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

I'm impressed you read the entire thread. That's quite an endeavor.

The idea of rewarding players for their contributions in battle has been discussed on a few occasions before. Ideally you would have a system that rewarded players accurately and fairly. Unfortunately, that's impossible to do. There are just too many ways in which a player can assist the group that don't involve simply dealing as much damage as possible. Buffs, healing, and curses are only the most obvious and easiest to account for. Player contributions are a very difficult thing to quantify.

So yes, you're right, scaling loot and XP rewards based on player contribution is the ideal. It's just not possible.

Actually, I was sidestepping that issue. Instead of attempting to quantify how much any individual player helped in the battle, my thought was to detect actions that where completely unrelated to battle (specifically, looting) and penalize that.

In short, instead of rewarding players for participating at a battle, it removes a reward (experience) that a player who is present at a battle but not participating very much usually gets.

As far as I can tell from the information present about Path of Exile's combat system, there is nothing that a player can be doing other than attacking, using skills, or using flasks that contributes to killing monsters. However, instead of trying to evaluate participation, the thought is that the game would detect players who where performing non-battle actions during battle and penalize that.
Other than looting, the only example of a non-battle action that would probably deserve to be penalized would be opening chests, which is attached to looting.

I'll point out that not penalizing a player's experience for messing around in their inventory or character sheet is probably fine, because they'll most likely miss the loot, and therefore penalize themselves. Also, it's possible that players would want to swap skill gems in battle, which is also fine, and certainly nobody would want that to be penalized.

TL;DR again
Instead of scaling loot and XP rewards in an increasing fashion based on contribution to the battle, everyone gets the full reward as a base value, and players who perform specific non-battle actions during battle suffer some reduction in their post-battle rewards. As this is only looking at the issue of in-battle looting, it's possible, although probably difficult to balance at all levels of play.

EDIT: I do agree with you, though, that attempting to give players different experience or loot based on stuff like damage dealt and healed, buffs and debuffs applied, etc., is completely impossible.

Your idea is based on the assumption that looting during battle is bad. Some people here would probably agree with you. I don't think that's a correct assumption to make.

Again, you're pushing the gameplay into this unnatural idea of phases where you kill all the monsters and then collect all the loot. The actual gameplay of PoE is not at all intended to be like that. You're supposed to be collecting loot as you battle monsters with no separation or interruption between the two. With your system, the game may as well just wait to drop all the loot until after the battle is over. Of course, this doesn't even look into the fact that it can be very difficult from a coding logic standpoint to determine when battle begins and ends and who can be considered engaged in which battle.

That is true. It's hard to determine how these techniques would work in PoE because it's not out yet. Also since items will have lower drop rates in PoE(every fourth monster or so) picking up items as you go wouldn't be too deductive from the battle. I was agreeing if someone was hanging back to get easy exp though like power leveling.

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tpapp157 wrote:

Your idea is based on the assumption that looting during battle is bad. Some people here would probably agree with you. I don't think that's a correct assumption to make.

Again, you're pushing the gameplay into this unnatural idea of phases where you kill all the monsters and then collect all the loot. The actual gameplay of PoE is not at all intended to be like that. You're supposed to be collecting loot as you battle monsters with no separation or interruption between the two. With your system, the game may as well just wait to drop all the loot until after the battle is over. Of course, this doesn't even look into the fact that it can be very difficult from a coding logic standpoint to determine when battle begins and ends and who can be considered engaged in which battle.

Alright...
First, yes, I'm assuming that looting during battle is bad. You're assuming that looting during battle is good. We're putting forth our thoughts from different bases.

Second. "The actual gameplay of PoE is not at all intended to be like that. You're supposed to be collecting loot as you battle monsters with no separation or interruption between the two."
Are you by any chance one of the devs? If so, feel free to ignore this. If not, what makes you think that you have any clue how this game is supposed to be? From the Dev Diary and other information available on this site, the developers want this to be a cut-throat Action RPG where the players are co-operating to survive and competing against each other to have the best odds of individual survival. Stuff like when they want loot to be collected isn't specified.

Furthermore, why is it that collecting loot after most of the monsters are dead is unnatural, and collecting loot as it drops is natural? To me, it seems more unnatural for players to ignore the monsters to grab items. Just because that's how other games have done it doesn't mean that's how PoE has to do it.
And no, with my system, you can pick up loot in battle. It's just not always the best decision for every character in every circumstance to pick up all the loot they can as soon as it drops. Also, there would be no clear delineation of phases, because the the looting would start as soon as people judged that experience loss or increased risk was no longer a factor, which would be different every battle.

Finally, the coding.
Based on the comparison of the instance servers to FPS server design, it is reasonable to assume that that players are tracked in absolute X,Y coordinates within the instance. From that, there are a number of relatively easy ways to track "in battle." Defining "in battle" as "dealing or receiving damage to a monster" is a simple check, and the radius for being in battle if a party member is in battle should logically be the same as the radius for gaining experience from a kill that party member makes. While not trivial, this isn't particularly difficult to do. The easiest way would probably be to incorporate it into the check for who would be receiving experience for a kill, which is, I'm sure, already implemented and functional.

I think Tpapp is talking about talking a fraction of a second to grab a piece of loot that wouldn't be very dire to the battle. Unless you stand their gawking at item most of the time it won't be all that disruptive.

Also i hate to set fourth an example simply to break your system, but couldn't i simply cast a DOT and go look for loot. Lets say it last for 10 seconds i have ten seconds to run around before i have to cast again. This wouldn't require a lot of effort and you would get the loot and the exp with no down sides.

I'm not actually claiming that picking up loot interferes with the player's ability to participate in a battle. It's more of a generic lore justification for the proposed changes. In the world of Wraeclast, I'd think that if an adventurer was only casting a poison spell once every 10 seconds and then picking up useful items while he could be hitting things (let's go with zombies again, I seem to like those as my mob of choice) with a club, his erstwhile allies would either abandon him or stab him in the back when they collectively felt that his item hoarding was reducing their chances for survival more than his intermittent poisoning of things was helping them.

The reason I made my proposal as I did was because I could put reasons behind it that seem logical. For example, a defense penalty and immobility for a short duration could be reasonably explained by the fact that stuffing a breastplate into backpack your backpack takes a few seconds at best and leaves you rather vulnerable to the clamoring hordes looking to kill you.
I could come up with other effects to discourage looting while there are still hordes of enemies in a minor way that are totally arbitrary and have no logical justification other than discouraging people from picking up items in battles from right as the first enemy dies to the end of the fight, they'd just be weird.


The goal is to create a fairness in loot distribution that isn't forced on the players in an arbitrary fashion such as round-robin allocation, but develops naturally out of the way the game works.

My proposal attempts to achieve this by turning picking up items in battle from something that every player wants to do all the time, as much as possible, even more than they want to actually kill the enemies to something that is circumstantial, so that players not only have to evaluate if they want to pick something up (why wouldn't you, when you can just drop it later or trade it to someone who does want it?) but also have to evaluate if they want to pick it up right now. The exact mechanisms and lore justification for those mechanisms are entirely irrelevant, as long as they are plausible enough that it seems natural to leave most of the loot lying on the ground until most of the monsters are dead and everyone has a chance to scramble for it.

Right. It's very easy to quickly grab a piece of loot and continue fighting without missing a single beat. More often then not, the people who are good enough to actively manage picking up loot and fighting at the same time are the ones who are doing most of the work during a fight anyway.

My deduction that the devs want people to be collecting loot while they are fighting comes from the system that they proposed. Their timed allocation system encourages people to pick up their loot as soon as possible before it becomes FFA at which point it will quickly be taken by someone else. The devs specifically stated that they do not want permanently allocated loot which (among other things) would lead to a much more leisurely game pace where people could take their time collecting loot. The fact is that if the devs (both for PoE and other arpgs) didn't want loot to be collected during battle then they simply wouldn't allow it. More to the point it seems like a terrible idea to me to drop awesome loot in front of people and then tell them they can't touch any of it until after the battle. That's how you treat dogs and children not adults playing a game.

I think you're missing kyadytim's point a bit tpapp, but I don't think I can explain it any better than he already has.

He's proposing no arbitrary allocation at all, unlike the timed allocation. Instead full FFA, but instead of instant pickups, something that makes picking up loot in the midst of battle dangerous, or "slightly less convenient than instatly picking". For instance a 1-2 second looting animation, which presumably would not occur when out of combat.
Basically just to discourage people from blindly grabbing everthing they possibly can. So there's nothing stopping you from looting in the midst of battle but you might think twice about it.

Just trying to help you understand what he's getting at.

EDIT:
Malice, thank you. I was starting to worry that no one had any idea what I was talking about.

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tpapp157 wrote:

Right. It's very easy to quickly grab a piece of loot and continue fighting without missing a single beat. More often then not, the people who are good enough to actively manage picking up loot and fighting at the same time are the ones who are doing most of the work during a fight anyway.

Alternatively, the people who are grabbing the most loot are the ones who are absentmindedly fighting while trying to grab as much loot as possible. There may be some skill involved in being able to fight and grab loot, but anyone can easily gain the same looting ability by focusing on looting the detriment of fighting, especially when there is no benefit for a player to be doing fighting over looting.
That's probably an element of the problem. With the system set forth right now, there are two actions to take in battle. These are fighting and looting. Regardless of how much fighting an individual player does, at the end of the battle, everyone has benefited from the fighting equally. In contrast, looting only benefits the looter. Therefore, the best way to get the most out of a battle is to focus on looting until you can't get any more benefit from it, then spend any spare attention on fighting.
Put one high skill player in with a few lower skill players who still know what their priorities are, and they lower skill players will be spending more time trying to get as much loot as the higher skill player, and so he or she will be doing more of the work during the fights.
From this perspective, the loot while fighting system causes the higher skilled player to do all the work during the fight.
That's not really where I wanted to go with this, though.

Anyway, the feeling I've gotten from the devs is that they want people to be competing against each other to make their characters as strong as possible as fast as possible, and looting during battle was one of the mechanisms they were using. I agree that permanently allocated loot isn't very good, but a total free-for-all on rare and unique drops probably isn't very good, either, because it tends to drive people who aren't good at spotting good loot fast away from the game. As long as there is one skilled looter in a party, these people will never get anything good that the skilled player doesn't allow them to get.

Anyway, my proposed system wasn't to force all loot to be left sitting around until the end of a battle, but that there would be a trade-off for grabbing it, so the players would have to evaluate if the loot was good enough to go for it now, or if they should wait a little at the risk of someone else getting to it first.
Right now, the game has something of a Diablo 2 style of looting, which generally translates to "whenever something good drops, stop whatever you're doing and try to get it before someone else can."
If anything, making players need to evaluate when and what they want to grab during a battle instead of operating on a simple "grab everything" algorithm seems like it should add depth to the game and make it more interesting, not the other way around.