Loot prioritizing

[Sairon]

In the center of basicly all PvE oriented MMORPGs lies the loot, even PvP oriented ones tends to focus a lot on loot. It's a source of both great joy and great despair.

However there's a large problem which I'm sure most of you have experienced first hand, you're in a random group and a phat drops. The unwritten rule is that those who can use it gets a shot at it through rolling, however human greed kicks in and suddenly that priest over there ends up with a sweet 2h axe and refuses to part with it.

Very little seems to be done on this front, World of Warcraft took a very small but simple step through introducing a built in rolling mechanism, something which really should be in MMORPGs by default these days. There's still a lot to be done though and I think I might have 1 sollution, although it has a downside to it as well. I call it LPS, or loot prioritizing system. I'l use World of Warcraft as an example because it's a very generic MMORPG and it's still fresh in my mind.

You would have an interface looking very much like the paper doll one, with all the equipment slots present. By clicking on a slot a small window would pop up where the prioritizing for that slot is done. We could for example be a warrior which is aiming for a very heavy crit build, so we move the slider for AGI and crit% furtherst to the right, meaning it's fully prioritized. In doing so all the other sliders gets moved a little to the left too compensate, the sum of all prioritizing should always be the same. Some warriors might want to get +AP and STR instead, so they max those out instead in the very same manner. You could also present the players with the possibility of prioritizing slots, for example if you have a crapy pair of boots, prioritizing the feet slots would be preferable. This is probably where the largest flaw of the system is, it's pretty complex. You could however supply the players with pre made templates for an alternative. You could lock it away until lvl 20 or so as well, because there's very little use of it before lvl 20, and it would prevent scarying newbies away.

So now you're done with all your prioritizing and ready to join a group. If we're talking a game like World of Warcraft where the boss loot drops is pretty much known before hand, you could prohibit modifying of the prioritizing once you get teamed, to prevent people changing around their settings before a boss fight. If the system will be used or not is up to the group leader, in pretty much the same manner as all MMORPGs, if the leader chooses free for all then naturaly the system won't have any effect.

After whacking away for a while in the instance an axe drops with the following specs:

Axe of Awesome
2h axe
150-250 dmg 4.0 swing speed 50 DPS
+30 str
+10 sta
+1% crit

In our team we have 3 guys who can wield this axe, a shaman and 2 warriors. We also have a priest and a mage. The priest and mage which can't use the item gets presented with 2 options which I'l call greed and cancel. Cancel naturaly means that you turn down your shot at the item, greed means that if it becomes a greed roll you will get a shot at it. One of the warriors is only intrested in PvE so he has minimum priority on 2hers, this means he has no chance of winning and also gets presented with greed and cancel. Now the shaman has full prioritizing on STR and crit%, but he has low on STA. He's also prioritizing slow 2h because he wants those nasty windfury procs. The last warrior is pretty much spot on with full priority on 2h, full on STR, full on STA, full on crit% and also prioritizing slow weapons. However since the STA mod is pretty low relative to the other stats the shaman is very close. Both the shaman and the last warrior is a very good match so they get a third alternative called equip, which basicly means he's in it for equiping the item if he wins. Both the shaman and warrior wants it so they hit equip. The system now does an internal roll in which the warrior is added a slight advantage, the winner naturaly gets the item. The item gets souldbound instantly as well to prevent selling to players. If everybody would've chosen greed then everybody would've had an equal shot at the item and the item would'nt have turned soulbound.

If you do some work on the system, like adding a negative roll modifier to people who has already won a lot of rolls, and the option to save the loot history. Then the system could perhaps replace DKP for high end raiding guilds as well.

[Yegolev]

Risking complexity, maybe you would want to restrict classes to usable items, or just allow a cap on priority.  Perhaps a priest could only put so many priority points into "2H axe", otherwise you have only mitigated the problem somewhat.

[tazelbain]

And what about the guy with the +17 sword rolling on +15 sword.
And what about the guy choosing off class priorities because he knows there are no good items for his class in this area and can sell the off class item for big bucks.

Hard to program fairness.

[Sairon]

Risking complexity, maybe you would want to restrict classes to usable items, or just allow a cap on priority.  Perhaps a priest could only put so many priority points into "2H axe", otherwise you have only mitigated the problem somewhat.

Yes, but I don't think a priest would prioritize 2h axe, since it's not beneficial to equip a 2h axe as a priest. He would be better of prioritizing for example staffs and then just greed roll if a 2h axe drops.

And what about the guy with the +17 sword rolling on +15 sword.
And what about the guy choosing off class priorities because he knows there are no good items for his class in this area and can sell the off class item for big bucks.

Hard to program fairness.

If the guy with the +17 sword still prioritize swords and a +15 turns up there's no reason for him to equip roll, since the +15 sword will get soulbound. It would be smarter for him to just greed roll, something which is available to everybody no matter their priorities, since a greed roll would mean he can sell it to players for profit.

Changing your settings on a per instance basis doesn't yield any benefits because of this as well, why equip roll a staff as a warrior if you can only sell it to a vendor for a very minor profit anyway? In WoW for example a rare soulbound chest piece of awesomenes sells for like 3g to a vendor, if it would be possible to sell it to players on the other hand you could get 100 times that price. So it would be smarter to just greed roll. Also since there's loads of possible drops from every boss in instances a specific item is not guaranteed, so you can't really tune your settings for mage stuff and benefit since there will be warrior stuff droping as well. Also there's the occasional world drop if we're talking WoW which can drop everywhere. Would be pretty irritating to be warrior set for mage stuff if http://www.thotbott.com/?i=18466 drops and you're forced to a greed roll because of your settings.

Of course all MMORPGs doesn't work like WoW, but in for example Shadowbane everything has a possibility of droping from every mob in the correct lvl range, or atleast that's how it seemed to be. Then it's not possible to change the settings either to gain a benefit.

[shiznitz]

Trying to fix social conflict with coding hasn't worked well but your intention is good. MMOGs are social games, though, so some things need to be player controlled. There is nFor exampleo way to remove all bickering. Devs should provide players with in game utilities to help organize better and let it work itself out. For example, why haven't any games implemented a DKP interface into the guild tools yet?

[Evangolis]

I'd rather go with an all-crafted system, where loot drops are all divisible items such as gold and ores, or untradable quest rewards.

[Margalis]

You could always take the systems some big guilds use now and code support for them into the actual game. Give people half-a-dozen tweakable loot-distribution policies they can choose from as leader.

Edit: The big advantage here is that those systems are proven to work allright and people like them.

[Yegolev]

Yes, but I don't think a priest would prioritize 2h axe, since it's not beneficial to equip a 2h axe as a priest. He would be better of prioritizing for example staffs and then just greed roll if a 2h axe drops.

Placing faith in people doing that is a flaw.  Say I had a priest doing raids, but I also had a warrior twink because priests are boring.  Obviously my priest can survive the raid encounter, otherwise we wouldn't be rolling on anything, so I prioritize the axe.  Or maybe I just want to be a dick.  A great way to be a dick is to have a priest that successfully rolls on some uber item he can't possibly use, followed by /dance emotes on the way to the AH.  You can't discount the players that just want to be dicks.

I am not trying to piss on your idea, but I think placing any faith in the player to make "right" choices is incorrect.

[Sairon]

Yes, but I don't think a priest would prioritize 2h axe, since it's not beneficial to equip a 2h axe as a priest. He would be better of prioritizing for example staffs and then just greed roll if a 2h axe drops.

Placing faith in people doing that is a flaw.  Say I had a priest doing raids, but I also had a warrior twink because priests are boring.  Obviously my priest can survive the raid encounter, otherwise we wouldn't be rolling on anything, so I prioritize the axe.  Or maybe I just want to be a dick.  A great way to be a dick is to have a priest that successfully rolls on some uber item he can't possibly use, followed by /dance emotes on the way to the AH.  You can't discount the players that just want to be dicks.

I am not trying to piss on your idea, but I think placing any faith in the player to make "right" choices is incorrect.

I think you misunderstod how equip roll works, which is what's used when something drops matching your prioritization, or perhaps I just explained it bad. If you do an equip roll it becomes soulbound, which means that it can't be traded anymore. If it's greed roll then everybody has an equal shot at the item, prioritization doesn't make a diffrence then.

All-crafted system seems great, I'm yet to see a game with that though, or perhaps AC2 used it, to long ago for me to remember anyway.

The loot systems some big guilds use works pretty good for managing loot within guilds, that is keeping track of raids and see who is geting the least loot and then giving him some. However I'm yet to see one of those who would work with randoms, when every raid is independant.

[Trippy]

One big problem with your idea is that penalizes the casual player who doesn't follow the spoiler sites religiously and know what mobs drop what items. Those that do that will be able to custom tailor their preferences for the specific drops that they care about in each instance (since you used WoW as your example) and that'll hose over the casual player. Yes the casuals won't usually get totally locked out of any drops but their preferences will be sub-optimal for the really good items reducing their chances. Any loot system that favors the hardcore catasses is not going to work in a casual-friendly game like WoW.

[Polysorbate80]

I'd rather go with an all-crafted system, where loot drops are all divisible items such as gold and ores, or untradable quest rewards.

Don't put it too much at the mercy of crafting classes, though.   You can either never find what you're looking for, or it's 10000000% overpriced if you can.

Make NPC item enchanters who can enchant (and disenchant/re-enchant) items for a fee, then go with something like WoW's talent system, only for items...you've got so many points per item (based on your level or something) so you can custom-enchant each piece of gear within the framework for whatever you want.  Need to go tank?  Buff your defense stats.  Got a tank?  Crank up the damage or utility.  Need stealth/healing/whatever? Blah blah blah and so forth...

Sure, you'll get the twinkies arguing about the one best set of stats, but hell, they do anyway.

Kinda ruins the fun of getting shinies, though.

[Typhon]

If auction houses accepted orders as well as items, then all-crafting could work.

Player wants item A, and is willing to spend X for it (item A crafting base price is N, X > N) and wants it within a certain amount of time.  Player creates a request in the auction house for item A, deposting Y amount of money ( Y = X + delivery time modifier).  Player crafters have a certain amount of time (rush/normal/long) to bid on the item request before NPC crafters fulfill the request for Y.  Regardless of how the item is created, the buyer recieves the item in the mail.  Requests for items which require specialy components can only be created with those items as deposit (in addition to the cash)

Casual players could be protected from their ignorance if most items were randomly generated, and all items could be broken down into (possibly randomly created) crafting components.  Get a crappy random with good stats?  Salvage it.

My preference would be for crafting to fill in the majority of player gear, with the lucky randomed item being the center pieces.  I also think items should have drawbacks in addition to bonuses.  Games that allow players to jack up every single resist do themselves no favors from an inflation perspective.

[AOFanboi]

If auction houses accepted orders as well as items, then all-crafting could work.

Ah, ye olde supply and demand. EVE Online rears its ugly head of near-perfection again. :)

[WindupAtheist]

And my soul dies a little bit more.  Someone code a spreadsheet with dings and give these people what they want.

[Margalis]

Again, what is the problem of just taking some popular methods that guilds use today and adding official support for them in the game?

[Glazius]

Again, what is the problem of just taking some popular methods that guilds use today and adding official support for them in the game?

Some guilds spend DKP ad hoc - that is, they assign to everything in the raid a DKP value and go from there. Doing this on the server side would either give guild leaders spoileriffic access to the raid's loot table if guilds could specify it themselves or raise complaints from players about the unequal utility of 5-DKP items that were assigned by the programmers.

Having a DKP-based auction system (bid against your guildies, the winning bid gets dumped into the 'coffers' and redistributed at the end of the raid) would certainly be codable. The problem is that there isn't anything you could do to the DKP system to make it sound reasonable _outside_ of a guild - or at least if it existed outside a guild it would become just another medium of exchange and people would farm it.

--GF

[Nija]

And my soul dies a little bit more.  Someone code a spreadsheet with dings and give these people what they want.

http://www.eve-online.com/

[Yegolev]

I think you misunderstod how equip roll works, which is what's used when something drops matching your prioritization, or perhaps I just explained it bad.

It is the former.  Reading is funduhmental.  I understand now that you are saying they get the equip roll option only if they can use the item, not based upon whether they prioritize it.  As I understand what you are saying, a wizard that prioritizes anything he can't wield would be screwing himself since he would never get the chance to do an equip roll on Unusable Sword +3.  Sounds good.

I'd rather go with an all-crafted system, where loot drops are all divisible items such as gold and ores, or untradable quest rewards.

Don't put it too much at the mercy of crafting classes, though. You can either never find what you're looking for, or it's 10000000% overpriced if you can.

IMHO, I take this as a sign that the crafting game is not working properly.  I'd like a system that only dropped raw materials if it was done right.  Unfortunately there will be whining anyway when the eventuality occurs: adventurers end up with Shiny Helmet of Slightly Less Sucking while the crafters roll around in their money like Scrooge McDuck.  This sort of white/blue collar division happened in Horizons, with the catass adventurers resenting the catass crafters.  Adventurers could kill shit easily but had the figurative moths fly out of their opened purses, while crafters lived in extravagant mansions.  Not that there was any barrier to doing both, mind you, other than a big supply of poopsocks.  Perhaps currency should not be implemented in that system... but this is becoming another topic.

I think limiting crafting to enchanting/socketing is an interesting idea, plus the idea of making crafting a separate class.  Taking on crafting in a MOG is, to me, like taking on a second job because you have to be good at combat in some form.  I think a section of players would enjoy a well-done business game, but integrating it with the combat game is the hard part.

Kinda ruins the fun of getting shinies, though.

Yes.  It is more fun to pull a slot machine arm than to haggle with a merchant for most people.  Might be able to work this with raw material drops, perhaps with a rune-like system where rare widgets can be crafted into gear.  Useless on their own and not immediately useful, but valuable.  Is this what people want?

What were we talking about?

[Alkiera]

the idea of making crafting a separate class.  Taking on crafting in a MOG is, to me, like taking on a second job because you have to be good at combat in some form.  I think a section of players would enjoy a well-done business game, but integrating it with the combat game is the hard part.

Agreed.  SWG did this to a certain extent, because to be a truly effective salesperson, you really wanted to spend CP on the merchant tree.  In the system in my mind, merchant is one of the specialties you can take, along with attack magic, sword swinging, or armor use.  It takes up a space on your character, thus you reduce the raw number of merchants... However, you need to make the merchant system worth it.  Make the merchant system rich and iinteresting(i.e. fun) for those who've spent the points or made the choice of that class, etc, and make it difficult for those who haven't to compete, in the same way the merchant won't be able to compete with the swordsman in a duel.

Of course, a system like this actually requires some thought, and if MMOs have taught us anything, it's that many players don't like to think while playing.  Mindlessness 4tw!

Alkiera

[Megrim]

I'm beginning to lean more and more towards the idea that in-game crafting should not be handled by the players themselves, but by NPCs that the players can hire to "work" for them. All the player is then responsible for is the Sims/Railroad Tycoon type interface/game system that governs the effectiveness of the crafting. Which, in turn leaves the PC to do all the fun foozle-bashing stuff.

 - meg

[Sairon]

And my soul dies a little bit more.  Someone code a spreadsheet with dings and give these people what they want.

I bet you want everything lootable by everyone and love all the problems that comes along with it. IMO for an enjoyable experience with randoms you need a loot distribution system of some sort, FFA simply doesn't cut it, especialy if you're playing a ranged class.

The only MMORPG I've played where crafting was a major source of equipment is AC2. I do recall me liking that aspect of the game, even if I didn't play it all that much. However, Super Mega Boss Dude droping 2 pieces of Super Wood isn't quite as cool as a Sword of Doom.

EDIT: fixed a typo

[WindupAtheist]

No, I want a game where uber-loot is such a non-factor that nobody commits suicide IRL because someone ninja looted their Cloudsong or wtf ever.

[Pococurante]

Crazy talk.  How else will we know who wins?

/end_GreenText

[Sairon]

No, I want a game where uber-loot is such a non-factor that nobody commits suicide IRL because someone ninja looted their Cloudsong or wtf ever.

Loot IS the game in a lot of cases today.

[Nija]

Well, a few guys in my clan were in the middle of finishing the UI mod for our LuckyLoot when they got banned, so it'll never see the light of day.

Here's the text, though. I can probably grab the framework if anyone wants to complete the mod, but I only ask that you give credit where credit is due.

http://nija.r33t.org/LuckyLoot.txt

We used this for ~3 months with 64 people in our DB and it worked great.

[Yegolev]

No, I want a game where uber-loot is such a non-factor that nobody commits suicide IRL because someone ninja looted their Cloudsong or wtf ever.

Horizons has (had?) mostly junk for loot.  Withered Aegis (teh bad guyz) equipment was unwearble, only good for salvage.  Any remotely useful item was (is?) player-crafted.  Even crafter tools were player crafted.

[Pococurante]

No, I want a game where uber-loot is such a non-factor that nobody commits suicide IRL because someone ninja looted their Cloudsong or wtf ever.

Are we talking about game worlds or John Lennon's philosophy of extracting money from do-nothing do-gooders.

Because I think I'd prefer a world not so thoroughly dumbed down that 0.0002% of the lowest possible denominator does not dictate the norm.  Silly of me perhaps.

[Furiously]

I think a bidding system would be interesting.

You want an item - you put up your gold and bid against other members of your group/raid. One sum blind bidding might be the most fun. But auction style would be fine too. The winning bidders money would then be split amongst the group/raid.

You can say this benefits players that play more as they will raise more money, my thought is at least everyone in the group would get something then from greedy-mcgreed and the next time an item drops they would have a better chance of winning. This would encourage people not to bid/roll for items they can't utilize, it would effectively be storing your karma.

Also wanted to add - if you are in a group with friends, bid 5 copper, and you have need before greed.  Or 3 friends and 2 strangers, something a friend can use drops, you can always give them back the portion of the money you receive from their bid to insure they win.

[Alkiera]

I think a bidding system would be interesting.

You want an item - you put up your gold and bid against other members of your group/raid. One sum blind bidding might be the most fun. But auction style would be fine too. The winning bidders money would then be split amongst the group/raid.

You can say this benefits players that play more as they will raise more money, my thought is at least everyone in the group would get something then from greedy-mcgreed and the next time an item drops they would have a better chance of winning. This would encourage people not to bid/roll for items they can't utilize, it would effectively be storing your karma.

Also wanted to add - if you are in a group with friends, bid 5 copper, and you have need before greed.  Or 3 friends and 2 strangers, something a friend can use drops, you can always give them back the portion of the money you receive from their bid to insure they win.

Hrm.  I agree, that sounds like a cool system.  Heck, the people who don't win one are going to go to auction house to get one anyway, or try to.  Might as well have all the people that want it spend the money there, too.  And it rewards everyone in the group/raid for the item.  The only problems I see...  people who buy(IGE) or farm gold and then go to a raid can drive prices at that one raid way up.  Then again, at least they'd be participating in the raid, rather than going to the AH and driving up prices on the whole server.

Alkiera

[Ironwood]

IGE Ruins Everything (tm)

[Furiously]

The only problems I see...  people who buy(IGE) or farm gold and then go to a raid can drive prices at that one raid way up.  Then again, at least they'd be participating in the raid, rather than going to the AH and driving up prices on the whole server.

Sure - but now that they have bought that gold and driven the price up, you are the one who benefits, you just got gold from them when they went into a bidding war with another IGE'r.

Every time you can't afford to win, you come closer to being able to. It's essentially a DKP system, with none of the bullshit rules.