The addictive properties of loot in Blizzard games

By Matthew Rossi 

My wife and I are playing a lot of Diablo 3 while we wait for patch 7.3 to drop. We’re almost to Paragon 200 on our Season 11 heroes, which is fun, and we’re pushing Torment VII for the Slayer meta. As a result, we have to run a bounty or two every so often for crafting materials — Forgotten Souls are particularly hard to acquire — and that means we’re often chasing treasure goblins around.Why? Because they have treasure.Last night, a fortuitous goblin died, and a swirling rainbow portal opened. We stepped through into the magical land of Whimsyshire, where colorful rainbows terminate in smiling clouds and chubby, purple unicorns dance with smiling, colored bears.And we proceeded to murder everything because oh my god, the loot.

A reckoning in Whimsyshire

So much loot in Whimsyshire — Legendaries, set pieces, a ton of rare drops, gold and gems, and crafting materials that flow like water. Nearly 60 Death’s Breath, over forty Forgotten Souls. Easily over 30,000,000 gold dropped. That one portal paid for itself just in the amount of Empowered Greater Rifts — which cost extra gold — it will let us run. But that wasn’t why we were interested — there was no cold, mechanical calculation of what all that stuff would let us do.No, there was the giddy, grasping clutch of gleeful hands. At least three times I stumbled into another trash pack because I was too busy looting the previous trash packs’ remains. Clicking on  boxes or clouds, spinning like a dervish to decapitate yet more colorful unicorns. We had to continuously use our Town Portal to ferry all the loot, even though most of it just got salvaged anyway — there was still no question that we were going to do it. Leave it on the ground? Are you mad? It’s loot. There was a palpable physical sensation to seeing that much stuff on the ground, I actually itched trying to gather it all up.That got me wondering about loot, and how it feels to collect it. When Diablo 3 launched, it had a featured called the Real-Money Auction House. That ended over three years ago, and I think it’s safe to call it a failed experiment from the start, because it clashed with one of the key emotional engines of the Diablo franchise: seeing huge piles of stuff.

I want a pile of treasure, not a click

Objectively, the Auction House (whether you used gold or real money) was a seemingly good idea. There’s no functional difference between getting lucky with RNG or seeing that item you want on the AH and spending gold on it. It’s worked in World of Warcraft for years and years. But WoW and Diablo are different games, and they work in different ways. There are a lot more items in WoW you can only get in a specific way — by running a dungeon or raid, PVP, etc. —  using systems that Diablo 3 never really had. I remember when D3 came out I bought anImmortal King’s Boulder Breaker. This was well before Reaper of Souls came out, so it was a level-60 set weapon. I still have it in my inventory on my non-Season characters. It served me well until RoS came out. So why was that so much less satisfying an option overall? Why did players reject it so thoroughly that the removal of the feature led to actual forum threads celebrating it?I mean, think about that. They took an option away from players, and the players rejoiced. Why? Mechanically it can’t really be said to matter how we get our loot, but the difference between seeing an item drop and hearing the clank sound of a legendary or set piece hitting the ground and just buying one from an Auction House is huge. Even games like Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm seem to have learned this lesson — they don’t even have gear but they make obtaining things like new skins or other cosmetic items somewhat random, so that players are always left chasing the potential of getting a thing rather than necessarily knowing you’ll get it — although Heroes certainly does let you just buy things like skins. That random element can be extremely frustrating, but it can also be almost euphoric when it goes your way, and that’s a hard thing to duplicate.

Make it harder for me to get what I want

When Diablo 3 changed to make it more likely that legendaries and set pieces would drop while also removing the AH, it increased random chance in people’s gear. You can’t just go to the AH and buy the Bul’Kathos set any longer, you have to farm and hope it drops. You can increase your Torment level to increase the chances of a drop, you can spend Blood Shards and use Kanai’s Cube to get more chances, but there’s no magic button to press anymore. You can’t farm up a few million gold and hit the AH. You can’t buy what you want; you can at best buy a chancefor it. And for some reason, that level of randomness really seems to drive Diablo in a way that it doesn’t in other games.Those piles of loot are addictive for many reasons. It feels good to see a big pile of treasure on the ground. Collecting and carting it back to your home base feels like an accomplishment. The random nature of the loot means you can end up disappointed or heartily satisfied. And it motivates you to try and play on higher and higher difficulties, which increase the odds but also enhance the random factor. Loot is the crawling engine of Diablo and I suspect any attempt to ameliorate that random factor wouldn’t work there as it might in a game like World of Warcraft. WoW has a player-based economy which revolves around the AH, and it makes sense in the fiction of the game and as a means to draw gold away from players while still letting them play the market to make gold. It needs a little less randomness. But Diablo 3 isn’t rooted in that kind of player economy, and it shouldn’t be.What works in one game can be something that works in others, but not always — some games are rooted in choices that are mechanically indistinct but have huge impact on how they feel to play. Loot is that for Diablo 3. The randomness, the acquisition, the satisfaction of it — that’s what drives the play forward.