Also you forget that the Diablo 3 was fundamentally AND monumentally worse because the AH DID AFFECT the game. 3000 of a particular piece on the AH and RMAH? That directly lowered the drop rate in-game. The difference is in MH you can ignore currency randoms and just play the game vanilla. In Diablo 3 by it's very nature you couldn't ignore the AH because so much of the gear was posted to it that it eventually became the ONLY place you could get the gear short of very exaggerated loot runs.
Diablo 3 was a fundamentally worse game due to many things, and even then I disagree, you could definitely ignore the AH. The loot's basic design was so crap that there wasn't any reason to, but you definitely could. they had the sense to remove it from the game in the future because they finally understood that even when it was an option, it made the game worse for it.
I'm merely talking about one particular system vs the other. Both, in a way, might come to devalue the general drops you get and the slot machine experience is not the one I want to rely on the most, for as weird as it sounds in a game based around randomness.
From a purist standpoint I get what you are saying.. and I do hope that they leave (or turn into) some shit where it is purely drop only. Definitely agree. But the random boxes they have setup everywhere and the different currencies, as long as they stay 100% optional and don't impact the game anyway whatsoever, I'm ok with it.
Yeah, that is what I'm getting at. Coming from the costume talk above is why I said that. When this game launched, the costume chase was for me the moment I was looking forward to the most, as a loot hunting game. 700 hours later, and still no costume drop (with goodies like chase costumes already on the store) I have already resigned myself and crafted around 6 costumes instead, which have devalued the experience of getting one as a drop and, the game has moved on to: getting enough credits, molecules and prestiging enough to keep doing it as a replacement. It is an option, I could ignore it, but why should I really?
Now uniques are still a nice thing to get, but they aren't really that ultimate item drop now, and plenty of the things they are adding will work in a craft/upgrade/box way as well, so that is the general gist of what I'm rambling about.
Compare this to Diablo 3 on PC, 150+ hours and I got 1 crappy legendary. Couldn't beat Inferno at launch until I bought über equipment off the AH some months later which made it go from impossibruuuu to a cakewalk. I know diablo is getting pretty awesome with the expansion but the vanilla game has been far from that. My time with Marvel heroes has been alot better regarding the actual loot.
To me it was the opposite of that really. I got a stupid amount of legendaries and set items. I usually would get 1-2 per Butcher run even when Inferno was impossible. It is just that Diablo 3 is fundamentally flawed because of the poor affix allocation and pool that made items only be useful if they had 1 particular set of them. My time with MH has been great too, and infinitely better in terms of drops and loot variety & usefulness simply because D3 was a terrible game at everything but raw combat.
I just prefer one type of experience to the other and would hope the game would lean more towards that. For me the game keeps being as enjoyable to play as ever, but there is no longer that drop moment I keep looking forward to, just a million of smaller ones combined that can add up to craft/gamble/upgrade until you finally have it.
The stuff like ghost boxes or random gear boxes are really only there for people who don't need to spend those currencies on their primary purposes (i.e. people who pay for everything with real cash or don't care about FCs/heroes). They're not meant for actually trying to get stuff like uniques out of them, nor are they even remotely close at competing with actually clearing content to find those items.
Again, I mentioned uniques as an example because now there is a way, when there wasn't before, just like with heroes and costumes. People are getting too hung up on that mention and pretending I am talking only about that particular case, when I'm talking about a system in general. I know who are they aimed at, I know people with excess ES and Cube Shards want something else to do with them, that is why there is also a random cosmic box as well, etc. I know all those things. Getting uniques in boxes is ot the point, or not the only point I'm trying to get at. I hope I made that clear above.
