Magic Find and selfishness

Blizzard has changed the Diablo 3 magic find mechanics.  It used to be that when in a group everyone's magic find applied just to their own loot.  This meant that if you wore nothing but Magic Find you would be able to follow a normally geared group around around leeching off of their kills and getting tons of stuff.  People complained a lot about this as they assumed that in any random group game there would be a somebody running in pure MF gear hoping to get carried.  I think these complaints were spot on.  Some people will certainly be geared for beatdown; the leechers would just have to search around trying to find those people.  We can also assume that players with balanced gearsets would have spent a lot of time trying to detect and avoid MF leechers.  The new mechanic is that MF is spread equally among the group.  For example, if you have 200% MF then in a 4 person group each player will have 50% MF.  This applies to everybody of course so everyone ends up having MF equal to the average MF of the party.

Now the complaints are different.  Much of the internet is convinced that this is a travesty and will spell the end of group games.  All the good players will stack MF and play only solo, they say.  Why would anyone want to share their hard earned MF with their teammates?  Why indeed.  Maybe because they are sharing their MF with YOU?!?

Hah, I don't want to share MF with my group, I will just stack Strength and do more damage! 

Of course the Strength / Crit / Intellect / etc. on your gear is already shared in exactly this same way.  If you do more damage or have more survivability you kill monsters faster which generates more XP and drops for your teammates.  The only things you get from killing monsters are XP and drops and increasing anything about your character increases XP and drops for everybody!  Everyone has an incentive to try to equip the best gear with a balance of survivability, damage and MF and when everybody does this they all win.  Of course there will be people who stack MF or people who stack damage and those people will help their party in relatively one dimensional ways but help their party they will.

Now our priorities when soloing and playing in groups are going to be pretty much the same.  Perhaps having access to more buffs or a tank will allow a player to sacrifice some survivability for damage or MF, hard to say, but generally your gearing goals will be the same.  There will be no significant way to leech off of group members aside from simply being undergeared or bad and that isn't something that is readily fixable by Blizzard!  This is certainly a change in the right direction.  I wasn't looking forward to dropping from games when 3 people in pure MF gear decided to hide behind me and watch me kill the enemies and Blizzard has made it decidedly suboptimal for them to do that.  You can't prevent people from being bad or being jerks but you can make sure that the best possible path to progression involves being effective and helpful.  As long as someone who is desperate to be as powerful as possible as quickly as possible has an incentive to play well and cooperate things will be just fine.