102 replies to this topic

[Molster]

Update: RMAH Commodities Coming Soon,  Gold Not Included Initially

Magic Find Gear Swapping
Blizzard has just posted a blog dealing with the issue of switching to high MF gear right before a kill. In the article five options are given and Blizzard will be looking for any and all feedback on the issue at hand. It should also be noted that with these they will also be looking at ways to add more MF bonuses to compensate for any changes.

• Set a Magic Find Cap
  
• Slowly Adjust Magic Find Over Time
  
• Use your average MF% or your lowest MF% of the last 5 minutes
  
• Zero-Out Your MF% for 3 Minutes After Swapping Gear
  
• Gear Swapping Interacts with Nephalem Valor

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Since release it has become an increasingly common practice to keep a Magic Find (MF) set in your inventory, and swap it in shortly before a kill. Philosophically we don't have a problem with the practice. While players getting more Magic Find for their kills isn't a game breaker for us, many players have said they don't enjoy doing it but feel the benefit is too large to ignore. Since the call for a solution really comes from all of you, we'd like to invite you to chime in with your opinion on what the solution could be.

It's worth keeping in mind that if we do implement a method to alleviate gear-swapping in combat, we'll simultaneously be looking at ways for players to get an added MF bonus to compensate.

Here are the solutions we're currently considering, and would appreciate your feedback and opinion on what seems the most reasonable for you, and why:

Option 1: Set a Magic Find Cap

We could set an MF cap between something like 100% and 200%. Nephalem Valor provides 75%, so you would need between 25% and 125% to reach the hard cap. Everyone could find ways to hit the cap for MF% on their gear and then stop.

Pros: Creates a gearing-game around trying to hit the "MF% cap" that some players enjoy. It also solves the swapping issue for people with enough gear to hit the cap. Players who want to min-max and gear swap can do so, and players who think it's stupid but feel "compelled" can try to hit the new cap instead.

Cons: Depending on where the cap is set, it may not actually alleviate gear swapping, and players who wish they didn't have to will feel compelled to do so. It also devalues a highly valuable stat, and desired stats mean desired gear, which helps diversify the item hunt.

Option 2: Slowly Adjust Magic Find Over Time

When you equip an item with Magic Find, we don't let your MF% change right away. Instead your Magic Find slowly "drifts" towards the target Magic Find -- potentially something like 1% every 3 seconds. If you open up your Character Details sheet, you can see the number change "8%... 9%... 10%." Even though you could in theory switch to Magic Find gear for the killing blow and get a few extra percent, it�s probably not worth it.

Pros: High degree of visibility as your stat sheet updates. Still allows you to swap your gear when you get an upgrade in the world without having to feel bad about putting the item on.

Cons: May not  alleviate the problem for players who still feel compelled to get a few extra MF%. Depending on the rate, some players may just swap in an item during the last 20 seconds of a fight even though they don't want to.

Option 3: Use your average MF% or your lowest MF% of the last 5 minutes

We could sample your MF% every 30 seconds or so and create a moving average, or use the lowest MF% the game has seen on your character in the last few minutes.

Pros: A lot of the same benefits as Solution 2, but harder to game. Still allows you to switch gear when you get an upgrade, which is great.

Cons: Difficult to communicate. We'd have to communicate this on the Details page somehow, but during normal gameplay there could be the sense of not knowing what your "moving average" is and wanting to look at it. Magic Find is already a difficult number to feel at any point in time, so hidden rules that modify Magic Find feel that much worse.

Option 4: Zero-Out Your MF% for 3 Minutes After Swapping Gear

When you swap gear, your Magic Find is disabled for 3 minutes.

Pros: Absolutely effective at discouraging gear swaps. Still allows you to swap gear when you find an upgrade, and the 3 minute duration is probably short enough that if you kill an Elite pack and get an upgrade, you can put that upgrade on and have your Magic Find active again by the time you get to the next pack.

Cons:  Players who are unfamiliar with the system may open up their details page and see their Magic Find as 0% and not understand why. We could mitigate this by making the 0% MF colored with a tooltip stating the countdown until your Magic Find would work again, as well as what your Magic Find will be when the time expires.

Option 5: Gear Swapping Interacts with Nephalem Valor

There's a whole class of solutions that interact with Nephalem Valor. For example, we could remove a stack of Nephalem Valor when you swap a piece of gear.

Pros: Stops gear swapping just for the last kill, while still allowing the player the option to do so.

Cons: Some players will lose a stack by accident. We could put a confirmation box in to address accidental loss of a stack, but game-interrupting popups are potentially character-killing. It also causes co-op players to drop out of sync. One person may switch gear and lose a stack or two, and if it happens before a boss they'll want to clear two more packs before hitting the boss, but the other party members may not want to -- causing some tense social situations in co-op play. Finally, it tightly couples two systems together and generally tightly-coupled systems don't function over the long haul as well as loosely-coupled systems. In other words, future changes to the Nephalem Valor system or the Magic Find system (or systems related to those two systems) become harder to make as both systems would be impacted.

While we're having our own discussions and tests of how well these options could work, we�re interested to hear your thoughts. We'd mainly like to hear which approaches you like, if there are any specifics you like or don't like about it, and why. Having the context of how this affects you personally really helps us.
We're going to be locking down comments in this article to focus feedback to one location, so please head to the forum thread link below to discuss.

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RMAH Commodities Coming Soon,  Gold Not Included Initially
The RMAH Commodities will soon go live. However gold will not be one of the features going live at first .

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

The following commodities will be available soon for trading in the real-money auction house:

• Gems
  
• Dyes
  
• Crafting Materials
  
• Blacksmithing Plans and Jeweler Designs
  
• Pages of Training

The ability to trade gold as a commodity won't be included in this initial update, but we hope to enable it in the near future. Keep an eye on this thread for further updates.

[sykotic]

Really guys........this is getting ridiculous.

Let us play the game.

Quit tinkering and driving away players with every single patch. You are removing EVERY chance for us to improve in a FARMING DRIVEN GAME. You nerf everything that will keep players here and not shoot them over to TL2 or GW2.

I choose Option 6: LEAVE IT ALONE

[Ryude]

sykotic, on 03 July 2012 - 04:07 PM, said:

Really guys........this is getting ridiculous.

Let us play the game.

Quit tinkering and driving away players with every single patch. You are removing EVERY chance for us to improve in a FARMING DRIVEN GAME. You nerf everything that will keep players here and not shoot them over to TL2 or GW2.

I choose Option 6: LEAVE IT ALONE

While playing diablo 3, Jay Wilson noticed that other players were playing the game differently than he envisioned. Outraged, he told his staff that there will be nerfs!

[Orinrin]

wow, i am not a gear switcher myself but why does all of those solution seem terrible.

[Seebor]

I choose Option Nr. 6: Implement switching your Armor, cause they already told us that they don't have a problem with swapping...

[Sidious911]

A) Leave it alone

If you HAVE to change it for the QQ's go with a modified Option 5. It interacts with your NV Stacks if you do it outside of a town. You should be able to go back to a town, switch up some gear without effect. Inferno Mobs will heal a lot if you attempt to do this switch during a battle. But a lot of people will die from a pack and realize that a sword and board may be more suited to fight the pack, or they want their other chest piece that has more Vit/Resist.

If our gear AND our spells are all tied up because of NV stacks, that will be dumb. You will come up with a cookie cutter character that can't be changed as long as you want to farm efficiently. Blizz wants us to feel the need to keep going after you kill a boss... but hey look, i found 3 upgrades during my run (LOL i doubt it), I have to stop farming and lose all my NV stacks so I can benefit from the gear I found!

[FreddyBenson]

this is a joke now, what feedback are they looking at, is the people who moan cos they cant gear switch?

christ all fucking mighty is this the stupiest thing ive ever seen

[KnowScott]

Gear swapping should be removed while in combat. Period.

Of the options 4 is by far the best with one addition, any gear that is swapped that has MF on it should trigger the 'cooldown'. So, people that switch to a shield or LOH wep arent penalized. But I'm of the impression gear should be what it is while in combat. If you need to switch gear do it out of combat.

edit typos and clarity.

Edited by KnowScott, 03 July 2012 - 04:19 PM.

[Ruppgu]

I don't care as long as they don't do option 4 or 5. For very valid gameplay related issues I often switch my gear before or during a rare pack. Often times this is equipping a shield or more defensive items if I'm encountering a pack that is difficult to kite or my defensive passive (spirit vessel) has already procced.

It would be a massive letdown if a band-aid fix to stop another problem harmed my play experience.

[Molster]

FreddyBenson, on 03 July 2012 - 04:18 PM, said:

this is a joke now, what feedback are they looking at, is the people who moan cos they cant gear switch?

christ all fucking mighty is this the stupiest thing ive ever seen

^-- I've never seen this guy get mad. Things are serious! (im serious)

[SFJake]

I think option 2 and 3 without any visual clue in details would be all this needs if they care so bad about removing this "feature", as they are not intrusive. Don't know why the hell they care about how players can notice it or not. So much crap in this game is never told to the player.

Edited by SFJake, 03 July 2012 - 04:19 PM.

[1lko]

I dont swap gear myself, used to, but stopped. I think if anyone wants to swap gear before the kill, they should. This was practised in D2 for years and years, why bother with it? To be honest, these solutions sound awful. While there are so many other major issues with the game, they try to take away the whole point of the game.

Seems like D3 will not see the success of the previous game, which is a shame.

[Hpnot1Q]

sykotic, on 03 July 2012 - 04:07 PM, said:

Really guys........this is getting ridiculous.

Let us play the game.

Quit tinkering and driving away players with every single patch. You are removing EVERY chance for us to improve in a FARMING DRIVEN GAME. You nerf everything that will keep players here and not shoot them over to TL2 or GW2.

I choose Option 6: LEAVE IT ALONE

This this and more of this +1

[sykotic]

Ryude, on 03 July 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

sykotic, on 03 July 2012 - 04:07 PM, said:

Really guys........this is getting ridiculous.

Let us play the game.

Quit tinkering and driving away players with every single patch. You are removing EVERY chance for us to improve in a FARMING DRIVEN GAME. You nerf everything that will keep players here and not shoot them over to TL2 or GW2.

I choose Option 6: LEAVE IT ALONE

While playing diablo 3, Jay Wilson noticed that other players were playing the game differently than he envisioned. Outraged, he told his staff that there will be nerfs!

I shook his hand at the launch party in Irvine......one of the moments I regret most in my life.

How can one person/ QA team/ company screw up a game so monumentally ?

[Cyeron]

I find all of these options quite bad... The only option that I find most effective against gear-swapping (if you agree there is a problem with gear swapping) is #4.

#1 is absolutely horrible, it will just result in a punch in the face for MF being devalued like an old hooker... if they go with that option they'd might as well remove the affix from items completely and let it rest on NV.

I'll go with option #6: make a Chuck-Norris factor that makes MF more effective the more Norris you appear!

[jzap3p]

I'm happy with the system as it currently exists. I don't see a need to change it.

[swn]

Definitely option 1. The other option would affect the game play greatly and ruin it for a lot of people.

[Zakaz]

People complaining about them changing things:

Why is your opinion on the matter more important than someone else's? IE - if you don't like gear swapping you don't have to do it.

Newsflash: MF swapping is incredibly effective, and even if it isn't enjoyable (for a large number of players), many feel compelled to do it because of its effectiveness.

Again, why is your enjoyment of the game more important than theirs? Pretty hilarious telling those players to go fly a kite because they don't like something, and then go into an uproar when something you don't like takes place. It's fun, isn't it?

Leave the hyperbole and outrage at home. Try some intelligent, calm, rational discussion on the topic and actually offer a solution without the "OMFG THIS GAME IS DEAD/DYING AND WE'RE BURNING THE CITY RWAAWRWARBLARGETYBLARG!!!!!" It's amazing how well it works.

[KnowScott]

If they cap MF I'm done with D3. That is the whole point for me; Riding the line between ridiculous MF and high DPS. If they cap MF why not just make every toon the same dmg and the same build and everyone gets the same drops. Everyone can clear act 1 2 3 4 until the are blue in the face. /Yawn.

Option 6: Remove gear swapping while in combat.

or

Option 4b: Add the 3 min cooldown to any gear that is swapped (outside of town) that has MF on it. (As to not penalize the people that switch for combat related tactical reasoning to insane pack combos, IE shield)

[sykotic]

Zakaz, on 03 July 2012 - 04:26 PM, said:

People complaining about them changing things:

Why is your opinion on the matter more important than someone else's? IE - if you don't like gear swapping you don't have to do it.

Newsflash: MF swapping is incredibly effective, and even if it isn't enjoyable (for a large number of players), many feel compelled to do it because of its effectiveness.

Again, why is your enjoyment of the game more important than theirs? Pretty hilarious telling those players to go fly a kite because they don't like something, and then go into an uproar when something you don't like takes place. It's fun, isn't it?

Leave the hyperbole and outrage at home. Try some intelligent, calm, rational discussion on the topic and actually offer a solution without the "OMFG THIS GAME IS DEAD/DYING AND WE'RE BURNING THE CITY RWAAWRWARBLARGETYBLARG!!!!!" It's amazing how well it works.

Curious who your post is directed at ?