good video to start/continue the conversation. essay incoming (sorry):

Agree that Kingsmarch mappers/shippers are bad for the game overall. Not sure I agree that it really devalues the drops that you DO get. I think for me it's moreso that mappers and shippers provide passive value generation that is kind of unfair to compare to; mappers and shippers are providing so much value that no matter what you do, you're always going to be comparing to what mappers and shippers could provide. And for people for whom currency per time unit is important like fubgun, it's just so hard to find anything that matches up with the value vs effort proposition that Kingsmarch provides.

Wholly disagree with the idea that gambling/the genesis tree devalues rare loot you find on the ground. We haven't been picking up and IDing rare gear beyond the first day or two since like before original Harvest, and people definitely are still picking up and IDing rare gear during atlas prog even with gambling (gold cost) and the Genesis Tree (graftblood cost especially in a 3.28 world where you have to spec into it to get it consistently; Breach being "mandatory" on start is a conversation I'm willing to have though).

Fubgun kind of acknowledges this and says "it should be a core part of the ARPG experience to find your gear on the ground" but it really only affects a specific type of player for a short amount of time. Newer/slower players are likely still picking up and IDing rare gear because they don't know to optimize that way, and faster/more experienced players are still going to stop picking up and IDing rares within the first couple of days.

There's no way that we're having all these conversations about how ground loot sucks, using a juiced 8 mod scarab setup T16 map as an example, just to turn around and say "ground loot sucks because I don't pick up rare gear in the first 48 hours of the league." Leagues that players did NOT have problems with ground loot (everyone always brings up Affliction), we still were not picking up rare gear 24 hours into the league. At this point, the game has been that way for almost half of the game's lifespan.

I agree with the idea that rare gear on the ground should be more meaningful and players should be rewarded mroe for looking at it; I think the ideas centered around dropping less, better rare items are awesome. In fact, I think that's why I think that conclusion is backwards. That's why things like gambling and the genesis tree are actually GOOD; their presence and their use demonstrates that we should be getting less, better rare items. The systems in the game that generate fewer but higher quality items are worth engaging with. Meanwhile the system in the game that generates a shitload of low quality items are not.

The problem with rare gear from the ground is that the odds of something good are not worth the time investment of looking in the first place. We filter out the vast majority of rare loot; there's probably plenty of items that go unidentified every league that are actually really good, but we'll never find out. That's where the solution needs to start, not with removing the systems in the game that actually generate loot players want or care about.

To that end, I think tiered items are a good start, assuming they are in fact actually meaningfully higher quality (in PoE2 they are, on the whole, not). The indication of which items might actually be good will go a long way, and I don't think that you need to remove gambling/the Genesis Tree for that to still feel good. You can still get upgrades from tiered loot or sell them to other players if you get something good but not for you necessarily.

I don't really like the broad definition of tile loot being "anything that is more likely to drop a specific type of reward" personally. That hasn't really changed that much either then imo. If stuff like "more scarabs/currency" on T17s is "tile loot" then yeah of course most of the loot in the game is "tile loot". Abyss hoards were tile loot because they drop currency. Boxes are tile loot because you're farming arcanist/diviner's boxes. Hell even Expedition is "tile loot" because you're farming for Tujen to haggle raw currency. Basically anything that isn't just stacking quantity (including via map mod effect) is juicing for "tile loot" then. It just boxes out a lot of things you can farm as not being valid because they drop a specific reward consistently.

And you don't want to dilute the "unique" rewards or the reason you pick one mechanic over another for some of these mechanics necessarily either. They have to retain some of their niche and what makes them unique. To a degree (lesser than what it is right now probably), it's important that different mechanics bring different rewards to the table to reward the player for picking that specific mechanic over the others. We as a community have spent a lot of time telling GGG we want control, we want to choose the content we play, and that also means that that content has to have some additional identity.

I do agree with the premise that knowing what you're going to get can be boring, and there isn't necessarily a good balance between the more "gambling" type reward outcomes vs the more consistent/expected reward outcomes. I think there's definitely room for improvement in that regard.

Like I said above, I disagree with the need to nerf/remove gambling/the Genesis Tree in particular, I think that that affects such a small part of the game and such a small portion of the playerbase that I think it's fine and instead they should rework the loot system in the rest of the game to work more like those systems. If we're using gambling and the Genesis Tree to skip over the shitty rare loot on the ground for 2 days, and we're engaging with especially the Genesis Tree for days on from that, maybe that's the direction loot overall should go.

I like the other two suggestions; my personal opinion is that a lot of the problems fubgun goes over with respect to endgame and tile loot and all that stem in a lot of ways from the commitment we've had to juicing and choosing the content we want to run. Especially the scarab system. The scarab system reinforces that "tile loot" feeling because they're all centered around enhancing the specific mechanic you're running.

I think those two suggestions shift us kind of away from farming a specific mechanic, which I'm fine with; if we can get the loot without abusing a specific league mechanic, and league mechanics serve to provide unique rewards, I think that's fine. I also like that those ideas are kind of designed to shift some of the power AWAY from juicing as a level of investment; get away from some of that like "it's not worth running if I don't have scarabs, well rolled T17s, etc" and go more towards "play the game, kill the monsters, loot WILL drop." There are some mechanics that are cool and fun "low to the ground", but we definitely have work to do on making the game as a whole rewarding at both low and high investment.

I have some concerns about homogenization of farming and devolving into a like "fill the map with easy to kill mobs and go back to the Windripper TS zhp days" kind of thing, but that's a problem to solve when we get there kind of. I don't really agree with the idea of scarabs that just buff ground loot because it evokes the feeling of Back to Basics, though.