 automatically made characters non-self-found too. I think most people simply would not agree with that at all as most self-found players agree that trading items between your characters is legit self-found gameplay.
Did you purchase those bank tabs on a non-self-found character? Whole account isn't self-found now. Something about that sounds simply asinine.
I think some people are putting too much emphasis on the definition of the term "self-found" and forget what it's all about.
If you use the AH, you will easily get awesome gear - but you decrease the probability of ever finding an upgrade for your character to almost zero.
If you play self-found, you might find an upgrade every now and then - there's no guarantee to find one upgrade per week or so, but it's not like running around in 300k DPS gear which essentially means that you probably won't find an upgrade yourself for the next few months. Therefore, any kind of "self-found" is a restriction you put on yourself to increase your level of fun and experience more of these moments when you can actually enjoy an item that just dropped (whereas for most AH users every drop is just about "how much gold do I get for this on the AH). It's about shifting the game back from an economy game to an RPG.
If you allow yourself to trade items between your characters, if you allow yourself to trade items with your close friends (of whom you know they're playing self-found as well), if you allow yourself to trade items with all of you friends to take their "crap that doesn't sell on the AH", it just means that you're reducing your own likelihood of finding an upgrade for the sake of getting slightly better gear. It's not a black and white game of "cool" and "uncool" players, it's a continuous scale from "naked MP10 HC" to "no limits at all". Self-found (regardless of how you define it) is somewhere in between.
I think I've made about 7,000g from the AH when you could actually sell low level recipes and stuff, does this mean I can't ever claim that all my chars are self-found?
People who try to add exceptions and stuff are basically trying to claim to be 'self found' just to sound cool but not man enough to do it lol. LOL. it is a thread about ppl, who are doing all this useless challenges, like self found or iron man, and then bragging on forum about beeing lolawesome. So reproaching other for doing the same but with other rules sounds kind a stupid..
People who try to add exceptions and stuff are basically trying to claim to be 'self found' just to sound cool but not man enough to do it lol. LOL. it is a thread about ppl, who are doing all this useless challenges, like self found or iron man, and then bragging on forum about beeing lolawesome. So reproaching other for doing the same but with other rules sounds kind a stupid..
As far as the OP said, this is a thread about what "self-found" means to YOU, and the different ways people play the game. Any "challenge" that makes the game more fun for YOU to play is far from "useless."
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i would choose my own religion and worship my own spirit, but if he ever preached to me i wouldn't want to hear it. i'd drop him, a forgotten god, languishing in shame; and then if i hit stormy seas, i'd have myself to blame.
It's necessary to remind you that if you have one character not self-found and you sell something in the AH for gold, then all of your characters become not self-found, for obvious reasons.
By that logic you can't be self-found, ever, unless your first toon was self-found.
Why? Essentially you're saying that if you, in any way, affect any shared resource with a non-self-found character that immediately invalidates the self-found status of all the other characters. I understand what you're saying, but I find that to be inherently extreme. Leveling up your crafters with another toon doesn't violate self-found play, not in a game where the crafters are tied to the account. All it does is create an impossible-to-win situation for most players.
Being that technical about things means that muling items in D2 automatically made characters non-self-found too. I think most people simply would not agree with that at all as most self-found players agree that trading items between your characters is legit self-found gameplay.
Did you purchase those bank tabs on a non-self-found character? Whole account isn't self-found now. Something about that sounds simply asinine.
It's not, it's nothing but logical.
For example, I play a not-selfound character, I sell something for 200m gold, then I use that gold to upgrade gems in my selfound character, then that character becomes indirectly and immediately not-selfound.
Otherwise, you would be cheating yourself.
A way to revert this status of not-selfoundness, is to get rid of your gold whatever you want (like dropping items in the floor that you previously bought in the AH) and start over.
For example, I play a not-selfound character, I sell something for 200m gold, then I use that gold to upgrade gems in my selfound character, then that character becomes indirectly and immediately not-selfound.
Otherwise, you would be cheating yourself.
A way to revert this status of not-selfoundness, is to get rid of your gold whatever you want (like dropping items in the floor that you previously bought in the AH) and start over.
I understand your line of thinking, but it just doesn't hold up as a hard-and-fast rule.
Take the following for instance:
I have a self-found character [A] and a non-self-found character [B] on the same account.
I have 100 million gold from picking stuff up and vendoring it.
B sells a perfect Mempo for 750 million, bringing my stash up to 850 million.
If A never spends touches that 750 million (ie: the only toon that takes the stash under 750 million is the AH toon), what's the big deal? He hasn't dipped into AH gold.
This also applies to the stash. If you somehow used AH gold on your first toon to buy stash spots, that means your whole account is not self-found from now on? That might sound LOGICAL, but it's really just being stupidly restrictive. Some people choose to go self-found after they already played a toon and used the AH. Are you somehow supposed to "erase" all your gold, your stash and artisan progress? Are you somehow supposed to audit yourself and figure out a way to remove the non-self-found gold and then continue? Are you seriously telling me that once you sell an item on the AH you have to go start a new account?
Aside from being completely un-verifiable, it's heavy-handed and arbitrary.
If B buys some items on the AH which helps him go from MP1 to MP 7, do you have to audit out the gold differential in those piles so that A can't touch "that" gold? Where does the stupidity end and common sense take over? People play this shit for fun, not to have a bunch of nerds on the forums telling them that their definition of "self-found" isn't hardcore enough.
Does self-found mean you have to play with other self-found characters? If you play with an AH toon aren't their AH purchases directly assisting you?
How do you "enforce" any of this? It's easy for a player to not use the AH and not trade. That's something they ultimately have control over. But all this other shit, you are setting up a system where someone can't even join a public game because they're afraid that some jerk on the internet will tell them they're not self-found anymore.
Does self-found mean you have to play with other self-found characters? If you play with an AH toon aren't their AH purchases directly assisting you?
Yeah, only playing with other self-found seems pretty much required for the term self-found.
I'd guess people who take this serious don't play with randoms.
If you allow yourself to trade items between your characters, if you allow yourself to trade items with your close friends (of whom you know they're playing self-found as well), if you allow yourself to trade items with all of you friends to take their "crap that doesn't sell on the AH", it just means that you're reducing your own likelihood of finding an upgrade for the sake of getting slightly better gear. It's not a black and white game of "cool" and "uncool" players, it's a continuous scale from "naked MP10 HC" to "no limits at all". Self-found (regardless of how you define it) is somewhere in between.
Pretty much this.
Unlimited amounts of weird limitations one can choose to play with.
I do think there is a fairly exact definition for the specific term self-found though. Most of what people seem to differ on in this thread is very minor stuff - like having 7000 gold from AH or whatever, or buying shared stash bags for the account... But you could have unlimited variations of more or less self-found.
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Like many folks playing from launch, I've been in the Auction House. I used it in small dribs and drabs to get one character (my Wizard) to level 60 before Paragon levels were patched into the game in August (thank you, DiabloFans.com for posting the timeline, I hadn't remembered when that happened exactly). At least for a while, I saw the AH as the only endgame. That I would travel around, kill monsters, sell some things, and either buy gear infinitely or until it got boring and quit.
Sounds a bit dramatic, but it's true...if they hadn't announced Paragon levels when they did, I may not have had the interest left in me to keep playing. Then again, I likely would've quit outright and not hung around on the forums whining endlessly, but that's another issue for another day. Anyways, enough backstory...
After seeing some people post in the Battle.net forums about only using gear they found (before crafting really made a huge jump in 1.0.7, though I'm sure some folks used it then, too), it really inspired me to step my game up and go without the Auction House as much as I could. And since then, I've seen more and more people use the term "self-found." So, I would occasionally call my approach "self-found," as ALL my characters (SC and HC) are using gear I found mySELF, or crafted mySELF. In other words, I didn't have anyone in my games with me to carry me through and get insane legendaries and sets to drop, I made them drop myself, solo. If my Monk found pieces for my WD or Barb or anyone else (which has happened a lot lately), in my eyes, that still counted because I found those gear pieces mySELF.
However, it dawned on me that certain charcters are sometimes PLAYED "self-found." That started to clue me in that maybe "self-found" didn't mean JUST finding gear. It could also mean that a character is only using gear that specific character found. As in, no hand-me-downs, no "I'm using my high Paragon level to benefit all other characters on the account." ONLY what THAT character finds and that's it.
When this occurred to me, I changed my classification and instead refer to my playstyle as "found and crafted." All the gear on all my characters is either crafted by me, or found by one or another of my characters. I refuse to call myself something I'm not, and I want to be as accurate, honest and fair about my progress as possible.
So, what do you all think?
Does/should "self-found" just mean gearing with anything you find yourself? Or does it mean a character geared with only things that particular character finds? Personally, I'm fine with being a "found and crafted" player in Diablo 3, if self-found means the latter. It still takes work, it still takes effort, smart choices, time, and even if it's not the longest possible way around, it still has no guarantee whatsoever that I'll ever have godly gear like I could get spending gold in the AH.
I still leave my characters' strength or weakness up the almighty RNG, what gear I get from drops I get, and that's that. Granted, having a Plvl 51 Monk now, even without the Anniversary Buff we got this week, I'm still seing far more sets and legendaries drop...but as I said, no guarantee any of them will be super epic enough to allow me to faceroll MP10 in one single equip.
Takers? Insight?
Before and now, I consider "self-found" to be any item that you find in-game by any character on your account. No player-to-player trades. No auction house of any sort. Crafting always counted toward self-found.
There is a shared stash after all... unless for serious, serious, serious "self-found" (per character only) players wish to have an option to disable access to the AH/RMAH and also sharing the stash amongst all characters.
Anyway, I'm a stats monkey, so I never had the patience to grind forever to find what I want. My goal is simply maximizing my main character's potential and I'll do whatever it takes (within reason) to do so.
...I may consider my personal "self-found" philosophy as hunting down items via DiabloProgress, friends list, d2jsp, etc. (I "found" the item/discovered the item's existence myself :P) It's getting ridiculously tough for me to find items that I can actually trade for to upgrade my wizard.
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Really, it's a bit moot to me though. People ought to play however they find the most enjoyment. All defining this stuff is really good for imho is looking down on other people's playstyles if they aren't "pure" enough (says the guys who buys on the RMAH).
In my opinion, self-found implies everything you found with any of your characters. I say this despite being a "one class only player" (I have a WD and barb but both stuck at p10 as wizard is the only class I'm interested in). You can always come up with your own definition of anything, like to only wear items whose names start with the letter "D" or refuse to repair any item ever. To each his own; some people even go for the MP10 HC "naked" Iron Man. But that definition of self-found is new to me and sounds a bit detrimental to the fun of the game. (Btw, in my personal definition of "fun" I'm even fine with trading with friends for self-found - it's by far not the same as having access to the unlimited demand&supply at the AH.)
Everything else is allowed, I thought it was crystal clear.
People who try to add exceptions and stuff are basically trying to claim to be 'self found' just to sound cool but not man enough to do it lol.
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If you have a non-self-found character on your account, then that character can never share items (or gold for that matter) with your self-found characters, otherwise they would not be self-found anymore.
Obviously you can't get items etc from any other sources. And of course you can never play with others who are not playing self-found.
I guess some might even argue you cant play with others at all, since they affect your "self-foundness" (which is now a word!) just by playing with you, but that seems too harsh tbh.
I levelled all 10 of them at the same time, in SP mode.
No gear from friends, not even for free.
No item from the AH, obviously.
This way suits me the best.
And that's why I think there should have been three types of characters: SC, HC and "no AH" (edit: "self found" may be a better definition) .
Here's a question for you all: what label would you apply to D2 characters? Even though it was fairly easy to move items between your own characters in that game, there wasn't any explicitly built-in functionality for it, and there was no shared stash. Would that make all D2 characters (who don't trade items with other players) "Ironborn"?
If Blizzard added an actual self-found option, everything would really have to be kept 100% separate. Like HC.
By that logic you can't be self-found, ever, unless your first toon was self-found.
Why? Essentially you're saying that if you, in any way, affect any shared resource with a non-self-found character that immediately invalidates the self-found status of all the other characters. I understand what you're saying, but I find that to be inherently extreme. Leveling up your crafters with another toon doesn't violate self-found play, not in a game where the crafters are tied to the account. All it does is create an impossible-to-win situation for most players.
Being that technical about things means that muling items in D2 automatically made characters non-self-found too. I think most people simply would not agree with that at all as most self-found players agree that trading items between your characters is legit self-found gameplay.
Did you purchase those bank tabs on a non-self-found character? Whole account isn't self-found now. Something about that sounds simply asinine.
If you use the AH, you will easily get awesome gear - but you decrease the probability of ever finding an upgrade for your character to almost zero.
If you play self-found, you might find an upgrade every now and then - there's no guarantee to find one upgrade per week or so, but it's not like running around in 300k DPS gear which essentially means that you probably won't find an upgrade yourself for the next few months. Therefore, any kind of "self-found" is a restriction you put on yourself to increase your level of fun and experience more of these moments when you can actually enjoy an item that just dropped (whereas for most AH users every drop is just about "how much gold do I get for this on the AH). It's about shifting the game back from an economy game to an RPG.
If you allow yourself to trade items between your characters, if you allow yourself to trade items with your close friends (of whom you know they're playing self-found as well), if you allow yourself to trade items with all of you friends to take their "crap that doesn't sell on the AH", it just means that you're reducing your own likelihood of finding an upgrade for the sake of getting slightly better gear. It's not a black and white game of "cool" and "uncool" players, it's a continuous scale from "naked MP10 HC" to "no limits at all". Self-found (regardless of how you define it) is somewhere in between.
LOL. it is a thread about ppl, who are doing all this useless challenges, like self found or iron man, and then bragging on forum about beeing lolawesome. So reproaching other for doing the same but with other rules sounds kind a stupid..
It's not, it's nothing but logical.
For example, I play a not-selfound character, I sell something for 200m gold, then I use that gold to upgrade gems in my selfound character, then that character becomes indirectly and immediately not-selfound.
Otherwise, you would be cheating yourself.
A way to revert this status of not-selfoundness, is to get rid of your gold whatever you want (like dropping items in the floor that you previously bought in the AH) and start over.
I understand your line of thinking, but it just doesn't hold up as a hard-and-fast rule.
Take the following for instance:
I have a self-found character [A] and a non-self-found character [B] on the same account.
I have 100 million gold from picking stuff up and vendoring it.
B sells a perfect Mempo for 750 million, bringing my stash up to 850 million.
If A never spends touches that 750 million (ie: the only toon that takes the stash under 750 million is the AH toon), what's the big deal? He hasn't dipped into AH gold.
This also applies to the stash. If you somehow used AH gold on your first toon to buy stash spots, that means your whole account is not self-found from now on? That might sound LOGICAL, but it's really just being stupidly restrictive. Some people choose to go self-found after they already played a toon and used the AH. Are you somehow supposed to "erase" all your gold, your stash and artisan progress? Are you somehow supposed to audit yourself and figure out a way to remove the non-self-found gold and then continue? Are you seriously telling me that once you sell an item on the AH you have to go start a new account?
Aside from being completely un-verifiable, it's heavy-handed and arbitrary.
If B buys some items on the AH which helps him go from MP1 to MP 7, do you have to audit out the gold differential in those piles so that A can't touch "that" gold? Where does the stupidity end and common sense take over? People play this shit for fun, not to have a bunch of nerds on the forums telling them that their definition of "self-found" isn't hardcore enough.
Does self-found mean you have to play with other self-found characters? If you play with an AH toon aren't their AH purchases directly assisting you?
How do you "enforce" any of this? It's easy for a player to not use the AH and not trade. That's something they ultimately have control over. But all this other shit, you are setting up a system where someone can't even join a public game because they're afraid that some jerk on the internet will tell them they're not self-found anymore.
I'd guess people who take this serious don't play with randoms.
Pretty much this.
Unlimited amounts of weird limitations one can choose to play with.
I do think there is a fairly exact definition for the specific term self-found though. Most of what people seem to differ on in this thread is very minor stuff - like having 7000 gold from AH or whatever, or buying shared stash bags for the account... But you could have unlimited variations of more or less self-found.