Saying half the people prefer randomized loot seems like a made up statistic to me. And of those who think they do, have they ever played a game with good hand-placed loot?
Itemization seems to be something that devs have largely stopped bothering with. Throw a handful of stats into a randomizer and call it a day seems to be the norm.
Edit: The sad thing is there *IS* some fairly interesting hand-placed stuff in this game. But the scaling comepletely negates its impact by immediately making it useless. Combined with the godly stock from vendors it makes finding things deeply unsatisfying.
It is irrelevant what the specific proportion is - that is a strawman. What is relevant is that, on objective grounds, that is a valid view to hold. It is a tried and tested method and, no, not everyone likes it, but there are valid grounds for liking either approach.
By the way, I have been playing RPGs for close to 20 years and I have never played one that has a hand-placed loot system that is strictly better than a randomised system. Nevertheless, this, again, deviates from the point. Some people prefer randomised loot as a concept, while other people prefer hand-picked loot as a concept. The best super-duper hand-picked loot system is not going to appease someone who prefers randomised loot. Both views are valid. The way either system is implemented is what really matters. I would not say that the implementation in this game is bad - and this is coming from someone who does not hold a firm view on either fixed or randomised loot.
And no, scaling does not destroy itemisation. Generally speaking, randomised, scaled, loot provides more armour. Unique loot provides more stats. Having a tradeoff and the choice that this provides is much better than just having one strictly best item in the game for any given slot. If you think that you +5 main stat item is useless because another item provides you more armour then feel free to go for it, but other people prefer damage over survivability.
