I am curious, how exactly you want to design the drops under ploot, number and examples please as I would like to maybe make experiment with that.
I have reading suggestion about ploot for a while so i have some imagination how it most poeple want it to work, so please tell me if I am right about this and if it should work like example i will present. If not, tell me how it should work.
OK lets see:
Rule 1
Game with 8 players: Number of total dropped items would be exactly same, if 20 whites, 15 magic, 6 rare, 3 set and 2 unique items drop in game under current FFA loot just like in game with personal loot active.
Rule 2
players have to be all in close proximity, ploot is not active outside of that range
Rule 3
If player leaves the game, all items which are not picked up by him, would be free for anyone who wants them again. Meaning they would be visible on ground.
Rule 4
junk items are not part of personal loot(potions, arrows, throwing potions…)
Then I have two major question and i would like to hear your opinions about that:
1) Should all loot be visible for everyone and player would just not be able to pick it up if it was assigned to somene else?
2) How is actualy distribution work? Let me explain:
Player A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H are playing together and is order how items drops in time with player who will get them:
White monarch - A
Flawed amethyst - B
Supperior Javelins - C
Small charm - D
Ber - E
Ethereal 4 socket partizan - F
Flawless diamond - G
Jewel - H
Feral axe - A
Tir - B
Grand charm - C
Magic Amulet - D
herald of zakarum - E
White Zakarum shield - F
Magic belt - G
Isenharts armor - H
Is that right?, and what will happen when player go to town for potion replacing for example? Will he be skipped? Or is he still included in certain time limit and item will drop for him there?
will you be happy to be guy C getting +4 dex charm and superrior javelins when guy E have Ber and hoz?
in my opinion you are making it way more complex that it usually is in most game with instanced loot.
it’s not even a specific order it’s an RNG roll between players in the same area (meaning , yes if you would go to town or afk in more than 2 or 3 screen radius , you wouldn’t see any loot from the area from where you weren’t there and where monster died.
and as it is RNG (just like loot itself) it’s not player A then B etc…each item will be rolled and allocated to someone randomly.
and usually yes , junk items are part of it in most game with it.
as for your last sentence , whether it would be FFA or allocated , there’s bound to be players more lucky than others when it comes to items picked up which is normal
That aside , you are speaking of making loot visible when people leave.
it’s yet another variant of instanced loot called “timed loot” which is nice too but most are advocating for the simple fact that loot are allocated randomly with no time windows (but i would be on board for a temporary “instanced loot” which is “timed loot” as well )
after that it’s only the devs to see if they want to implement it and in what shape of forms.
The thing to remember is simply that it would be an optional check box and that it doesn’t increase the amount of loot dropped by a boss.
some people might like it some not , and it’s why it would be a toggle at game creation
but saying “would you be happy as person E ?” well it’s like saying : “guy A got shako from one andy” “guy B got it after 1000 andy” would you like to be guy B ?
rng being rng , nothing to do with the matter at hand.
it seem to me like you are making it more complex that such thing usually is : it’s only random drop allocation between players in the same area (usually 2 or 3 screen radius)
one sentence explain it all
Well, Instanced loot killed trading in Diablo 3. I dont want that in D2. It has to be complex like this, how else you want to do distribute the loot then?
I see, but how it would work then? So basicly all player would be throwing dice on every item and the one with biggest number would get the item right? Well in that case you can have many players who will simply get zero usable items in several baalruns dont you think?
It can be actualy even worse with ploot than with FFA loot, as many players are not interested in their items they would roll in that RNG system so they would just let them be on ground. In FFA these items are scavenged by others.
Your example is basically a round-robin which could be one way to do it. RNG roll for every item is another. I would also point out that usually with loot allocation you don’t allocate every single item.
While they may be good for crafting bases, I don’t think you should bother to allocate white items personally. Or even magic items other than maybe charms. I’d say you’d allocate rares, uniques, gems, runes, any charms, maybe socketed items, not sure what else. Everything else would just always be FFA.
Another point was that it could also be a very short duration allocation. For example, 5 second allocation was one idea being used. In that system, the item is only allocated for 5 seconds and them becomes FFA again. That would just give players a bit of extra time to grab something and have more even loot distribution without permanently locking it to a player who may not want it or may not ever notice it.
You’d probably want to indicate an item was allocated to you and not just FFA too by maybe giving it a different background color or border or something.
not at all, it’s not that that killed diablo 3 trade
in the first day of diablo 3 was more than fine.
(i was there , with the difficulty where bee could one shot you even with the best stuff)
but no worry i do understand your fear.
what killed diablo 3 trading isn’t personal loot , it’s what came a dozen updates later : Item bound on drop and way higher drop rate.
but the personal loot itself has NOTHING to do with it.
it’s not about higher number , it’s the system deciding to who directly (no number no nothing , so here again you are making it more complex that it actually is)
as for your concern , it’s exactly the same with FFA : i can’t tell you how many time i saw people getting shako, skulder and other neat item and in the end sold it to a merchant before leaving the room/Game.
whether it’s FFA or ploot , both might indeed make you have 0 useable item. but if it wasn’t the case that wouldn’t be an option anymore but something forced upon you even if you disliked said type of game if one was overly better than the other
Some magic items are extremely valuable and their price is in multiple High runes. Base items socketed/ethereal also. I think white, grey and amgic should be included also.
If a lot of people are after those things then including them as well would make sense.
I do think temporary allocation would be better than permanent in this game because in the chaos of an 8 player game, particularly when you’re all moving around and not doing something more stationary like a Baal run, a lot of items are skipped and if you permanently allocate then a lot of items go to waste that someone else may have wanted. Five second allocation would help distribute loot without causing as much waste as permanent allocation.
they are base for the best items in the game which are runeswords.
a good ethereal poleaxe with the number of socket required for infinity etc… could go for a high rune sometime
same for good ethereal shield / armor. (and also because those two could be bugged due to the infamous glitch , but even before that , they were still worth a lot )
Well how will system decide that? I wasnt trying to make it complex, I was just trying to imagine it as throwing dice and picking the one with higher number. It doesnt matter, effect is same loot is distributed randomly with many people getting nothing valuable for multiple runs. How better is that vs FFA?
activity (benefit: filters out afk players, problem: none (apart from “dodging the timer”))
exclude towners (benefit: filters out players who did not participate, problem: excludes players from boss drop if they die in boss fight)
none of the above (benefit: has no artefacts if everybody plays normally, problem: allows “leechers” to take 1/8 of the loot)
Rule 3
i agree here, but i want to add two variations (not exclusive):
items are displayed to all players, but transparent
items are made public after x seconds (0 seconds would be FFA)
Rule 4
i do not think it would be necessary, especially with the FFA after x seconds rule
loot visibility? Yes, i think so. Seeing the loot is part of the game. Even when you are not getting it. pLoot would even make seeing loot more common, because players do not need to grab it so quickly anymore.
Also there might still be a small FFA component here, if we are working with timeout (described above), 7 players might still want to grab the unique staff after it becomes FFA after 2 seconds.
Distribution: You are making a round-robin. It might work, but it gives a penalty to the people who are last on the round robin.
In an endless loop, it should even out, but depending on how the round-robin is populated, the ones who join the game first, might always be in the front seat. You might also be able to calculate your next drop and just kill 2 more tentacles to drop scrolls until you are in a sweet spot.
I would rather have chance decide. Every drop rolls a dice. Every drop your chance is 1/x where x is the number of players in the game to get the drop.
This means you can get nothing out of a drop of 8 or even all. But it is much more common that you get 0-2. Which is likely what you would have been able to grab anyway.
Yes, that is the trade. You give up potential loot for secure portion of the loot. If the deal is not in your favor (judging by your feeling), you can always go back to the FFA loot option.
Well to be fair, with ffa loot, guy E could be getting the +4 dex charm, superior javelins, ber and hoz.
There are many ways to handle personal loot. I’d argue that if duping is fixed and botting is handled, the personal loot (even at 100% drops rates) would just even it out or not even get near the amount of items the cheaters introduce into the economy.
I doubt that if they enabled personal loot that people will find enough SoJ’s to sell thousands all the time to NPCs like dupers/botters do.
I think a good balance would to just have separate ladders for traditional players and new players. Always offer the classic mode in case the blizzard developers go too far and ruin the game. The new ladder can be a testing ground to see if personal loot is too destructive.
it randomly generate a name among the players present near the monster that died pretty much.
yea you could still call it a roll of the dice but with name instead of numbers i guess.
once again it’s not about being better but more “fair” towards those with ping , or those that simply don’t want to only care about the floor. (usually at boss fight people stop attacking the boss when it goes to 50% hp simply because they are awaiting for it to die and pick up the loot …that’s a bit…well bad in my opinion)
but whether it’s FFA or ploot , both are RNG based anyway , like if you solo bosses , you could get nice item on the very first andy like you might get nothing for 100 andy straight.
And you said I was overcomplicating it? I think these sorft of things would only create more issues as people would try to abuse it in many ways.
Sure. Question is what would make poeple more angry? To see loot and not be able to pick it up or not see that loot at all?
My issue from above still exist tho, under that system many players could get nothing worth picking up in multiple baal runs. So in the end, how is that better than FFA loot? There is only certain amount of loot, there is not system to make everyone happy, there will always be people who will get loot and people who will not, doesnt matter how well you design it, unless you want to kill trading how D3 did.
that is for the devs to decide i guess (if they do decide to put any kind of allocated/instanced loot in the game that is) , each game has various way of doing it.
it’s not us to decide , we aren’t the whole playerbase , each player might have a different opinion on it anyway.
you can’t please everyone that’s why toggleable option that aren’t clearly “better” than others are important in order to atleast please a bit more without making others feel rejected.
For that reason i also think that everything should be included.
If pLoot works, then it should be fair for all item categories. (ideally including the “timeout rule”)
D2/D2:Lod already calculates the drop/no drop chance and item identity based on multiple factors, including the number of players in party and those in physical proximity to the monster kill.
Mechanistically, there are 2 main ways that drops could be allocated in an instanced loot system:
An ordered system similar to what you described
An RNG based system where after a drop and the item identity rolled, it is assigned to a player in physical proximity to the monster killed. (i.e a town chiller gets nothing)
And how is that any different than the current situation where guy E (or a botter or pickit cheat) can collect both of the runes in an 8 party game? In the case of the game with the botter/pickit cheat, good luck with getting a shot at those runes. If personal loot in an 8 player game with a single cheat, the odds are high that both runes will go to non-cheaters.
Yeah. It does not matter. It is a blackbox that puts out a player name. The inside of the box is random.
Either everyone rolls a dice. Or there is a dice with 1 side for each player. It really does not matter too much how it is implemented.
The requirement is: each 1 item drop, 1/x chance to get loot for every of the x eligible players.
I have a question. If they permanently set the loot to players 1 and offered each player their own loot, would it really even effect anything that much?
I think these sorft of things would only create more issues as people would try to abuse it in many ways.