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

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AceNightfire wrote:

In a solo game, you and only you would benefit from IIR/IIQ, but with randomized timers it may happen that you never get a good item. With loked timers for everyone, everyone had the chance to make the lucky click and get the item. That much more fair then anything else here.

Everyone in the party is contributing and has a fair chance to get a good drop. If its random you can and will get currency adn rares at some point. Its technically possible to spend 40+ fusings to get one 4L but how often do that acutally happen?

To me pure randomness is much more fair and consistent to this game than a silly click fest. With a click fest your teammate could simply have a better connection and thus the loot is far slanted towards him.

Not saying WoW = PoE. I was using it as an example for how options won't make other options pointless. I'm not going down a "is WoW a good game or not" debate as it's irrelevant and purely subjective.

And I just explained how purely instanced loot would take less resources than FFA with timers. I'm not doing it again.

Posting this again so it might be read:

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TremorAcePV wrote:

Spoiler

Basically, loot doesn't appear (it drops, but can't be seen or picked up) until all monsters in an instance are dead.

That fixes the following problems:
Looting while fighting - Breaks up combat, which isn't fun for most players.
Lag - Everyone is just as oblivious to items off screen as the rest of their groups, bosses and areas where the last monster is killed, the exceptions.
Ninja's - Everyone has just as much chance to find a good drop as the rest. Since everyone starts at the same time, it's fair.
Melee and Ranged aren't distinguished.

^^^Every problem the current loot system has (minus entitlement)

The only problem I can see is:
Movement speed stackers and skills that make movement faster/easier. But that's no different than build choice imo.

Added to that suggestion:

It can be an option, when making a public group to make it so that when the last monster is killed, it becomes open PVP and the last man standing gets the loot. Loot can't be picked up until this is over. Very cut throat. Purely player choice to join/create the group though.

Now, when the last monster is killed, the instance would be locked so that only the players in it when that happens are the only ones who can go to it. Preventing people from ninja-ing from recently cleared instances.

Now, you say it's nonsense that instanced loot takes up more resources than a timer. Right.... That makes no sense. At all.

A single (or even 2-4) timer(s) for an entire group, versus X amount of instances of loot, where X is the number of group members.

You sir obviously don't understand basic math. Multiply > Add. It's not that hard.

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TremorAcePV wrote:

The options you think of are FFA VS Instanced? Instance won't happen because of the reason I gave iamstryker. It's far too hard on server resources. The reason instances are closed every 8-15 mins is to save on server resources. They have talked about how they are going to increase the time once the game is more optimized and they can handle it. Adding instanced loot would magnify/multiply the problem which would make it beyond unmanageable.

Pure speculation. You are not a dev for this game.

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mercetron wrote:

EDIT: And the "it takes more server resources" argument has already been refuted. It won't take more resources (probably less) than FFA timers. Each item gets a player ID tag, and the server only allows the player with the same ID to pick the item up (and the client can simply not render items with other players IDs). The current system keeps track of a timer as well as a player ID.

That sounds like it makes a lot of sense. Maybe its true maybe not. I don't really care because until a dev comfirms it we will never really know.

Personally I think if this was a problem then the devs would have mentioned it already.

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TremorAcePV wrote:

Posting this again so it might be read:

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TremorAcePV wrote:

Spoiler

Basically, loot doesn't appear (it drops, but can't be seen or picked up) until all monsters in an instance are dead.

That fixes the following problems:
Looting while fighting - Breaks up combat, which isn't fun for most players.
Lag - Everyone is just as oblivious to items off screen as the rest of their groups, bosses and areas where the last monster is killed, the exceptions.
Ninja's - Everyone has just as much chance to find a good drop as the rest. Since everyone starts at the same time, it's fair.
Melee and Ranged aren't distinguished.

^^^Every problem the current loot system has (minus entitlement)

The only problem I can see is:
Movement speed stackers and skills that make movement faster/easier. But that's no different than build choice imo.

Added to that suggestion:

It can be an option, when making a public group to make it so that when the last monster is killed, it becomes open PVP and the last man standing gets the loot. Loot can't be picked up until this is over. Very cut throat. Purely player choice to join/create the group though.

Now, when the last monster is killed, the instance would be locked so that only the players in it when that happens are the only ones who can go to it. Preventing people from ninja-ing from recently cleared instances.

Now, you say it's nonsense that instanced loot takes up more resources than a timer. Right.... That makes no sense. At all.

A single timer for an entire group, versus X amount of instances of loot, where X is the number of group members.

You sir obviously don't understand basic math. Multiply > Add. It's not that hard.

FFA with timer adds 1 unique player ID to the item, and 1 timer (which is calculated). 1 + 1 = 2.
Instanced loot would add 1 unique player ID to the item. No timer. 1 = 1.

2 > 1.

Math is hard.

It's the same amount of loot as FFA, only split up. Imagine FFA where the timer is infinite and where the item the system hasn't tagged for you won't be rendered for you.

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mercetron wrote:

FFA with timer adds 1 unique player ID to the item, and 1 timer (which is calculated). 1 + 1 = 2.
Instanced loot would add 1 unique player ID to the item. No timer. 1 = 1.

2 > 1.

Math is hard.

It's the same amount of loot as FFA, only split up. Imagine FFA where the timer is infinite and where the item the system hasn't tagged for you won't be rendered for you.

Your math is incorrect. Let me fix that for you.

"FFA with timer adds 1 unique player ID to the item and 1 timer (which is calculated). 1 + 1 = 2

Instanced loot would add 1 unique player ID to the item. No timer. 1 = 1

Then it would generate, at most, XY items for every Y number of items that would normally drop in FFA when a monster is killed, where X is the max group members and Y is the max number of items that can drop from that mob.

Assuming X is 6 and Y is 1, 1 item would drop for each member of the group in their own individual instance. That's 6 player ID's instead of the 1 that drops in FFA plus the timer.

6 * 1 = 6.

2 < 6"

Math is very hard when you don't understand what you are talking about.

Essentially, what that means is, if a group of 6 people kill a monster, the monster has a chance of dropping 1 item at max per instance. If it dropped 1 item for every single instance, 6 items would drop, 1 for each player in their individual instance. That's multiplication.

Now, imagine an instance cleared filled with loot. For FFA, that's 1 instance of loot. For Instanced loot with a group of 6 people, that's 6 instances filled with 6 times as much (possible) loot. Obviously, an item won't drop for every member of the group every single time. RNG is RNG, but it's possible and beyond likely (almost certain) that more items would drop than would normally drop in a FFA loot system when there's only 1 instance to account for.

So the maximum is 6 times as much loot, versus 1 times as much loot.

Imagine killing Merveil with the entire group having IIR+IIQ and that loot rain multiplied by 6.

Plus, only magic/rares get timers, whites don't. Whites still count as normal (1) for Instanced loot multiplied by the number of instances.

Edit: You say "it's the same as FFA but only split up" and I don't see how that's any better than FFA. At all.

In fact, I would assume (as I've done above) that you would get loot as if you are soloing content since that's basically what being in your personal "instance" would mean, only you have help fighting the mobs.

The items (or "item representation pickups" as it's hardly "the actual item" laying on the ground) without timers in this game hardly use another system than items that do. It wouldn't be enough data to justify optimizing away the database overhead on the items without timers, instead of simply letting all item pickups use the same database and data structure even if they don't have any "time" (and "id") allocated to them.

I don't quite understand what you're trying to say, so I'll explain as simple as I can what really would happen with item quantity etc:

- The total quantity of spawned items across all players in the party would be the same regardless of FFA or instanced loot.

- Instanced loot does not mean that if an item drops, everyone gets a copy of that item. If this is what you believe then I understand what you're trying to say, but that's not how instanced loot (usually) works. EDIT: And actually, I really don't think any one proponent of instanced loot on these forums has ever said that they want the same loot as everybody else.

- The monsters and chests would still have the same chance of dropping whatever item they drop, regardless of loot system. It would just be allocated to a specific random player (with an "infinite timer" to make a comparison).

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mercetron wrote:

Spoiler

The items without timers in this game hardly use another system than items that do. It wouldn't be enough data to justify optimizing away the database overhead on the items without timers, instead of simply letting all item pickups use the same database and data structure even if they don't have any "time" (and "id") allocated to them.

I don't quite understand what you're trying to say, so I'll explain as simple as I can what really would happen with item quantity etc:

- The total quantity of spawned items across all players in the party would be the same regardless of FFA or instanced loot.

- Instanced loot does not mean that if an item drops, everyone gets a copy of that item. If this is what you believe then I understand what you're trying to say, but that's not how instanced loot (usually) works. EDIT: And actually, I really don't think any one proponent of instanced loot on these forums has ever said that they want the same loot as everybody else.

- The monsters and chests would still have the same chance of dropping whatever item they drop, regardless of loot system. It would just be allocated to a specific random player (with an "infinite timer" to make a comparison).

What you are describing is a true allocation loot system, separated by instance. This is different from purely instanced loot. Purely instanced loot is completely irrelevant of group members. Meaning, it drops loot as if you are alone. It does this for all players in their personal instance. (Further explained below)

- That would defeat the reason people claim to want another option besides FFA. It's to get all the loot. No other reason. If they get the amount of loot that would normally drop divided by the number of group members, it would basically not be different than playing FFA. The only difference really being that they are limited to what they see and can't pick up anything else besides it.

For example, on an FFA run, I usually pick up ALL the blues and Superior whites (to trade in for armourer scraps/Blacksmith's Whetstones/Alteration+Transmutation shards etc). I do this after everyone else in my group passes them, so I'm sure they don't want them. The monsters are usually dead at this point.

If I were to play instanced, I would be limited to only what I see. If someone else didn't want something, I couldn't have it in their place. Such a waste...

- That's not what I meant. What I meant is that, when a mob dies, it has the potential to drop loot for every player, each individaully and independant of itself. That doesn't mean it will, only that it could. And what it would drop could be completely different for each player.

For example, imagine you were one player and a mob died. You might see nothing drop. Whereas, your friend might see 1 item drop, a white armor, for example. And another player might see 2 items drop, a white sword, and a yellow ring. Completely random for each player, as is normal, but the normal drop rates, basically multiplied by the number of different instances there are.

The server would look at allocated loot separated by instance like this: "Ok, this mob dropped this, so I'll give it to this guy." Whereas, the server would look at instanced loot like this, "Ok, this mob died and in this guys instance, it dropped this and this, and in this guys instance, it dropped this, and in this guys instance, it dropped nothing... etc etc."

The potential maximum amount of loot in 1 player's instance would be equal to the potential maximum amount of loot that would drop in an entire FFA run of that instance. If it were less, as you describe, so much so that it would be the entire loot of an FFA run split up among the players, it would be pointless to choose instanced loot over FFA.

The reason I say that is because, assuming your group is fair, you would get only what you wanted, which could be more or less than you might get in instanced. And you would never know what others got. You wouldn't even know if you wanted to trade them for something.

That would seriously hinder your loot pool. Sure you are certain you get *something*, but I would never say that's worth dividing my total loot pool to look at and choose from (even to trade) by group members. And I completely doubt they would bother to say, "Hey guys, I see this, and this, and this and this, etc etc, do any of you want it?"

What if another player got the Rare you were looking and mindlessly goes off and sells it rather than asking you if you want to trade for it?

It's like you are saying the reason to choose instance would be so you don't know what other people get and can't get mad when people get something you wanted. That's a very poor reason to change things, or to choose allocation over FFA in general, imo.

- Still dividing the loot pool available to you by a large amount.

I mean, I don't even see a positive in any of that. And saying "I won't get mad if someone gets what I want." is just a sad thing to say. The problem would be with the player, rather than the game at that point.

My point though, is that instanced just hinders your loot pool while making it so you can't get mad when others get what you want. I don't see how that's a good trade-off at all. Especially when the positive is something you could give yourself quite easily by simply accepting that someone else got it before you, then offering to trade them for it.

Simply put, in the system you describe, it's the equivalent of 1 roll, yours, for loot, whereas, in FFA, it's X rolls of loot where X is your group number, since you see all the loot.

More rolls = greater chance of getting your loot. Perhaps not with orbs, since players will not want to trade those so easily, but with rares that you could use far more than they could, that'd be optimal.

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TremorAcePV wrote:

- That would defeat the reason people claim to want another option besides FFA. It's to get all the loot. No other reason.

This isn't remotely the only reason people give.