People sure do want crafting to be mandatory. Personally I'd rather crafters have their own serperate and interesting niches instead of changing masses of end game loot that would otherwise already be completed items into crafting mats so crafters can feel useful. Heck I can understand having some rare crafting drops here and there, but 60% of all drops? Maybe 10-20%. And how will these crafted items work in your eyes? Are they going to be tradeable, eventually flooding the economy?
And loot tokens, man. That takes most of the excitement out of it for me and it becomes the stale token grind of FFXIV. Great way to also destroy actual varying rarity of drops. Also, players being able to reliably get the exact drops desired will relatively quickly lead to item value deflation for all the non-raid/highest group content drops. Why did FBSS stay a sought after & highly valuable item for a very long time? Because players/raiders never knew when the next Cloak of Flame or Runed Bolster Belt was going to drop. Same thing with any number of non-raid drops that kept the economy strong and had raiders participating just as much as the non-raiders who often had the items they wanted.
hackerssuck said:If I'm going to use stragegy, teamwork and effort to beat a boss, it would be nice to get *something*. I like loot.
Ok - I'm going to start by saying I'm NOT trying to attack the poster here... it's just that the post brought up a talking point.
Back in the day when a good percentage of gear did not bind, if you got an upgrade at a raid, you would pass your old item to someone else in the raid who had something worse on. Raiding was a "WE" encounter, not a "ME" encounter. Everyone wanted upgrades for sure. There were bosses that you would HOPE would drop the item that you really wanted, and, if it did, that you were the one to get it.
But if you didn't get something, you felt a little disappointed for yourself (if there was something there you wanted) but still happy for the raid in general - because back then, it was your guild that you raided with on a regular basis... and guilds, in a game that was much more reliant on community, meant more to players in them than they do today (at least I think so). Upgrades in general made your guild stronger... which increased your chances to get loot at later raids... which also would make your guild stronger.
But that passing down thing - it was a means by which more people would get upgrades at a raid than just the people who got a drop from the mob.
Yes, yes they should. Especially if raid bosses are going to be contested rather than instanced. That's not to say that some items shouldn't be rarer than others, but if X amount of people get together to spend time and effort to take something down, while also competing against rivaling guilds, they should at least get something to show for it.
Wandidar said:hackerssuck said:If I'm going to use stragegy, teamwork and effort to beat a boss, it would be nice to get *something*. I like loot.
Ok - I'm going to start by saying I'm NOT trying to attack the poster here... it's just that the post brought up a talking point.
Back in the day when a good percentage of gear did not bind, if you got an upgrade at a raid, you would pass your old item to someone else in the raid who had something worse on. Raiding was a "WE" encounter, not a "ME" encounter. Everyone wanted upgrades for sure. There were bosses that you would HOPE would drop the item that you really wanted, and, if it did, that you were the one to get it.
But if you didn't get something, you felt a little disappointed for yourself (if there was something there you wanted) but still happy for the raid in general - because back then, it was your guild that you raided with on a regular basis... and guilds, in a game that was much more reliant on community, meant more to players in them than they do today (at least I think so). Upgrades in general made your guild stronger... which increased your chances to get loot at later raids... which also would make your guild stronger.
But that passing down thing - it was a means by which more people would get upgrades at a raid than just the people who got a drop from the mob.
This.... This sums up the "everyone is a winner" mentality perfectly.
Not only did I do pickup groups, but I did pickup raids as well in EQ. Most of my pickuup raids were with a specific guild on Brstlebane called Arch Overseaars. That aside, I was disappointed when I didn't win a roll for loot. I dealth with it. That's part of the game. Everyone is *NOT* a winner. Sometimes you lose. Get over it. When I lost a roll on loot, we moved onto the next battle. We didn't sit around upset because we didn't get anything. Sometimes I would go on raids with them KNOWING that I wasn't getting anything because the raid was for a specific item that a specific person needed. An example is the EQ Epic Weapons. More than once I helped people out getting the items for their Epic Weapons knowing that I wasn't getting a damn thing out of it other than a good time and the satisfaction of knowing that I helped someone else in the community.
It's not all about the loot. It's also about the fight. The fun. The teamwork. The battle. The experience.
Too many of the "younger" gamers have been raised on a steady diet of "Me. Me. Me. Me" in their MMOs and they have lost the sense of community and FUN that MMOs are supposed to be.
With this being said, any sort of "everyone's a winner" nonsense like raid tokens is going to kill this game for alot of us because we are not looking for the cuttent style of MMOs where everyone's a winner and everything gives "phat lootz".
Isaya said:IMHO any raid mob should drop raid items. And more than one type item. I have limited time raiding.../... This to me was so unfair. When I asked why it was given to a person not even in the raid I was told he was in the guild longer than me and was next in line.
Needless to say my stay in the new guild was short lived.
I know this is different than a raid boss but it is an example of what happens when drops are so rare that it takes a long time to get the drop again.
I think a way to get rid of this happening is to take all control away from anyone. When a mob dies, a chest drops, and when it's opened, everyone in the group/raid can choose to Need/Pass or Greed for this item. If a person who Need'd on it, doesn't already have it, the game then computes your need vs. others who need'd on the item and may the luckiest win.
Iksar said:People sure do want crafting to be mandatory. Personally I'd rather crafters have their own serperate and interesting niches instead of changing masses of end game loot that would otherwise already be completed items into crafting mats so crafters can feel useful. Heck I can understand having some rare crafting drops here and there, but 60% of all drops? Maybe 10-20%. And how will these crafted items work in your eyes? Are they going to be tradeable, eventually flooding the economy?
I'm trying to understand where you're coming from. I don't want crafting to be mandatory, in that I don't want people to feel like they have to become crafters if they don't want to do that. However, neither do I want crafting to be relegated to a "side game" either. I want it to be an integral part of the game in the big picture - guilds should want to have crafters, just as guilds should want to have a tank for raids. That was where the idea for "repairable" items came in. It's a way for that top-end raider who's very well equipped to steal need to interact with a crafter from time to time.
My reasoning behind components is similar. I want crafters to supply raiders who are looking to gear up for raiding, but I want to insure that the raiders are getting something the crafters want, so that people don't feel like they have to craft just to have the money to gear up for raiding. Having components drop in raids, that are tradable, that then can be used to craft a raid-quality gear piece, helps with that problem - or at least, I think it will. That's not to say that the piece has to be better than the finished pieces that drop - that would be silly. There can be, after all, multiple quality tiers of raid loot. That's why I used the words "rare" and "ultra rare" :) Vanguard's dusts are an example of one way you could handle the system. Raids drop dusts that make powerful stuff, that doesn't come from anywhere else in the game. So, a raider who gets one could go visit a crafter to get something made with it, OR, could turn around and sell it for a lot of money - provided the drops aren't super common, anyway.
As far as flooding the economy goes, I think we should be careful not to make assumptions. Here's what I know though: In any game where items do not leave the economy through some sort of breakage/decay/sacrifice system, over time more and more and more of them will be available to players in general. Bind-on-equip is a mitigation for this problem, as much as people hate it, it helps keep items from being reused, which in turn increases demand for "new" items. This is true regardless of whether those items come from crafting or from loot drops - and it's true at every level from those first starter areas on up to the top end raid bosses. If an item enters the game and can be sold/traded, then over time, more of that item will become available, because players will keep on making/looting them. It might be fast or it might be slow, just depending on how hard it is to get or make the item, but it will happen. The solution to that historically has been flagging things no-trade as soon as they enter the game, which usually happens on raid loot, OR in the case of crafting, making the requirements so high that it's almost unattainable. None of this changes whether you're talking about crafting or looting by the way - the EQ we all know and loved was primarily a loot-based economy, and it too had the problem of tradable items becoming more and more common over time. Heck, even untradable items, once enterprising raid guilds got stuff on farm and started doing things like selling loot rights.
There's a balance that needs to be struck in order to ensure that people do feel like they can get something out of the things they do in the game, whether that's crafting or raiding - so, we will probably have to accept that over time, items will lose their market value simply because more and more of them will be available. However, I think drop rates and item characteristics can be tuned so that we're talking about a process that takes years to occur rather than months - at least, that's my hope.
It's a strong statement to make but I think that any real crafter cares deeply about having an economy that works. We want to have a market for the things we make and in order to do it, the markets can't be flooded. We're willing to accept some things being harder to make in terms of ingredients or difficulty in order to help keep supply down and demand high. Likewise, we want the things we make to be useful and relevant to *all* players, even raiders, and thus we're willing to accept having to source some of the ingredients we use from those very same raiders, as long as in turn we can use it to produce things that they would buy/use. In fact, we prefer that, because the more people that participate in the economy, the more stable prices will tend to be.
Anyway my point here is that if we want to address market flooding, the problem isn't the percentage of crafting vs. non-crafting drops. The problem is the overall drop rate itself. If all those drops were non-crafting drops, you'd eventually have the same problem where stuff is either rotting or loot rights are getting sold, with the added "bonus" of making crafting far less relevant for people at the top end of the game. I don't really see how that would be a good thing? Like I said in my post up above, I actually agree with you that market flooding is a terrible thing. I disagree that the solution is throwing out the idea of crafting drops completely though.
Iksar said:And loot tokens, man. That takes most of the excitement out of it for me and it becomes the stale token grind of FFXIV. Great way to also destroy actual varying rarity of drops. Also, players being able to reliably get the exact drops desired will relatively quickly lead to item value deflation for all the non-raid/highest group content drops. Why did FBSS stay a sought after & highly valuable item for a very long time? Because players/raiders never knew when the next Cloak of Flame or Runed Bolster Belt was going to drop. Same thing with any number of non-raid drops that kept the economy strong and had raiders participating just as much as the non-raiders who often had the items they wanted.
Wanted to comment on this separately. I'm also very opposed to tokens that can be gathered and used repeatably - because while they're nice at the time, eventually no one has any reason to want to go to that raid anymore, and that happens far faster than it would otherwise. However, I am *not* opposed to one-time "tokens" that are part of the loot table. By one-time, I mea that you can get a quest (that you can only do once) to take down that raid boss, and upon completion you can get its head, or ear, or scale, or whatever, and turn that in for the NO-DROP quest reward. Since any given player can only do that once, it doesn't cause problems over time. And by part of the loot table, I mean that only one or two drop, total, each time the raid boss is killed. Thus, a person might still have to attend multiple raids before they can get that item and complete the quest.
But please, let's not go into LOTRO-style "Give everyone a token" systems, or FFXIV-style "Get an upgrade token on your first raid each week" systems. That way lies only madness.
Wandidar said:In today's games, it's a certainty that when you kill a raid boss, it will drop some number of its "good" items. It's not guaranteed that someone will need them, but they WILL drop.
Back in the day, you could work your way to a raid boss, kill it, and see only common junk drop - or sometimes- nothing but the dreaded fungus clump (something not useable by anybody for anything).
Should raid boss mobs always drop something that someone might want (raid loot), or should there be a risk that you can kill a raid boss and have nothing at all drop?
I guess I don't understand the post. Mobs have a loot table and they have a chance to drop something from that table. Some mobs drop a specific item every time. Some mobs have a loot table of 2. Your "back in the day" isn't really true.
Krixus said:Wandidar said:In today's games, it's a certainty that when you kill a raid boss, it will drop some number of its "good" items. It's not guaranteed that someone will need them, but they WILL drop.
Back in the day, you could work your way to a raid boss, kill it, and see only common junk drop - or sometimes- nothing but the dreaded fungus clump (something not useable by anybody for anything).
Should raid boss mobs always drop something that someone might want (raid loot), or should there be a risk that you can kill a raid boss and have nothing at all drop?
I guess I don't understand the post. Mobs have a loot table and they have a chance to drop something from that table. Some mobs drop a specific item every time. Some mobs have a loot table of 2. Your "back in the day" isn't really true.
I think what Wandidar is getting at here is that the "value" of items in EQ's raids was very subjective. There were certain items, like the Cloak of Flames, that literally *everyone* wanted. There were plenty of other items on those loot tables that were only marginally useful to certain classes - and thus, their value was questionable. As the game aged, I remember plenty of runs where a bunch of things dropped that no one really cared about, because they could get better items from elsewhere.
So, his "back in the day" is very valid, if you take the time to think about where his experience might be coming from. I think it points out the need for good itemization practices on the part of the designers, so that every item on those drop tables is useful/desirable, even if it's not the uber item that everyone wants.
Wandidar said:hackerssuck said:If I'm going to use stragegy, teamwork and effort to beat a boss, it would be nice to get *something*. I like loot.
Ok - I'm going to start by saying I'm NOT trying to attack the poster here... it's just that the post brought up a talking point.
Back in the day when a good percentage of gear did not bind, if you got an upgrade at a raid, you would pass your old item to someone else in the raid who had something worse on. Raiding was a "WE" encounter, not a "ME" encounter. Everyone wanted upgrades for sure. There were bosses that you would HOPE would drop the item that you really wanted, and, if it did, that you were the one to get it.
But if you didn't get something, you felt a little disappointed for yourself (if there was something there you wanted) but still happy for the raid in general - because back then, it was your guild that you raided with on a regular basis... and guilds, in a game that was much more reliant on community, meant more to players in them than they do today (at least I think so). Upgrades in general made your guild stronger... which increased your chances to get loot at later raids... which also would make your guild stronger.
But that passing down thing - it was a means by which more people would get upgrades at a raid than just the people who got a drop from the mob.
You are absolutely correct Wandidar :)
In an open world, no instance, game having no usable loot drop is a real blow to the community as a whole especially if there are items of very high value on the drop table. Competition is ok, I’m not as big a fan of it as some are, but being locked out of even a chance at the highest content because 40 elite players who can be logged in 18+ hours a day monopolize the entire worlds raid content simply because they still have not gotten enough drops to lessen their interest is a bad thing.
I would guess that many of us that are active on these boards are likely to at least be part of the subset of players in competition for raid content. So the question becomes what portion of the population should be able to reach the raid content. Having boss mobs drop nothing limits the number of players that can experience raid content because the most aggressive and motivated players still are not done with it.
I would rather see a consistent value coming out of every kill plus a random bonus. On dragons for example their horde may vary what is in it but you will always be able to harvest body parts that become craft able/quest reward items.
I think every raid boss should drop awesome loot. If the drop is an awesome ranger bow but no rangers in the raid than that's ok with me.
I've never been a fan of a loot table for every person in the raid or loot tolkens. I prefer older school version with one table and pray to the rng gods that it works in your favor. I'd like to see a variety table though so it's not that a boss will only drops one of these 4 dps items, but have a chance to drop an item for any "role".
As for crafting drops, I like crafting and have crafted in every MMO that Ive played in. That said, I have to admit that I was happier when they were planning to leave crafting out this time or when the plan was to make it super simple like earlier EQ. However, since things change and now crafting is a big role in the game then I'll just hope for the best with that one. My initial thought would be to agree with those that suggested having crafting drops equal to the rarity of any other drops.
For those that have had bad experiences with guilds in the past, all I can suggest is make sure you know how a guild handles raid loot early on so you know what to expect before hand. Nothing more frustrating than to find out things are handled in a way you don't like after you've devoted a lot of time and energy to a guild.
I'd imagine loot will be adjusted based on feedback thoughout alpha and beta but I can't imagine no loot or junk loot on a raid boss as being an option.
A piece of awesomeness should drop, but who it goes to can be left up to the RNG gods even if no one can wear the damn thing, random it off for sale. Only problem with allowing stuff like that to sale is people ninja, but as long as theres no name changes or server changes ninjas will meet a quick end of “stfu bro i heard you ninja.” Just 1 thing of awesomeness though if its a group of 6 if we doing 18 2-3 things of awesomeness would do.
It's worth pointing out that a lot of social issues around loot happened in early EQ, because EQ really didn't have very much support for controlling how looting would work after a fight. Eventually they did add in some configurable loot rights if I remember. It's something that more recent games have improved upon.
So, I think the goal for Pantheon should be that group/raid leaders can set loot rights for their group or raid. Whether that's FFA, Roll/Pass, Need/Greed, or Master loot. I'll go a step further and say that this information should be displayed to group or raid members somewhere, so that they can see what they're getting into before it comes an issue. That won't stop people from not paying attention, of course, but it will take away the excuse that "no one told me that it wasn't rolling!"
Of course some games have gone even farther than this, allowing you to set up looting policies for groups based on item rarity and etc. I feel like that stuff is optional though - the thing that's really needed is just the core loot type selection.
Nephele said:I'm trying to understand where you're coming from. I don't want crafting to be mandatory, in that I don't want people to feel like they have to become crafters if they don't want to do that. However, neither do I want crafting to be relegated to a "side game" either. I want it to be an integral part of the game in the big picture - guilds should want to have crafters, just as guilds should want to have a tank for raids. That was where the idea for "repairable" items came in. It's a way for that top-end raider who's very well equipped to steal need to interact with a crafter from time to time.
My reasoning behind components is similar. I want crafters to supply raiders who are looking to gear up for raiding, but I want to insure that the raiders are getting something the crafters want, so that people don't feel like they have to craft just to have the money to gear up for raiding. Having components drop in raids, that are tradable, that then can be used to craft a raid-quality gear piece, helps with that problem - or at least, I think it will. That's not to say that the piece has to be better than the finished pieces that drop - that would be silly. There can be, after all, multiple quality tiers of raid loot. That's why I used the words "rare" and "ultra rare" :) Vanguard's dusts are an example of one way you could handle the system. Raids drop dusts that make powerful stuff, that doesn't come from anywhere else in the game. So, a raider who gets one could go visit a crafter to get something made with it, OR, could turn around and sell it for a lot of money - provided the drops aren't super common, anyway.
My concern is largely directed toward crafters making raid items that are tradeable with the effect that will have on non-raiders and the economy as a whole. I think a part of it comes back to the item level discussion we had in the other thread and my assumption/hope that they are going back more toward an EQ style/way of handling items (The lack of item levels, the lack of gear grind (gear being replaced every 5 or 10 levels), the removal of the idea that higher level drops are necessarily better than some lower level ones). Having an influx of crafting drops for raiding that are then tradeable wrecks havoc on the item economy and value of non-raid items as well as essentially ensuring that raiders (in time) dominate the markets. Depending on how competitive raiding ends up in this game it could also be bad in that it adds further encouragement for those raid groups that might otherwise be geared/done from/with a raid to continue locking others out of the content so they can reap the wealth to fill their coffers.
Nephele said:
As far as flooding the economy goes, I think we should be careful not to make assumptions. Here's what I know though: In any game where items do not leave the economy through some sort of breakage/decay/sacrifice system, over time more and more and more of them will be available to players in general. Bind-on-equip is a mitigation for this problem, as much as people hate it, it helps keep items from being reused, which in turn increases demand for "new" items. This is true regardless of whether those items come from crafting or from loot drops - and it's true at every level from those first starter areas on up to the top end raid bosses. If an item enters the game and can be sold/traded, then over time, more of that item will become available, because players will keep on making/looting them. It might be fast or it might be slow, just depending on how hard it is to get or make the item, but it will happen. The solution to that historically has been flagging things no-trade as soon as they enter the game, which usually happens on raid loot, OR in the case of crafting, making the requirements so high that it's almost unattainable. None of this changes whether you're talking about crafting or looting by the way - the EQ we all know and loved was primarily a loot-based economy, and it too had the problem of tradable items becoming more and more common over time. Heck, even untradable items, once enterprising raid guilds got stuff on farm and started doing things like selling loot rights.
It's a strong statement to make but I think that any real crafter cares deeply about having an economy that works. We want to have a market for the things we make and in order to do it, the markets can't be flooded. We're willing to accept some things being harder to make in terms of ingredients or difficulty in order to help keep supply down and demand high. Likewise, we want the things we make to be useful and relevant to *all* players, even raiders, and thus we're willing to accept having to source some of the ingredients we use from those very same raiders, as long as in turn we can use it to produce things that they would buy/use. In fact, we prefer that, because the more people that participate in the economy, the more stable prices will tend to be.
Anyway my point here is that if we want to address market flooding, the problem isn't the percentage of crafting vs. non-crafting drops. The problem is the overall drop rate itself. If all those drops were non-crafting drops, you'd eventually have the same problem where stuff is either rotting or loot rights are getting sold, with the added "bonus" of making crafting far less relevant for people at the top end of the game. I don't really see how that would be a good thing? Like I said in my post up above, I actually agree with you that market flooding is a terrible thing. I disagree that the solution is throwing out the idea of crafting drops completely though.
Having raid loot in the economy skews things too heavily toward the raider, who is already rewarded enough by virtue of having access to raid drops/some of the best gear. Sure some raid loot could be tradeable, but I feel those items that are should be limited to "lesser" item slots like ears/fingers/face/back/neck/waist/wrist/trinket. I think the real cornerstone of crafters is going to be customizations/augmentations for items with some rare items here and there. Now one way to add raiding to the list of crafter benefits would be if there were a crafting specific sort of trade window, a player could browse your recipe/schematic list, pick an item they want crafted, put the crafting material(s) in the "trade" window, and then the crafter could set a price & once both agree they do their thing using the mats that are in the window as an extension of their inventory but not actually have the mats on them. The completed item would go into the clients inventory and the crafter gets their payment from the player. That way the raid dropped crafting loot could be no-drop and allow crafters to make those proposed powerful raid items that would also be no-drop. And of course they would interact with raiders the same as everyone else by customizing/augmenting their gear.
This keeps the value of non-raid drops higher and allows your average player a lot more room to participate in the economy (including and perhaps to greatest benefit of the non-raiding crafter), especially since raiders (and everyone else) will be coming to buy those items when making alts/twinks. Again, this is assuming there are no item levels so that there could be some highly sought after rare drops at any level which further allows everyone to participate in the economy regardless of level.
Liav said:I don't remember a single game where you could kill a raid boss and get nothing. Sounds terrible, hard pass.
Yes, it is demoralizing to mobilize for contested content or a static raid and waste people's time.
EQ2 Tier 5 raid content , either dropped wooden chests or Epic level loot.
This sucked period , getting people to go race and kill a contested mob for nothing is a mood killer to say the least.