Ask the Devs Round 1/NEW CRAFTED ITEMS

Wyatt: The most important thing to keep in mind about the new crafting recipes is that they are not for everybody. They are designed primarily for two groups:

• High-end players who already have extremely good gear, but are having difficulty finding new upgrades (either through drops or the Auction House).
• Self-found" players who don't use the Auction House and, as such, are happy for any opportunity to upgrade their gear through available means.
  
  

Certainly players can (and should) compare the new crafted gear to current AH pricing. If you are still finding the occasional upgrade on the AH, then you may not want to make the investment in the new crafting recipes – and that's okay.

Any analysis being done on the tradeoff between AH pricing and the crafting recipes’ probabilities assume a current gear level. If the AH has upgrades for you at the 10,000 gold price point, then you probably don't want to craft the new items. If your next upgrade on the AH tends to cost around 500,000, then the new crafting recipes may start to look more appealing. Similarly, if reasonable upgrades to your current gear cost around a billion gold or more, then the new crafting recipes should be worth making.

Also, keep in mind that the new items have a chance to roll higher-than-ever values of Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Vitality. Anybody who has spent time looking at high-end items knows that the value of items at the best items increases at an incredible rate. The difference between a 98th percentile and 99th percentile item can increase the value by tenfold or more. We expect that the new crafted recipes will appeal to those who are operating at this elite end of the market.

For those who fit into neither audience category, you may want to try your luck on some of the new crafted recipes, or you may just want to wait. Maybe you'll find yourself at the high end of the market in the future, and those recipes will start to seem more appealing. Maybe you'll decide to make a self-found character and you'll find the new crafting recipes to be a huge boon. If you never find yourself in either of those groups and the crafting recipes just never appeal to you, that's okay too -- not every feature in the game will appeal to every player.

This really begs the question: why not also add recipes for the other 99%? Part of this is caused by the restriction imposed by the way that crafting works currently, with its built-in randomness. This actually makes it very challenging to provide a solution for players who would like to make something for themselves, but don’t have the gold in the bank to press the button enough times to benefit. We actually feel there are better solutions for crafting out there, and we are working on some of them, but it’s no small issue to solve, which is why you haven’t seen much progress on it in patches.

Travis: Making the new crafted items account bound was done for one very distinct reason: to give players more incentives to play the game rather than the Auction House. Something we discuss frequently is how the Auction House has impacted the game and how we can refocus players away from farming the Auction House and onto farming monsters.

Demonic Essence was made account bound to encourage players who wish to create the new items to play the game instead of simply going to the Auction House and buying all the mats necessary to mass produce the items. For that same reason we wanted the product of the recipes to be account bound as well. We want players to not only find or produce their own items more often but also diminish the impact the Auction House has on the game, and we felt like this was a good opportunity to take our first steps in that direction. (Okay, well our second steps since the Hellfire Ring was designed with the same goal in mind.)

Andrew: This change only affects the Rare crafting plans and jeweler designs. The Legendary crafting plans remain very challenging to find.

Andrew: Auto-pickup of gold and health globes is a clear choice for all players for a few reasons that don’t really translate well to other kinds of items. To begin with, I can’t think of a situation where you don’t want to pick up gold! Health Globes are a little different, though, in that there can be a strategic choice during combat when to pick them up, but generally collecting them doesn’t do you any harm.

Both of these items also have their own dedicated storage slot that isn’t restricted in any way (you can pick up as much gold or as many health globes as you want). If we were to expand that auto-pickup to items that consume slots in your inventory, the question of whether you should pick it up or not becomes muddy, and we’d prefer not to overcomplicate that. Some players may not be farming for Demonic Essence and ignore it, so they wouldn’t want to pick it up, but some others may want to hoover everything.

It’s also important for gameplay reasons for players to be making active choices about their decisions on a regular basis. If everything was auto-pick up and you never had to make choices, there wouldn’t be an ebb and flow to the gameplay experience. These pauses to make a decision inspire your brain to a different form of activity as opposed to killing monsters, which can actually feel good and we’d like to encourage that.

So, to answer your question: we’ve definitely considered it, but we’ve decided not to have the new crafting plans and items qualify for auto-pick up.