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

Last but not least, the controversial bit.

All of these story and lore points are nice, but how can we tell the story of being an exile through mechanics alone? What kind of mechanics require no writing whatsoever, but directly convey a lack of trust, a little too much paranoia, a tenable hold on order?

Well, we had it. At least until the 0.11.0 announcement. The answer to that question was: free-for-all loot.

Ninjas: Actually a Good Thing

FFA loot was actually a brilliant mechanic for forging a lack of trust between players. Sure, that made everyone QQ all over the forums, but the point is that it did it's job. Much like communism, party rules could work in theory; the game even temporarily allocates the loot, so that you're given a hint on how you could distribute said loot fairly. However, FFA loot required you to actually trust the players in your party instead of depending on arbitrary, game-enforced enforcement -- because that enforcement was exactly what the game denied you. Trust issues, paranoia, greed... all told through a simple mechanic.

Yes, I understand that FFA loot is something that almost no ARPG does. But try to imagine the game if it didn't drop the ball on ostracizing you once you opened the door to Lioneye's Watch. Imagine that, without flogging you with exposition pieces, it kept you remembering that you're just a petty criminal, and your friends are, too. The mechanic definitely served a strong narrative purpose, in an environment otherwise devoid of narrative mechanics.

Yet FFA loot was hated. With a fervor.

Was there a problem there? Absolutely; that many angry forum-goers can't be that far off. However, how did the problem come to be, and what was its nature? The members of a fair and equitable group fear the greed of the possible ninja, and the ninja fears... nothing. Deficiency detected. In order to have a legitimate fear, there needs to be a legitimate threat. So how could we threaten ninjas, without prohibiting their behavior?

Now there are many different mechanics that could have been used. I don't think enabling PvP would have been good, as it just would have allowed more PK griefing like with bandits (which I actually really like as a mechanic, but let's not overdo it). So instead, let's look at how players actually tried to fix the problem: they tried to go to the forums and create threads saying "Player X is a ninja, don't trust him."

Now think about this for a second. The whole mechanic is supposed to promote the feeling of being ostracized. Can you really think of any better consequence than being ostracized in real life? I sure can't.

If you ask me, GGG's failure with FFA loot was its policy against name and shame. Name and shame could have been left completely in the hands of the players. By now, at the very least we should have had third-party sites that rate players by their trustworthiness in parties.

If they were really clever, GGG would have embraced the concept and worked the mechanic directly into the game, giving each player a "reputation" score that could be upvoted or downvoted, Reddit-style, and when trying to join a party the party leader would get a pop-up showing name, class, level, and reputation, along with an option to allow or disallow. Could you be a jerk? Sure, at any time. Would anything stop a player with a solid rep of suddenly turning to the dark side? Not really. But there would be a consequence for ninja behavior.

With a system like that in place, the mechanic could have been pushed to its limit. Name timers could have their duration shortened. Map to maker would be enforced by the players, not an artificial system.

GGG, if you care at all about giving Path of Exile a cohesive narrative, please remove the loot options in a later patch, along with some kind of system that makes it easy for us, as a community, to actually monitor the reputability of players. I strongly believe you made the wrong choices by making a mechanic with such a strong narrative purpose merely optional, and by forbidding all forms of name-and-shame.