f13.net

Okay, this is my thoughts on looting in general...

You should either have a Morrowind type loot system or not have one at all.  So, the question comes down to, is a Morrowind type looting system worth the network expense or not?

Yes or No responses are fine.  Feel free to elaborate if you wish.

** Edit 1 **

For those who don't know, Morrowind's system is setup such that what you see is what you get.  Once you loot the item, it removes it from the corpse.

So, if a mob was wearing a pink shirt you could loot the pink shirt.  When you loot the pink shirt it would remove it from the body of the corpse.

** Edit 2 **

For the people who have nothing better to contribute to a discussion other then to point out ones grammatical errors, I have correct the ones above.

I only want phat lewt.

I don't remember anything particularly noteworthy about looting in Morrowind.

I guess he means if someone is wearing a breastplate and wielding a claymore you should be able to loot them, and only them.

"this i my thoughts on Loot", that's classic, as is misspelling Morrowind, twice.

Well sure, in a single player game you can save and reset.  In a MMoG, not so much.

Ja Herr, Allgemeine Grammatik!

Don't know that this is really the issue; the idea (I assume, I may be wrong) is that most enemies in MMOs drop one or two items at most, and you take everything they have.  In Morrowind, they drop their entire outfit; you can strip corpses naked if you want, but you'll be carrying around a lot of junk after just one or two kills, so you have to be picky about what you tote around.  Also, they drop whatever's in their inventory, so if they've got a key or reward or something, and you kill them, you get the shiny whether you finished their quest or not.  It kills normal diku advancement because it means that you don't get a percentage drop on something; if you see someone wearing Pants of Uberness, and you kill them, you get the pants, 100% of the time, so there's very little grinding.  And if you want an enemy to look cool (or, at least, not completely drunk), he's probably going to be wearing a full set of armor, which means that someone in your raid is going to get a full set of uber armor, rather than just the pants (though there are kludgy workarounds for this) every time you run the encounter.  And your trash mobs are going to presumably be kitted out in fairly respectable gear, too, so you can outfit forty guys in decent gear extremely quickly compared to something like WoW where you have to farm each piece separately.  So as a casual, I like it, but I imagine it would make the catasses bored.

One note is that I do wish more single player games would incorporate this.  I remember in Neverwinter Nights 1, having to find a pirate uniform for a quest.  I must have killed twenty or thirty pirates who were obviously wearing it, and naturally I couldn't get a uniform off any of them; I had to jump through some hoops first.  Or the huge number of times I've seen some guy with an awesome looking sword, killed him, and gotten nothing, or a sword that looks nothing like the one he was using.

That just means designers do what my DM used to do -- throw non-humanoid creatures and monsters at us that don't wear armor.. or hordes of kobolds wielding rusty worthless daggers.

I really like the "no loot" idea.

Let's have more games in which selling trash and hoarding treasure isn't an important part of teh fun.

This "discussion" was poorly thought out and doesn't even deserve my off topic contributions let alone the first sentence I posted which actually tried to explain what the fuck you were talking about.

Let's have a discussion!  Just say yes or no to my terribly phrased and somewhat obscure notion.  :roll:

I like the idea that what a creature is wearing is what it should drop.  That said, there's a number of problems with it including what's pointed out above.  However, there are ways to get around that.  First off, how about size?  Look, if you're a gnome and you loot a suit of armor off a human, you should NOT be able to wear it.  Hell, if you're a human and you loot a suit of Full Plate Armor off a man a half inch taller than you, that should be difficult to wear at best, reducing the bonuses on the armor significantly.  Full Plate is extremely carefully fitted to the individual, it's not a t-shirt.

As far as the drop rate for rare items, that's not a major issue - sure, if you see someone wearing Pants of Uberness, you get Pants of Uberness, but that doesn't mean there's a lot of guys out there wearing them.  Just as now, loot tables would be constructed when the mob spawns, and items would still be just as rare as they are now.

Another way to limit the introduction of massive amounts of stuff is with the 'but it was damaged in the battle' excuse.  Remember Fallout and the Powered Armor the Brotherhood of Steel wore?  You couldn't get it by looting it off them, because in order to kill someone wearing the stuff you would have to damage the armor so much that nobody outside the Brotherhood of Steel could possibly repair it.  So if you want a mob to drop powerful items but not his entire suit of armor, have a combat system that tracks damage by body part and some of that damage goes to the armor, rendering it useless once it takes x amount of damage.  It could even introduce an interesting element of strategy, considering that if you want a breastplate, you'd have to avoid damaging the chest too much, which could make the fight more difficult.

Trash mobs wouldn't necessarily be wearing great gear either - they're trash mobs, their purpose is to come at you in swarms.  That is, as long as we don't follow the idea that each trash mob is powerful in itself, like a lot of these games do, where you want one mob at a time only.  If trash mobs only have strength in numbers, then one can presume that anything they're wearing is vastly inferior to what the people who are defeating them have.  Also, their method of being powerful could be something other than armor.  Depending on the genre of the game and nature of the enemy, there's a lot of enemy types that wouldn't depend on armor or weapons as much as a normal human.  In your typical fantasy, monsters and demons could make do with inferior weapons simply because their strength is sufficient to make those weapons deadly.  Or perhaps much of their power is derived from magical tattoos upon their body, and so on, rather than magical arms and armor.

There's another side to it though.  There are many ways to make it work, but they would all require effort.  Furthermore, would this effort be appreciated?  Limited inventory space is usually an issue in these games, and in a game with limited inventory space, finding truckloads of items all over the place can be irritating, especially if the items are worth something, since you would basically *have* to leave piles of stuff laying around.  And if they're not worth something, there doesn't seem to be much point in most of them, which just means it's stuff in the inventory list the player has to look through and not loot.

So, don't post your off-topic contributions.  It's not rocket science.

Ironically enough, a few have apparently found plenty to talk about from my "terribly phrased and somewhat obscure" discussion topic...

Koyasha,

I'm thinking that perhaps someone wants to make a living as a scavenger.  They go in after battles and scavenge weapons and other useful things, load them into crates of like item (in which the crates only use up 1 inventory space each, think SWG) and then sell them to the opposing faction (or back to the same faction that lost them).  This is significant because I am tentatively planning to have factional control NPCs that you have to outfit with a uniform or armor and weapons.  So, the scavenger aspect to the game would be a way of recycling the economy as well.

This concept actually occurs quite often on Planetside--partially due to the "Scavenger" award, but mostly due to people wanting to use other empire's weaponry.

Prior to the fodderside accounts, there was an entire black market barter system that you could dig into, and if you knew the right people you could get anything you wanted, all the way up to BFR trades. With fodderside (free accounts), it mostly went away as people just created alts in the empire they wanted weapons from, but it's still around.

Please be discussing with Ultima Online what happens when you let people leave things on the ground.

Keeping track of all the loot that everybody is wearing at all times, and everything they've dropped on the ground when they died, and everything somebody discarded a few moments ago but somebody passing by might want in an hour is a LOT of record keeping for a LITTLE reward. Most of what gets dropped is trash and players will treat it like trash.

Excellent point!

So, perhaps there's a "Junk Heap" mound object that appears after the battle that, when scavengers click on it, brings up a window with the different types of loot and how much was left on the battlefield.  Then they could pick and choose what and how much of each they wanted to take.  Perhaps also, the items decay the longer they sit there.  Maybe 10% each hour?  That would give scavengers (namely casual playing scavengers) 10 hours to find out about the battle, where it was, and get to the location.  Otherwise, for general combat purposes, you'd have to get to the NPC before it "decayed" (about 5 minutes).

Didn't EvE implement scavenging 2 patches ago?

It would probably not work due to lag exploits (refer to EQ disabling the dropping of coin onto the ground) but in general I like this idea.  I honestly don't see any problem with "trash" drops outside the technical reasons, but the economy and design of the rest of the game will have to take this into account.  Sales of the items, melting into raw materials, and reselling to players that can wear it are all interesting ideas.  You would not have to let things drop into the world to do this stuff.

In Morrowind most things were trash in the diku sense because one ebony sword was about as good as another.  Couple this system with full item loss and it gets pretty interesting; refer to EVE as something of a reference.

EVE implemented Salvaging.  In that system, all ships leave a wreck that can be salvaged for parts.  It's not really what we are talking about here, but the existing loot system of EVE is.  Basically some of the destroyed ship's modules are destroyed and some are dropped as loot, found inside an unsecured cargo container that is analogous to the "lump" mentioned earlier.

To start off a tangent, you said "Morrowind loot" and, well, inventory space is limited by weight in Morrowind, and not by item size, and that's different than the WoW system where the number of items you can carry is limited (and their size or weight doesn't matter).  So, did you want us to "discuss" this aspect of loot, too, or are we sticking to the nakedness of looted corpses topic?

As far as corpses displaying the armor they're wearing, I'm reminded of EQ and the piles of bodies left around after unsuccessful raids, and the issues they kept having with video lag due to that.  How does Morrowind perform when you pull all of a city's guards to one spot, blow them up with a nuke, then remove only certain armor pieces from each body? 

WoW's models appear a lot nicer than would have been possible to do with models of naked gnolls, centaurs, nagas, and the various humanoids with armor and clothing rendered as a layer above their skin.

And, ok, so when you loot the armor you get it and the corpse looks naked.  Do we extend that to "when you kill the wolf and skin it, you should see the bloody carcass"?  How about heads, ears, paws, horns that are required to be chopped off and returned for the quest reward?

Yes. The potential for silliness gets absurd. How many teeth does a wolf have? Do we differentiate lupine molars from lupine canines.. or from bear molars? Do we differentiate a wolf pelvis from a wolf ribcage? Can you dissect the ribcage into ribs? What quantity of wolf blood is extractable? What portions of the wolf viscera are going to be implemented? Is it important to separate the wolf colon from the rest of the lower intestines? Surely not all wolf meat is created equal: Wolf flank vs. wolf brain vs. wolf leg vs. wolf heart.

If not, why not?

If they're just vendor trash, you ask, what's the point in creating that level of depth? Good question. Now I ask precisely the same thing about all the junk on most humanoid corpses. Can the armor be salvaged into individual plates, straps, and buckles... or is it abstracted into tailored chunks? What if I just want his awesome shoulder spike? I can SEE it there, why can't I just take that and put it on my shield? I like the runes on the puffy sleeves on his robe, can I sew those sleeves onto my tunic? I want the plume atop his helmet on my helmet, but not the rest of it. I want to pry the gem out of his scabbard. I want to scrape the gold leaf off his epaulettes.


Looting isn't either/or... it's a continuum.

I personally could not care less about the display of corpses.

This, OTOH, is interesting.  In either system, you run into this issue with loot that in most MMOs, the average player is carrying multiple back-packs worth of 'stuff' around with him in combat; whole sacks of platemail, bags full of polearms, etc.  I think most will agree that from both a 'realism' and from a mechanics PoV, this is pretty silly.  There are lots of things you can do if you don't have to worry as much that every player has a wagon train full of alternate equipment and/or consumable goods with him in each fight, or that he's going to haul every lovin thing that appears in an enemies corpse, then chop up the corpse for various pieces that have some value, and sell it all.

WoW had this come up recently regarding consumables, since they tend to stack, and even the ones that don't, the only real limit to the number each player can have (in an organized guild) is gathering the components and time to craft them.  If you don't want them doing that, either make the effects not stack, or don't give them enough space to carry all that crap around.

As to systems...
EQ, and WoW too, really, have the issue that one gem, and 5 gems, both take the same amount of space.  Also, they take the same amount of space as a halberd.  Given that I can fit quite a few gems into my pocket, and no actual-sized halberds, we can all see that this is an issue.  One that the 'weight' system solves, to some extent.  Don't constrain the player with UI issues, just give them as much scrolling space as they need.  Instead, give items a weight, and assign limits based on strength.  (EQ did that, too.  Weee)  The real key, though, is to allow for this in game design.  If the average person can only carry 50 lbs of stuff around with them, don't design quests that require gathering dozens of 10-20 lb bear furs.  In general, de-value 'stuff'.  Otherwise people will get in this loop where if they can't carry any more, they want to stop doing what they are doing (having fun) and run back to town to store/sell/whatever all the 'stuff', so they don't lose out on the 'stuff' that came later.  See Diablo 1, 2, Fate, TitanQuest, etc.  All those are very stuff-centric, and have a fairly limited inventory in comparison to your average MMO.

My personal ideal is to have maybe 3-4 'grades' of equipment.  You have crap that you find on thieves, brigands and n00bs, who can't afford better.  It's not worth much, because it's fragile, or statistically less good.  Then you have just average stuff.  Many common players should be able to do just find with average stuff.  Next is Superior stuff, which is finely crafted with good materials, etc, and so will be more durable, hold an edge better, be better balanced, etc.  Superior equipment is what 'experienced' specialists will have in their field of specialization.  Finally, you might have magic items, which have been enchanted with some kind of effect.  These should generally fall statistically around the 'superior' stuff, but with some additional effect. (Not just 'does more damage', but, say, burns with flames, or detects undead, or something.)

Both EQ and UO started out with something like this system; both decided to add many more levels on top of it, where magic items went from being 'procs a small DD', to 'people playing at the base resolution can't see all the stat mods of the sword without a scrollbar' and 'I get more hitpoints from my armor than I get from my level'.

--
Alkiera

Ah, but your ideal is decidedly unshiny, by today's standards.  Take any of the animated equipment pieces (staves with snakes or lights moving about, that shield the face breathing fire, etc) and explain how something that looks like THAT only has +3 INT and Detect Undead as its abilities.  This train of thought, though, leads to a discussion about visual preferences, and for example how WoW looks vs. how Vanguard looks, etc., and we probably shouldn't go there.

It's probably a given that what attracts players to MMORPG's, and to an extent single player RPG's too, are increasingly unrealistic (but cool) animations and visual effects, coupled with bigger and bigger stats and procs on the items.  To me, what's interesting is the various ways that a loot system can support this (and mudflation) while at the same time keeping the game realistic, and fun.

Why do all of the MMORPG's have vendor trash?  Why not just give coins, and occasionally the good magical item?  Is it because players feel better when they fill up their bags, even if it is with junk, than when they just see the number that represents their cash grow?  Is it just a time sink, and cash sink (must buy bigger bags)?  Does the loot table have to have a minimum of 15 items per critter?

Incidentally, the Diablo loot system had limitations based on size of the object and total number of objects.  I have a feeling that the inventory grid was THE place where you could see the shiny; the avatars were so small in that game that you couldn't really tell what you were wielding...  but as soon as you opened your inventory, you could see the difference between a 6-square 2H axe and a 2-square hand axe, heh.  So they built that aspect of the game (the shiny) into the loot system, rather than through models on the avatars, which is cool.

It wasn't needed in WoW, because you could see it on the avatar, so everything got reduced to 1 square.  Probably won't ever be needed again.

So, what's the best way to implement an infinite number of "grades", to accomodate mudflation, expansions, etc.?  Just show the item level, and otherwise get rid of color coding?  What's the best way to add "shiny" while keeping the stats from inflating beyond reasonable?  And, other than to support game mechanics, why is one type of limitation of the bags (weight vs. size vs. count) chosen over another?

I'm pretty sure the EQ/DAoC/WoW-style 'bags/slots' choice was made for ease of coding the UI.  Especially in the EQ case.  SWG had a weight-based system that let you switch between views of your inventory like Windows does, as a list, as icons, etc.  Their UI was more advanced in some ways, in that they seemed to have a very solid UI system, more so than predecessors.  WoW was just copying the best of what had come before in that genre, which was EQ, even though they had a superior UI tool. (as shown by the various bag-combination add ons out there).

I think UO and SWG shows how to deal with shiny... people will collect new objects for no reason other than they look different.  Even if they don't act any different.  Even if they are completely useless outside of being neat looking; if they can somehow display them, in a house, equipping them, etc, they will collect them.  The bonus to having the appearance change, without the actual mechanics of the item changing, is it frees you up to put them in, and there's no reason not to use them in combat, rather than your more generic-looking version of the same thing.

Adding new mechanical shiny puts you back into the EQ/WoW 'gee, all high level X look the same' because all high level X are wearing armor from the same boss/zone/instance.  Also, the 'Hi, I'm a fashion reject' issues of having some armor from one zone, and more from another, or one piece each from 10 different sets.  If the stats are better, people will use it, even if they don't like how it looks.  I'd like to remove that barrier.

Expansions and whatnot can add 'shiny' that is mostly art, or new races/classes/skill sets/whatever.  I'm really very anti-diku, so I don't have a solution for dealing with lots of levels of mechanical progression.  It's a matter of goals.  To me, in EQ or WoW, you basically are your equipment.  A level 60 mage in generic equipment vs. one in epic 'I liv 2 raid' equipment is a larger difference than any other difference the characters could have, be they AAs in EQ, or Talents in WoW.  To me, that's unacceptable, but then, I don't like raids due to time investments and whatnot.  I don't care about any +17 Sword of E-peen Expansion.

--
Alkiera

So let's throw another kink into all of this.  Let's say all Broadswords deal the same amount of damage, same attack speed, and (generally) look the same.  A players stat may influence (add to) the damage dealt per blow or how they swing the sword (think Jedi Knight Outcast "stances" where one stance had a greater defense chance, another had a greater hit chance, and the other was a happy medium).  Keeping in mind that this is with a FPS (skilled based) interface.

Though, this is a bit off topic.  Clarification looting, I wouldn't expect to be able to break the parts down and the looting aspect would be geared more towards "scavengers".  I don't want people to be slowed down by feeling the need to check corpses for a better weapon then whatever they have.  I want people to choose there weapon based on how well they use it on a personal level.  It should be a preference.  Are you going to sacrifice attack speed for damage?  Are you going to sacrifice accuracy for speed?  I also want to take the time spent examining (and cross-examining) weapon stats.  When you pick up a replacement broad sword, you should know about what the DPS (Damage Per Second) is without examining the weapon.  Ideally, if you "Examine" a weapon you will just see a new window with the weapon in it.  Now the weapon may be "graphically" showing it's age (shiny for new or rusted and blood stained for old...it may even be chipped a little) or it may be customized in some way (again, graphically).  But that's what I'd like to limit it to.  Part of this is technical, first, to unneeded stats to be associated with a particular object.  Second, to minimize combat calculations.  Combat, IMHO, should be primarily skill based.  How you move and how quick you are with a mouse should be the key to determining victory in a battle, not ones level or stats.  Most may disagree, but I think that's the way modern MMO's are heading...

I like the idea of a broadsword being a broadsword.  Rather a fan of the low-fantasy right now.  Please refer to Mount & Blade.

I think you're speculating, a little bit, about how players will behave in the game.  What will be the I-win strategy?  Go all speed?  Go all damage?  Go all accuracy?  Go speed on the weapon and get +damage from the armor or from enchants?  If the swords don't look different from each other, then the only reason to pick one vs. another is to min/max your damage, and whatever combination is unbalanced in your game will be what everyone picks up and uses.

EVE's modules are an example where looks don't matter at all, because you only see the ship, not the modules, so all decisions that are made on how to fit a ship are based on maximizing (to the extreme) the one strategy that will win with that ship, and ignoring all others.  In the first second of combat, you figure it out, are you in your optimal strategy, or are you gonna lose because the enemy is out of range, or too close, or has a tank that negates your exact and very narrow damage type, etc.?  And if you're gonna lose, you just run away.

No visual shiny makes it difficult to /con or determine how tough the opponent is, so there will be the need to color-code the NPC's.  And possibly the players, if PvP is possible.  I think color-coding isn't as nice as a visual representation of how tough that enemy is due to gear.

Now your speculating. ;)

The "I-Win" strategy would be your preference in weapon.  That was my point.  No +damage from Armor or Enchant or any of that non-sense.  I'm moving away from a "number game" and moving towards an FPS style "skill game".  Thus no con system as the playing field will be mostly level.  If you've even played a battleground instance in WoW, then that's about the difference in skill you'd experience in the entire game (for those that don't know, battleground instances in WoW are generally limited to a 10 level range, ie lvl 10's - 19's would only be allowed together in the same instance).

I'd be careful using the term "skill level" - you're speaking of twitch skill.  When most people say "a character's power is based on his skill" he doesnt mean the user/player/customer's ability to move a mouse. They mean the in-game character's numerical proficiency based on skills grown.

Just a clarification.

Well, I've never seen a FPS where the term "skill" meant anything but 'twitch'.  So, I figured if someone is reading the post carefully, they'll realize that any reference to "skill" would mean twitch.  Though, the skill level of the players will be somewhat modified based on numbers.  Similar to Morrowind, when a players strength increase, they have a higher chance of hitting their target and of getting a critical hit.  When a players ability increases, they can run a little faster, jump a little higher, and have a higher chance of taking a glancing blow when hit (damage mitigation).  So, while there are "some" numbers being thrown around, you can visually see who's stronger or has a higher ability based on how accurate their hits are (especially with ranged weapons) and how faster they move around.

But this has nothing to do with loot...
;)

If a game does not have levels, color considers are dumb.  Actually I think considers are dumb anyway, being a holdover from text MUDs.  A nice replacement would be to see someone and visually say "he's a little guy with a raiper" or "he's a huge guy with a hammer", with the details being worked out after you flick your cigarette into his eye.

Since the only reference marker in the original post was to Morrowind, which really isnt a twitch game (by pressing+releasing the mouse button your character pulls back+swings his sword, but damage, wether he hits or not etc all depend on stats.. the only thing twitchish is the timing, but that also depends on weapon speed).

Anyway, carry on.

That was my vision of the combat system. ;)

DarkSign, good point.  I should have been more specific. :)

My own experiences are quite different, particularly in PvP in DIKUs. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but from my own experiences it seems that while gear does make a difference between players, that difference alone is more palpable in PvE raid than it is is a PvP match.

For one, a player with a lot of time to repeat the same PvE content over and over and over has conditioned themselves to play a certain way. That person will get steamrolled in PvP simply by virtue of how they've assigned their hotkeys. What works in PvP in a DIKU is just that different. There could be that person who can master both sides of the endgame, but they are very rare. In six months of Battlegrounds in WoW, my AB PUG was only ever steamrolled by a fully coordinated team in top-tier gear obviously on VoIP twice. The theory of such occurences are much greater than the probability of them occuring.

Gear makes the character, but only in PvE.

Darniaq,

Is that also true in the case of two PvP players, one whom is skilled at PvP, but hasn't done alot, say, on this server, so he just has his gear from leveling, maybe a few purchases off the AH, but has the player skills for PvP, vs. someone who has been around awhile, and has the 'I've been grand marshall' or whatever PvP purple gear?

WoW, in particular, makes your case as there is the concept of 'Raid/PvE gear' and 'PvP gear'.  To me, if the required stats for your character are that different depending on the intelligence of the target you're fighting, either (a) equipment is too much of your character, and/or (b) the combat system or NPC combat AI is screwed up.

It's one of the reasons I don't bother with PvP in most games, as, for example, in EQ, I tended to play casters... which had spell damage reduced to 50% or 75% of the normal amount, because too many melee's complained.  Nevermind that once a melee got close, the spellcaster basically could no longer get a spell off.  WoW seems to be better about this, but there are still plenty of classes that depend on things like fear, stuns, pet taunting, etc, that an actual intelligent enemy either ignores, or uses some very common item to make go away('pvp trinket').

--
Alkiera

Classical MMO's aren't really designed for PvP, which is what makes them so difficult to balance that aspect.  PvP is just another element that developers know that attracts a certain crowd.  SWG, with there "hundreds" of profession/skill combiniations always had a "flavor of the month" which is why it's old system was impossible to balance (and I why I can't understand why anyone wants to go back to Pre-CU or Pre-NGE in general).

Flavors of the month have been around forever, but are much less prevalent in games where the Dev team doesn't make huge changes and assign various "I Win!" buttons every month.

As for the loot issue, it sounds neat on the surface, but would not be worth the trouble for anyone.
Forcing players to leave things behind is a bad idea.
Scavenging sounds neat, until you start to go over the logistics required for it.

Lets say that on average, your server has 4,000 people online.
In a standard looting situation, lets say every single player kills and loots one monster per minute, with the corpses dissapearing immediately once emptied.  10% of players have a full inventory/don't want trash loot/pony so they leave the corpse behind.  That corpse will persist for 10 minutes, and on average have 3 items in it.
That means that on average, you've got about 1,200 items sitting around wasting CPU.

In your situation, every player kills and loots one monster once per minute, 100% of corpses will have *something* left on them, and they will persist for a period of 10 hours so that scavengers can bypass the whole risk/reward thing.  Who wants risk anyways? Fuck that noise, I want the reward!
Now, an average suit of armor is say 14 pieces (head, shoulders, arms, bracers, 2 bracelets, gloves, 4 rings, chest, legs, boots), add in the 4 items that were in pockets, and figure every single corpse is going to retain 75% of that load.
Now we have 54,000 items being generated and tracked per minute, and since they persist for 10 hours, your server, on average, is going to be tracking 32,400,000 (32.4 million) items.
Plus, the 2.4 million corpses lying around.

Personally, I don't think that rendering 34.6 million items is worth the "ooh, cool!" factor of letting you run around and loot without having to fight.

As far as twitch gaming with a sword goes, download Rune, I'm sure theres still a bunch of servers online, it's just what you're looking for.

1. The Loot items wouldn't be "rendered" except when accessed.  As was discussed earlier, there would be a "Loot mound"(trash pile) left in the battlefield.  When they are, it's just 1 per item type.  IE, | [image] | Heavy Armor Boots | 247 | Pairs |  Then you click on that line item and select how many you want to take.
2.  The risk comes in when they try to transport 1 type of fanctional loot through an opposing factionally controled area.  There will be a chance that a guard (or guards) will stop and check their cargo for contraband (which opposing factional loot would be considered contraband) and then an appropriate action would be taken.  Hence, the need for a smuggler system, etc.

It's really not as CPU intensive as you might think.  Even then, it's primarily client side and not server side.

Sup guys.

Loot is easy.

1. Have monsters be using the loot. If he's carrying the sword, you can loot the sword. Giant plant monsters and landsharks don't drop swords. But sharks might drop lasers.
2. Randomize what type of loot is on the monsters.
3. Have collectibles drop off monsters: charms, etc. I.E. Steal that entire system from Titan Quest. Collectibles are things that are small enough to not be shown on screen (a tooth or scalp for example - technically they're part of the monster rather than loot, but ya know what, it's my system and I know loot better than you).
4. If you think you're being creative enough, you aren't.
5. Never reveal all of the loot in the game. Ever. Always keep the player guessing. The moment he knows the best loot, there's no reason to play your game.

#5 is my biggest problem with MMOGs. And you know what, it'll continue to be. I didn't play DDO past beta because I saw people in the highest level armor. If there's an Obvious Thing that I have to aim for, I consider the game flawed to the Core. Anything with raids falls under that because they break rule #5, which I suppose is a side-effect of rule #4. Which brings me to my summation, if even 1 rule is broken, all rules are broken.

So when I say loot is easy, I mean it's hard, really fucking hard.

Not because it's hard to say, program, but rather - it's hard because designers are dimwits that don't "get it."

Edit: Sub Rule Alpha and Omega - Not necessarily a sign of failure, but not having colored loot is Stupid. It's the single best thing you can possibly carry over from muds. Sure, it's completely archaic since we're getting to the point that actual graphics are detailed enough it might not be necessary, but it should always be considered necessary. I want to be able to eyeball a pile of loot while holding down the "show loot" key. If I see green, purple, rainbow, gold, etc, I will pick it up.

Edit: Sub Rule Delta: Another one that's not a sign of failure, and an easy one. Shitty loot is better than no loot. All those cracked, broken, tarnished items... make them drop anyway. Sometimes it's pleasing to stand amongst a giant pile of loot on a hill, naked, and tell people to look upon your kingdom. For you are Ozymandias. And if the loot isn't tarnished, cracked, and broken then the Ozymandias joke makes no sense.

I would only agree with this one if there was a loot filter present so that you can filter it away. I mean, has there ever been anyone actually using a grey item in Diablo/WoW/whatever? In WoW it's at least a source of income, but in diablo it's mostly just junk polluting my screen when I'm looking for my precious.

I'm sorry, I addressed your first post ala render a naked corpse and then every item is rendered separately on top of it, it was a silly idea and needed ridicule.

I personally think the trash pile left on the battlefield is just as silly, mainly for the risk/reward reasons stated above, and I'm not even going to start getting into how immersion breaking it is then every time an enemy is vanquished, their loot is magically transported to a huge rubbish heap.

As an aside not related to aforementioned silliness, I personally don't like corpses and having to loot them, it's not very satisfying.
Think lineage2/diablo 2.  Every time you make a kill, if loot is going to drop, it pops onto the ground with a nice thud, ching, etc.  So much more satisfying than opening a corpse and seeing an icon.

A perfect system would be, of course, the system from Titan Quest where items fly off of a recently vanquished foe in every direction, while their newly naked corpse flails across the map. Ideally those items should roll down hills, off cliffs, and into lakes.

Nice, although I wouldn't call that perfect.  Now if they set things on fire, or exploded, sign me up!

I'd like a MMO to put a bit more focus on how and what items you use instead of mostly just their quality.

Consider an FPS: some quality differences, but for the most part, it's about switching between the right tool for the job.

You can still have your progression, but instead of one awesome sword-of-do-everything, you have 5 or 6 weapons that about took the same time to earn/raid/whatever. Leave most in your bank, and take 2-3 out to battle, choose your armor type based on your role for the evening, and then how you apply them to the battle is where you get to add some skill and tactical depth. Again, similar to how knowing the best weapon for a situation in a broad FPS can do the same.

Didn't VG try this and miserably fail?

I don't remember anything like that in vanguard at all.  IIRC it didn't matter one bit if you were using slashing/piercing/blunt/etc.
VG failed because they released an unstable game with no real story and a treadmill from hell, and that carrot in front you? Turd painted orange.

I'm talking in Beta. There was a system in place that had a dynamic combat wounding system. You could aim for certain bodyparts and whatnot and in turn do damage accordingly.

I also remember some Aradune Mithara posts that had to do with people carrying around multiple sets of gear for different combat roles. This never made it to launch either: The horses were supposed to be able to carry a big set of gear, but unfortunately the only bags you could feasibly put on your horse with a decent amount of playtime was a 16slot. That about covered one set of gear with no real place to put your cash loot for repairs.

In other words, it was horribly broken and never really worked.

This rule in particular is a good one to stick by, and overall the rest are pretty good guidelines for loot systems.  However, the problem with this mentality in general is that it almost puts a focus on "loot".  While I do think that items are an integral part of any good MMORPG, I think that where their importance should be stressed in MMOG's is as a means to an end as opposed to an end itself.  Gear is the primary driving force and like you said, if players know the "best loot" there is no reason to play your game.

Well, if you want to talk about the real problem with the MMOG or the loot system then the below needs to be fixed.


This is where some innovation needs to be made.  The truly pathetic thing about mainstream MMOG design is the fact that the focus of our games still lies in the realm of the trite, monotonous, and pointless.  This is even while gamers everywhere are expressing their desire for more depth.

Good discussion.