Is crappy, common loot really necessary to "Loot games"?

I fully agree.

To those saying that you need shit look constantly in your face to truly appreciate good named loot I say you're out of your mind. When a ton of green, blue and purples drop - isn't it fun wading through the different great loot and then picking up the best one?

If you got rid of shitty white trash loot that is literally clogging up system memory you could have more fun loot to choose from. Give me more varied unique guns. Give me a shotgun that has bouncing bullets, SMG's that home in on targets and shoot behind corners, sniper rifles that have super long reload but can shoot through walls. Give me fun, diverse, unique drops ALL the time and let me have fun.

I'm level 28 and I still CONSTANTLY come across white shotguns that deal 65 damage. Thats not making the good stuff that drops later any better. When colored loot drops you get excited because you've been conditioned that the colored items will have good stats while the white items will not. If every item that drops in the game is always going to have good stats then you will be excited all the time because that means you'll always potentially be able to upgrade up.

Sometimes I've gone 5 levels without changing a weapon to the point where my game is becoming too difficult as I'm not doing enough damage. This is because I constantly find shitty guns that are useless at my current level. Why bother spawning in rifles that deal insignificant damage at the current player level?

Get rid of trash loot, put more effort into diversifying the items you offer up - everyone will be happier.

Switch your questions around and it makes more sense (although you already answered the first one yourself).

1. Why so much loot?

The whole point of these games is to "play slots", and as a player you just want to put the next quarter in right away. In Borderlands they are actually showing more restraint than you think as there are several parts in the game you can go for a while without finding a loot chest. If a player goes too long without finding any loot he will lose interest in the game. While there certainly are games that deal with loot the opposite way (most notoriously adventure games) they tend to play on a sense of accomplishment rather than the rush of "winning the jackpot".

2. Why have common loot?

Removing white "trash" loot would only make the greens the new white. By necessity with the amount of loot given out there will always be a big chunk of the loot given out that is considered crap or else "winning the jackpot" becomes pointless and the game falls apart. You would just end up getting way more blue loot leading you back to the same "why have green loot?" question.

Having that said, I've been playing the game picking up every item I find and very rarely run out of space before I get to a vendor. I've also pretty regularly been using white items (especially shields). With the scaling that happens in TVHM a white item that's just 2-3 levels higher can quickly be better than both green and blue items.

@Humanity said:

Sometimes I've gone 5 levels without changing a weapon to the point where my game is becoming too difficult as I'm not doing enough damage. This is because I constantly find shitty guns that are useless at my current level. Why bother spawning in rifles that deal insignificant damage at the current player level?

This is a problem with the level scaling in the game, not different qualities of loot. The level of gear available to you is in many cases determined by where you are in the story, while you can easily overlevel your story quest (making enemies level with you to that level). While it was certainly a good idea of them to try to deal with the overlevelling issue the first game had, they didn't really hit the nail on the head leading to somewhat of an incosistent experience when it comes to loot and difficulty.

@Colourful_Hippie said:

You won't be happy to find that shiny new expensive loot when the past ten drops were on the exact same level.

bam

Having very infrequent drops of good loot sounds good to me, but only if it's guaranteed to be better than what you have now, because otherwise it's just a very infrequent version of the same thing you're already doing.

I think that they have a statistical distribution to handle their loot system. Theyre not gonna handpick what you get and when because that would be crazy, they have to rely on a mathematical algorithm. I'm sure they tweaked the hell out of it so that the weapon progression drops enough cool weapons without breaking the game.