Looting -- The official thread for discussing the loot system. Updated 18th March, 2013.

In a loot heavy ARPG like PoE, losing Exp for picking up items might be counter-intuitive, and just feel wrong.

So, you level up, but can't pick anything up until you kill some enemies? Or do you propose that the player de-level when picking items up because they cost Exp.

Or maybe you say, after the player levels up, they must now take longer to get to the next level because they need loot to sustain their build.

In a game where the loot is what makes you more powerful, I can't see how losing experience for acquiring the loot will be fun at all.

But at least you're thinking of new ideas, the doesn't hurt.

Yes that is true new ideas are always welcome. the only hole i see in it is if the players is loosing Exp and can't delevel then they we'll simply not try to get exp and focus on picking up items. Disregard this if you mean they can delevel though. Though i think deleveling is bad for the players especially because of the skill tree. Maybe limit the player to an allowance so you can pick up 1 or 2 items every minute for free then after that it costs a experience reduction. This won't kill normal players, but will deter loot ninjas. Just an idea let me know what you think.

You would not delevel but you could still drop below the XP for your current level. For example, level 5 may require a cumulative of 10,000 XP to achieve (that means 10,000 XP from the moment you start playing not from level 4). Level 6 may require 12,000 XP. Say you just got level 5 and you have 10,050 XP and you pick up a nice item that costs you 100 XP. This would drop you down to 9,050 XP but you would still be considered level 5. Now level 6 is just that much farther away though.

The loss in XP is never meant to be really significant for normal play. The bonus XP you get in the lower difficulties is meant to completely offset the XP loss from picking up items for the average player. So on average you'll still level up exactly the same as you would otherwise. If you pick up very few items then you'll actually level up a little bit faster. If you pick up every item that you see then you'll level up more slowly (especially if you grab all the best items). If you go around lurking other groups and snatching their items without contributing then you'll lose XP overall.

Interesting idea, but that'll never happen.

Because the developers have chosen to use FFA looting, this discussion is now about how to change the FFA system to be more fair and to encourage that everyone gets their share.

While I respect the fact that everyone thinks about looting systems, I think we are just running around the bush with these ideas, because there is a perfect system already out there: assigned loot.

Assigned loot is fair and gives an incentive to play with other players, instead of soloing and playing only with friends. FFA looting on the other hand encourages griefing.

You can't 'grief' looting. If the system is bad and does things like promote not fighting or promote melee getting loot first then that's one thing, however if you are slow, blind, or too lazy to pick up items off the ground then that's your fault.

FFA looting has superior dynamic qualities, however it suffers from normalization problems.

The job of the community is to try to identify normalization problems such that a certain group doesn't have a much larger probability.

Sure, but I think the priorities while partying should be: 1. combat, 2. looting.

For me having to compromise this is both counterintuitive and devoid of fun, it also doesn't make it a more cut-throat ARPG experience.

It is basically a minigame you have to do while fighting monsters that is more rewarding (in terms of character advancement) than fighting the monsters.

I said if an item drop and it is an upgrade for any players in the group, it pop a little window and the first to clic it get it. Otherwise, items drop to the ground and it's ffa.

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Vandro wrote:

Sure, but I think the priorities while partying should be: 1. combat, 2. looting.

For me having to compromise this is both counterintuitive and devoid of fun, it also doesn't make it a more cut-throat ARPG experience.

It is basically a minigame you have to do while fighting monsters that is more rewarding (in terms of character advancement) than fighting the monsters.

I actually agree that this is the hardest part to normalize... It's easy to normalize for connection speed or distance, however it's very difficult to normalize for gameplay itself.

So you're fighting 10 guys, and you kill 2 and an item drops... everyone stops what they are doing and rushes for the item, meanwhile the 8 guys hammer one of your teammates. They take a death penalty get mad and leave.

You're fighting a boss and the boss is down to 5% health... the ranged guys stop attacking and/or healing and the tanks die and the ranged commence with killing the boss and get the drops.

These types of things will be huge problems potentially and I don't see a realistic way of normalizing for them. I mean it worked in Diablo 2, but it wasn't an ideal system, and the ranged people often got the short end of the stick.

Having a situation where the party doesn't want to do their best isn't really good for the community as a whole, but it's possible that the community itself would police such activity by blacklisting players that do such things.

The question then is: will there be a system in place for people to let others know that so-and-so lets you die for loot, or whatever.

Considering the two issues you mention - dropping crowd control on a fight to grab an item, and waiting for others to die to cut them out of a drop - the first is at least mitigated by the fact that any given item doesn't take very long to pick up. If a good drop distracts everyone from the fight for just three seconds, odds are everyone will still be alive at the end of them.

Now, to help with this, it could make sense to factor enough time into the allocations to cast a typical crowd-control skill before it expires - that way even the guy getting whacked by all eight has a chance to get free and move on.

As for the second issue - if your teammates can survive without you but not vice versa, go with lower-level party members.

Also, if boss behavior is anything approaching random, "letting the tanks die" will not work consistently: the boss may just waste weak attacks on said tanks, who whittle down the last 5% with no fuss, or the boss may lay waste to the tanks and then proceed to do exactly the same thing to the rest of the (presumably more fragile) party.