Glorious Alpha Two Testers!

Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!

For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.

You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.

Loot System for World Bosses

The loot system for world bosses in my opinion really needs to be along the lines of anyone that does damage to it while it's being attacked should get loot from it. Including the same chances at the rare loot.  This way, a lot more people would be willing to get involved with taking it down when it appears.  If the loot only goes the person/group that does the most damage, or attacks first, then you will wind up getting a lot less involvement from a lot of alienated/apathetic players, especially from smaller guilds, random and solo players.  If everyone gets loot, then there will always be interest by everyone around, rather than being completely excluded without choice due to loot mechanics. 

/thoughts?

Comments

  • Participation metrics (healing, cc's, damage, mitigation, etc,...) could be used to algorithmically determine the loot drops. This can be tuned during testing to encourage active participation fights, without flooding the market with too much loot.
  • That'd be rough cause the whole point is the rarity of what it drops if every member of a 100 person raid gets it it kind of defeats the point.  Traditionally they drop very few things and usually the raid leader gets it and determines what to do with it.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited July 2017
    You can still have the rare loot be just as rare simply by adjusting percentages.  100 people attacked?  Maybe one of those lucky people got that super cool awesome loot.  The other 99 could get different loot from common to rare.  The game would treat all attackers/healers as a single group rather than as individuals/separate groups. The devs can easily set-up tiers of loot with varying drop rate percentages and each player gets one roll.  

    All I'm saying is that if you exclude a large portion of the player base from ever even having the opportunity to participate and get anything from it, then people will become less interested in participating at all even though it's billed as one of the bigger selling points from Intrepid.
  • Warkov said:

    All I'm saying is that if you exclude a large portion of the player base from ever even having the opportunity to participate and get anything from it, then people will become less interested in participating at all even though it's billed as one of the bigger selling points from Intrepid.
    Intrepid hasn't talked about excluding anybody from loot? They want this game to encourage people to participate in a meaningful way. This is one of the pillars of the game design.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited July 2017
    I understand wanting loot to be rare AND have meaning, cause I'm right there with you.  My fear is that long term smaller groups and guilds will be forced out from participating in this cool content by the larger guilds.  Of course small groups and guilds can join together at the time and form an ops group, but that is assuming that there are going to be enough players around at the time to do so.  

    Imagine a big 40+ man guild group shows up, or even two.  That little 10 man guild and the 8 or 9 random people around at the time that they picked up still wouldn't get anything from the experience, other than helping take it down faster.  Someone suggested that maybe if each player/group hits some small % number of damage/heals, then they should be included for loot.  That's a good idea IF the game offers loot to each group/player independent of the other groups/players, otherwise you start taking away the incentive of the large groups to participate.

    I know we don't know the loot rules, or methods yet which is why I brought up my initial post.  I'm hoping to bring a little attention to the subject prior to anything being decided.  I would just like some mechanic that works to gets everyone involved, from the solo players all the way to the mega guilds, and to do so, there must be some type of rewarding for everyone who actively participates in the engagement.
  • phew.... sorted :smile:

  • Letting solo people tag a world boss for a chance of loot cuts the need of social interaction what's one of the main cornerstones of ashes. I've seen many many games that have slowly done this over time and it always damaged the community of that game what they have never recovered from.

    I think one solution for smaller groups is to count their group tag and if they manage to do 5% of the damage/healing during the fight, for example, they get loot still but the main guild/group that's put in the most effort gets the biggest reward.

    When you stop needing each other it stops being an MMO in my eyes and ends up a loot simulator.
  • What I don't understand with these small groups is... Why does one not simply form a raid and invite everyone? If you see some randoms like looking for groups and some 5-6 men teams, just whisp and tell them that you want to form a raid for a better chance to loot anything.
  • I think they should drop loot as a normal mob would and the people involved need to decide what they want to do with it. Giving everyone a piece makes it so that a huge amount of people can just zerg it down to some extent and get easy loot which tends to make for a far too easy experience.

    Compare it to GW2, where at least when I played, people ran around to every world boss with 100 solo people easily killed the joke of a world boss (because they had so many people) and were rewarded for it for individually doing almost nothing.

    Now, they have said that world/raid bosses won't be 'zergable' but frankly I'm skeptical. Short of only allowing a certain amount of people to damage a boss, I have a hard time picturing a situation where a boss intended to be killed by 20 people would not be easier with 40, simply because a big part of the number requirement for a boss is simply a damage check. Unless there are mechanics in place where a character cannot damage a boss directly and instead uses some 'raid mechanic' to deal damage to it. But that sort of cheapens the experience, at least for me, since it feels like more of a puzzle instead of a fight.

    Put simply, bosses should have a set loot table no matter how many people kill it and the people looting need to decide what they want to do with it. There will be times when someone may get nothing, but bosses can be repeated until everyone gets what they need from it over time. In a game with meaningful open world pvp conflict, world bosses should be a huge pvp hotspot and it wouldn't really work with the 'everyone gets a trophy for participating' system.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited July 2017
    Pureos said:
    I think they should drop loot as a normal mob would and the people involved need to decide what they want to do with it. Giving everyone a piece makes it so that a huge amount of people can just zerg it down to some extent and get easy loot which tends to make for a far too easy experience.


    You can scale the loot based on group size.

    Say the world boss will drop three tiers of items.  Rare, Uncommon, and common.  For the sake of this post lets say the percentages are 1%, 30%, and 69% respectively.  

    Now say the attacker break down is like this:

    Mega Guild - 40+ players
    Zerg ops group - 20 players
    Smaller Guild A - 10 players
    Solo random players - 5 

    The game can reward X number of items based on group size.  So mega guild would get 8 rolls for instance, zerg group would 4 rolls, small guild gets 2 rolls, and give solo players something like a flat 15-25% chance to get 1 roll if they also pass a damage/heal % check in order to do so.  OR conversely they could get 1 roll, but all the drop rate percentages change making the rare/uncommon loot a lot harder to get.  In addition to that, you could also adjust the drop rate percentages up on the tiers based on the group size too.  That way it would also to give people more reason to group up.  This way, regardless of the group dynamics, players would still have a reason to participate in the event at all group sizes.  All my numbers are made up obviously, but the idea I feel is at least functional. 
  • Well, if the answer Intrepid has to loot isn't in this thread, there are sensible alternatives here. For common mobs and NPCs I agree that the loot shouldn't be based on who tagged it but for World Bosses I think there needs to be a way to enable the greatest contributors to the kill to get the loot. I'd be more than happy for solo'ers to get low tier mats with a daily quest completion from joining in, but if 40 man raid started fight then they should reap the rewards.
  • Kratz said:
    Well, if the answer Intrepid has to loot isn't in this thread, there are sensible alternatives here. For common mobs and NPCs I agree that the loot shouldn't be based on who tagged it but for World Bosses I think there needs to be a way to enable the greatest contributors to the kill to get the loot. I'd be more than happy for solo'ers to get low tier mats with a daily quest completion from joining in, but if 40 man raid started fight then they should reap the rewards.
    What do you do when there are two opposing mega groups?  Let's say group A tagged it first, but group B does a little more total damage.  Who should get the loot?
  • I think you've come up with a possible answer to that yourself. I'm assuming/speculating that what we'll have is similar to what you've discussed above or a variation of it. They need to make sure the good stuff goes to the mega contributors but I don't want a game where there's a queue for mobs - be of soloers or raid groups.  
  • I'd say the lowest rolls win, or the least dps, feet-dragging, lazy, lewtz-whoring, backseat driving toon gets the steal.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited July 2017
    here is my idea- a formulae should be used like this- drop rate of item = value*(a*aggro generated+b*damage dealt+c*percentage of total healing)/(a+b+c)
    value,a,b and c should vary for each boss, every time.
    rarer items have lower value 
  • For world bosses, etc, I'm a fan of awarding tokens, and once a person has XX number of tokens, then they can purchase a piece of gear.
  • While I enjoy a good piece of shiny new loot as much as the next guy, it should not be forgotten that the primary benefit of defeating a world boss is not losing your home.

    From what I understand of nodes and events, these massive bosses will eventually destroy a node if not dealt with. If there aren't enough people who care to defend a city, then it should die. In this particular scenario, loot is secondary IMO.
  • For world bosses, etc, I'm a fan of awarding tokens, and once a person has XX number of tokens, then they can purchase a piece of gear.
    I actually really like this idea.  They could have a vendor with awesome loot, that requires these world boss tokens.  Maybe the token drop amounts from the WB could even be proportional to the actual damage/heals each player does during the fight too.  It would solve a lot of the loot drop conflicts.
  • Warkov said:
    For world bosses, etc, I'm a fan of awarding tokens, and once a person has XX number of tokens, then they can purchase a piece of gear.
    I actually really like this idea.  They could have a vendor with awesome loot, that requires these world boss tokens.  Maybe the token drop amounts from the WB could even be proportional to the actual damage/heals each player does during the fight too.  It would solve a lot of the loot drop conflicts.
    Exactly, that's basically what I was trying to get at, but not too well at 4am.
  • I actually hope that we can't just repeatedly kill/farm world bosses over and over again. I hope that after awhile, they will just stay dead, or, a less extreme option, move to a different location. In a game that is supposed to react and change depending on what players do, it wouldn't make sense for the world bosses to remain static forever. 
Sign In or Register to comment.