Twoflower: RiF exists because rifts are a better place to farm than bounties once you have the RoRG. Therefore, not having to do bounties to open rifts speeds up the process. Now that you have to do bounties anyway (albeit not as much), RiF cannot contribute. Illustration in solo play:
I want to farm t3 rifts, and I have 6 keys. I finish the rift in 5 minutes, and now I'm out of keys. I then do bounties for 15 minutes because I can't find the "#¤ exit to caverns of aranae until I've explored the entire map. Then I get enough keys to open another 5 minute rift. The efficiency of this is zero, obviously.
Enter RIF: I do the 5 minute rift, spend 1-2 minutes inviting 2-3 people to open the next one once they get their shards, and do another 5 minute rift. This should be roughly 3 times as efficient, and is also the reason Rift it Forward exists. So that we can farm continously were it is the most rewarding, and because a lot of us find bounties, split or otherwise, to be a waste of time.
Without the need for someone else to open your rifts for you, in order that you can save the time you are otherwise wasting in bounties, there can be no rift it forward. It would be illogical for me to spend the 1-2 minutes inviting 3 more people in.
Anyway, I like this change. As it is now, my group always keeps a spot open so we can invite someone else to open the next rift. Now we can play 4man again, and will at least have to spend slightly less time doing bounties.
I made a deal with friends to play 4-man barb and divide the sets based on what we needed. Three long nights in, and they're decked out whereas I've gotten nothing for myself. I think diablo 3 is connected to the microphone, that it evaluates speech to see who takes the initiative for shortcut solutions, and then flags their account as "cheeky" and rewards their friends instead. Even if someone managed to stare RNG in the white of the eye and consider all the implications, the problem would only resurface outside d3 code in the guise of bad karma or the accidental angering of Ixzzthar, the Spider God of Chance.
This kind of paranoia is always verificationistic. Whenever I start growing tin foil hats, I remind myself that there is no such thing as chance except from the perspective of someone who is making predictions. Anything that has already happened will by definition have had 100% chance of occuring. If you throw real physical dice (not hypothetical ones) and get two sixes, the odds are 100% that you got two sixes, meaning that with that force, friction etc, you could not have gotten anything else. It is only in a projection to the future from a certain perspective that probability is a useful tool.
What're the odds that I exist given everything that had to happen for me to be just as I am now? Astronomical against, or 100% determined in a physyical, lawlike universe? What does this mean in d3? We can make the following prediction: The odds are high that someone tonight will get an unusually long streak of no legendaries, given the amount of people playing. Likewise, the odds are high that someone will get that sweet wand of woh, SoJ and harringtons they've been looking for. The crucial point, however, is that the odds are just as high that for whoever single person this happens to out of the thousands playing, they will feel very (un)lucky indeed. The "why me?" reaction is very human, but not rational. Probability is a matter of perspective; reality just is. It is highly probable that for any universe where sentient beings occur on a planet located at just the right distance from a sun, and a certain sperm would have to make it instead of a great deal of other sperms, etc. etc., it will be the case that from the perspective of one of those sentient beings with poor philosophy skills who gets a wand of woh, that what has happened to them would seem very improbable. But in any universe where this did not occur, there is no perception of chance. So if there is such a thing as a sentient being with perspective, the impression of improbability necessarily and ironically follows.
Consider this and all our other biases and general narcissism first, then make threads about kadala being stealth nerfed. Anyway, good thread!
I doubt that this is bannable, since it is possible not only in this quest, but across game-wide mechanics. This one is simply somewhat faster. And honestly, even in hardcore, the leveling is generally not part of what we think of as progress. Whenever someone dies, another person speedlevels him in an hour or two. And even if your level 70 friend's character is too weak to efficiently take you to 70, and you are only taken to level 40, the -30 level requirement weapons in your stash will trivialize the remaining 30 levels. There is no challenge in leveling, and it doesn't affect game balance (which is all about end game gear progression). Blizzard neither will nor should care particularly, besides nerfing the most obvious ways (such as this one). It is an exploit, but it is virtually harmless. If blizzard were opposed to boosting per se, it would've been removed years ago. Personally I think they should remove the methods of boosting which are without risk, since even though boosting is generally close to risk-free, it is fascinating when once in a while the boosted character is exploded by fallens on level 65.
Basically what it comes down to is the carrot-on-stick. Some people are playing a competitive multiplayer game which needs balance between players and playstyles, and some sort of endless incremental progress, Other people are playing a single player/friendly co-op game like any other game on anyone's list of steam games, where the purpose of the game is to properly "win" after they aquire the skill or invest the time to do so. What constitutes a "win" in d3 can not be killing malthael, obviously, but must be the certainty that their character can do the hardest difficulty in a fairly straightforward way and that their character, from their own point of view, feels like the one, true nephalem. The design philosophy in the game group #1 are playing is incompatible with the game of group #2, clearly.
I'm not sure which of the two games Blizzard has intended d3 to be, nor which group of players I belong to, but I symphatize with those that just want to finally find the great items, after maybe a 100 hours, that let's them win d3 once and for all, so they can stop playing and move on to the next game. You might claim that nerfs suggest blizzard want it to be the first kind of game, but certainly the 4-player max, account bound stuff and the lack of pvp/leaderboards suggest the opposite. I suspect my own opinion is that it should be possible to win, but that it would require a few thousand hours, not a hundred. I feel like they shouldn't remove the possibility of a godlike character, but that they should require a fantastic and clever combination of items which are hard, but not impossible, to find. Balance still seems a bit meaningless in the long run, since it removes the possibility of beating the game, but at the same time the progression needs to be balanced so that you won't just suddenly win it if one item drops.
I'm sure that the OP will welcome any criticism to his model and revise it according to where he feels that the criticism is warranted. He should be used to that as a PhD student. I would like to see his follow-up to the critical response. And we will never get any answers if we are required to blindly applaud attempts based on the amount of effort required in producing them. The correct way to honor a post such as the OPs is constructive criticism.
As for criticism based on the fact that simplifying assumptions have to be made, they are a bit unwarranted. Obviously we can't get a thousand people with the exact same build and gear to farm the same route a thousand times on different torment levels to get the required empirical data. This must be done with a priori logic. The OP equates mob health with time, and assumes that this accounts for the amount of instances to have a chance in a given timeframe (which is the real effect of MF, not the qualitative value of a single mob regardless of how many times you kill him, which is effectively uninteresting). The choice isn't between killing 1 skeleton with 30% more chance or 1 skeleton with 0% more chance, but in whether you want to kill 5 skeletons with 10% chance or 1 with 30% chance in a given minute. And the answer we are looking for is where exactly do the lines go for a hypothetical average character in the world of d3. Travel and loading time must be left as ceteris paribus in this respect. But arriving at general advice shouldn't be impossible. Perhaps it can be looked at relative to damage scaling from items; what does it take to one-shot a mob on normal, and how much more damage can be achieved relative to the percent increase in HP from torment levels relative to magic find? I don't know.
The OPs post can inform this question, but not if the values are wrong and certainly not if they are randomly chosen. We need more.
The loot wall does indeed come quickly if we're talking about the joy of finding upgrades every night or even every week. Hoping to get the next upgrade sometime within the next three months of hard farming will not be many people's idea of fun, I imagine. There are a few things you can do to change this however, if you want to have fun in d3 and are not content to simply jump ship.
#1. Play hardcore. It's much harder to evaluate upgrades when survivability and offense must be carefully balanced (sidesteps at any rate can feel more significant in the sense that they represent important trade-offs). There is also a tendency for spontaneous ladder-resets, which afford you the possibility of getting the gear all over again.
#2. Play more than one class. It'll be a while before you deck out all of them.
To the OP, nice job - getting 50 toughness (it looks like you did it without block or dex-stacking too).
Claims that there are no enrage-timers naively overlook client-side rage. I'd say the enrage timer is around 15 minutes, and that the OP got around this timer with either opiates or simply knowing that it was a first kill.
It's not especially meaningful to talk of drop rate as if it were the drop rate per kill. Rate implies a time unit.
Clearly, even if the drop chance per mob on torment were fifteen times higher, it would amount to the same if a particular player's kill time on a mob were fifteen times longer. It's quite easy to see, considered in abstract, that the lower difficulties will yield a much higher drop rate of legendaries per hour. It is better to kill 1001 mobs with 1% chance per mob of legendary drops per hour, than it is to kill 100 mobs with 10% chance per mob per hour, etc. This simply follows by definition.
Naturally there complicating variables such as builds, AoE and rare cases of absurdly high dps characters, but in general it should be true that for any given hour, the amount of legendaries you get will increase proportional to the amount mobs you have slain. Think of it like this: every time you kill a mob, it is another chance for a chance. You want as many chances as you can per time unit to get a chance at winning. There is a dice and you want a six: It is better to throw the die 10 times than only 1, even if on the 1 throw you get to remove another digit (such as five). The quality of the throw increases, but throwing ten times far outweighs it. Clearly, if you check the tables, in d3 ros - as in vanilla - the quality does not even come remotely close. Excepting, of course, the matter of the sets. The reason for this is that mob HP increases much more than it is even theoretically possible for a player's damage output to scale.
Well in regards to your last point, it all seems to presuppose giant altruism. It assumes that your teammates will tell you that they found this exact legendary, and not just keep it to themselves. But fair enough. However, it also presupposes that the kridershot they find is not superior to the one they already have, in which case they'd legitimately want to keep it (and still couldn't give you their old one, which will have become soul bound by then). Playing 4 DHs will improve your chances, but certainly not times four, and besides, it will be a less efficient farm - at least include two monks for some diversity while maintaining dex drops.
This method is shaky from a statistical or game theory perspective, except of course if you are multiboxing, in which case your chances are simply x4 minus the loss in efficiency from multiboxing software and interface.
I'm not so sure that Badglad's response is correct, except in some bizarre, outlying circumstance. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is how much hit points an attack will take from your pool of hit points, regardless of what type of attack it is. Let's say you have 1 millon toughness. If it came only from hitpoints, you would have 1 000 000 life (?). With this amount of hit points, you most certainly would not get one-shot, any more than you do with one million toughness from a combination of 100 000 hit points compounded with the requisite amount of armor, dodge and all resists (the normal situation). For all intents and purposes, effective hit points are effective hit points (toughness). Of course, if you derive a large quantity of your effective hit points from lightning resist, if that is even possible, you would struggle against fire. But it isn't weighted particularly high by the in-game EHP calculator, and who in their right mind would do this anyway.
Not sure about this, just putting out a counter-thesis.
[...]It's much harder to say "live and let live" because there was a time when exploits would be relatively unknown and for the most part, people would just play the game.
[...]As an old man in terms of gaming culture, I'm shocked at how often I see streamers cited as some kind of authority on how the game should be played. I understand the mentality, but it's just way too pervasive.
And then those people turn around and pan the game for being broken. I used to watch Kripparian's videos and think to myself, "Well of course you have these complaints, you've played the game for several thousand hours. You need to go outside." But then you see other players with the same complaints, and they're like paragon 30. It's just toxic.
I do agree with these sentiments, but I suppose that there is something I have trouble letting go of. At the end of the previous century a central part of the fun in games was figuring out not only how to beat them on the terms they presented, but also as far outside the metaphorical box as you could get without downloading "trainers" or editing whatever file was available in ascii. I realize of course that this aspect is gone now that it is, as you say, immediately broadcast, and through the lazy attitudes of others becomes the standard to which developers must, now, balance the game. Too bad though, as it wasn't a question of finding exploits on youtube to (illogically) skip (the very) content (you have paid for), or to lengthen one's penis in the eyes of other gamers, but simply to have fun. Games were a challenge to be beat in whatever way you could.
I'm still quite convinced that the removal of the AH will be a big change in this respect, and that it will greatly influence the effect of streamers on the mood of the forums. Statistically, there will be a much closer connection between progress, i.e. character strength, and time played. People will start treating this game more as an individual experience. It'll be an improvement.
If any kind of exploit does not have a negative impact on the game, I don't care; but as soon as an exploit is being abused by a selected few, the result is not rolled back (as the ~100 paragon levels acquired by others), and the impact might potentially harm everyone's game experience (i.e., leveling might become slower for everyone as a result of that action), it is affecting everyone.
This is a fair point and I understand the concern. Whether or not the accounts should be rolled back is uninteresting to me, as it is a trivial sanction compared to bans. But so is the benefit of the exploit we are talking about here, chest farming, and the effects of an eventual backlash on general balancing should be, I would estimate, negligible. Of course, who knows. Your example is much more drastic, and relates to the AH which obviously made this, at least in part, more of a competitive game and a sensitive ecosystem. Right now, it is more comparable to the console version, where it is totally irrelevant if anyone else has exploited (always possible there due to the save-game-trade-load-game system, for all games of this type).
I don't understand the negative connotations many ascribe to the concept of an "exploit" in a non-competitive game, especially once the trading is out of the picture. It is counterintuitive to me. And this one certainly will not lead to a ban of any sort, regardless of how you interpret the vague blue posts, because it does not relate in a direct manner to RMAH transactions and do not involve a bug, but simply "clever" use of game mechanics. I haven't done it because my friends are patiently waiting for RoS, but I would have if I had been invited to a chest-farming-party, at least until I got bored an hour later.
I do agree that this should be "nerfed", because it is consistent with the game's design philosophy: The point of diablo 3 seems to be to fascilitate a grinding experience, and the longer the experience, the better the (late) game (paradoxical, I know, but we all know it to be the truth and moreover, it is why they are now removing AH). It's quite obious from the developers point of view that they want people to use a wide range of the game mechanics to avoid boredom and, therefore, complaints. We all want to use the best method, but we don't want for there not to even have to be a method (i.e., in the logical absolute, for us to be lvl 70 paragon level 2000 the minute we join and not have to play the game).
To those who claim that this method is only slightly better because there aren't always chests next to the WP, you have misunderstood the nature of the method: 4 players try to find it in their own, individual games, but as soon as 1 person finds it, the other three join his game. We did this at one point to farm treasure goblins, back in 2012. It wasn't particularly effective back then, but it is now.
While it is an exploit, it is only exploiting the fact that it is a 4 player game, and not some sort of sinister hole in the programming. Similar in this respect to how we farmed demonic essences in the beginning with WDs BBVoodoo (people leaving the game and joining again once the TR monk finds elites, in order to reset their cooldowns). Again, fun for a -very- short while because of the intrinsic joy of high efficiency, but monotonous and eventually detrimental to the enjoyment of the game.
Basically when you are doing this alone and finding it to be only slightly better than normal farming, you need to multiply this result by 4, initially, and then add the general MP bonus. It will then be apparent how it is wildly effective and should be nerfed (but not punished).
As regards having fun and playing efficiently, I fail to see the dichotomy if not the distinction. It's been a while since I played, and what I miss the most is 1) figuring out how to make the most of what little time I have to play and 2) putting on some coffee, loud, fast-paced music and grinding mindlessly for a few hours until real life demands that I do something that matters. There is of course no intrinsic point to playing this way, in the sense that how fast you progress doesn't affect anything besides how fast you progress. No one else cares, and if you don't either, then play differently. But to say that instead of playing efficiently one should play for fun, is a meaningless statement unless playing for fun somehow entails not playing efficiently. Certainly for me, it can occationally be more fun to wander around aimlessly in-game while talking to friends on skype. But usually it's more fun to play fast and to see how much you can do in a given time. D3 for me is a racing game where the finishing line is the (reasonably relative) inability to get further upgrades and paragon benefits.
That having been said, I much prefer finding the efficient way to do it myself (in terms of which route to take, what to pick up, whether to do it solo or multiplayer, if so what classes, which build is more efficient etc). If you simply search the forums for an answer, then - in my opinon - you rob yourself. "Hacking" the game is half the game.
I want to farm t3 rifts, and I have 6 keys. I finish the rift in 5 minutes, and now I'm out of keys. I then do bounties for 15 minutes because I can't find the "#¤ exit to caverns of aranae until I've explored the entire map. Then I get enough keys to open another 5 minute rift. The efficiency of this is zero, obviously.
Enter RIF: I do the 5 minute rift, spend 1-2 minutes inviting 2-3 people to open the next one once they get their shards, and do another 5 minute rift. This should be roughly 3 times as efficient, and is also the reason Rift it Forward exists. So that we can farm continously were it is the most rewarding, and because a lot of us find bounties, split or otherwise, to be a waste of time.
Without the need for someone else to open your rifts for you, in order that you can save the time you are otherwise wasting in bounties, there can be no rift it forward. It would be illogical for me to spend the 1-2 minutes inviting 3 more people in.
Anyway, I like this change. As it is now, my group always keeps a spot open so we can invite someone else to open the next rift. Now we can play 4man again, and will at least have to spend slightly less time doing bounties.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
This kind of paranoia is always verificationistic. Whenever I start growing tin foil hats, I remind myself that there is no such thing as chance except from the perspective of someone who is making predictions. Anything that has already happened will by definition have had 100% chance of occuring. If you throw real physical dice (not hypothetical ones) and get two sixes, the odds are 100% that you got two sixes, meaning that with that force, friction etc, you could not have gotten anything else. It is only in a projection to the future from a certain perspective that probability is a useful tool.
What're the odds that I exist given everything that had to happen for me to be just as I am now? Astronomical against, or 100% determined in a physyical, lawlike universe? What does this mean in d3? We can make the following prediction: The odds are high that someone tonight will get an unusually long streak of no legendaries, given the amount of people playing. Likewise, the odds are high that someone will get that sweet wand of woh, SoJ and harringtons they've been looking for. The crucial point, however, is that the odds are just as high that for whoever single person this happens to out of the thousands playing, they will feel very (un)lucky indeed. The "why me?" reaction is very human, but not rational. Probability is a matter of perspective; reality just is. It is highly probable that for any universe where sentient beings occur on a planet located at just the right distance from a sun, and a certain sperm would have to make it instead of a great deal of other sperms, etc. etc., it will be the case that from the perspective of one of those sentient beings with poor philosophy skills who gets a wand of woh, that what has happened to them would seem very improbable. But in any universe where this did not occur, there is no perception of chance. So if there is such a thing as a sentient being with perspective, the impression of improbability necessarily and ironically follows.
Consider this and all our other biases and general narcissism first, then make threads about kadala being stealth nerfed. Anyway, good thread!
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
I'm not sure which of the two games Blizzard has intended d3 to be, nor which group of players I belong to, but I symphatize with those that just want to finally find the great items, after maybe a 100 hours, that let's them win d3 once and for all, so they can stop playing and move on to the next game. You might claim that nerfs suggest blizzard want it to be the first kind of game, but certainly the 4-player max, account bound stuff and the lack of pvp/leaderboards suggest the opposite. I suspect my own opinion is that it should be possible to win, but that it would require a few thousand hours, not a hundred. I feel like they shouldn't remove the possibility of a godlike character, but that they should require a fantastic and clever combination of items which are hard, but not impossible, to find. Balance still seems a bit meaningless in the long run, since it removes the possibility of beating the game, but at the same time the progression needs to be balanced so that you won't just suddenly win it if one item drops.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
As for criticism based on the fact that simplifying assumptions have to be made, they are a bit unwarranted. Obviously we can't get a thousand people with the exact same build and gear to farm the same route a thousand times on different torment levels to get the required empirical data. This must be done with a priori logic. The OP equates mob health with time, and assumes that this accounts for the amount of instances to have a chance in a given timeframe (which is the real effect of MF, not the qualitative value of a single mob regardless of how many times you kill him, which is effectively uninteresting). The choice isn't between killing 1 skeleton with 30% more chance or 1 skeleton with 0% more chance, but in whether you want to kill 5 skeletons with 10% chance or 1 with 30% chance in a given minute. And the answer we are looking for is where exactly do the lines go for a hypothetical average character in the world of d3. Travel and loading time must be left as ceteris paribus in this respect. But arriving at general advice shouldn't be impossible. Perhaps it can be looked at relative to damage scaling from items; what does it take to one-shot a mob on normal, and how much more damage can be achieved relative to the percent increase in HP from torment levels relative to magic find? I don't know.
The OPs post can inform this question, but not if the values are wrong and certainly not if they are randomly chosen. We need more.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
#1. Play hardcore. It's much harder to evaluate upgrades when survivability and offense must be carefully balanced (sidesteps at any rate can feel more significant in the sense that they represent important trade-offs). There is also a tendency for spontaneous ladder-resets, which afford you the possibility of getting the gear all over again.
#2. Play more than one class. It'll be a while before you deck out all of them.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
Claims that there are no enrage-timers naively overlook client-side rage. I'd say the enrage timer is around 15 minutes, and that the OP got around this timer with either opiates or simply knowing that it was a first kill.
Anyway, congrats.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
Clearly, even if the drop chance per mob on torment were fifteen times higher, it would amount to the same if a particular player's kill time on a mob were fifteen times longer. It's quite easy to see, considered in abstract, that the lower difficulties will yield a much higher drop rate of legendaries per hour. It is better to kill 1001 mobs with 1% chance per mob of legendary drops per hour, than it is to kill 100 mobs with 10% chance per mob per hour, etc. This simply follows by definition.
Naturally there complicating variables such as builds, AoE and rare cases of absurdly high dps characters, but in general it should be true that for any given hour, the amount of legendaries you get will increase proportional to the amount mobs you have slain. Think of it like this: every time you kill a mob, it is another chance for a chance. You want as many chances as you can per time unit to get a chance at winning. There is a dice and you want a six: It is better to throw the die 10 times than only 1, even if on the 1 throw you get to remove another digit (such as five). The quality of the throw increases, but throwing ten times far outweighs it.
Clearly, if you check the tables, in d3 ros - as in vanilla - the quality does not even come remotely close. Excepting, of course, the matter of the sets. The reason for this is that mob HP increases much more than it is even theoretically possible for a player's damage output to scale.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
This method is shaky from a statistical or game theory perspective, except of course if you are multiboxing, in which case your chances are simply x4 minus the loss in efficiency from multiboxing software and interface.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
Not sure about this, just putting out a counter-thesis.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
I'm still quite convinced that the removal of the AH will be a big change in this respect, and that it will greatly influence the effect of streamers on the mood of the forums. Statistically, there will be a much closer connection between progress, i.e. character strength, and time played. People will start treating this game more as an individual experience. It'll be an improvement.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
Generally, I suppose I agree with you.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
I do agree that this should be "nerfed", because it is consistent with the game's design philosophy: The point of diablo 3 seems to be to fascilitate a grinding experience, and the longer the experience, the better the (late) game (paradoxical, I know, but we all know it to be the truth and moreover, it is why they are now removing AH). It's quite obious from the developers point of view that they want people to use a wide range of the game mechanics to avoid boredom and, therefore, complaints. We all want to use the best method, but we don't want for there not to even have to be a method (i.e., in the logical absolute, for us to be lvl 70 paragon level 2000 the minute we join and not have to play the game).
To those who claim that this method is only slightly better because there aren't always chests next to the WP, you have misunderstood the nature of the method: 4 players try to find it in their own, individual games, but as soon as 1 person finds it, the other three join his game. We did this at one point to farm treasure goblins, back in 2012. It wasn't particularly effective back then, but it is now.
While it is an exploit, it is only exploiting the fact that it is a 4 player game, and not some sort of sinister hole in the programming. Similar in this respect to how we farmed demonic essences in the beginning with WDs BBVoodoo (people leaving the game and joining again once the TR monk finds elites, in order to reset their cooldowns). Again, fun for a -very- short while because of the intrinsic joy of high efficiency, but monotonous and eventually detrimental to the enjoyment of the game.
Basically when you are doing this alone and finding it to be only slightly better than normal farming, you need to multiply this result by 4, initially, and then add the general MP bonus. It will then be apparent how it is wildly effective and should be nerfed (but not punished).
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/
That having been said, I much prefer finding the efficient way to do it myself (in terms of which route to take, what to pick up, whether to do it solo or multiplayer, if so what classes, which build is more efficient etc). If you simply search the forums for an answer, then - in my opinon - you rob yourself. "Hacking" the game is half the game.
http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/sodomir-2220/