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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Steven, I love the current looting rules (though the need/pass bs could go jump out a window) and loot design, so please keep it. All these "every single participant of the raid deserves loot" people are not the TA.
So far no one has said literally every single person needs a gear drop, or the best of the best materials or special rares.
If someone provides significant contributions and multiple hours of their time, they deserve something for that. This isn't a 'modern gamer' thing, it's common sense when you want these things to be fought over tooth and nail, which I assume is still true of open world bosses.
The more people competing for hitting those merit thresholds, the less will reach them, and thus groups are encouraged to wipe each other. They're encouraged to deny groups the clear because there's a good chunk of materials on the line that your group could use to upgrade gear, commission new equipment through the crafting networks etc.
But honestly all that isn't even the biggest point of this thread, it's that putting loot control in the hands of players invites and enables bad behavior with no consequence. Steven said he won't allow any form of DPS meter because it would, or so he believes it would, negatively affect the community, despite the fact that it's an invaluable tool for players to understand their skill level and where they need to improve. How is it that these sort of outdated loot distribution systems, which are much more easily abused by the inherent way they work, are not only the permitted, but required?
As for the "every participant deserves loot", I'm not the biggest fan. Perhaps some common mats would be fine, but for the actual good loot you go to raids for, nah.
And if you don't want everyone getting valuable loot and are satisfied with people getting 1 crafting material each - we agree.
I expect 40-man raidbosses to drop 1-2 full items and crafting materials for 1-2 more (talking about BiS stuff here, for context). And I expect those items to requre ~10-20 mats each, so the boss would be dropping ~40 instances of loot overall.
If you think that would satisfy all the people asking for "fair" loot - cool. I personally doubt that. Then on top of that, if you think that those mats won't be immediately pulled to craft full items (unless the boss drops ~40 absolutely random crafting mats) - we simply disagree there, because in my experience of this exact looting design, those mats always get used to craft items for a person who deserves them.
Honestly yeah I think it would be enough, though I’d want the craft material and amount to be determined by Gathering ranks like I mentioned before. Even if it’s minor, it’s an incremental step toward an upgrade and it’s enough to lessen a sting of missing out on a gear drop or the rarer items.
Guilds coming together with those drops of their own volition to get someone a gear upgrade would also feel much better and rewarding socially than having one person taking all the loot and handing it off with no input from anyone else. One fosters genuine goodwill, the other is going to inspire bitterness.
‘No no, that’s not your loot. It’s OUR loot.’ isn’t something that people enjoy, generally speaking, and all that should be done willingly by players, not mandated by game mechanics.
Toxic people will always be toxic.
Well, this comes down to player culture and preference. I know hundreds of people (and have played with thousands) that DO love to be a part of something bigger and work towards the greater good.
They're fine with giving up their loot to their GL because they want their guild to win and not just themselves to get geared up. Because they know, if the guild wins - everyone wins.
They will, but better the game not bolster their ability to be scumbags. Also, in this scenario, a guild’s bad reputation actually does have consequences. They won’t have people giving up any drops when they show they can’t be trusted.
Of course plenty of players enjoy contributing when they feel like a part of the group, but that is something that has to be done of their own choice, not because their charity is by default mandated by the game.
Edit: This is the same general logic behind you wanting to be able to seige a parent node, player choice over game-mandated behavior.
In both cases the guild will be known as a shit one and the GL will be known as a dick who shouldn't be followed. I've seen this countless times in my 12 years of playing with the looting system of "GL picks everything up and then shares it".
But you already made the choice. You chose which guild you joined. If you didn't look into their rep - that's on you making a bad choice, not on the guild and their members.
We already have a really wide variety of looting rules, so I'm sure there's gonna be dozens of guilds per each rule, so people will simply need to find the one that suits them.
Except we don't have that choice in nodes, while we do have that choice in guilds. Hell, if you're charismatic enough, you can even change a guild's behavior. While you can't do shit about your node being a vassal, unless you're willing to completely leave it for, potentially, weeks, in hopes of its parent decaying and the node growing in lvl (somehow
The reputation in the first scenario leaves the majority with nothing at all, is the issue. The toxicity hits them with no recourse. With the second, those players have something to show for it and the guild didn’t benefit off screwing them over. It mitigates how much players can be exploited by default, and that inherently makes it more appealing to engage with a guild you enjoy being part of. Even if you leave a bad guild, the damage is already done.
‘It’s your fault someone scammed you’ isn’t the point you believe it to be. It actually just shows how the system breeds toxicity. For every comment about how a guild is unfair about its loot distribution, there will be just as many claiming it was that players fault or that they’ve never seen it happen or acktually it’s not unfair at all because those people are just more important.
There shouldn’t have to be damage done first before someone is able to walk away from a bad guild or group. Let players make the choice of how much they want to pour their resources into a guild.
Of course you have that choice in nodes. You should have picked the better node (even though there was no way for you to know it was going to hurt your progress). Or you should change it from within (except you can’t do that re:vassalage because you have no power over the parent, nor with a hoarding GM because you have no power within that sort of exploitative guild structure).
I will say, ‘just tell the bad guild leader they’re being bad and hope they don’t kick you out the door’ wasn’t what I was expecting hear today, but it’s on the same vibe to me as a cartoon where they just talk it out and the villain changes their mind.
I assume that node part was a cynical joke? Cause that's literally the same as your complaint about you not knowing that the guild you chose was shit. Except it's way worse for nodes cause their citizenship will cost quite a bit of money (unless you're an inn dweller).
As for this, I wasn't talking about changing how the GL behaves. I was talking about pretty much taking over the guild instead.
Those super shitty GLs usually have just a few friends that they keep boosting with loot, so a ton of other parties in the guild are getting fucked over, but are not leaving the guild for whatever reason. Taking over such guilds is quite doable and I've seen it done before. You join the guild, become friendly with the non-GL-friends groups, start internal drama of "why da fuck is GL screwing us over, while we're so successful?" (if they are successful of course) and then steal all those successful players into your own guild.
This is exactly why I want vassal system to have rebellions. Cause the approach would be the exact same. You yell "the king has no pants" and if your charisma is high enough - everyone believes you and follows you.
Sometimes people just need a new outlook on their situation to truly see that their situation is shitty. And then it becomes waaay easier to change their minds about said situation.
Hell, I've even seen those shitty GLs willingly give up their leadership, but stay in the guild, because their ego couldn't allow them to lose all of their success, and that was their exact future if they didn't listen to the rest of their guild.
It was a tongue in cheek joke with the same logic you gave me for the looting issues, yes.
I think you and I just fundamentally disagree on how effective the social consequences will be if the loot systems are kept in this highly restricted state (and in the node systems too). Even in the ideal scenario of you taking that guild’s members, they still don’t have gear or material stores with which to get better gear to drive out the existing guild. They’ll have all the perks and artifacts and equipment the members contributed since all that is fully owned by the toxic gm.
And even if the GM claims they’ll change up because they don’t want everyone to leave right before a castle siege, there’s still no gameplay mechanism enforcing that, and they might very well kick you out once it’s concluded rather than change their ways. If you live in the castle node, yours might be paying real high taxes for that next month in retaliation, so they can take the money and recruit, or build, or further invest in their own power.
In reality, we would have contracts of negotiation to ensure everyone holds their end of the bargain. In Ashes (currently) there is nothing to enforce it and many many ways to scalp people of their contributions.
You want a mechanical system to overthrown a parent node (which I also think should exist, to be clear) otherwise ‘just leave your node and seige the parent eventually’ would be a valid solution for you.
I want a mechanical system that prevents the wholesale hoarding of group members’ loot by distributing materials directly to players based on their contributions and craft profession ranks.
It encourages player choice, ensures guilds have to inspire trust and loyalty for the members to give up their drops for collective progress, and bolsters an individual’s motivation to do content with others without needing to fight for a scrap.
Sure it might only be a scrap, literally, but it’s something that directly translates to a step toward an upgrade, or a few coins on the market toward something else they want.
Did you not read any of the comments? Everyone who posted input are veteran MMO players.
The only possible reason you could like that thoughtless system is if you have a history of being a guild leader or an officer.
And that's cool if intrepid wants to make a game built on those systems to give sweats power. The game is gonna flop hard though. The second a new player or a veteran, with some form of a brain and respect for their own time and effort, encounters their first bad roll, they aren't tolerating it and will move on to a better gane. We have a handful of better options out there these days that respect our time and efforts.
Thank you for posting this. I wasn't aware it was their goal to "generate drama and conflict inside guilds and parties". If that is their goal, better for them to go with the old school loot systems, because there will be drama lol.
Yeah, Ashes seems to rely on social interaction quite a bit, so they're probably trying to promote any interaction between players. Stuff like fully randomized looting might diminish that.
While logistics are an obvious hurdle to running a guild, the actual hardest thing is building a culture where players don't feel like that and members buy into the concept of guild>self. A guild with a successfully implemented culture doesn't have the issues you described.
This is something I have never experienced personally, have heard of only very rarely, and when hearing about it, the guild has been black listed and ridiculed by the entire server. If you are pugging in a guild group, you run the risk of anything happening (this can even happen in non guild situations). The same goes for guilds that run the risk of their server reputation by doing something stupid like this.
Also, if you are choosing to solo in a game where players are actively recruiting for their guild to organize efficient raiding teams, you are doing something wrong. Join a guild, be part of a community, help lead/recruit/organize. MMORPG is in the name for a reason.
@Smaashley If every time you killed a boss you got a bunch of loot, you would quit the game because it would be too easy or too boring. If you killed 10 bosses and never saw anything, you would be bored and leave. There is a balance to be made with how loot drops.
The idea that rare materials drop from bosses (along with occasional gear/weapons) is amazing. It brings purpose to professions which usually become a horrible/pointless part of most mmorpgs. If players are having issues with where loot will go, join a guild and get organized. Form a guild even. It's not difficult to recruit players by being a decent human being with common goals. I do it in every game I play. Right now in WOW I am playing SOD. My guild started in SOD and we have over 100 players raiding on a weekly basis. No toxic people, no drama, content is cleared, we parse 85%+. All it takes is effort communicating to others.
If you're there to pug and roll on loot, you're bowing down to the RNG gods.
I agree that players who are part of a fight deserve to be on the loot table with options to roll. It should be determined by being in the group when the fight is engaged. This is also very easy to implement and will probably be a thing.
However, I absolutely despise the "trophy for all" the world is coming to. You do not deserve to be showered with anything just because you were there clicking buttons. Flood the market with junk and the market values are nothing. Then it also becomes a auto attack issue because no matter what, players get rewarded.
Rolling for loot in a pug or organizing loot for guild members in a full guild raid simply makes sense, promotes community, builds trust/friendships and is exactly what an MMORPG is supposed to be. Games that play themselves, rewards everyone with everything, dumbs down the extra layers of what this loot system provides don't have a place in a game that is trying to bring back the best parts of mmorpgs.
"However, I absolutely despise the "trophy for all" the world is coming to. You do not deserve to be showered with anything just because you were there clicking buttons." - By that logic, anything you do in game is just "clicking buttons", so there should be no rewards?
I'd argue that spending your time to take a boss down is you spending your time and effort, that could've been spent on something else that WOULD give you rewards.
Again, you could simply give players something, while good rewards are still locked behind this loot system.
It could be anything, from raw gold, recipes, low tier materials - you could also simply make it into a quest, which completes once you kill the boss, and you go and collect the reward from NPC.
All the good rewards, like rare weapons, rare materials, etc. are behind the current loot system.
"If every time you killed a boss you got a bunch of loot, you would quit the game because it would be too easy or too boring. If you killed 10 bosses and never saw anything, you would be bored and leave. There is a balance to be made with how loot drops."
Nobody's arguing you should get a bunch of loot though. How easy it is is dependent on the fight, not just what you receive at the end of it.
Imagine if it's a hard boss fight, that always has PvP competition. After a couple of hours, you manage to kill the boss, and in turn....you get nothing at all...
The second part is exactly what people have a problem with, you could go on and kill 10 bosses, without receiving anything, because of this system. And trust me, in organized groups, it will be set to Lootmaster, so the raid leader will decide who gets the loot, and unless you are one of the top people/officers in the guild, you won't get anything - that is until all of them get what they need.
I've played Lineage 2 for 12 years. In that time I've been everything, from a random solo player buying craft mat by craft mat in order to make a single piece of armor for myself, all the way up to a GL of a 200-member guild that used this exact looting system to fairly distribute the loot.
And in my 12 years of playing the game I've barely ever seen guilds that would fuck over people as much as all yall are scared shitless of. You know why? Because L2 is a party game, where your party is pretty much your family, so you have the same people playing with you day in day out.
And then those parties join each other in guild families, where everyone holds each other responsible for good culture and fairness. And if someone was such a dick that they fucked people over on loot - they'd be known across the entire server and barely anyone would even agree to guild up with them.
Yall seem to come from places where "pugs" was a normal thing and where everyone only thought about their own loot and success, so not getting a piece of drop EVEN ONCE meant that you got "fucked over".
This is why I called yall modern gamers. And if you're all supposedly "vets" and you still want an "everyone gets something" system - well, as the classic phrase goes... this game is not for you
You should read the rest of the posts in this thread to get caught up on my stance regarding loot. What I've been asking for a merit based system in which the game, not players, award common loot. The rare stuff can be handled as-is as long as there's something taking the sting from players that don't win out on rolls. Someone claimed the design is intended to cause internal guild strife; I just don't think that's the case, and if it is, that's a very bad direction to take when group v group combat has been advertised as the focus. Are we meant to be social PvPing with what should be our closest groups in the game? I can't imagine we are when there are no mechanisms for that to occur on a gameplay level as opposed to guild v guild wars, flagging, competition over raids and world bosses, etc.
Determination for merit (induvial) loot would firstly be which group got the looting rights (so if that's not your group, then you still don't get anything because you lost), and then from there anyone in that group who met the merit thresholds would get some form of drop, which could be based on damage done, damage %, combat duration, healing done, dmg mitigated, threat level held, etc etc whatever method(s) Intrepid would want to use to determine what counts as a meaningful fight contribution.
I wouldn't expect or want a lone wolf that dished out 0.05% of the dragon's hp getting a loot pull.
But this request isn't about 'everyone getting a trophy', it's about giving players enough of a carrot after they spend a lot of time and energy on a boss to keep them coming back to that content and to get them to challenge harder content by giving them something that acts as a (tiny) step toward progress that will eventually become a more significant step toward progress as they take on more and more of that high-competition content.
Also, I much prefer systems that reward my group for doggedly fighting off competition than a system that rewards zerging, because as it's currently set up, as long as your guild has lead in the groups, you have no reason at all not to invite every single person you can to that 40-man raid. If you're getting just those 4 drops either way, why not bring 200 people? Why bother taking it on with less when there aren't any consequences to bringing double or triple or ten times what the content was designed around?
The best way of establishing a culture like that in your guild is, in reality, allowing the players to choose to prioritize the guild rather than it being mandated that all their contributions go toward the guild leads. It's the difference between crowdfunding and communism.
One of those is going to inspire a solid sense of community and promote reliance on each other, can't really say the same for the other.
Everyone in the raid getting something would still require 200 people to come if your enemies had 200 of their own people to fight you with.
If two people brought a team of 200 to a 40-man raid, then they’ve essential forfeited most merit loot in favor of prioritizing PvP, which fine. That’s a choice a group can make.
But I was talking about the current setup supporting zerging, because there is no change in the reward structure whether you have 40 people or 200 people. Currently it’s always better to bring as many people as you possibly can, because equipment gain is a static value.
Nothing changes in this regard. This is one of the examples Steven used for "zerging won't really work in Ashes". Rewards are limited so bringing more people to a boss farm would mean that you've ultimately wasted their time, cause they could've been farming something else in the meantime.
Except in your suggestion people would 100% bring more people to defend their loot, cause now all 40 raiders would be getting something. So, if anything, it's your suggestion that's promoting zerging, cause there's obviously more reward in it than in the current design.
Spot on, man. Spot on.
Some modern gamers will never understand the feeling of a L2 siege. They probably can't even comprehend the idea of going DOWN in level, just to protect the clan's reputation. The me-over-we mentality is going to make them farmable in Ashes. And that will be our reward.
A 40-man raid might all get a drop for themselves, but a 200-person group on a 40-man raid might get none.
Consider how exp splits into practically nothing when you have a massive party farming mobs under your level, that’s how merit loot should function.
At a point, your group should have to make a choice about they want from the encounter. Will they let the potential merit loot go to waste and just try to get the tag for looting rights by all targeting the boss during the contention with other groups? Or will they split teams to keep other groups down or wiped entirely while another portion of the group is dedicated to pumping out damage on the world boss to try to maximize their merit gains for those individuals.
A world boss designed for 40 people should at max grant 40 instances of merit pulls. At worst, it grants nothing but the group loot because too many people were splitting contributions too many ways during the encounter.
Reducing the reward potential when you either bring a zerg of allies or neglect to wipe a zerg of enemies means you’re discouraged from the passive gameplay and overloading the boss into irrelevance.
I also don’t see an issue with PvP breaking out after a world boss. That’s seems like a pretty typical response to losing out in a raid no matter what kind of loot there is or isn’t. People get salty, it’s gonna happen.
40 people is the max number of players that can have the rights for the loot, but the amount of loot doesn't impact that. And the amount of loot definitely doesn't influence the zerging of any given content.
This reads as you believing zerging won’t actually be deterred at all in Ashes like Steven has claimed it would be. In the current state, that seems to be the case, because there’s no reason not to. It’s a consequence-free decision in a world meant to be big on risk vs reward.
When there is no detriment to bringing hundreds of people to a 40-man raid, why would you ever not bring hundreds of people? If loot is only ever a set amount of items, then rewards are always maximized regardless of how overkill your group size is.
If loot is variable, and you’re penalized for going overkill on your group size or not fighting off other groups aggressively enough, then you now have a direct reason not to have 200 people fighting the dragon. That zerg you might have had now has to split up its focus if it wants to maximize rewards and do so intelligently.
When I'm saying "everyone will bring a zerg" I mean "that zerg will be used to kill any enemies, while the 40-man group fights the boss".
You seem to be talking about the same thing, but somehow think that giving everyone in the raid loot changes people's desire/requirement to bring said zerg?
Are you suggesting that if a boss was hit by more than 40 people its loot is now decreased? Cause that won't work in an open world game like Ashes.
I define the zerging of a boss as taking an overblown amount of people to kill the boss specifically. Big PvP groups trying to keep each other out is expected, it’s just a more localized version of large scale PvP which honestly seems to be intended.
I’ve only been referring to merit loot, not the group loot subject to the existing dispersal rulesets.
Again, merit loot is there to give contributors a basic (or less common depending on gathering ranks) consolation prize, worth not-much on its own but enough to get them coming back to try again, or something a close group might pull together to collectively get someone an upgrade.