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

Currently the loot is FFA.

FFA looting will encourage solo play.

If the item drops are the same when you are in a party or solo , nobody will play with a group.

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Corpsepaint wrote:

FFA looting will encourage solo play.

...and monster difficulty will encourage group play. We've been over this (and a lot of other stuff) already.

I think this sounds like a great theory, but one would have to test it in many games with many players. Love the intuition shown in these forums, such great people making good contributions. I would say more but I feel it has already been said.

FFA looting would most definitely (in my books) encourage crackhead farmers to farm repeatedly by themselves, then return to player filled servers to show off items. I feel this is much better than the current stance on looting, however, for it brings out a most boring experience. (open monster, collect loot)(each player has his own "version" of the same body) <--- terrible way to go about looting

We already know how it'll go... it's the D2 system with a slight fairness tweak. We have a lot of evidence for how such a system pans out in the long run.

I hope the developers will eventually consider at least adding the option of individual loot.

I have seen attempts to bend a cut-throat system into a more carebear friendly system by adding neat tricks to "balance" things in other games. Didn't work. PvP, Looting, will never be fair unless you make it fair.

Unless you make the allocation time something like 30 seconds or a minute there will always be players who are at an advantage that has nothing to do with skill. Runes of Magic for example does something like this. It gives you the option to take all the loot you want and leave the rest for others.

In the end it's the same decision many games make in terms of PvP. They make separate servers and let the players decide what they want. Why restrict yourself to one pool of players if you can have both?

Here is a solution that fixes the system outlined in the initial post, such that it accounts for player loot distance and latency.

When I'm knee deep in corpses, still cutting monsters down on the way to waist deep, the last thing I want to devote attention to is scrambling to collect loot so that some jerk doesn't beat me to it.

Fix)
Make no drops lootable until combat has been over for a couple seconds. There are two ways to handle this.

#1 A global timer, where everything becomes lootable n seconds after combat is over. This fixes the ranged character issue, but not the player latency issue.

#2 Use a global timer in #1, but additionally have item-specific offset timers that begin counting once the global has elapsed. E.g., suppose a sword drops, and then a bit later a spear drops, and later a shield. So, once the global timer is done, the sword is flagged for me for one second, the spear for two, and the shield for three (adjusting timing whatever way you feel is appropriate, but if fights are long, it will be obnoxious to use the ACTUAL time differences between when things dropped, as it will make players wait, and waiting is not fun.) This resolves the latency issue as well.

Frankly, I do not find the idea of having to pay that much attention to getting screwed out of loot fun. Also, if I have to waste a skill gem on the equivalent of Telekinesis, the game has become that much less fun.

Even with the above fixes in place, the system proposed in the initial post encourages players to find and repeatedly play with a few friends they can trust, rather than casually jump into games. Anonymous strangers can be obnoxious enough online without having games explicitly building in griefing mechanisms.

Though, if anyone's keeping track, I would really just prefer drops being player specific, which lets us dodge the whole mess entirely.

Also, while we're on the subject of looting, there are a couple mechanics/UI designs that would be well copied from other games:
1. Auto-looting gold.
2. Sacred 2's convenient, wide-range looting circle.
3. Filters on minimum-quality loot display (TQ, etc.) and circle-loot (Sacred 2).
4. The DS3 style item pickup information with icon/text on left (as opposed to Sacred 2's text rising mid-screen, covering action).

(I apologize if what I've said has been priorly addressed; I'm not going to skim 50+ pages to verify.)

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Skivverus wrote:

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Corpsepaint wrote:

FFA looting will encourage solo play.

...and monster difficulty will encourage group play. We've been over this (and a lot of other stuff) already.

This implies the difficulty will be badly tuned for single player, which is a separate problem.

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Corpsepaint wrote:

FFA looting will encourage solo play.

If the item drops are the same when you are in a party or solo , nobody will play with a group.

yes and i prefer to play game solo and do pvp ,trade with others