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

As noted by many other people, this system will depend entirely on the other players. I like to try and play the nice guy in online and will chuck items at people who most need them.

Grabbing everything and running off is such a dick move ha.

I am not sure if this was suggested or not. The idea of a timer seems okay in so far as it gives some time to figure out if you want something or not. I think this promotes a play style that is more focused on loot than cooperation. So, in order to keep greedy people on their toes, picking up items during battle should come with a consequence. Perhaps the mobs dislike watching you fondle their fallen comrades belongings causing them to focus on you. The greater the item rarity, the higher the aggravation it causes. If you pick up a rare in battle, your tank might lose all agro suddenly and you might get squished.

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Gamer4156 wrote:

I see an issue with a timer, what will stop someone from turning on an autoclicker and just spamming loot untill it goes live?

I can think of a few things.
First, the "loot button" you're thinking of doesn't exist. You pick up an item by left-clicking on it on the ground (when you've highlighted it, which is impossible before the timer's up), at which point your character will jog over to it and pick it up.
Other notable uses for the left-click are (1) your basic attack (by default, anyway), and (2) movement. So, if an item drops, it's allocated to someone else, and you think you want it (never mind that you can't actually see its quality, rarity, or sockets with the way the devs have it set up now), you have to run over there and stand there without clicking until it shows up, because any more clicking will get you jogging away from that item.

Cons:
FFA = Loot Bots.
FFA = Focus on loot, not the fight.
FFA = Brings out the worst in people.
Clicking items on the floor = Tedious and boring.

Pro's:
...


Just round rob loot into players inventory, with a tad of intelligence to distribute items to classes that can use them. Show the loot in the chat, so if you see someone else get an item you want, you can ask them for it.

With looking over some comments made about the loot, i can clearly understand that there will be more thought on the loot rather than the boss fight, and if its a difficult fight, then people will just get angry at other players. Regarding the player temper, i think the system should allocate loot, we´ve all seen it with other games, that if one person gets a piece of loot and they want it, they will overwhelm that player with "I need it more", "Iv waited for this for 8 months" and include lots of swearing in there :)

I agree that not all loot should be allocated, but I would say epic items or such should be allocated and maybe loot like health or mana pots should be free-for-all.

If all loot of free for all, i see a large problem with latency issues as if someone has a latency of 200ms and another person has 120ms and they both click at the same time, of course the lower latency person will win all the time.

How about meeting in the middle, why not have it so that the person who did best in the fight.. for example, a player will get points for not standing in bad stuff, but at the same time, if they stand there for 2 seconds without moving or using any abilities, they get points taken off. Its complicated as you have different classes and different roles, but use it for general stuff, not how much dps was done. This means people will do their best as the loot is based on their performance = no slackers :D

a mere few seconds to me is not enough

i think a 15-30 sec rule should be made if u kill a monster/monsters and they drop items u have 15-30 secs to claim it why 15-30 sec if there are alot of monster u need more time to kill them and get ur items some boss fights might take longer to kill
or u could make a system if u walk away from items and get a certain distance from them then there free game

Make everyone have own drops on the screen based on own quantity and rarity % of drops no matter who kills the mob ,its party afterall.
If you pick up the item from ground and drop it back ,it should appear to everyone in party.

Simple as that ,no fighting over lucky drops ,no ninja stealing ,no bots problem. If you wanna give items from your "view" just trade them or pick them up and redrop.

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amindamok wrote:

I am not sure if this was suggested or not. The idea of a timer seems okay in so far as it gives some time to figure out if you want something or not. I think this promotes a play style that is more focused on loot than cooperation. So, in order to keep greedy people on their toes, picking up items during battle should come with a consequence. Perhaps the mobs dislike watching you fondle their fallen comrades belongings causing them to focus on you. The greater the item rarity, the higher the aggravation it causes. If you pick up a rare in battle, your tank might lose all agro suddenly and you might get squished.

And suddenly you've created a system where a smart party can abuse this and have their tank intentionally loot items.

Things are that simple. There are a couple of real issues that are getting confused. Latency is a factor that the developers are trying to remove from the game, and is therefore something they're trying to weed out. A cut throat environment where you need to properly establish looting rules with your party ahead of time and have a community based punishment for abusing them seems to be what they're going for. If we start out grouping together and we say we'll "random" for any special drops regardless of the allocation after combat, we'll probably work out better than the people who are jumping all over each other to get to items. There's still a question of how much you trust people, but that is what makes a cut-throat game cut-throat, you have to work together but you need to balance that with looking out for yourself.

As for the idea that ranged combat users are less likely to be able to get to an item in a cut-throat environment, they're also less likely to be the ones to die and pay the consequences in a team environment. I don't think that a healer is much going to appreciate the tank looting up an item he shouldn't have, and suddenly being in the thick of things without backup doesn't seem like such an advantage.

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Things are that simple. There are a couple of real issues that are getting confused. Latency is a factor that the developers are trying to remove from the game, and is therefore something they're trying to weed out. A cut throat environment where you need to properly establish looting rules with your party ahead of time and have a community based punishment for abusing them seems to be what they're going for. If we start out grouping together and we say we'll "random" for any special drops regardless of the allocation after combat, we'll probably work out better than the people who are jumping all over each other to get to items. There's still a question of how much you trust people, but that is what makes a cut-throat game cut-throat, you have to work together but you need to balance that with looking out for yourself.

As for the idea that ranged combat users are less likely to be able to get to an item in a cut-throat environment, they're also less likely to be the ones to die and pay the consequences in a team environment. I don't think that a healer is much going to appreciate the tank looting up an item he shouldn't have, and suddenly being in the thick of things without backup doesn't seem like such an advantage.

I had thought about that after I wrote it. It would be abused to a certain extent.

The biggest problem is lag. Dealing with that might be the hardest problem with a short timer. I hope they find a way to minimize the associated loot problems.

As far as community based punishment. That has been touted around in so many games over the years and it has never been a real deterrent to being a dick. Unless GGG can provide a way to prevent users from having multiple accounts and also limit each account to 1 character, then there will never be any real deterrent. As long as the loot can move from one character to another, there is nothing to fear from anyone. I am not saying they should make such limits. Just pointing out that being completely cutthroat mean sacrificing community trust.

I think ranged characters have a much higher chance of gaining loot since they are not getting the crap beat out of them during battle. Same goes for anyone not in direct contact with a mob. Its kinda hard to click spam a mob and loot at the same time. I guess the only way to deal with it is to just boot people from the party that don't play nice and then train mobs on them. Speaking of which, there should be a log off timer. if you "log off" during play your character should stay in game for 10 seconds or more.

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herflik wrote:

Make everyone have own drops on the screen based on own quantity and rarity % of drops no matter who kills the mob ,its party afterall.
If you pick up the item from ground and drop it back ,it should appear to everyone in party.

Simple as that ,no fighting over lucky drops ,no ninja stealing ,no bots problem. If you wanna give items from your "view" just trade them or pick them up and redrop.

Did you even read Chris' post?

They said that they specifically do not want to do that

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Chris wrote:

It's important to us that Path of Exile has a cut-throat feel where players are not only competing against monsters, but also their fellow players. We do not feel it is an option to arbitrarily hide items from players who have not been allocated them.