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

i want loot my HC boss's all

Ok, I really have issues with an FFA system in this modern era of gaming. When we started playing online RPG's 10-15 years ago a FFA system was fine because people wanted to continue that Dungeons & Dragons Table-Top RPG "feel". Then with games like Ultima Online and Everquest you saw just how terrible this system worked with random people involved. I am sure a few people here know the pain of camping a mob in EQ for 8+ hours and getting the kill only to have someone pop from out of nowhere and gank their loot. In UO I remember when the 3D client came out people using the 2D client got all the loot because it appeared prior to the 3D death animation finishing.

It's not 1996 anymore and we have moved on from those systems for the most part. If you look at Dungeons & Dragons Online for example you see a game that rewards every single member of the party at the end of a mission. A treasure chest appears and everyone gets to loot it for items assigned to their character and class. The options even has it so you can toggle off only getting class-specific items to increase what the loot tables will allow you. If you don't want an item you can choose to leave it and anyone else can loot it.

The World of Warcraft system allows FFA, Master Looter, Round Robin, Random, etc [Pre-Set by the group leader] as well as earning tokens which can be used to trade for items via NPC's to work on sets or other filler pieces. This is a very well designed system which allows groups of similar mindset to adventure together with less strife than most systems while still keeping the much loved RNG System [For the most part RNG is only actually loved by Devs since it makes DB work easier].

Guild Wars 2 is expanding on the WoW system by offering all of those same things plus the addition of instance specific tokens. These tokens can be used at NPC's to trade for an item from the specific boss that the token was looted from. This way RNG doesn't screw you over constantly when you really need that item to finish out a set or build. In WoW I have literally ran a dungeon 50+ times to get a dagger I needed for raiding that only randomly dropped off a certain boss. GW2 sees the problem with that and is fixing it.

The concept of running content because you want to and not because you have to is a very alien thing in our genre. I applaud Guild Wars 2, Dungeons & Dragons Online, World of Warcraft, and Warhammer Online for their work in that area.

As for PoE if you absolutely have your heart set on a FFA system and cannot be swayed to something more refined I'd like to offer this. Allow groups to assign a timer to when designated loot becomes FFA. You can have it base at 0 so it's true FFA or maybe allow 5s increments up to a max of 30s. That way the players have a bit more control over just how "cutthroat" they want their PUG experience to work.

I simply do not understand the desire to specifically create situations which pit players against each other when they are acting as a team for the end goal. It's a twisted concept just like playing Dirty Santa with your close family.

Alienating your playerbase is only going to force you into changes later to adjust to the masses (ala Trammel in Ultima Online) or losing people simply because you're too stubborn to change.

Just my 2c on the subject.

whatever is decided, just make it fair to all players.

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Zwingnut wrote:

No offense but making it so that a random member gets all the loot seems silly to me, that is not cut throat rules that is getting screwed via RNG. Most people will play in a mode that reduces the amount of randomness they can be subjected to, this change does not promote party play at all and opens a whole new can of worms. There will be many people who will be looking for ways to make it so they can screw over other players such as kicking players before loot etc.

not global option roll, need, greed but like this :

> item 1 [need][greed][roll][pass]
> item 2 [need][greed][roll][pass]
> item 3 [need][greed][roll][pass] etc

+ filters for item color, type

maybe global option pass all

just a proposition, if pvp then just option fight for loot or pass, if won then winner takes all

Make loot separate for each player so that when a mob dies, the game rolls loot for each player in proximity.

This way latency isn't as much an issue and it will encourage co-op a LOT more.

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Madaxe wrote:

Make loot separate for each player so that when a mob dies, the game rolls loot for each player in proximity.

This way latency isn't as much an issue and it will encourage co-op a LOT more.

I do not think they can do loot for everyone on a free to play game. Accounts are free so people will just make multiple accounts and sync them into instances and walk out with 5x the loot. This will flood the system, and ruin the trade system.

If they were charging people either to buy the game or monthly fees then I think people would be entitled to getting the loot for each paid character, and that would create co-op play.

Having free accounts does not promote co-op it creates horders.

Agreed having an open drop system when you just met someone online and started an adventure could be problematic. But that is the reason why guilds will be important. You need to be able to find people you can trust. But that comes with the free game territory. Guess it will be up to the game Dev team to decide how it plays out.

having items restricted to just 1 player for a short delay I think is fine but a group/party should have the option to increase decrease or remove the restriction as they please.
i would also suggest that to increase the backstabbing/cutthroat nature of this game letting a group select to have drops permanently restricted to a single player should not be an option and the highest the delay should be around 10 seconds and by default it should be about 3 seconds.

"your item only" delay would be just fine.
3 seconds plus time/distance sounds good.

Monster number should be based on the number of players in the game (not linear); more monsters = more loot.

Bosses should drop more loot based on number of players that were actively fighting the boss so there couldn't be idle players just for increasing the loot.
This could be done in many ways, in my opinion it should be done by some arbitrarily defined mathematical equations involving minimum damage done to the boss, minimum damage received from the boss and stuff like that so all players that were attacking and tanking the Boss will increase the amount of loot and idle players will not increase the loot.
Bosses should also have increased health based on the number of players in the game so idling would be punished because boss would be more difficult to defeat, but wouldn't give more loot.

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Zwingnut wrote:

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Madaxe wrote:

Make loot separate for each player so that when a mob dies, the game rolls loot for each player in proximity.

This way latency isn't as much an issue and it will encourage co-op a LOT more.

I do not think they can do loot for everyone on a free to play game. Accounts are free so people will just make multiple accounts and sync them into instances and walk out with 5x the loot. This will flood the system, and ruin the trade system.

If they were charging people either to buy the game or monthly fees then I think people would be entitled to getting the loot for each paid character, and that would create co-op play.

Having free accounts does not promote co-op it creates horders.

This seems to imply that there are the same amount of drops for a party of 4 that there are for 1 person under the current system. If that's the case, then the only advantage to grouping is that things die slightly faster, and that is more than offset by the fact that someone can take all your loot if you're lagged, slow, or more focused on playing than you are on loot. Normally, more people means more drops, either because there are more mobs or because they each drop more loot (normally offset by making them stronger when more players are present).

I am not fond of FFA loot, but if there are extra drops, there is at least some small justification to grouping. If the drops are exactly the same, there's no good reason not to play solo or only with friends that you trust to distribute the loot fairly.