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[Rentahamster]

With some prominent loot-whore games on the horizon (Diablo III, Torchlight II, Path of Exile, etc), and with some prominent loot whore games being such a significant part of our history (Diablo I/II, Torchlight, Titan Quest, Borderlands, Dungeon Siege I/II, etc), what do you think of the concept of "magic find" on wearable equipment?

Did it work positively on the games that had it? Were the games that lacked magic find stat better off for not having it?

I understand that it's an evolution of the risk/reward mechanic in the sense that adding magic find comes at the cost of not adding something that will help your damage or your survivability; essentially you are gimping yourself (risk) in order to get better loot (reward).

Some people love it, some hate it, and of course one of the most important things we should be looking at is "is this fun?", but something as subjective as "fun" is a bit hard to measure. What I want to know is if the concept of magic find on gear in a loot-driven game makes sense.

Of course an obvious answer might be, "Of course it makes sense. The objective is to get good loot, and magic find help you get good loot!". But is that really the case?

What is the reason we want to get better loot in these kinds of games?

We want to get better loot to make our characters stronger by increasing our stats. That's one of the main points, right? However, if magic find is such an important stat that we need it to get better loot, doesn't that defeat the purpose of wanting better loot to get stronger?

I mean, if I'm killing monsters and find a really great piece of gear without magic find stat affixes, I'm left with 2 choices:

1. Wear the better gear and kill more monsters faster, but have less chance at getting good items.

2. Keep my current gear and kill less monsters slower, but have more chance at getting good items.
​

It seems that in a lot of games with magic find, those 2 choices are rarely equally balanced. Most of the time it's better just to go with option 2, but doing so is counterproductive to the point of the game.

What's the use of farming for better(more powerful, better stats) gear, if I'm not going to wear it anyway because it doesn't have enough magic find? Is it arbitrarily putting too much power and value in one stat like magic find when instead we should be encouraging the player to value things like skill, strategy, and stat placement?

Is this really the best way to encourage risk/reward? Couldn't we do the same thing without introducing the side effects that "magic find on gear" has?

So what can we do? I guess we could try things like increasing difficulty so that equipping MF gear is more hazardous, or perhaps introducing a cap on MF, but that seems more like band aid fixes.

If it were up to me, I'd probably do away with magic find on gear completely. It gets rid of a large hurdle in balancing it properly. It also takes the game to its basic goal: kill monsters -> get loot. Increasing your power is essentially increasing your capacity to get loot (MF) since the faster you kill, the more loot you get.

If the players feel the need to have more risk/reward in the gameplay, then actually make the game more harder instead of resorting to the players willingly gimping themselves. Allow players to choose to endure harder content for better rewards instead of gimping themselves to counteract the game's lack of difficulty.

Add magic find bonuses for having the players complete the game content and doing it competently. That way there is positive feedback for playing the game in its most fun manner.

 

[pancakesandsex]

I play a thief in FFXI. There is a stat similar to magic find called "treasure hunter" (aka placebo) which is basically my reason for being. Since it's not a random loot driven game, the ability simply affects whether you get drops or not, rather than their quality.

The difference here is that in FFXI you can swap equipment mid fight, putting on your more powerful gear after hitting the mob in your placebo +7 gear so there are really no sacrifices made for the sake of getting better toys.

 

[Rentahamster]

The difference here is that in FFXI you can swap equipment mid fight, putting on your more powerful gear after hitting the mob in your placebo +7 gear so there are really no sacrifices made for the sake of getting better toys.

You could do that in Diablo II, but it was more of a pain in the ass since you don't have gear change macros like in FF11.

 

[forrest]

Yeah, I'll have to say I'm not particularly a big fan of it. It makes you store the equipment you really want to wear in order to find more equipment that you really want to wear, but will just store in order to wear more magic find gear. It doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean do you only quit wearing it the moment you find all of your best possible gear?

 

[SiegfriedFM]

It makes sense to have it when you're farming for something in particular or when breezing through easy enemies.

 

[ultron87]

I pretty much agree with you.

I feel it has a similar place to +exp gain items. Having a bonus that makes your character better at getting better instead of just straight up making him better is a really weird design that encourages you not not to use anything else if you want to play the game optimally. This is a huge design problem when a lot of the motivation in the game involves getting cool new stuff to use.

 

[aliencowz7]

I'm kind of neutral on it, I don't think it really adds much to the game but at the same time i don't feel having it is a detriment either. As long as its balanced to a point that its not a requirement for finding gear i see no real issue with it.

 

[forrest]

It makes sense to have it when you're farming for something in particular or when breezing through easy enemies.

I didn't play Diablo 2 to the ends of the earth or do any high level farming stuff, but what was the actual chance of getting that rare you're farming for? I always read about this amazing bow (and I've seen it has been added to Diablo 3's loot list) but how many people actually farming it had it drop, including those wearing MF?

It just seems like such a random chance in a huge pool of possible drops.

 

[echoshifting]

Completely agree with the op. I hate hate hate magic find.

Nothing worse than getting a great drop for your mf character...which you can't use because you need the slot for mf.

Same flawed philosophy extended to charms in Diablo II: LoD, in a way. Risk/reward on inventory space was even less fun.

 

[Air Zombie Meat]

I always saw things like this as being for when you're grinding somewhere for an extra rare drop, not as something you should be using all the time. The temptation to use it all the time is understandable though.

 

[birdchili]

it doesn't make sense on a weapon.

perhaps if you had to choose between: magic find, higher-level fights (better loot *and* more xp), easier fights, gold find, and perhaps some other stuff in slots that don't compete for dps items it might make for a reasonable choice.

otherwise... i think the intuition that it's a more-or-less bad thing to add to items in games like this is true.

 

[scy]

Always appreciated TWEWY's "Magic Find" mechanic of lowering your level to increase drop chances.

 

[Mashing]

I like the way TWEWY (not an loot-whore game in the strictest sense, but it does have elements of it) did it. If you increase the difficulty you'd get more item drops and the best chance to get rare pins.

Edit: Beaten like a read headed stepchild

 

[Rentahamster]

it doesn't make sense on a weapon.

perhaps if you had to choose between: magic find, higher-level fights (better loot *and* more xp), easier fights, gold find, and perhaps some other stuff in slots that don't compete for dps items it might make for a reasonable choice.

otherwise... i think the intuition that it's a more-or-less bad thing to add to items in games like this is true.

If it's not on your weapon that means that it can negatively affect your survivability. If the game is so easy that survivability is a joke, then I can see your point, but ideally, I'd like a game to be challenging enough so that defensive choices are meaningful too.

 

[aliencowz7]

Something along the lines of a magic find mode you could switch on and off would work better then MF on items, Switched on you get a flat % better magic find but your total stats are reduced by X amount , that way everyone has access to it, and better gear will still reduce the effects of the stat reduction while allowing you to use whatever items you want.

 

[Victrix]

Don't care about it

It's a psychological trap for players addicted to the hamster pellets

I don't play the games that use it for the same reasons that the people who love that stuff do, so it doesn't really impact my experience positively or negatively - it's a useless drop, but there are lots of useless drops in those games, so its no different than +light radius or whatever the other equivalent junk mods are

 

[birdchili]

If it's not on your weapon that means that it can negatively affect your survivability. If the game is so easy that survivability is a joke, then I can see your point, but ideally, I'd like a game to be challenging enough so that defensive choices are meaningful too.

it wouldn't need to compete with armor either, depending on the design. you'd need a dedicated spot for stuff like this, perhaps (monocle slot!).

i'm a big fan of games that let you dynamically adjust the difficulty for better rewards (as long as it doesn't break at some point and make everything super easy). "treasure find" could easily work its way into systems like this (i haven't played twewy, but that seems like a good example of how to handle things)

 

[pancakesandsex]

You could do that in Diablo II, but it was more of a pain in the ass since you don't have gear change macros like in FF11.

You could have 2 weapon sets though. I didn't know that that would stick after gear change in D2.

 

[scy]

(i haven't played twewy, but that seems like a good example of how to handle things)

Basically, you can (temporarily) reduce your level by 1 to increase your drop rate multiplier by 1. There's food items you can eat that boost it by 1 or 3 permanently as well and two pins (basically, your spell/ability load out) that boosted it by 4 or 8.

These are used to modify the in-game drop chances along with the size of the chain (e.g., how many enemy groups you're fighting at once). If I remember, it's (Sum of all drop rate bonuses) * ChainSize with the first term being limited to 999 (1000?).

The rarest drop in the game was, I believe, a 0.03% chance drop (~3333 drop rate multiplier needed) and there's a lot of 0.10% drops. A lot.

It's a nice system since it was basically "make the game harder on myself, get better drops."

 

[V_Arnold]

On one hand, I do not hate the option of it.
On the other hand, I feel like that it is simply nothing more than an amplifier of imbalances.

What does that mean? It means builds that rely on inherent damage, not the +skill modifiers and +stat modifiers get more and more benefit from Magic Find gear than builds that rely heavily on the equipment itself.

Also, I think Blizzard keeps this stat just for catering the old D2 veterans, because otherwise, an economy-driven game does not need a stat like this. But they are at least implementing an interesting method, which, combined with the supposed difficulty jumps would make it so that someone specialized in MF plus its class buffs should be welcomed in a group, and in solo, he would have a hard time with killing the champion groups that can have a variety of difficult affixes on them.

 

[Rentahamster]

i'm a big fan of games that let you dynamically adjust the difficulty for better rewards (as long as it doesn't break at some point and make everything super easy). "treasure find" could easily work its way into systems like this (i haven't played twewy, but that seems like a good example of how to handle things)

Diablo II had a similar mechanic in the form of /players8 where you could make the game harder for better exp rewards. It was pretty popular and didn't really have any downsides, IIRC.

It's a psychological trap for players addicted to the hamster pellets

Nom nom, no one can resist!

 

[Victrix]

Nom nom, no one can resist!

Waiiiiiiit a minute

(I play loot games for the rest of the gameplay, the loot is an added bonus, terrifying I know)

Risk/reward is something else entirely, and few games do it well (DMC style games on higher difficulty, but there the reward is... beating the challenge, so maybe that's a bad example). MF specifically, meh, whatever.

 

[Vodh]

Never really played Diablo 2 other than casually getting a few characters up to ~90 and doing some boss runs, but I never really liked the MF mechanic. It essentially created a need to make an MF character to farm, and a proper character to use all the farmed stuff. I'd rather be able to walk around with my baller character in my baller gear without any nagging sense of diminishing my loot gains through having more fun.

Not sure if I mind it the way it looks in Diablo 3 though, since I can at least use the same character and just swap gear/skillset. Would be nice if they got rid of it, but at the same time I'm not going to cry if they don't. And they most probably won't, because some people enjoy the ability to maximize their drop rates other than through pure speed of clearing the dungeons and removing MF would cause more outrage than keeping it, especially with so many people having a dream of buying a house and 4 cars with RMAH money.

 

[Rentahamster]

Not sure if I mind it the way it looks in Diablo 3 though, since I can at least use the same character and just swap gear/skillset. Would be nice if they got rid of it, but at the same time I'm not going to cry if they don't. And they most probably won't, because some people enjoy the ability to maximize their drop rates other than through pure speed of clearing the dungeons and removing MF would cause more outrage than keeping it, especially with so many people having a dream of buying a house and 4 cars with RMAH money.

That's the thing, though. In a game without magic find, increasing your player skill and character strength is basically the same thing. You kill more monsters, you get more loot.

I think we should be encouraging players to play better rather than encouraging them to micromanage some meaningless stat that has no relation to killing things.

1. Build a strong character -> get reward (great!)

2. Assign a strong set of skills -> get reward (great!)

3. Use strategy to kill faster and survive longer -> get reward (great!)

4. Stack magic find -> get reward and interfere with #1, 2, and 3 (meh...)

 

[zoukka]

I love it. Nothing is more satisfying that maxing luck and exp boost while suffering from low skill stats. I do it in all RPG's.

I don't even care for the rewards really.