Most items are bad because there are many more items than characters.
Let's look at a simple example. For simplicity, pretend that you never look at the auction house. You've finally hit level 60, reached Inferno, and found your first level 60+ weapon, which is better than whatever you had before and you equip it.
5 minutes later, you find another level 60+ weapon. What are the odds that this is an upgrade for you? 50/50. Half the time it's better, half the time it will be worse, not accounting for anything else.
5 minutes after that, another weapon! But is this one an upgrade? Well, it would have to be better than either of the previous weapons you have found, which it has only a 1 in 3 chance of being.
The next weapon? 1 in 4.
It keeps going like this, with the odds of any drop being an upgrade for you being proportional to 1/T, where T is the time you've been playing. This is totally without regard to the randomization algorithm or how items are generated or anything of the sorts - once you're no longer improving your drop tables, your upgrade frequency is going to drop as you keep playing, until you essentially stop finding upgrades at all.
Now take the auction house into account. What this does is redistribute items between players. Assume, for example, that there are a million players with a level 60 on the auction house. That would mean that, roughly, only the million best weapons ever found are worth much at all, with the price of weapons right on the edge of that million being exceptionally low since they're so similar to items that just miss the cut. Then add in that this is going to suffer from the same 1/T relationship as the solo play example - we're 10 weeks into the game so far, and after another 10 weeks the number of weapons found will have doubled, which means half the weapons that currently exist will have dropped from 'marginal' to 'crap'.
What does that mean for your own drops? It means the usefulness of your own drops, from the perspective of the auction house, does not depend on how long you have played, but how long *everyone* has played. The more everyone plays, access to high quality gear increases, while an increasing number of items on the edge slip from useful to trash.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the randomization method, or even how item mods are generated; it's just the nature of picking out the best items from a random pool with a constant generator algorithm. There's nothing whatsoever Blizzard can do about this; it's baked into the game.
If the RNG on diablo 3 is truly random then it should be impossible to get two of the same items with exact stats,name,gold sell price and durability form 2 different mobs, well folks a friend of mine did.
no not really, even in truly random scenarios you can get 2 equal outcomes, even in a row at times
That only happens if the loot table is from 1 to 10, the loot in this game is billions, it may be possible to get the same item some time down the road but not that soon. Also it seems they are just reusing the random hashes.
I believe there was(is?) a bug which causes the same item to drop twice in a row from different, subsequent packs.
So when was that said bug fixed? Because the item was looted on the day I also posted it.
If the RNG on diablo 3 is truly random then it should be impossible to get two of the same items with exact stats,name,gold sell price and durability form 2 different mobs, well folks a friend of mine did.
Actually this statement is completely false
you can obtain an exact copy of an item from another mob randomly, it is just a very small chance.
I think Kripparian's video, which someone linked on the first page, explained it really well. In a world where 50% of the drops were what we consider "good" right now, your standards for what counts as "good" would go way up, to the point where you wouldn't consider most of those drops "good" any more.
If a great item somehow dropped every 10 minutes, you wouldn't be able to sell a single one of those items on the AH. No one would bother to buy them, because all they have to do is play for 10 minutes to get a great item on their own.
This will generally hold true if you equip the items you find the moment you find them regardless of how they compare to your existing items. Lets suppose over a period of 6 hours, you found swords A.B,C,D,E & F. If you equip each sword then it’s likely you will see a 50% chance of usability when going from one to the next.
However, if you play like me and only equip a better items, then this changes everything. Lets suppose again that you found 6 swords A.B,C,D,E & F.
Sword B is an almost perfect ( let’s say 95% ) roll of a Thunderfury, the chances of swords C, D, E and F being an improvement on it are extremely low.
This is natural selection at play.
If Blizzard were to make sure “we had 50% chance to get a usable item”, they would have to make sure every upgrade is controlled ( say +1 int/dex point ) from one item to the next otherwise weapon stats would go through the roof.
Let's look at a simple example. For simplicity, pretend that you never look at the auction house. You've finally hit level 60, reached Inferno, and found your first level 60+ weapon, which is better than whatever you had before and you equip it.
5 minutes later, you find another level 60+ weapon. What are the odds that this is an upgrade for you? 50/50. Half the time it's better, half the time it will be worse, not accounting for anything else.
5 minutes after that, another weapon! But is this one an upgrade? Well, it would have to be better than either of the previous weapons you have found, which it has only a 1 in 3 chance of being.
The next weapon? 1 in 4.
It keeps going like this, with the odds of any drop being an upgrade for you being proportional to 1/T, where T is the time you've been playing. This is totally without regard to the randomization algorithm or how items are generated or anything of the sorts - once you're no longer improving your drop tables, your upgrade frequency is going to drop as you keep playing, until you essentially stop finding upgrades at all.
Now take the auction house into account. What this does is redistribute items between players. Assume, for example, that there are a million players with a level 60 on the auction house. That would mean that, roughly, only the million best weapons ever found are worth much at all, with the price of weapons right on the edge of that million being exceptionally low since they're so similar to items that just miss the cut. Then add in that this is going to suffer from the same 1/T relationship as the solo play example - we're 10 weeks into the game so far, and after another 10 weeks the number of weapons found will have doubled, which means half the weapons that currently exist will have dropped from 'marginal' to 'crap'.
What does that mean for your own drops? It means the usefulness of your own drops, from the perspective of the auction house, does not depend on how long you have played, but how long *everyone* has played. The more everyone plays, access to high quality gear increases, while an increasing number of items on the edge slip from useful to trash.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the randomization method, or even how item mods are generated; it's just the nature of picking out the best items from a random pool with a constant generator algorithm. There's nothing whatsoever Blizzard can do about this; it's baked into the game.
Sprechen sie statistics?
So when was that said bug fixed? Because the item was looted on the day I also posted it.
you can obtain an exact copy of an item from another mob randomly, it is just a very small chance.
If a great item somehow dropped every 10 minutes, you wouldn't be able to sell a single one of those items on the AH. No one would bother to buy them, because all they have to do is play for 10 minutes to get a great item on their own.
This will generally hold true if you equip the items you find the moment you find them regardless of how they compare to your existing items. Lets suppose over a period of 6 hours, you found swords A.B,C,D,E & F. If you equip each sword then it’s likely you will see a 50% chance of usability when going from one to the next.
However, if you play like me and only equip a better items, then this changes everything. Lets suppose again that you found 6 swords A.B,C,D,E & F.
Sword B is an almost perfect ( let’s say 95% ) roll of a Thunderfury, the chances of swords C, D, E and F being an improvement on it are extremely low.
This is natural selection at play.
If Blizzard were to make sure “we had 50% chance to get a usable item”, they would have to make sure every upgrade is controlled ( say +1 int/dex point ) from one item to the next otherwise weapon stats would go through the roof.
^^ What Ashes said.