The Diablo 3 servers were down for a couple of hours earlier today to make room for a new update, dubbed the “loot hotfix”. The update, as you can imagine, has to do with the game’s loot system and its changes are intended to make the game’s Rift mechanic more rewarding than they currently are.
According to Diablo 3 game designer Travis Day, the driving goal of their design is to make killing monsters feel more rewarding, and that they want players to find “tons of cool items that you are excited about” while having fun doing it.
“Rifts have always been intended to be the most efficient play method in the game, currently they aren’t for a number of reasons,” wrote Day. “Part of this has to do with the high level of efficiency in farming that players find doing things like farming Manglemaw, Razorclaw and any other number of unique monsters. Another contributing element is that farming chests without having to actually fight monsters is far more effective than actually fighting the monsters. It is very important to us that chests are exciting to find and feel rewarding but presently they are far too common and reliable to farm in certain areas of the game.”
“Loot is an incredibly important aspect of Diablo games and we will continue to keep a very close eye on it,” continued Day. “If more problems arise we will continue striving to address them. It isn’t our goal to take loot away from people, we just want to make sure they are having as much fun as possible while finding it and these changes all support that goal.”
In effect, the hotfix thins out treasure chests and nerfs loot drops from named unique monsters in the base game, while boosting rewards from Kadala and boosting Rift drops in Adventure Mode—effectively doubling them in comparison to the base game.
Rifts sound like the best place to be right now. We even said so in our review of the game.
