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

Not a fan of FFA loot myself; the only appeal I can see in it is in the added chaos in the middle of a fight where stuff is dropping and you have to pick it up before someone else does, and the ''competitive'' element it adds.

Some players might enjoy it; for me this sort of chaos breaks the pace, immersion and takes my attention away from the pleasure of breaking apart legions of enemies and towards reading a massive wall of text on my screen, and the added ''competition'' with other players only serves to make me want to avoid cooperating with them to complete content - I don't quite view it as so much of a competition anyways, so much as a more or less random clickfest in hopes that your mouse was at the right spot at the right time and that nobody, intently or not, was blocking your way towards the loot. Of course there's also the obvious appeal for griefers, but I'm kind of ignoring that; I tend to think of these people more like parasites than anything else.

I would advocate for a more personal loot system. I'm sure not sure I see a reason for not having both possibilities in one way or another, since there's obviously interest in a FFA system. Having a league with FFA and a league with personal loot would be an option but I guess it might fragment the community in a bad way - although not quite as bad as having a horde of people pissed off about a fairly important part of the game (loot distribution), in my opinion.

Giving a party option to set up either FFA or personal loot seems to me like the best option: those who want FFA can get FFA, those who want their own little phat lewtz can get them, and if either of the systems ever fall out of favor and end up unused, then it becomes fairly obvious that it was unwanted. The community is not fragmented as drastically as it would be with seperate leagues.

That being said, I think the current system is about as bad as it could get. Mainly because, by putting a name on an item for a short amount of time, the player sees it, instantly feels like it belongs to them, and might still have it stolen from them before they could react, inducing more rage than if they'd never felt this particular item belonged to them because their name was on it for a second.

And to the FFA loot people: loot is obviously a concern (unless this thread is just an exchange between 6-7 people that's been going on for over 320 pages and doesn't involve many posters at all) and rightfully so: it's a core element of the game. The game is still in beta, which would lead to think that it's more flexible to drastic changes than it otherwise would be, so you see a bunch of people trying to change it to improve their experience. They don't want to go to Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2 for all kinds of reasons: this game has other features which are very interesting, and having our experience undermined by a single feature is unfortunate.



TL;DR more options ftw.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

Instanced Loot will result in a party of 3 players experiencing a 300% chance of receiving loot per monster killed while Free For All Loot will result in 200% chance of receiving loot. With 6 players there is 600% chance of receiving loot with Instanced Loot Vs. 400% in FFA.

Instanced Loot also opens up a slippery slope towards enabling each players Loot Quantity and Loot Quality stats to affect each players loot spawns regardless of who dealt the final blow.

I am in favour of FFA loot and just felt like listing some of the differences between FFA and IL.

It would be trivial to have instanced loot match the amount of FFA loot.

Not to mention your percentages are bollocks since you obviously do not have access to the algos the game uses.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

Instanced Loot will result in a party of 3 players experiencing a 300% chance of receiving loot per monster killed while Free For All Loot will result in 200% chance of receiving loot. With 6 players there is 600% chance of receiving loot with Instanced Loot Vs. 400% in FFA.

Instanced Loot also opens up a slippery slope towards enabling each players Loot Quantity and Loot Quality stats to affect each players loot spawns regardless of who dealt the final blow.

I am in favour of FFA loot and just felt like listing some of the differences between FFA and IL.

this is a result of bad programming Instanced loot not an excuse why instanced loot is bad...as i already said the Instanced loot cant' reward more (or very much more) than soloing.

what i am saying is that with instanced loot i want the loot that i woulda take myself but playing with strangers (with the potential to become ingame friends and hung around more)

everything above that is bad programming and game mechanincs NOT instanced loot problem

I wouldn't mind a loot system similar to Torchlight 2 or Diablo 3. I know it's verboten to say Diablo 3 did anything positive, but the one thing that wasn't broke in the game was the way loot was distributed. The loot itself might have been utter garbage, but at least the way it got distributed was good.

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Machida wrote:

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

Instanced Loot will result in a party of 3 players experiencing a 300% chance of receiving loot per monster killed while Free For All Loot will result in 200% chance of receiving loot. With 6 players there is 600% chance of receiving loot with Instanced Loot Vs. 400% in FFA.

Instanced Loot also opens up a slippery slope towards enabling each players Loot Quantity and Loot Quality stats to affect each players loot spawns regardless of who dealt the final blow.

I am in favour of FFA loot and just felt like listing some of the differences between FFA and IL.

They could surely program it in a way where the same amount of loot would drop. Quantity/Quality is a more legitimate point and something I'm sure people will disagree on, but as (I think) it is at the moment it could just be shared between all group members.

They could, but the reduction in loot per player when playing in a group game would feel underwhelming in comparison to single player.

Now that I've read the decision and design of the current loot system as well as the philosophy behind it, all I can suggest is doubling or tripling the minimum amount of time that loot is locked for. Do not change the maximum amount of time.

Okay, since people are busting balls over what's fact and what isn't, I'll try to propose this argument in a way that strictly separates fact from opinion.

Fact: Whatever the ratio of unsatisfied, angry, frustrated players is compared to satisfied/happy ones is, what we do know for sure is that it's a very significant ratio. Whether that percentage of the total player base is 25%, 50%, or 75% really just determines the extent of the issue, rather than whether or not there is an issue. There is definitely an issue.

Therefore...

Fact: A significant percentage of players have had really negative first experiences when trying out the group system.

And...

Fact: A significant percentage of players have altogether abandoned grouping in a game that is supposed to be a definitively multiplayer experience.

Therefore...

Fact: FFA completely ruins the multiplayer aspect of the game for many people, but those who support it feel that it is more fun and feels cut-throat as intended.
Opinion: Contrastingly, instanced looting would not completely ruin multiplayer for anyone, but those who oppose it may feel that it is less fun and less cut-throat.

Fact: Complaints about instanced looting in other games are so few and far between that you can't even find enthusiastic complaints about it on Google.
Opinion: Instanced looting is the only aspect of Diablo 3 that both fanboys and haters widely regarded as positive.

Fact: If you type "FFA loot is awesome/I love FFA loot/instanced loot sucks/etc" or similar queries in Google, all the top hits are ironically against FFA and the vast majority of the topics are in reference to Path of Exile.
Implication: There are more people who vocally oppose FFA than those who vocally support it. FFA loot supporters are mainly only vocal about supporting FFA when directly in confrontation with anti-FFA supporters. FFA supporters feel that the purity of their game is being threatened by anti-FFA supporters.

Fact: No matter what the issue being presented is, there are those extremely loyal to the development team who will always agree with the precedent.
Opinion: To most of the people who are supporting FFA, supporting the purity of PoE is more important to them than what the loot system actually is.
Opinion: I suspect that if the devs originally implemented instanced looting and had well-written justification for it, the current FFA-supporters would not be adamantly (vocally) opposed to it and if they were, it would be much less of an outcry than the current situation.

Opinion: FFA supporters consider themselves purists, but suspect the opposing viewpoint are casual carebears who want to dilute the game, thereby making it less true to its essence.
Opinion: Anti-FFA supporters also consider themselves purists, but feel that the loot system actually hurts the purity of the game and distracts from its essence.

Conclusion: Nobody is trying to fundamentally change the purity of this beautiful game. Those of us who are vocal about the looting system are only vocal because we feel part of our gaming experience is ruined by it.

We understand that there are also many people who prefer/have fun with it the way things are, but if we assume that the player base is divided 50/50 on this issue, half of the player base having more fun with this system does not justify the experience being ruined for the other half. I don't think anyone can honestly argue that their multiplayer experience would be ruined by instanced looting or longer timers or whatever opposing arguments there are to this system. Therefore, I think we can safely and objectively say that the disadvantages of the current system outweigh the benefits.

One's latency should not be a factor in trying to pick up loot in a game where looting is one, if not, the biggest draw.


As much as a I want instanced loot, I know it ain't going to happen. But simply experimenting with increasing the timers can't be a bad thing.



It is beta. I am sure you "hardcore pros at ARPGs" can stand a little change here and there.

Please don't change the current system, the compromise is more than fair for ranged and those with latency. I like that the design decision was to keep it at least semi cut-throat. I have faith in GGG and that this will be one game that whiners and carebears won't ruin, however.

@Luvz

Generally the more vocal party in a dispute is a minority under these circumstances. Why? Well you only tend to speak out when there is something you don't like. So with this in mind it would seem that more people are enjoying the current system (And staying silent/playing the damn game) then there are those complaining about it.

There are a few of us here sticking up for the current system and a few against the system, the few against the system may post more often but is generally just the same people over and over trying to make the issue appear bigger then it really is just to get there way.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

Instanced Loot will result in a party of 3 players experiencing a 300% chance of receiving loot per monster killed while Free For All Loot will result in 200% chance of receiving loot. With 6 players there is 600% chance of receiving loot with Instanced Loot Vs. 400% in FFA.

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mobutu wrote:

-In a party of 6, ffa-loot, one instance cleared: total of 100 items dropped from the total monsters on that instance;
-In a party of 6, longer_time/instanced loot, one instance cleared: total of 100 items dropped from the total monsters on that instance.
Nothing changes at all regarding the economy. It's at dummies level, I can't explain better than that.

Please read the topic before making false assumptions.