f13.net

Might be the wrong section, but anyway...

Can you have a MMO without loot? Without some kind of item (outside of xp) dropping on the successful defeat of an opponent? I think you can have a MMO without uber loot, or without rare loot you've got to get lucky to find, but I've been arguing on another forum that loot is a pretty vital part of MMO's reward structure and is required. Other people are arguing that it should be taken out, it isn't needed, that points to boost abilities / skills are good enough, etc.

Any ideas? Have their been any lootless MMOs? If so, what were their reward systems?

CoH/V was close to lootless. The only things that dropped were their equivalents of potions, plus enhancements, which were not really loot exactly. When I was playing they weren't really anything like a hard to get or limited resource.

 I think they added some sort of loot-esque stuff eventually with inventions.

Would Planetside count?  You could take enemy weapons, but if you died with them they were gone.

If you want to keep people addicted playing your game it really really helps to have some sort of random reward system. It doesn't have to be "loot" per se (items you can equip or use on your character) but it helps if the rewards are "persistent" and help improve your character in some fashion.

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/07/the_neuroscience_of_gambling.php

It might be best to ask the question about what exactly loot is.

Simply put even quake and doom had pickup items. In fact its going to be difficult to find a game that has no concept of a power up or an increase in effectiveness. Even in pacman you had many forms of loot.

What do you define as loot exactly?

Planetside, CoH, ATitD, all say yes, absolutely.

GW, EVE, say 'relatively'.


You can have a MMO that is absolutely gear dependent, only slightly gear dependent, or not at all gear dependent.

Didn't mean to be too vague in the opening post, but the MMO the rather heated at times discussion is surrounding ChampO.

There's a very vocal group who think that since superheroes don't loot the fallen bodies of their opponents, then drop loot shouldn't be in the game. I'm not quite sure what they want to replace it with, but I think they want ChampO to fall closer to the p'n'p book and have everything relate purely to powers. Given that ChampO is going to be using a lvling system, unless the lvling rate is fast or combat is really, really fun, no loot is going to leave long stretches with no small incentives to keep playing.

CoH/V does have loot, but it is a loot-light game. People complained about that having 'loot' at all too.

Most characters in Fantasy novels don't go around looting the dead bodies of all their enemies either.

Ah ok
I see what you mean.

This goes along the same problems you see when killing a feral dog or a wolf gives you gold.
Why in the world did a wild animal have gold on him you ask?
Or for that matter should a superhero take the boots from his enemy?
Depending on the type of game and lore some game mechanics can seem rather strange or out of character.


basically you can in fact eliminate these kinds of things through proper presentation.
example:
"During the fight you knocked over something revealing some cool boots" -- However this is a bit of a bandaid it would be hard to explain how you happen on so many things by chance.
You simply collect points or build a score that you later trade in for items -- You gain your loot in a more indirect mannor
As you level up you get stronger and there is no emphasis on equipment or artifacts -- You experience points are your indirect loot -- you use points to buy special abilities or traits.

I see it as perfectly reasonable for people to want the way they progress in a game to closely match the lore of the world from which they are immersed.
However with that said as a core game mechanic the concept of loot in and of itself is not limited to just drops from bad guys. Its literally anything you collect either for points, prestige, or stats, temporary or permanent is by definition loot. Since presentation plays such an important role its very possible to simply paint the picture however you want.

Yeah you can present your MMOG in such a way where the basic definition of loot has no part in the game at all.

And most fantasy novels are terrible and boring.

Maybe they should start looting.

/insert Tasslehoff reference here

They don't have to have the loot actually drop off enemies. It could be implemented purely as a reward from quests, kill collector npcs, and that kind of thing.

Looting an enemy = One pull on the slot machine.  In most MMOs, loot is dropped when an enemy is killed because the dev can fairly easily control how long it takes to kill an enemy, and thereby control the flow of cash.  You could easily couple that to something else (e.g. enemies don't drop loot, but they guard boxes which do), but I suspect it would take a few iterations to iron out the exploits.

If you want to go with something that's consistent with the lore of Superheroes, they generally don't get much of anything for their efforts, they're doing it because people will suffer if they don't (which you can't really duplicate in an MMO).  You don't see them getting any loot from anything, bad guys or otherwise.  Iron Man doesn't clear out a warehouse and rummage through the crates in case there's a set of better gauntlets in there.  Maybe you could have some kind of secret identity mechanic, or something.  Like Spider-Man, he wouldn't be lifting the wallets of the thugs he pummeled, but winning the fight might net him some "Photographs" which he could then sell.  But generally, I don't think superheroes and loot really work together lore wise.

Most superheroes avoid actually killing their enemies anyway so the argument is kinda moot anyway.  Superheroes often seem to be independently wealthy, above the concerns of materialism or in the pay of some top secret ultra rich organization that provides most of their equipment and day to day needs.  Then again just like many fantasy heroes are of the ruling class and have everything provided for, have a privileged tutor/mentor, can summon all they want with magic or lead a traveling lifestyle not conducive to lugging around too much money.  Most characters almost always have at hand the things they need.

In general most literature/movies as a part of the escapism conveniently avoid the minutiae of being a hero and stick to the action. Hero poorkidbutspecial gets the supersword of bad guy killing cos he is destined to weild it, not because he spent days repetitively killing monsters to collect crafting materials. Movies like the Spiderman series showing Peter struggling for money is a point of contrast.  Its only in  rpg games and especially in mmo's where you have to grind out the day to day troubles of getting paid to support 'the action' cos its gots to be real.

Sure they may not loot bodies in fantasy novels but they sure as shit loot something. They may get a upgraded sword from a Dragon's stash, or steal some booty from the King's castle, etc. I always thought it was silly to loot bodies and thought it would be more realistic if the NPC or Mob was guarding a coffer or chest or something, you sure as hell would loot THAT, given the opportunity.

That said, thinking back to playing Motor City Online, they didn't have loot, per se, but an achievement system that allowed you to upgrade your vehicle as you earned points. So you could advance your character through races and the like but without having to expressly loot anything. Something similar could work in just about any persistent game to satisfy the 'ooooh shiny' need.

Weird, I always thought it is silly in movies when people DON'T loot bodies. Especially an extra pistol in modern times. Maybe less so in fantasy setting, but I would be looking for a dagger if I only had a sword....shit like that. Can never be overprepared :)

Superheroes do get more powers and abilities from time to time.
Tony Stark is always tinkering with his gear, and at times has a fleet of Iron Man suits to pick from.
So he'd be the type who took a trade skill and makes his own loot out of rare mat drops.  :grin:

I think if you present it in a little more abstract way, like the Badge of Justice system in WoW, then superheroes can get loot that they can turn in to augment their powers, thus emulating the loot, ding, gratz mechanic without having wolves drop swords and shit.

CoH suffers for having a lack of loot to be honest.  You can only play a game so long where the goal is to fight bad guys and level.  I actually think CoH would be a better game if there were loot beyond the invention system, even if it were just cosmetic.  They have added costume drops in the invention line, but most of it is too ugly to be desirable. 

Let's face it, loot is a retention carrot.  It creates an arms race among people with far too much free time.  I think that any MMO with a long term retention goal will have to have loot as part of their design model.  It's far easier to create player diversity through loot than it is through powers/archetypes/skill sets. 

I love the term retention carrot!

Question
Are you saying that such an arms race among people could not exist with out armor or weapons as loot? Too me I see armor, weapons to be nearly the same thing as sinking points into a skill tree as you gain levels.

They both provide stat bonuses depending on how they are implemented.
My initial way of think about this is that you can have such an arms race even if improved armor and weapons are not a part of the game at all.

It is far easier to vary players through loot than to create a myriad of classes/skills/archetypes.  The more possibilities for the latter, the more difficult the game is to balance.  Loot allows players to be both different and equal at any given momemnt.  Variation of looty tables is as easy as skinning objects.  Archetypes/skills/classes require rigorous balancing. 

Yeah, don't get hung up on loot as storytelling device, e.g., as something which immersively connects to the source fiction for a MMO. About the only MMO where looting as it is experienced in game would be reasonably expressed as behavior within the source fiction is Fallout/postapocalyptic or maybe the Matrix (e.g., a world which *is* a computer game, with all their conventions).

Instead, ask what a looting mechanic *is* as a game mechanic. The slot machine analogy is perfect: it's the random chance of a positive consequence from actions taken in game, with said positive consequence having permanence or persistence within the gameworld's economy. You can have a random consequence that's basically temporary (short buff for character) and that's not really loot. Loot is a persistent object or a persistent change to the gameworld.

Now could many MMOGs do a far better job at making loot more integrated into the source fiction, the way that (for example) some MMOGs take pains to make "death" make sense within their gameworld fiction? Yes, absolutely. The fantasy-themed MMOGs could do all sorts of things that made more sense than pulling a magic sword out of the ass of a dead rat. But whatever fictional skin you chose to put on the mechanic, the basic structure would be the same, and the "hook" it provides to players the same. It boils down to an additional reason to engage in combat or take an action: the random chance of an event that will provide a persistent benefit to the player. I think most MMOGs benefit from that mechanic, and it doesn't necessarily make a MMOG more or less gear-dependent to have one.

And what about collecting medals or achievements that when "equipped" or earned give you stat bonuses or new abilities.
I suppose it is the same exact concept as armor in some ways but much more simplistic in almost every sense possible.

I don't think CoX qualifies as a lootless game anymore, sure the majority of the loot is vendor trash or sold on the auction house for a pittance to get your "sold x amount of stuff" badge, but there are a few useful and rare recipes that people will run your Speed Edens or Katie Hanon tfs again and again in order to get. It's a bit better than camping a rare spawn on a timer, in that you can do it a bit at a time, but it's still a loot camp. The next issue is replacing the random recipe drop with merits and a recipe store, removing the randomness of the rewards, the details of which are the subject of much wailing on the forums.

I do agree that games need loot though. As mentioned, it's that periodic little reward that keeps you going. An mmo without loot would need to have insanely fun combat or a powerful and compelling narrative to motivate players to kill all those foozles month after month.

Most of the best SF and fantasy books have anti-heroes be they thieves, torturers, cowards, lunatics, fools or pirates. Its easier to get sucked into writing something banal if you try and follow the generic sword and sorcery hero, villain and princess theme.

Loot is good. Random loot that offers the lucky player something typically attained only by hardcore achievers is better still. Making lower-grade loot so abundant that anybody can choose how to balance their character from a wide selection after only a few hours of play (as per Diablo and its clones) is best of all.

ToonTown

No loot.

Yup, Toontown is the first that comes to mind for me. But that's not lacking loot to keep it simple, it's also because the premium value in the game is spontaneous cooperation between players. Loot almost inevitably works against that, because it's an individual chance at a random reward. Even if you rewarded it to groups in something like Toontown, you'd create an incentive for people to somehow arbitrage a higher chance of the reward through controlling or manipulating their grouping behaviors, probably. E.g., let's say that a whole group pulled "the slot machine" at the end of a fight and got rewarded equally. If you made so that the table of random rewards was always the same regardless of the level of challenge provided by enemies, every player would stay in the easiest environment and pull the slot machine level constantly there. (Just as if the jackpots were the same on penny machines as on $10 machines, everyone would play the penny slots.) If the slot machine paid off in relationship to risk, then many players would try to arbitrage the best risk/reward ratio by trying to "free ride" off of higher level Toons fighting higher level Cogs. Which works against spontaneous cooperation.

you don't need loot, but then you wouldn't have an item based economy, and then you couldn't have an item based combat system.

like in Eve, if you don't need loot then you better have an alternative system of advancement other than XP, since XP needs combat which needs items.

So yeah, you don't need loot, but you would need to overhaul everything else.


The problem is not "can you replace loot/XP_advancement" in an MMO, but how do you reward players for playing without them (see what Trippy said)?  How do you maintain competition and learning if there are no apparent and immediate rewards? 

Eve is nothing but loot.  Your avatar doesn't exist except as a .jpg and a pod.  All miners do is loot asteroids for hours on end.  The only reason gear has any requirements is to prevent people from endlessly making alts for easy money.  Hell, having enough loot in that game means you no longer pay a monthly fee. 

Planetside allows looting (hacking terminals and vehicles), and it has corpse looting, but loot is extremely easy to obtain on respawn, almost to the point of effortlessness.  So it has 'free loot'.

CoH's loot was initially pretty abstract.  It was more like random powerups then actual widgets. 


Making a totally lootless game might be a bad idea, since people like to be rewarded and collect shineys, but loot is usually gated by some other term of advancement, like by levels.  I think its less about a game being lootless, and more about how disposable the loot is.  No one cares about losing your rifle in Planetside: when you respawn, you get a new one right away with a keystroke or two.

actually I thought Eve was best for player created gear -- untrue?  I knew there were high end blueprints that might drop, but again they are player crafting

Player created gear is still loot though; I think what we're talking about here is a totally itemless game.

Imagine this instead: on killing a creature, there would be a chance that a random event would occur in the world around you. Or your character would change randomly in some fashion. Would that satisfy the "fun" of having a meaningful, persistent thing happen as a random additional consequence of engaging in combat? Done right, I think it might.

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: Loot is simply *things.* The flair that makes up any given game. It's one of those basic building blocks. If we're talking about loot SYSTEMS, that's one thing. But loot is basically one of those pieces of matter that exists no matter what.

Mind you, I can find counterpoints, Pong, Tetris, Bejeweled - some puzzle games, etc. But anything with a beginning and end that isn't a challenge against yourself, has loot.

Mario had loot. That is, a temporary power up is still loot. Have you ever yelled at a friend "Get the star!" Well, you're asking him to get loot.

The bigger question is, "What kind of loot systems should MMOGs have."

To which I'd answer, depends on the game.

All of that said, "Loot" is one of those words that's simply in the vocabulary of gaming. How you define the loot doesn't take away nor add to be it being loot. It exists in some form or another. I'm trying to think of a modern game that isn't a puzzle title without loot, but I can't. Even sports titles let you trade players and grow them - they are the loot. Maybe the playbook is as well, I don't know if sports titles have evolving playbooks yet.

Scores, if you want to get down to the nitpicky.  Pong might be one of the few games without 'loot'.

This was my first inclination as well but I think the OP is driving at a different definition of what loot is.
He seems to be saying loot as in items dropped from bad guys you defeat.


..
To be honest the idea of a game with out the proper definition of loot hurts my head... Even in pong you had score system to show how many times you have won. And for that matter the ball would move faster each time you hit it if I recall.. I need sleep.. lol...

Dropped items are but one part of loot.

Yeah and I think that's where the Ops question is tricky..
One of the reasons this is being debated so heatedly in the other forum is because you have people with different definitions of loot yelling back and forth...

Too me what you said before

sounds about right to me..
pacman had pac pellets, and tetris has points, doom guy had a soul sphere, the original mario had coins and a POW.
loot

Reading the OP's post, he's differentiating between xp and levels and gained abilities verus a sword or a gun or a +5 Condom of I Want To Finish College.

So high scores would fall under XP. Mario's invulnerability stars and Pac Power dots would fall under buffs.

And I think you can make a MMOG where there's no loot. Planetside is a good example since the equipment is a tool and not an objective in itself. And you don't loot enemy players in order to get a chance at a more powerful version of a specific weapon.

I think loot in a persistent-world MMOG needs to be persistent for it to be appropriate to the genre. Rewards in games that just last for one session are "loot" of a sort (objects in the game environment that the character can collect or use which are a result of the player's actions), but non-persistent rewards in MMOGs don't seem to me to pose a distinctive question about the MMOG form.

I was a bit vague in the first post, but I wanted to see the replies.

To split hairs (and probably sent this thread straight to the Design forum) there are two kinds of reward models you can offer within MMOs (that I can think of right now): deterministic and probabilistic. Deterministic is XP, points, high score, achievements - you do a specific task to get a specific reward. Probabilistic is loot drops, random events, temporary power-ups... can't think of any others - during the course of play you get a random reward.

The ChampO argument circles around that probabilistic loot doesn't fit the superhero genre - everything is related to powers and powers don't get random upgrades. To a smaller extent items don't fit within the superhero genre, because what is more important are the powers a character has. Superheroes don't loot off their fallen opponents, don't need to carry around food or crafting tools or anything like that because it goes against the genre. They don't get random rewards for fighting.

I disagree to a large extent - Batman has 'looted' his opponents for technological advantage (OMAC), often characters are fighting over a loot MacGuffin, there are a few superhero crafters such as Forge - but I also think they are arguing from the wrong side in trying to make a video game into a comic book when a lot of the genre conventions are pretty weak (e.g. secret identities. Yeah, everyone loves pretending to be a powerless nerd like Clark Kent - there's some powerful escapism for you) especially in-game. Superheroes should be centred around their powers, but a bit of gear - for rounding out a character, for providing a few more options - doesn't hurt, nor does getting that random power-up you wanted having just defeated a mob.

Didn't know about ToonTown, so thanks for that.

Fishing doesn't count as looting?

I like loot of some kind in games, whether it's fishing or other resource gathering, but the best loot was the plink from Diablo2 when a gem of some type dropped.

I can see where fishing should count. When I posted ToonTown as my response I was thinking that there isn't anything transferable between folks that resembles loot.  You fish and get the fish, nobody else can take them from you.

I feel the urge to write rising.

That's just gas.

huh?
Should I run for cover or something??

The reality is that sometimes you have to make gameplay decisions that don't exactly fit in with the source material.  If you read the Lord of the Rings books, you don't see random magic items just dropping off every 5th or 6th random orc that gets killed.  That's something that P&P games and then CRPGs added in.

Don't these arguments generally end up with people talking about how you don't do things in games that you do in real life and vice versa anyway?  Trying to be too realistic or true to the genre or whatever could well net you a very boring game.

Yeah - the same people who say that superheroes don't loot are willing to ignore the fact setting someone on fire with your radioactive plasma probably isn't just going to make them fall over unconscious so they can be arrested.

The idea of a persistent space should have a purpose for existing beyond a lot of players occupying the same space.  That end alone is not only insufficient; it's counterproductive. 

MMOs have not become public spaces for dynamic roleplaying, where various player-characters assume the roles taken by computer-controlled characters in single-player games; instead, MMOs are people doing essentially the same thing as players in a single-player RPG do; going up against NPC enemies at the behest of NPC characters.

In the absence of some compelling reason to do this, the MMORPG experience is inferior in a lot of ways to a single player RPG.  Nobody in a single player RPG will ever roll into town and kill your questgiver, forcing you to wait for it to respawn.  If you want to kill an annoying NPC in a single player game, you can be given the choice to do so; in an MMO, it has to respawn for use by other people.  You won't ever have to wait for the enemy you're hunting to respawn because someone killed it.  You won't ever be killed by some random player while fighting your epic battle. 

In a single player RPG, you can also control the destiny of the world and be an important character in the story.  Playing an MMO makes you a generic or anonymous hero.  You may get to fight alongside an important character, but you never become one.

Because neither the world nor the story can revolve around the player as a consequence of other players using the space, sharing the space with other players is not an end unto itself.  Let's be real, even if most of the players were interested in roleplaying in the game, and we aren't, it wouldn't take very many people to counterbalance the benefit of such a community in terms of gameplay.  And, if we're there to make friends, the game becomes a glorified chat room.

Just like other online gamers, MMO players don't come to RPG, they come to game.  And loot is the most obvious thing that makes it rewarding to play a persistent character in a persistent unending world, where you don't get the benefit of "You win" at the end of the round. 

The allure of a persistent character is in the ability to advance and improve that character, and improve your character's status within the game's social ladder, ordinarily by making him more powerful.

Of course, when you talk about RNG loot drops or arbitrary rare drops, those are not necessary. The pendulum seems to be shifting from powerful stuff being a "winning lotto ticket" to being a consequence of achieving difficult things; i.e. killing a nasty boss most people won't make the effort to beat, or prevailing in PvP.  WoW has been progressing in a direction of trying to reward players with something less random than a roll at a loot table by putting in token system, the badge of justice turn-ins, gear for reputation accomplishments and even NPCs who will take one loot in trade for another.

 

(http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/6342/lootgv1.jpg)