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

If more items than players drop then the party will just have to sit around until each person's loot cooldown period expires so they can finish picking everything up. If enough items drop then this could go for multiple rounds and several minutes. Also it's best to pick up the first item that drops because then your cooldown period will expire before everyone else's giving you first pick of all the remaining items in addition to whatever the first item was.

For example, if there are 5 players and 6 items dropped then the player that picked up the first item will also get the last item giving him two items and everyone else only one item. The first person to pick up an item will always get more items.

Another example. If there are five players and 21 items drop then the first person to pick up an item gets his pick of the remaining 16 items. Looting goes in rounds with each player grabbing an item as their wait period expires. At each round the first person gets to pick the best item of those remaining. At the end, the first person also gets the last item. So not only does the first person get more items then everyone else, he also gets better items than everyone else.

In practice, your system would do the exact opposite of what you intended.

Hmm.. what game are you playing that 21 items drop? :P you will be lucky if 3 good items drop from a pack of mobs ;)

Delay could be deternined by numbers of players in the group, and quality of the item. If there is like 16 items that drop, i dont think it will takes severals minutes, because the fight should be over. and delay could be limited to 1 sec when not in combat.

You can search for "bad things", but I will have a solution for them all :P

well, for me this system doesnt solve the biggest concern i have about normal FFA loot, and thats the fact that i would still be forced to check the loot all the time while fighting to not risk loosing something of need/value.

solve this :P

I kinda like this idea, actually.

Mainly useful for boss drops, but the fact that it's there should keep people thinking if they really need the item they're going for. A further possible refinement: a reduction on the timer based on who else in the vicinity has a timer going: so, if everyone else picked up loot already, your first item picked up doesn't have a cooldown associated with it. (Roughly, idea is to have everyone's cooldowns run out around the same time, given decent reflexes)

Edit: Narfi, I think your problem is something the devs actually want to have in the game - blending combat and looting rather than separating them.

Narfi: By playing the game, you will learn items' sounds, and when you hear something interesting, you will press alt (if item's sound are implanted lol i dunno if it is..). Maybe it should have a special sound when something realy worth pressing alt. ;)

Diablo 1 does'nt have that problem, you hear a ring droped, everyone is "mouse searching" in the screen and the first to find it loot it haha

Skivverus: Yeah it could be a possibility but i like the fact that if someone pick a realy good item, they have higher delay, so a big item worth looting it, but you have less items in some case. So if you are 2 in the party, your teammate loot the better items and you loot the 2 others from the boss.

Maybe if items drop like 1 sec before you can loot them then it could reduce the problem of players latency. Rather of loading the animation of the drop and display the item name, it will just load the name. But i'm not good with latency so... i'm probably saying stupid things :P

Sounds work, atleast for some items yes (Rings or Gems always had a clear sound)
But i could barely tell what armor type/piece dropped, guess i shouldnt listen to music while playing :)

Extra Sounds for Rare or Uniques and maybe for high grade currency items sounds somehow intresting though.


@Skivverus: Im not so sure if thats what they are aiming for, overall its just the standart way of looting and the question is if/how they dare to change this since it is quit a tough thing to decide as we see so many diffrent opinions about looting.

My personal opinion for example seems to be quit diffrent to what many others think.
I Love the Fighting and fast paced action, but looting slows this down quit a bit, and im always so afraid of missing something good, even when playing alone that i usually double check everything :)
ofcourse this is kind of my own fault :)

thats why i overall prefer loot systems that doesnt interfer with the fighting part, but its hard to find a decent system towards that without having many other disadvantages again.

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tpapp157 wrote:

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zeto wrote:

I'm not saying the system would be perfect for this game... just saying it's a concept to consider, as it alleviates some major issues.

Sure it alleviates some of your issues with the system but it certainly adds quite a few more. How long do you think divvying up a hundred or two pieces of loot between 8 people would take? I thought thirty minutes was conservative. It'd probably take more like an hour. Especially if there was some really good loot.

I'll keep this short and sweet cuz you did it again:

You left out the most important part of what I said "Obviously that's not the way such a system would be done."

You wouldn't roll on everything, and the system simply wouldn't be built to be a burden... it provides a potential new mechanism for dealing with 'some' loot and if it were ever used in any game, would be tailored with rules that make it usable.

The mechanism is the important part, not the specific nonsense hypothetical implementations.

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zeto wrote:

it provides a potential new mechanism for dealing with 'some' loot and if it were ever used in any game, would be tailored with rules that make it usable.

The mechanism is the important part, not the specific nonsense hypothetical implementations.

The mechanisms don't matter at all. The implementation is the only thing that matters. You can have the best mechanisms but if they're implemented poorly then you'll have a terrible game. Conversely, bad mechanism that are implemented well can still make for a good game. We can see that in many popular games out currently.

More to the point, you seem to be pretty quick to give your suggested methods the benefit of the doubt while withholding that same leniency to the current system. Your method gets "if it were ever actually use, it could be modified to work just fine" (paraphrased) while GGG's method is the worst idea since abrasive condoms and will absolutely ruin the game. I'm sorry if you don't like me pointing out issues with your method but you can't simply wave your hand and say they'll go away.

I'm not saying that FFA loot doesn't have problems. People have posted many legitimate issues that they have with that system and I readily acknowledge those. I am saying that I don't care. Even with the issues of FFA, I would still prefer that system to allocated loot (which is very very far from the perfect system that some people have tried to make it out to be).

I still fully believe that GGG's method provides a reasonable compromise. I think it still maintains the feel and flow of FFA loot while making some concessions to those people that can't be bothered by core game mechanics.

This thread is a 30 page circle xD

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tpapp157 wrote:

The mechanisms don't matter at all. The implementation is the only thing that matters.

In this context, we have not ascertained an implementation. My goal was to throw out a new mechanism that hasn't been stated before. How to balance that mechanism is not of our concern, because we haven't played the game yet. Suggesting a worst case implementation and then using that to say it would be terrible is a straw man fallacy.

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More to the point, you seem to be pretty quick to give your suggested methods the benefit of the doubt while withholding that same leniency to the current system.

Have you seen my other suggestions? I don't think you are comprehending the modus by which I've been operating in this thread. This thread was to throw out various systems, and discuss the pros and cons of the FFA looting system... that's all I've done.

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Your method gets "if it were ever actually use, it could be modified to work just fine" (paraphrased)

This is not a paraphrase at all, this is your misunderstanding of what I said. I simply mentioned the mechanism... you injected a hypothetical worst case scenario, to which I stated that it wouldn't be implemented that way, and if it were implemented it'd be tailored to the system it was created for. Obviously if it didn't work well it wouldn't be used.

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while GGG's method is the worst idea since abrasive condoms and will absolutely ruin the game. I'm sorry if you don't like me pointing out issues with your method but you can't simply wave your hand and say they'll go away.

I think that timed FFA loot has problems, although I don't think it's worse than the other options currently on the table. It's close to an elegant solution even. Show me a quote where I slammed timed FFA loot instead of pointing out it's known flaws.

I also didn't say that the idea I recently threw out there was ok... I said there are some issues while it solves other issues. Essentially the idea I threw out there solves the issue of major loot being FFA, allocated, or rolled for. That's it. It comes with its own problems... it's just another idea.

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I still fully believe that GGG's method provides a reasonable compromise. I think it still maintains the feel and flow of FFA loot while making some concessions to those people that can't be bothered by core game mechanics.

I tend to agree with this. I think timed FFA loot is the best current idea on the table.

My only purpose to replying to this is to clarify that you seem to have read what I wrote in a light that I didn't intend it. If you take nothing else from this post, take the fact that in general I agree with you that timed FFA is simple and could possibly be made fair and unobtrusive.