I was playing some random free-to-play MMOs recently and the loot spam was insane. I was new and was trying to keep and collect everything to eventually figure out the purpose of it all but I was having to make runs to the bank so often that it felt like I wasn't really doing what I was supposed to do. I recall back in the day of EQ1 of being able to be out for quite a long time before I would run out of room and have to bank. I hope this game leans in that direction. I understand that at lower level that bag space would and should be limited, and therefore require more bank runs, but I hope that over time, you'll be able to sit and farm an area for a decent amount of time without having to make long bank runs every 20 minutes.
Now, I'm not saying that loot should be so rare that you never see anything, or that one area shouldn't neccessary have more or less drops than another, but I'm hoping that the loot doesn't become "spam". Another good example is Diablo 3...that game is nothing but loot spam. It really ruins the game when drops become so meaningless that you leave 90% of the things you see on the ground.
Not sure how others feel about this or if they share the same thoughts I do. I just know I'd choose a Plane of Nightmare / Kael Drakkel / Velk's Lab / Chardok loot-type situation over a Diablo 3 type of situation.
As a low level it is obviously useful to be able to get a bit of coin from kills - but I agree.
Humanoid enemies can give mostly coin - it isn't exactly unrealistic for a bandit or gnoll to be carrying some copper or even ((gasps)) a prized silver piece. Maybe the chief of the tribe will have some armor that isn't wearable by a character but a smith in town would buy. Dropping 2 fingernails, a wrist bone, a bloodied piece of cloth and a broken helmet - all sellable for almost nothing - that works but we don't really need it. 2 copper pieces works for me. Skip the partridge in a pear tree - too much encumbrance.
Animals should not carry money or usable gear - how many bears eat hunters and have undissolved sets of chain mail plus 2 in their bellies? But one can limit the type of animal parts that they drop and have them stack. Thus if, somehow, local merchants prize ears instead of burdening inventory with 12 boar ears, 7 deer ears and a prized bear ear (each worth a different amount) perhaps just 20 "animal ears" if space is at a premium.
Maybe have items that are vendor trash be stackable were it makes sense to.
And have the stack size be 100.
I do not like running to the bank too often and also leaving corpses with loot because bags are full.
Would be nice to have two feature abilities when you Loot All a mob corpse.
1. Auto do not loot an item.
A. Right click an item and set it to not be looted, until you log out. This leaves the corpse if any loot was not looted.
2. Auto delete an item.
A. Right click item and set to auto delete it, until log out. Corpse disappears cause no loot on corpse as it normally does.
Of course the hide all corpses would be nice also.
As long as there is incentive to sacrifice, deconstruct or otherwise consume the drops from conquered enemies, I don't care about frequency or quantity.
But as I've mentioned before, I would prefer all loot from all creatures be resources, and require crafting NPCs, or crafting players, or my own crafting to be able to equip them or use them, or derive any value from them.
I would also prefer that all drops have exactly zero coin value, unless processed first (again, by crafting NPCs, or crafting players, or my own crafting)
My design goals would evidently be quite different from Visionary Realms, though. :) (And those that love(d) the bad ol' days of a terrible loot system from 1999.)
vjek said:As long as there is incentive to sacrifice, deconstruct or otherwise consume the drops from conquered enemies, I don't care about frequency or quantity.
But as I've mentioned before, I would prefer all loot from all creatures be resources, and require crafting NPCs, or crafting players, or my own crafting to be able to equip them or use them, or derive any value from them.
I would also prefer that all drops have exactly zero coin value, unless processed first (again, by crafting NPCs, or crafting players, or my own crafting)My design goals would evidently be quite different from Visionary Realms, though. :) (And those that love(d) the bad ol' days of a terrible loot system from 1999.)
This would be aweful. Forcing people to take part in an aspect of a game they do not want to take part in to derive ANYTHING from their time investment seems bad to me.
I am hoping for loot drops to be fairly rare. I would like to see things like plain leather/chain/etc armor drop, which would have no real stats. Something ok for a newbie with an empty slot. Items with any stats or real value would be few and far between. As seen in Vanilla EQ. Items weren't really falling from the sky and a toon might have plain non-stat armor or empty slots up into level 30 if your luck wasn't great. It really made the loot you did get memoriable and special.
Yep, and any economic model that permits infinite loot/gold taps is also "awful", for the long term health of the economy. But that's what everyone seems to enjoy, so that's probably what Pantheon will have.
It's their game to make, but having to go back to town to interact with just another NPC hardly seems like anything new or terrible. /shrug
Dreake said:I was playing some random free-to-play MMOs recently and the loot spam was insane. I was new and was trying to keep and collect everything to eventually figure out the purpose of it all but I was having to make runs to the bank so often that it felt like I wasn't really doing what I was supposed to do. I recall back in the day of EQ1 of being able to be out for quite a long time before I would run out of room and have to bank. I hope this game leans in that direction. I understand that at lower level that bag space would and should be limited, and therefore require more bank runs, but I hope that over time, you'll be able to sit and farm an area for a decent amount of time without having to make long bank runs every 20 minutes.
Now, I'm not saying that loot should be so rare that you never see anything, or that one area shouldn't neccessary have more or less drops than another, but I'm hoping that the loot doesn't become "spam". Another good example is Diablo 3...that game is nothing but loot spam. It really ruins the game when drops become so meaningless that you leave 90% of the things you see on the ground.
Not sure how others feel about this or if they share the same thoughts I do. I just know I'd choose a Plane of Nightmare / Kael Drakkel / Velk's Lab / Chardok loot-type situation over a Diablo 3 type of situation.
Freakin amen!
Loot spam is idiotic. People should "never" have to be filtering items wholesale in a game like this. Less is more.
dorotea said:As a low level it is obviously useful to be able to get a bit of coin from kills - but I agree.
Humanoid enemies can give mostly coin - it isn't exactly unrealistic for a bandit or gnoll to be carrying some copper or even ((gasps)) a prized silver piece. Maybe the chief of the tribe will have some armor that isn't wearable by a character but a smith in town would buy. Dropping 2 fingernails, a wrist bone, a bloodied piece of cloth and a broken helmet - all sellable for almost nothing - that works but we don't really need it. 2 copper pieces works for me. Skip the partridge in a pear tree - too much encumbrance.
Animals should not carry money or usable gear - how many bears eat hunters and have undissolved sets of chain mail plus 2 in their bellies? But one can limit the type of animal parts that they drop and have them stack. Thus if, somehow, local merchants prize ears instead of burdening inventory with 12 boar ears, 7 deer ears and a prized bear ear (each worth a different amount) perhaps just 20 "animal ears" if space is at a premium.
Or recycle and make some of those animal parts good for crafting, that way as I have seen on Agnarr, masses of unlooted corpses aren't left around ..as anything and everything on those corpses would be valuable to someone. I made 75 plat in one day as a newbie on Agnarr cleaning up all the corpses left around by the multiboxers...they were power levelling themselves and leaving zones full of dead corpses. Clean up crew isn't a bad way to make money, but at the same time, alot of those mobs being killed are placeholders for something else, therefore need to be looted, so that the spawn you are looking for ...pops. Example killing low level skellies, allows the spiders with the silks you are collecting, to pop.
Cana
I've mentioned this before, but I'm of the opinion that there should be very few (if any) drops that are *only* for selling to NPCs. Everything that drops should have a use - either as a piece of equipment or as a crafting component/material. Further, drop rates and the uses of those items should be balanced such that generally speaking, you're better off selling that stuff to other players than you are vendoring it.
I'm ok with having a few things that are vendor fodder, but you shouldn't go through a play session and end up with half your bag full of random monster parts that you're just going to sell to an NPC merchant.
Along with this, I also think dropped components should be important in crafting. This helps stimulate the economy - I know as a leatherworker in some games I would sit in zones and buy hides from the people adventuring there, as an example (once I could afford to do that). I'd love to see that kind of interaction happening in Terminus.
I will also agree that the Cash to Crop to Crap ratio is important for immersion and fluid game play. I would like to see the need to go to a vendor or bank be no more than once an hour and preferably once every 4 hours without abandoning a significant amount of resources. This may not be reasonable when focusing on specifically good farming locations but through normal game play.
I would really like to see what VR is now envisioning for both the crafting system and the % of a characters power that comes from gear. The robustness and significance of those two factors will greatly effect what optimal loot quantity is and how to incentivise higher risk areas.
I also would be interested in having VR create some dynamic cash sinks. Select high end items that are more vanity than function whose price is a function of the total server cash held by players. They would need to be things that are interesting and could be desired multiple times per character without changing the power level of the character. As long as the total server cash remains below a certain amount the vendor cost doesn't go up but if say the total server cash is twice the target then the items price would be twice or even exponentially more expensive. This should do a good job bleeding higher cash drops off from the high end without hurting leveling players.
Loot spam and gold spam are the 2 most annoying parts of any mmorpg. This is the most important reason to have auction houses. To come into a zone only to have the chat window flying along, because most people think that spamming on auction is not for them, is really annoying. If people would stay on the auction channel then it would be ok but most people think they are too important to go to another channel because they may miss something in chat. And gold spammers re even worse. they flood the chat and send annoying tells to everyone who is online.
I now it is hard to keep these people in control but I sure hope VR can do something about it.
I am 100% for putting animal/creature body part type crafting items into a player-skill based harvesting mechanic seperate from looting. I'd also like to have filters on the looting window so that one that isn't interested in certain kinds of loot can easily filter those out of a quick loot button but can still look if there is a specific item that they may want.
Everquest actually dropped a fair amount of junk for you to know which was worth saving and which was worth leaving on the corpse (Thus hide all corpses was so critical). This was a huge help early on when you were farming 2 handed staffs from skeletons in Freeport to get some starting cash.
Not saying you should be receiving 5 peices of loot from random mob A, but having to make those decisions of what to keep and what to leave was always key. It was a factor of learning the game and the value of items and bag space being limited. Even worse if you were a monk and needed to worry about weight limits.
Janthu said:Everquest actually dropped a fair amount of junk for you to know which was worth saving and which was worth leaving on the corpse (Thus hide all corpses was so critical). This was a huge help early on when you were farming 2 handed staffs from skeletons in Freeport to get some starting cash.
Not saying you should be receiving 5 peices of loot from random mob A, but having to make those decisions of what to keep and what to leave was always key. It was a factor of learning the game and the value of items and bag space being limited. Even worse if you were a monk and needed to worry about weight limits.
That was more just an issue in the early levels with limited bag space and the weight vs payout for rusty weapons being terrible, cracked staff the only really worthwhile weapon drop. For the most part all items were worth picking up past level 15.