0.10.3c Patch Notes

Overall I think it's an improvement. Until the game can be optimized the loot timer needed to be increased. This isn't just a wooden PC issue, in 6 man parties even if you see your loot and click it first things like latency and fps drops can cause disproportion. Being melee range on anything less than optimal situations was worse. The distanced traveled helped in these situations, still not enough to counter certain people with better latency and gaming rigs to more or less get loot that the person it was designated for had 0% chance of picking up. There are people that play top of the line PC games on brand new PCs on max settings and are fine on most games and these people still drop to 5-20 FPS in 6 man parties, its optimization and until its fixed you can't have loot as cutthroat as it was, I think the time allocated is better now. Certain people, no matter how much time given, will never notice chrome items or 6 links and they will complain no matter what, but the timer needs to reflect how well your game is optimized.

The removal of designating blues was needed. I highly doubt people look at the blue items first when a boss drops a huge pile, they just grab the rares. Protecting and distributing blues always seemed silly to me. In friendly parties I can't remember who the rares AND the blues go to when it comes to trading blues for chromes so it was always ffa with blues, in my experience anyways.

The only part that's not good is the removal of my name and others names on the loot. Normally I train my eyes to look for certain names, like my own or item names and socket colors and links. Now I have no reference on the loot except the shading. Instead of looking for my name on items I now have to basically scan the entire pile and on the fly and search for slight hue differences in loot which is incredibly more difficult. QQ or whatever you want to label it but even though it adds much needed balance to loot, and makes it so more loot can fit on the screen which is also amazing, it does, at least so far seem to make the process of finding YOUR loot more difficult overall as well as causing disaster in friendly parties that liked to rely on the random distribution the game provide and will now have to ninja in their own parties or figure out other methods of distribution.

This could be fixed in a way that sounds easy but may be difficult to implement. Either designate each position in the party with a color and then border that player's items and picture on the left side of the screen with that color, sort of like map borders are white. The leader could be red and his picture and all his drops, while greyed out, will have his red color border so that there is at least someway of identifying whats yours, other than its brighter than the rest. The second player could be blue the third green and so on. Either this or even a small number like designate 1-6 to the position in the party and somewhere on the loot's name it would show a number while its greyed out. Without a way to scan and distribute based on identifying it's much more chaotic. There was never a problem in identifying what was yours other than how much space the loot took up, removing blues sorta solved this problem already I feel you went too far.

Definitely way more good than bad, but could be tweaked.

So the new patch offered a few changes. I would like to provide feedback.First and foremost, let's take a look at them and analyze which ones are better than the previous system and which aren't.

-Magic items are no longer allocated to specific players when they drop. The only items allocated are: Uniques, Rares, Gems, Currency and Maps.

This is definitely better overall. It should stay. No problem here.

-Increased the base duration of the item allocation timer from 1.6 seconds to 2.6 seconds. There is still a bonus allocation time for characters that are a distance away (travel time +10%).

Same at the above change. Nothing wrong with this one too. It should stay as it is.

-Allocated items no longer show a countdown timer or player name. They are still dimmed out while they are allocated to someone else.

^ This is really bugging. While it's a change in the right direction, it still goes into a wrong direction as well. Problem with this change is, once the timer expires, you still don't know who this item belongs to. So in public parties, you cannot really tell if somebody ninja'd something from a 3rd person or if it was theirs in the first place.

My suggestion is, just let the items be dimmed forever, even after the timer expires, and show the name above the item, just like in the last patch. You can even revert the timer removal change as well, since you fixed the overall chaos, and mass items with timer, by making blues non-shared. This way you will know if somebody is ninjaing things in public games, and when you're playing with friends that you trust and vice versa, be more enjoyable. Even if somebody missed their items, you will still know who they belong to, even after the timer expired.

Well that was just my 2 cents. Hope you like the suggestion.

An 850 page thread & an internal discussion & the best you could come up with is add a few seconds to the timer...

Just a band-aid on a shitty system.

If you want tension & cut throat then just make the loot have no timer & let players pk each other for drops but this wishy washy, half one way half the other serves neither camp.

Fail patch IMO.

The increased timer and removal of magic items from allocation are both steps in the right direction. Thank you.

However, the removal of player names from allocated items is going to play havoc with the group of friends I run with.

We clear maps rapidly and someone will keep an eye out on loot, alerting others if they missed an item. We don't waste time dallying over every single loot drop.

Now we will have no way of telling who items dropped for. This will slow down our entire group, as we will now have to all pause and check each allocated drop.

This change wasn't necessary and is just a psychological tactic to soften loot drama. It won't help since the person who the item was allocated to still sees it as pick-upable on their screen, and if someone else takes it, they'll still say, "You ninja'd my item!"

This could actually cause MORE loot drama, because now only the person the item dropped for knows it was originally allocated to them. Imagine this scenario:

- A unique item drops.
- Someone loots the item when the timer expires.
- Everyone says "That dropped for me!"
- No one knows who it was actually allocated to except the person it was actually allocated to.

Please revert this change, or add it as an option the party leader can enable. We use it to implement our round-robin system, because the game doesn't provide one.

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Mysterial wrote:

For the names, I would have actually advocated the exact opposite - to leave the name up forever - so that players who are actually cooperative can know about items that were intended for someone else after the fact and ask if they want it, etc.

Yes!

The clutter problem is not really about the size of the item boxes)[/quote]

Yes again, the font and box are both too big.

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Yay, more 6S/5L+ (now in blue) that ranged chars won't have a shot at. :/


I like the changes overall, though. I personally would love to see 5L/6L/6S get assigned, no matter the color.

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Sebulous wrote:

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Melly_me wrote:

This will be a problem for party races. Very often loot drops outside of the owner's view when the whole party is rushing through an area. We rely on our teammates to let us know that there's timed loot for us somewhere, especially when it's important like currency or rares. This will force parties to slow down because you have no way of telling whose loot it is anymore.

thats what happens when you don't contribute, why should you get rewarded for not doing anything? If you are playing with friends and they nice enough to say you got loot back there, isn't it easier to pick it up and trade later? It's not like team loot sharing is completely hopeless. Round robin, need/greed, even DKP have been methods of divvying up loot. I prefer running need before greed groups anyways. (Why do archers and melee need that wand?)

Have you not played a summoner/totem/trap build? it's EXTREMELY easy to fight off-screen and contribute a TON to the battle.

The safest place for summoner/totem/trap builds is AWAY from the monsters. Not necessarily a "glass cannon", but plays by controlling the battle instead of taking melee hits.

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Ushela wrote:

Your GCP wasnt stolen..you FAILED to grab your item before it became FFA. In other words..YOU..as a gamer..failed! I don't see how that translates into an item was stolen from you.

YOU obviously don't know how to read, or selectively read.

Here's a memo:

GGG acknowledged that players can stand on loot to prevent people from getting it. How do you know that didn't happen to me?

you know what happens when you make an assumption?

I would value a non-paying customer's opinion as much as I value maggots.

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TehHammer wrote:

Yay, more 6S/5L+ (now in blue) that ranged chars won't have a shot at. :/


I like the changes overall, though. I personally would love to see 5L/6L/6S get assigned, no matter the color.

These items are extremely valuable and should fall under the same guise as currency.