I meant the game appears to keep track of how long you have been playing since you loaded the last time. If you load the game, play for an hour (or whatever) and save in front of a chest before opening it, you will tend to get better loot that instance than if you reload again and try the chest right away. Of course you can get crappy loot the first time and reload to get something better, but several times I got something pretty good, didn't save, and tried reloading to see what else I could get, only to need to reload a fair bit to get something of equal value to what I originally passed up. After that I started saving if I got something valuable (even if not useful for my build) if I wanted to reload a couple times, in case I didn't get anything I could use (or anything of greater value). Fairly often that was the loot I ended up going with, especially if I was only willing to try a few times.
Playing again I would still reload at the start of the game, until I had decent equipment, but for all the time it takes, you would probably do almost as good just playing (except for certain chests, boss fights, malachite veins, or if you start having problems, etc).
Loading the game and leaving it sit at the load confirmation prompt also appears to count as playing time, as I noticed reloading a few times while doing something else.
