Rarity/Quantity find calculation (proposal)

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gh0un wrote:

In every action rpg that uses a loot system, whose dropchances can be altered through several effects (rarity and quantity find), and also is dependant on the player that lasthits a particular enemy in order to calculate which players rarity find bonus is utilized, there always is one particular problem:

People are being encouraged to always let the player with the highest rarity find get all the lasthits.
There is a chest? Sorry cant open, the player with the highest rarity find should open it.
There is a rare enemy? Sorry cant kill it, have to wait for the rarity find player, so on and on.

People stop playing the game (killing monsters and opening chests etc) and start standing around, out of fear that they might lasthit a boss by accident, or open a large chest by accident.

This is bad gamedesign. It was bad gamedesign back in diablo 2 and it is still bad gamedesign in every single arpg that utilizes this way of handling the issue.
This issue makes playing the game in a group a hassle instead of a fun experience.

People shouldnt have to worry about tedious stuff like this if they want to compete, but right now you are basically forced to.
People basically are encouraged to play alone instead of in a group, because they dont want anyone to mess their rarity find up (in case they have a lower value).

Players should never be punished for playing in a group, it should atleast be as fun as if you were playing solo, rather it should be more fun.

There are several solutions that can fix this issue without making rarity find too strong.


The perfect solution (probably the hardest to implement) would be to have separate loot for each player.
If player A and B play together, and A kills an enemy, the enemy should drop loot for both, once for player A and once for player B.
The loot for player A is enchanced by player A´s rarity find, while player B´s loot is enchanced by his rarity find.
Every player can only see his loot and not the others.

Problem solved. No one has to worry about opening chests and killing stuff if they have low rarity find, they can do it without having to wait for the player with the highest rarity find.

As that solution is probably the hardest to implement, it probably is not the most preferable one, therefore i have two more solutions that soften the issue up a little (they dont fix it altogether).


The first one is to have a weighted table that factors in the player with the highest rarity find the most.
If player A has 100% rarity find, and player B has 50% rarity find, the lootsystem could factor in player A´s rarity find with a factor of 2, while factoring in player B´s rarity find with a factor of 1, regardless of who lasthits an enemy.
Player A would basically contribute 200% rarity find to the kill, while player B contributes 50% rarity find.
250% divided by 3 = 83% combined rarity find.


This would mean that the combined rarity find is a little closer to the rarity find of the player with the highest value, while never exceeding it (there is no way to abuse this system and increase the combined rarity find above 100% in this particular case.



Another option is to have a weighted diceroll on whose rarity find is utilized for a specific slain enemy (regardless of who lasthits).
If player A has 100% rarity find and player B has 50% rarity find, 66% of the time the lootsystem will utilize player A´s rarity find when determining the loot (regardless of lasthitter) and 33% of the time the system will utilize player B´s rarity find instead.



All three options would make it a lot more fun to play in a group when rarity find is involved.
Right now its a hassle to play with friends, since you are always forced (if you want to be competitive) to leave the lasthit/chest to a specific player.

The suggestion that each monster drop separate loot for each player using their own rare find chance sounds the best to me. Maybe a 5 s time when loot is locked to the player that is assigned to it? after 5 s its free for all? it rewards players stacking rare find, while the other 2 punishes the player stacking rare find.
Great post though. :P

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akajinroh wrote:

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Strill wrote:

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akajinroh wrote:

I think the chance to find should be based on either the mean of both player's chance or should just default to the highest player's chance and eliminate the "last to hit issue".

As far as having the developers provider baby sitter conflict resolution in the programming I think that's lame. Getting screwed is part of life. Deal with that now or resign yourself to a life of cutting and watching Twilight. Build trust, form partnerships, be wary of new people in your parties.

If the dev's want to have fun make PvP allowed in parties. Add a vote feature or button you can push opening up the item to contest. Don't like that they grabbed your uber item? Hit the "bad teammate button", slay them, and watch the last 1-5 items dropped become available again for you to take what was rightfully yours.

I don't need a random system, roll system, raid leader system, etc etc etc.

Fairness or combat = problem solved.

Lost the fight? Lesson learned. Maybe a rep system. You could defame the person and their account gets flagged. Name in red, skill and crossbones next to their name. Wanna be ruthless and player with the ruthless? They can be found easily. Want mommy to tuck you in and tell you the bad man can't hurt you anymore? Only party with folks with hearts and rainbows in their rep profile.

You're welcome.

You're incredibly ignorant. Anyone who's spent 2 minutes in Maple Story knows that rep systems are worthless.

And I also might add that you haven't given any justification for why we should tolerate getting screwed on drops other than "I think that's lame" and that getting screwed happens in other completely irrelevant contexts.

I absolutely did, you just don't like the implications of a world where you remain at risk of getting screwed. I like the idea having the chance to screw and be screwed. It ads an element of danger, risk, relationship building, social ramifications, planning, etc etc. You know, like in life. I don't want to have this removed because your solutions are either to be anti-social entirely or remove social interaction from the party system.

This part of your post couldnt be more wrong.
I can tell you have never played an ARPG in multiplayer before, otherwise you would know that your post makes a point for our argument, not yours.

In diablo 2, people stopped playing with random people and stopped socializing with them because guess what, just like in real life people dont like to get screwed with more than once.
People that played on a competitive level, never played with a random group of people. Never.

They would have rather played solo (due to the rarity find issue) but that would have meant 7 free slots on their server for any kind of troll that wants to screw with them, so they basically were forced to play with 7 other people, which then ofc had to be mates, never someone random.

In path of exile, you can play solo perfectly fine because no one can enter your instance of a location unless you invite them to your party.
With the current system i can see top players and pretty much everyone that wants to compete, playing this game solo.

You have to invite someone to your party, so he can screw you over? How much sense does that make?
The feature in path of exile that only encampments are global, pretty much already removes any possibility of "cut throat item grabbing" because no one will ever invite someone random to their party.
There is no incentive to participate in an arbitrarily created competition for items (which wont be a competition anyways, its gonna be a jerkfest) when in actuality you can choose to play solo and have your cake and eat it too.

The only people that are going to be invited in such an environment are good friends, but thats where the issue i described in the OP comes into play.
The solutions i suggested would fix that, and the separate loot for each player solution even fixes the problem that there is ZERO incentive to play with complete strangers in the current system.

I have never invited a random player to my party since there really isnt any incentive to do so right now, nothing good can come out of it.


If developers want players to compete against each other for items, they would have to make the whole world global and enable the killing off of other players (so you can defend your boosloot, by killing others off before you finish the boss).
Then it would make sense to party up with people, so you can defend each other better.
But the problem i described in the OP would still persist even there, and it definitely needs fixing, we cant allow GGG to make the same old mistake again.

Even blizzard (im saying EVEN blizzard, because lately they didnt make wise choices at all) realized that having an arbitrarily created competition for items (whose winner is determined by latency anyways) is terrible game design, and having seperated rarity find for each player is just bad.
Thats why they use the solution with seperated loot, it fixes the issue i described in the OP, and it also fixes the problem that people dont want to play with strangers if there is a possibility of someone screwing them up.

GGG needs to reevaluate how they want competition between players to occur, because there is no way that any of the stuff that is described in their post (that someone linked in this thread) is going to happen when all they have to do is NOT accept any party invite (except in cut throat league, but if you can party up with others in that league, then the problem persists there aswell).

Are people allowed to party up with others in the cut throat league or is it a solo league so to speak.
Joining that league with friends sounds incredibly fun to me, solo sounds kind of boring.
Anyway, point is, if you party up with friends, you shouldnt have to worry about who lasthits what due to rarity find discrepancies.

Having leagues where all areas are public, they obviously should have ffa loot, anything else doesnt make sense.

Another option that came to my mind, fixes the rarity find lasthit dilemma i described in the OP, but at the same time works for cut throat league (if you can actually party up there, i still dont know whether thats possible or not).

Monsters dont necessarily need to drop loot that is invisible to some in order to fix the issue.
Monsters could just have several loot tables, each allocated to a specific player.
If a monster is slain, it is decided whether something drops, FOR each loot table (with the same dropchance that a player would have if he played solo).
If player B kills a monster, then the system checks twice whether something drops, once out of player A´s loottable and once out of player B´s loottable.
Player A´s loottable is enchanced by his own rarity/quantity find, and player B´s loottable is enhanced by his.
Once the item drops, it is visisble to everyone though.

This way, mates that party up dont have to worry about who lasthits what, because they dont have any disadvantage rarity find wise when compared to playing solo, while at the same time making it possible in cut throat league to have a competition for items (since the items dropped are visible for everyone).

This solution fixes the issue that is described in the OP, for both normal leagues and cut throat leagues, without any unwanted sideeffects.

I will add this solution to the OP.

The way i see it, D2 style drop of items just makes the community unfriendly. Like i would never play with randoms just cause i know most of them are jerks stealing loot. Especially on HC mode where they try to get me killed aswell.

Though i would like to have a choice to make my own league, and make my own rules. So Players can pick and choose what league to play in (micro transaction to buy a create-a-league permit)

Finally if this games Normal/HC league is going to have a system that penalises me for playing with randoms and people with no rare find. Well im going solo then. Because i care about my loot and if randoms decrease my chance of finding good stuff. I wont play with them ever. And if i play with people it would be with friends then that i could trust.

Well, I stand by my opinion. If you want to rep good players and "bad players" so you know what you're in for and can ostracize those who don't play by the rules of the party fine. Setting the chance to find at either the average of everyone or the highest player's chance to find fixes the last hit issue. And if it's a question of more phat lootz you can set a small increased chance to find for each party member. Justify it with 'more eyes' looking for drops or w/e.

I played Diablo 1 on the day it was released. I've seen the progression too. I still don't think you need a system to decide who gets what. Let players decide. Got screwed on ebay with glorious plates of the whale and rings. It happens. I don't think I need to pay Blizzard or GGG an extra 5,10,or 50 dollars a year to prevent me losing 5,10,50 dollars a year to people who are jerks. You want to pay people to prevent you from ever having your feelings hurt next?


I stand by the idea of having the ability to duel or slay a member if they grabbed something the party thinks they should drop. If they overwhelm you and take it anyway *flex* survival of the fittest. You guy's can geek it up all you want hording your digital artifacts and hiding under a bridge from the chance somebody takes a ring from you. I'm sure the industry will solve this problem with more micro-transactions for you. Don't like something you say? Well the cause and solution will be more money.

I don't want my game play experience with other players to be widdled down to "wow, gratz on the whatever" and "wow, you eat food in Whatitstan too!? Wow, it's a small world and look how connected we all are". How is that not any less inane than marching around solo for 1000 hours hacking away at nothing until you get some uber item. Other than throwing it on the growing pile of regret and broken dreams that's been building in the corner of you room, what do you plan to do with it? Play with people, learn how to roll with the punches, and accept that you'll take a few blows and give a few blows.

I'd love a cut throat league. Make that happen GGG.

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akajinroh wrote:

Well, I stand by my opinion. If you want to rep good players and "bad players" so you know what you're in for and can ostracize those who don't play by the rules of the party fine. Setting the chance to find at either the average of everyone or the highest player's chance to find fixes the last hit issue. And if it's a question of more phat lootz you can set a small increased chance to find for each party member. Justify it with 'more eyes' looking for drops or w/e.

I played Diablo 1 on the day it was released. I've seen the progression too. I still don't think you need a system to decide who gets what. Let players decide. Got screwed on ebay with glorious plates of the whale and rings. It happens. I don't think I need to pay Blizzard or GGG an extra 5,10,or 50 dollars a year to prevent me losing 5,10,50 dollars a year to people who are jerks. You want to pay people to prevent you from ever having your feelings hurt next?


I stand by the idea of having the ability to duel or slay a member if they grabbed something the party thinks they should drop. If they overwhelm you and take it anyway *flex* survival of the fittest. You guy's can geek it up all you want hording your digital artifacts and hiding under a bridge from the chance somebody takes a ring from you. I'm sure the industry will solve this problem with more micro-transactions for you. Don't like something you say? Well the cause and solution will be more money.

I don't want my game play experience with other players to be widdled down to "wow, gratz on the whatever" and "wow, you eat food in Whatitstan too!? Wow, it's a small world and look how connected we all are". How is that not any less inane than marching around solo for 1000 hours hacking away at nothing until you get some uber item. Other than throwing it on the growing pile of regret and broken dreams that's been building in the corner of you room, what do you plan to do with it? Play with people, learn how to roll with the punches, and accept that you'll take a few blows and give a few blows.

I'd love a cut throat league. Make that happen GGG.

Id like a cuthroat league aswell. Like you suggested with "oh you stole my rare item? well say bye bye to your health". But in the end it comes down to latency and how good ones economy is to have good internet/good pc. Also melee will have a significant advantage for picking up loot as they will be next to the mob, unlike ranged who needs 1-2 s to reach the loot. Which i why i think depending on the melee vs ranged balance of things we need a separete pvp damage system then?

And about the good rep, bad rep system. It will be abused, so its really no point in having it. LoL has that and most of the people that use it just gives bad rep to everyone that they are supposed to judge irregardless of how they acted in the case they got reported for. Or just report randoms for any reason they see fit such as: "Ill report you cause i felt like it".

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akajinroh wrote:

I still don't think you need a system to decide who gets what. Let players decide.

Dont want to sound rude, but thats not the point of this thread.
You are free to reread the OP. I really dont like it when threads stop discussing the OP and start heading into another direction.

Allocated loot was just one of the solutions i offered to fix the issue that is brought up in the OP.
The solution i offer in the edit of the OP fixes the issue, while keeping a ffa loot system.

There are some hardly to solve problems with the supposed changes of the (especially) rarity calculations:

- if you unbound the calculation of the drops from the killing hit, I see abuse potential (and that means it will be abused): take one strong fighter char, and cram the rest of the gang full with rarity modifiers and you have a perfect support by chars that would land no deadly hit ever. (to choose the average rarity value of the chars instead of the highest is just a number, with the same effect - only lesser)

- to give the drops a delay before they are visible to all party members cause a very major loss in killspeed (you'll have to check all "your" loot after every kill...
And, it may be even dangerous and frustrating if you, as a ranged fighter, have to run to your drop to grab it (and run back after) while in a unfinished battle.

I could think about a 'crazy# solution for personal item drops, but since its forced by GGG to offer a FFA loot model its not really necessary to dive deep into this.

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Mr_Cee wrote:

There are some hardly to solve problems with the supposed changes of the (especially) rarity calculations:

- if you unbound the calculation of the drops from the killing hit, I see abuse potential (and that means it will be abused): take one strong fighter char, and cram the rest of the gang full with rarity modifiers and you have a perfect support by chars that would land no deadly hit ever.

If you can beat the endgame with 1 strong class, while having a party full of rarity modifier chars, then the game is too easy and needs to be made harder.
Its that simple really.

The root of the problem you are describing lies in the difficulty of the game and therefore needs to be fixed there.

I am in merciless right now and am wearing full rarity/quantity find gear with my witch, and my marauder friend is also wearing full rarity/quantity find.
Until now the game was way too easy, we never ran into a problem
Nothing stops us from splitting up, playing solo, and abuse the even weaker enemies (since they scale up in strength the more players are in the party) in regards to utilizing our rarity/quantity find.

The fix to that problem is to make the game harder or to nerf damage output of specific classes (that deal too much damage).
Fixing it by only utilizing the lasthitting players values, is laziness.

Now im talking about the casual league, both Normal and HC with the following suggestions.

Ive tried both systems of unassigned loot and assigned loot.

In D2 i lost items left and right when i played with randoms. And i just disconnected and never got far with randoms and ended up playing the game with a friend.
For the same reason i wouldnt play with randoms in *fastest to pick up loot* race in PoE. Now if i could kill the randoms, that would somewhat alleviate the issues.

I play Guildwars 1 aswell, In which all loot is reserveed for some time for a specific player. The issue here is that in some cases youd have a ton of loot on the ground just because the randoms/friends/guild buddies didnt have space to pick them up. Now that system would need a "make all my loot free for everyone" button for each player.

How about a player option like that? An option for players to make the normally reserved loot free-for-all? Say i play with 3 randoms. then id make sure my button for my loot is set to "reserved for me", and if i play with friends id set it to "make my loot free-for-all".

And about nerfing magicfind by math. it punishes players stacking magic find, and punishes players that are forced to wear magicfind cause their friend is wearing that. Say player A wears 200% magicfind and player B doenst care about magic find at all. Now player A will get worse loot and and player B will be blamed for it, thus ruining the game for both.



Overall i think PoE should strive for a blend of hardcore D2 rules and modify those to emphasize co-operation between players. Like Guildwars 2 does with all its systems designed to say "Play with others, you only benefit from it!"

Now unless i completely missed the point of online gaming, isnt it to have fun and meet new people? And not worry about drops, killing blows, math to get max magic find rate and thinking "i may be forced to kill this random player, ill treat him/her/it as an enemy and let them die instead of supporting them"?

If anything, a hostile community that punishes co-operation due to the standard ruleset will kill PoE really fast.

PS: I still think a cutthroat league will be a good idea, different leagues, differnt rules. Then GGG will get alot of happy players that can choose their ruleset as which to play by.