The Winning Item Factor

[hook]

hmmm... i like the idea that everyone just sits around, stares at the items heap, and then they start arguing whi gets what :] ...sorry, but that\'s the easiest to implement and the most life-like

[Mehallie]

Oh the memories:

Assembling for dragon raid: one hour
Going over rules: one hour
assembling groups while clearing: 2 hours
kill monster:  3 MINUTES
Argue over the Need before Greed loot: about five hours.

It\'s not worth it, trust me.  Besides, if uber items drop off a mob, people will start camping the bleeding thing to get the \"uber sword of doom\" and then the real fights will start

I wuz here first!
No u wernt I just went to sell!
I haev 2 kill this mob, I\'m sapposed to sell three of these swords on ebay!

Meanwhile, crafter looks at all the swords and things they\'ve made and sighs at the empty shop...

I am greatly in favour of the \"something useful\" ploy.  Hence, crafters that may not be capable of hunting some of those scarier monsters can buy off mercenaries or such who have gone out to get the items for crafters so assemble.  This works in most people\'s favour because there is no \"class or race\" restriction on carrying a particular item (as often happens with weapons or such - what would a monk do with a sword?).  Also, if weight is a factor in game (it may not be) harvesting hide or something else is often lighter and therefore you can carry more of it without having to run off and leave your group in the lurch.

The problem with item-dropping is it encourages camping for items.  There is nothing more annoying than sitting around waiting for the spawn rate to get up and whack something, loot body, sit down, get up, etc etc.  I miss the good, old-fashioned \"dungeon crawl\" where you went in, kicking and biting all the way, got to the bottom, fought the big bugger down there and maybe got a few gems or sommat that was actually worthwhile, and then you got the heck out of there before his mates showed up.  Infinitely more satisfying to a melee than just pulling and whacking blindly.

The issue I have with \"group points\" is much like the \"main looter\" problem in other games.  More often than not, you don\'t know who you\'re grouped with.  Hence, someone you don\'t know is designated main looter.  It often happened that once a uber item dropped, main looter would loot up and force a linkdead so that he was left with all your items.  Hunting said main loot-stealer was impossible, as you often didn\'t write down their names and the GM\'s would tell you (often quite correctly) that it was your fault for trusting a stranger. Hence, if a player must log off suddenly or goes linkdead and can\'t get back in game, what happens to all their points?  So, no, I\'m not in favour of that one.

Having actual useful items would also eliminate \"pharming\", another bane of crafters everywhere, of hunting mobs that were too low of a level for you to get experience points, but you needed whatever they dropped in order to craft.  There\'d really be no need to pharm, as someone would always have a bit of something that you could probably use, and it wouldn\'t just be limited to a few friends you could ask - the whole world would be getting these things, and therefore could *gasp* interact to find out who they could sell them to.

Therefore, everyone would end up happy; the melee would end up with coin, which is infinitely more useful than an item he won on a roll that no-one actually wanted, the crafter is spared having to go out into the field if they can\'t be bothered to do it, and is more than willing to part with coin, and their trades aren\'t undermined by the introduction of other items that everyone wants because they\'re \"rare\".  Conversely, people don\'t go into the game and try and twist the rp factor by camping a monster with their friends for two weeks at a time so they can sell these items on the \"pixel black market\".

Bear with me a bit longer on the money idea:

I\'m also more in favour or a ratio or \"rounding up\" of money.  There was nothing more annoying than having several hundred copper and silver pieces on your character as such fiddly small change at that level was utterly useless.  Most of the time, you destroyed it.  Often, people refused to split because they didn\'t want to be weighed down with all that.  So, perhaps, in some instances, such \"small change\" would be rounded up to the nearest fair amount (equivalent of gold pieces or higher).  This way, those of higher rank don\'t have to be annoyed at this small amount of change in their pocket after a ten minute skirmish.  If money is going to be the only thing other than crafting items, it should be negligible.

Anyway, just my idea.  I know, dropped items are so \"kewl\", but unless you\'ve had a crafted item made with your own initials or name scribed upon the side, you\'ve never really experienced \"cool\" yet.

[Thynett]

Well Melhallie said almost everything that was to be said, and undoubtfully in a much better way that I would have

To sum up her ideas :
- item-dropping encourages hatreds and anti-roleplay attitudes, thus they should be avoided.
- instead of that ALL monsters should drop \"raw materials\", like fur, claws, bones, rusty metal or broken bad quality wood weapons or armors, gems, flesh, herbs... Some of these could be directely used, but of a bad quality.
- Those loots would be used as raw materials by crafters, who would then REALLY become indispensable, as the core of the society.

(I hope I got everything right ^^)


I wanted to add a few details :

- those collected raw material wouldn\'t weight a lot (since players must be able to collect quite a lot of them)

- anyone should be able to pick up any loot (so that when someone is camping for training his fighting skills and not picking up the loots, a crafter can come and pick up his raw materials. But since a single loot wouldn\'t worth much (well except some rare metal/gems/whatsoever), one would not be tempted to steal loots to make money.

- However to avoid the server to suffer from this, loots mut dissappear let\'s say 5 minutes after they\'ve been dropped

- when picking upwhile in a group, loots are distributed randomly (so that even wizards and healers get something, not only close combat fighters)


- comsetible monsters must drop flesh. And if eating is implemented in the game, this easy-to-find food can be a way to avoid going back to town every hour, but there could be a drawback, like getting poisoned if eating too much of roasted lizard...

- Why not a \"hunting skill\" to increase the loots you can pick up from a dead mob ? A great hunter must be able to pick up the fur, teeth, claws, bones from a dead wolf, whereas a novice would only pick up its fur...

- Must be a market to trade your daily harvest. I\'d love to see people shouting to get the best price from his badger fur, or to swap it for a chicken to eat.
- However since you will most of the time hunt far away from big towns you would need intermediaries (ie NPC merchants) in small towns. Abd to enforce trading with players, those NPC would buy items very cheap, and sell them very expensive (see on my post economy/jobs paragraph \"III/ prices evolution\" for more details


To sum up all this, rare items loots are to be banned, and everything about crafting AND trading must be enforced.

[explorer]

Well, if the items dissapear in under 5 minutes, would it stay infinitatly if someone had picked it up, then moved it for a transfer between someone\'s character?


I like that hunting idea, but adding some: I\'d like it if as you leveled, you\'d be able to find more meat on an animal to eat, along with more of the body parts (as you said.).


I like the idea of traveling NPC merchants, ones that go through paths, from town to town. If you find a main road, and you\'re full, you could sit and wait for a merchant to come along, then hail him down and trade with him.

[Misjak]

In my opinion, we don\'t. If you always loot everything, nobody will go with you next time. Be honest and you will have good reputation. It\'s a world, where inhabitants live their lives and can talk to each other...

...and this \'rule\' saves maximum server time.

[paxx]

Well, excluding the last?no loot rules :-) another valid option.

I think Mehallie that you missed my ?virtual? loot space concept. In the different shared loot options there would be no designated looter, every character would carry a ?virtual? loot pouch that simulated the weight of all the loot, and it would be based on current str bonus. What I mean by that is the STR bonus after other loot and equipment.

When everyone gets weighted down then the group would distribute loot in one of the possible ways.

In the random way, then no need for the ?virtual loot?.

Now an issue comes up when we deal with people leaving the group or lagging out?or any other of those types of issues. The best way in my view would be for the server to simply take what it deems as lowest value equal to weight being carried by that person and adds it to their inventory for when they come back. But there are better added features that can be added there. That is just the simple explanation.

On the money issue?I also favor the rounding up of money and not making it weigh anything?.that just makes it annoying?.but for some it makes things more ?real? but unless money exchangers are a major part of the game, I see little use for money having weight and not just be rounded.

Now, personally I was very big on the?creature drops everything it has, if players have the skills and choose to skin the creature?cut up its meat?.bla bla then they can get those things as well. But realistically there would be such a glut of items in the world and tracking quality of those items based on how destroyed the creature got based on damage types and such made me realize the it would be more work then it was worth.

For example:
Group kills a Giant Stag. As base loot?nothing?if the group skins the stag then the skin quality is based on the best skinner in the group, and what types of blows it took.
Horns: quality based on age of the stag and how many blows to the head it took.
Meat would be in many chunks and the quality based on each chunk and the damage taken by physical blows.

Now lets imagine a person in the party used a spell that poisoned the creature?is the meat still good?

A fire ball spell, is the skin still good?

And so on and so on.

While in my opinion I feel this adds a lot it gets much more complex when we have intelligent creatures in the mix.

He has a sword, a bow, chain mail armor, a small purse, a back pack with sleeping gear, some food.

Does the party get all these things? I would say yes but the economy would get glutted since players don?t loose all of their goods when they die... I?m not even sure they will loose any items.

Can players skin intelligent races?
If so does that affect faction?
What if one player in the group wants to and the others don?t, it should still affect their faction, any person who skins another person and eats their flesh will be judged badly by most, and those that let him or her do it will also be judged badly. But being that there is no real way to stop another player from doing it?how is it fair that one person skinned 50 elves and has their teeth in his wallet but his party didn?t stop him from doing it?

So while I really love the concept of all the raw materials possible?it?s not a realistic option, by realistic option I mean one that will likely appear in the game.

Also what if we kill a giant with a giant greatsword that weighs 200 Kg?what use is it to any PC

That being said, we might have their equipment transformed into raw materials for loot , so a sword would become a bar of steal, a bow would be a block of wood, his leather armor, a patch of leather?

That is a possibility.
There are many, so keep the ideas on this concept coming.

[Mehallie]

Good grief, I just lost everything I wrote *screams*  Has anyone else been having trouble staying connected to the site?

Gah...right, I\'ll try again.  *bangs head on keyboard*

Ok.  The \"virtual pouch\".  I skipped it because I honestly didn\'t understand it and also because it once again seems to favour tanks and those with high strength, which I don\'t quite care for.  Sorry about that :/  But then I\'m not a developer so tell me to bugger off if you like.

So, if you cannot harvest items off monsters, where in the world do tailors or other crafters get their items?!  Do they have to buy them from NPCs?  Well that certainly takes the fun out of it.  The whole hope is that people will actually interact with each other, and not merely run around without talking to anyone else.  Would a crafter have to hunt for said items?  What if they\'re absolutely no good at hunting and, Well, who wants to \"pharm\"?  It\'s quite dull.

As for the use things in game rule - why does it need to be complex?  I don\'t think it\'s necessary for EVERYTHING to come off a mob.  Perhaps in some cases it\'s a \"trade secret\" as to what drops off what mob.  For example, if someone wishes for some items for making Klyros clothing (which I believe comes off aquatic animals only), one discovers that a particular fish is required.  However, there are three \"sub-species\".  One drops scale, another drops meat, and yet another drops bone for needles.  It is up to the hunter to be able to find out which is which, and to get an idea of what needs to be used to harvest it.  Worrying about poison or spells just gets too complicated, and it doesn\'t really need to be that difficult, IMO.

Conversely, when it comes to intelligent or humanoid races, yes we can see that the mob is carrying weapons and armour, and it probably has a pack and meat.  But it is really that all-fired necessary for someone to be able to strip it to the bone for everything.  I don\'t think so - suffice to say that coin and perhaps a magical item, or even a quest item, drops off the thing and leave it at that.

Let\'s take this a bit further:  there are people that really enjoying crafting and trading, and there are people who just want money and loot.  Now, with the option of harvesting for crafting, again this doesn\'t need to be complex, and it can be done in such a way that it encourages interaction with others, rather than just the NPC option (I\'d hate to see the trader \"mules\" of EQ come into play here in PS).

When I was tailoring in the above unmentionable game, I needed certain hides.  They only dropped off bears and pumas, and they were a \"green con\" (I didn\'t get experience to hunt them).  Now the choice was really boring farming, or getting the lower level characters who were already hunting for experience to save them for me.  They were very happy with the money I offered, they got experience, and I got hides to practice on.

Now, I have leather padding.  I make friends with a smith who is more than happy to take these off my hands.  Trouble is, he needs iron ore.  Now, in this game (silly, I know) iron ore dropped off a certain monster, and he was too high of a level and didn\'t want to \"pharm\".  However, I got experience, and I\'d go and kill these things, happily bring back as much ore as I could carry, and more often than not got some new armour in the process.

That\'s healthy interaction.  This same thing could be approached in PS.  Traders need a certain item.  There are hunters who really enjoy gathering such items off various mobs.  Let us suppose that the only creatures that actually drop items for crafting (for food or clothing or what have you) are animals.  Therefore, it\'s up to the specialised hunter to know just which animal to get items from and how.  After establishing a friendship with a trader, they now can do business together - trader buys items from hunter, hunter gains experience from the kill and coin from the trader, and the trader has wares.  There is no overburded market because supply and demand is totally balanced - the trader knows where to buy things, and the hunter knows where to sell.

Conversely, there are people that just want coin and experience only.  They don\'t want to be weighted down with things they won\'t use.  They just want to kill.  To them, the humanoid hunting is the most rewarding.  They get coin and experience, perhaps a magic item for use, or a quest item for their job or a task for learning or what have you.  They don\'t need to be bothered with trading and, because there\'s very little there to trade, they don\'t need to sell anything.  They can keep their hard earned money without it being a problem to anyone else, they don\'t need to leave their camp, and they never have to be bothered with unidentifiable \"bits\" that they have no idea what to do with.

Dividing up the mobs into crafting/money divisions would also take care of another problem in most MMORPG\'s - the higher level pharmer taking over an experience camp for lower level characters.  This is infinitely frustrating.  I can\'t count how many times I\'d journeyed through really nasty terrain with a group of mates in order to do some experience hunting and maybe get some decent items only to find that someone 30 levels higher was claiming that entire area (if not the entire zone) in order to farm materials or level up their character on another account (the park-and-play method, a huge cheat and utterly ridiculous).  Said person would often tell us to bugger off rather than just offer to buy the items off us after we did the killing, or if we did convince them, they\'d try to rob us blind, offering 1/10th of what the item was actually worth.  Again, this doesn\'t promote good interaction.

However, if mobs are divided into the cash/crafting way I mentioned above, such problems could almost entirely be eliminated.  Hunters for crafting items see experience as a nice bonus but they won\'t be robbing anyone who just wants experience alone from being able to achieve it.  People who just want experience won\'t be hogging a mob that a crafter needs for an item in order to sell it for a ridiculous amount, and it would also cut down on the \"camping\" syndrome quite a bit, as \"phat lewt\" wouldn\'t be driving force behind humanoid hunting.

Right, anyway, that\'s all I can think of for the moment.  I hope I\'m not beating the dead horse, but I think it\'s a really good system as long as it is kept simple and there isn\'t a whole lot of worrying about making it too \"realistic\" with all the concerns of corpse-stripping and the like.  The game is, after all, your own, and doesn\'t necessarily need to follow the laws of earth biology.

[paxx]

I would recommend that you write your reply in a offline manner?gives you less chance of failure.

As for your view point it is very valid?I am just offering ideas and playing a little devils advocate in the hopes of inspiring new thought?so keep beating away as far as I?m concerned.

The \"virtual pouch\" benefits no one?it just keeps the load among the players even?it actually is worse for the tanks since they care about STR?

The only real negative in my opinion to goods for crafting to come off as loot, I?m very ok with it, is it makes a really odd way of gathering goods.

Personally, the only difficulty I have with raw material only dropping is the fact that people may have problems selling their items when they need to?or have to really travel to get a decent price, this is why I like having options for the players?they do what they feel is best for their character.

But truthfully the only loot system I am really happy with is the one in ToonTown?but it is by far too simplistic for our needs wants and desires. But we will make a system that is fair, and avoids Farming to a large extent?at least those are big goals we have in mind, other then that it is still up in the air.

[Mehallie]

Most crafting is a labour of love.  The challenge of it is half the battle otherwise it becomes too boring and is just a round of combine-clicking and selling wares.  Traders that \"migrate\" from level to level could be their own market - buying items from below from the Nolthir and selling to the level at the very top.  If they\'re ripping people off, it will be discovered quickly.  The successful trader is the shrewd trader.

I had no problem travelling to get what I needed when I was crafting because the satisfaction at the end rivalled the same satisfaction I felt watching that big dragon wheeze out its last.

Also, with it being so challenging, you cut out the \"wanna be\" crafters who are just doing smithing and the like because they think they\'re going to make a quick buck.  You craft because you really enjoy it, even when it\'s frustrating.  Hence all those folks hunting down those elusive recipes in EQ even when they knew they probably weren\'t going to be able to sell the end product.  It was the satisfaction itself that counted.

Again, however, I\'d have to ask where these items would come from if they don\'t drop off mobs.  The only other option would be to buy them from NPC\'s and I don\'t see that as being a very \"interactive\" way of going about this whole process.  And even then, there\'d be no way you could have npc\'s in one area alone that would possess all the things needed for making items.  And where would the traders get the money to buy it in the first place, if they can\'t start bringing in a little cash from making items?  Chicken-and-egg sort of thing.

Right, as you said, lots to ponder and lots of time.  I got on a crafting tangent somewhere else and what I heard from Venge was encouraging, so I\'m sure things will work out.  And \"that\'s all I have to say about that...\"

[beza1e1]

The scenario:
A group killed a dragon, which has the unique uber sword of 1337ness. The group consists of
- the mighty fighter who did 99% of the damage
- the archer who killed it, after i missed every other shot
- the healer without, whom they all would have been killed
- the wizard who made \"slow down\", \"freeze\" and \"shield\" spell, but did not do any damage
- 10 newbies who watched the fight
Who should get the unique uber sword of 1337ness ?

My opinion is, the objects should go to the group leader. Everybody knows who has the things and if he betrays his party, they will leave or kill him. Think of the pirate movies, where the captain cheats his crew ...
If they did not form a \"official\" group the items are dropped. As in reality the group will fight about it. But i think there should be a message of all the dropped items, so everybody knows of the unique uber sword of 1337ness