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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.
Open World Bosses and You - The Importance of Furniture Drops
JustVine
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I have seen many concerns about the games loot system in reaction the showcase of Firebrand. After discussion with Azherae I have come to the conclusion that there is an easy enough fix that Intrepid might already have in the works. The solution? Furniture drops! (and other non-combat oriented crafting.)
The main complaint I have seen is "Why should I help fight a boss if I get nothing out of it?". I think this is an important concern when it comes to 'node loyalty' that Steven seems to be betting on. Guilds swiping all the content local to your node is discouraging. Even if you are at the bottom of the rung in the ruling guild, you are still demoralized! As a citizen of a Node, you should feel good about the content in your node. You should feel some comfort in the unique content in your node. There is going to be a lot of live content at various sizes that you as a citizen stand to benefit from. But getting gear, while important, does not really feed a player's positive play loop when considering the node. It makes you more powerful. It makes you more capable of defending your node, but what of the content? What of the character of that content!
I propose that this problem is solved through the power of a wyvern leather chair or couch. Furniture that can go in your peasant abode, in your apartments, townhouses, and freeholds. Furniture, as we know, grants you little quality of life benefits mechanically, but not enough for it being a common drop from impactful content like Firebrand to be a point of imbalance. Small drops like this may seem like they have an equally small impact, but I can assure you that one must never underestimate the power of player housing when it comes to incentive to participate in open world content!
Rest easy about Firebrand drops by sitting back in your Firebrand recliner!
Edit: In case it isn't clear I mean materials specifically for that furniture, not entire pieces. Crafting the furniture is still important.
The main complaint I have seen is "Why should I help fight a boss if I get nothing out of it?". I think this is an important concern when it comes to 'node loyalty' that Steven seems to be betting on. Guilds swiping all the content local to your node is discouraging. Even if you are at the bottom of the rung in the ruling guild, you are still demoralized! As a citizen of a Node, you should feel good about the content in your node. You should feel some comfort in the unique content in your node. There is going to be a lot of live content at various sizes that you as a citizen stand to benefit from. But getting gear, while important, does not really feed a player's positive play loop when considering the node. It makes you more powerful. It makes you more capable of defending your node, but what of the content? What of the character of that content!
I propose that this problem is solved through the power of a wyvern leather chair or couch. Furniture that can go in your peasant abode, in your apartments, townhouses, and freeholds. Furniture, as we know, grants you little quality of life benefits mechanically, but not enough for it being a common drop from impactful content like Firebrand to be a point of imbalance. Small drops like this may seem like they have an equally small impact, but I can assure you that one must never underestimate the power of player housing when it comes to incentive to participate in open world content!
Rest easy about Firebrand drops by sitting back in your Firebrand recliner!
Edit: In case it isn't clear I mean materials specifically for that furniture, not entire pieces. Crafting the furniture is still important.
Node coffers: Single Payer Capitalism in action
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Comments
In fact, I am all for there not being any loot drops (as in, items, components for items, etc) at all for this kind of content, as I believe that can only detract from the actual purpose of it as a content piece.
Loot from mobs should come from mobs that have loot as their primary, secondary and tertiary reason for existing.
P.S. The UO system of furniture placement was so cumbersome and reliant on skillfull hacks that only a few players knew to produce desired arrangments that people would actually hire them to do decorating work.
Hum. Are you saying "this kind of content" specifically because this world boss is part of a big plot development, or do you apply this to world bosses as a gameplay challenge in general?
Cause I'd argue setting up a big world boss kill can, at least theoretically, be just as much of a personal advancement challenge for a guild leader, as setting up a coordinated dungeon raid party. So I don't think I'd want to see all world boss rewards restricted to node advancement and some cosmetics, if that's what you're saying.
I think that's something players have to learn to deal with, and the rest of the game's design needs to ensure that other players don't end up with empty hands all month.
If every player is guaranteed payment for a takedown, whether it's a cosmetic trophy or a competitively significant reward, that makes it trivially easy to summon people to zerg encounters. As a player who plays in small guilds, I like showing up for people I want to support. For fellow node citizens I want to see equipped with stronger weapons, and for guild members asking for help.
That's an organic community interaction to me.
If everyone just shows up to get their cash prize, there's no real social interaction.
I would even argue that by restricting loot to very small numbers without automatic payment for most contributors, you're encouraging more other players to show up to thwart boss takedown attempts, instead of just joining the masses every time something's happening, in order to get their share of the payment.
It also makes it feel all the more special when your 10-man-raid manages to snag the loot away from the 40-man-raid.
I don't mind furniture and sieging resources (again, not sure if that was a typo, but I think it's a good idea) being dropped to all players at some encounters, but I think it adds to the game if half of all bosses and half of all dungeons only grant very limited rare rewards that have to be distributed among the players who earned them, like we saw on this world boss.
Splitting up these reward schemes depending on whether a boss/dungeon is part of a story arc might be a good idea.
Just give everyone that meets a merit threshold loot, whether it’s material to be used for crafting or upgrading, or some kind of recipe/plan/quest lead etc. The more reliable the loot acquisition is for the victors, the more people will want to fight over it.
Kill the Winter Dragon in order to end the Perpetual Winter it brings. Which should then provide access to trees and other Resources that allow furniture to be Crafted.
Essentially what we're arguing about is whether Steven's speech about scarcity discouraging zerging adds up or not.
The best counteragument might be: "Mega guilds are gonna zerg anyway, so all you're doing is making sure other people will interact even less."
The best pro argument would be: If mega guilds zerg every encounter that shows up in their vicinity, it's up to other players to decide how to deal with that. If every player gets breadcrumbs, lots of smaller guilds might feel enticed to accept the majority's dominance and just join the zerg. Whereas if there's a small, limited pool of highly valuable rewards to benefit from, and all of it is likely going into the hands of the mega guild, other guilds are more incentivised to properly contest that mega guild. And as a result of cooperation being less of a beneficial default, all players will be more incentivised to take down encounters more quickly with smaller group sizes present, instead of waiting for the full zerg and risking higher chances of interference.
Thoughts?
If loot is restricted to only a few pieces, then that zerg will benefit very little for all that manpower, and my group wouldn't benefit much by fighting them off and claiming it, so why bother denying them that small chunk of loot when I could just go to a different area while they're 100-manning a 40-person lvl25 raid?
If loot is merit-based and awarded to everyone that meets that merit threshold (damage, healing, mitigation, what have you) in the group that gets the winning tag on looting rights, in addition to those few rare items that act as group loot, then I REALLY have to make sure that mega guild doesn't successfully zerg it down.
As it's currently set up, I am not encouraged to participate since denying the group is only denying them a handful of items, nor would my group join the zerg because none of those items would land within my group anyway. If I saw a 100-person zerg, I'm just not going to bother contesting with my group of 40.
What you call "not benefitting much," other games call "am honest day's work."
Top-tier and high-tier loot shouldn't be handed out to everyone within a few months. You keep it top-tier by not letting everyone have it.
If you play with 60 people on average, and each of you gets one piece of loot a day, you will each have gained one piece of loot after 2 months.
That gets reduced by the fact that some of that loot won't be a completed top-tier craft, which is again offset by the fact that an encounter doesn't usually just give a single item per group, not can you only fit one encounter into an average day; maybe you'll each have one top-tier item after 3 months, that's fine too; and your leadership will have the completed sets earlier, making your group stronger as a whole.
If you want things faster, you'll have to try and achieve more in smaller groups.
That may or may not check out depending on how responsible your playerbase is.
Your solution relies on the playerbase to keep gear distribution against zergs balanced within the gameplay design, it rewards zergs for existing,
(technically you could scale down the total value of the loot of a zerg gets it, but you're actively suggesting the opposite),
and generally rewards passive non-competition over proactive contestation, because everyone who goes where the action is and complies with whatever is happening gets their breadcrumbs.
Aside from no contestation (Which can be argued is fine to a degree: Co-operation is fun, too.) this also just doesn't require any coordination. You just wait for more people who want loot at it until it works. That's not awful as a small part of the game experience, but it absolutely shouldn't be the default plan that the game design rewards.
You could theoretically solve that last problem by only attributing loot to a single allied party, but that would lead to other complaints, and still doesn't solve that the basic maths are just inferior here.
If you ran into the same one or two zergs every time you showed up for the best encounters in your area that your group can handle, you'd just split up and go farm overland map monsters instead, every time?
How do you expect to get anything in a self-declared high-risk-high-reward game, if your go-to strategy in the face of opposition is "roll over and die"?
What about grouping up with other people to take down those zergs and teach them a lesson about efficiency with their manpower, and sharing objective control?
Blown past falling sands…
Ah well, I was hoping that things were going to turn around, but so it goes.
For Intrepid, just be aware that ofc, OP's suggestion is serious, but obviously, I doubt she'll be particularly interested in continuing any engagement on it.
We will continue to hope that someday, those who also think things like this are important will return.
I understand that the encounters and special gear drops are meant to be rare, but material drops aren’t high-tier loot. They’re an avenue to a minor power increase via the crafting systems, but they’re not rare nor are they anything unique to raiding other than maybe a few of the boss-specific materials that would require a high level gatherer to actually collect off the boss.
(I have other concerns given this recent stream that raiding is being completely divorced from the Gathering professions now, which isn’t how they were described in the past where Steven said you should bring gatherers for the best possible materials drops. ‘No, hunters won’t get anything of note from world bosses’ is a pretty stark turn away from the previous way they were talked about, but that’s a whole different thread of feedback.)
Back on the topic of promoting zerging, part of merit systems is that not everyone is going to qualify, aka they didn’t contribute enough. It’s the same method behind the tagging system in determining which group gets rights to the Group drops, and then within that group anyone who met the merit thresholds gets some personal materials drops.
That means massive zergs would end up splitting their merit values between so many more people that a significant chunk, perhaps all of them even, wouldn’t get any of that personal material loot (same idea as splitting EXP too much), just the group loot they’d have to split between 100+ people, which can spark some person conflict, ire within the guild for their handling of the raid, not thinning the participant field aggressively enough etc.
It discourages zerging when doing it directly hampers your gains.
If I see the same zerg at every world boss, consistently, then that means the game is rewarding them for zerging, and there’s larger issues with the design at that point. PvP is group based, which means unfortunately, that the larger group more often than not will be the victor, and if they’re double my groups size, then yeah I’m not going to roll for the 10% chance we wipe them when the 90% chance is us all eating gear degradation and exp debt. Serious combat adjustments, diminishing returns on heals/buffs, target caps, etc have to exist in significant fashion to prevent ballgroups from being the standard raid approach and unapproachable mobs that they end up in most open world PvP.
My approach for reducing the frequency of ballgroups would focus more on giving them reason to need to use smaller numbers, rather than hope ballgroup #2 forms to wipe out the first one, and then you still have a ballgroup or you’ve got your allies turned competition again which results in a net-zero aspect of cooperation. Why would this group cede control to mine? Why would my group cede control to them? Only one group is actually going to walk away with anything to show for it.
This is how it should be. If a group doesn’t want you to get any drops, they won’t invite you, but if a group has invited you, you got looting rights as a group and met a personal merit threshold, then that group shouldn’t ever be able to deny you looting privilege whether it’s the materials or a roll at the gear drops. That group invite should never come if the group lead intends to deny loot to anyone in it, and they shouldn’t be permitted to do so at a game level. It’s shitty behavior for one, and everyone here knows exactly how shitty it feels to run into someone like that.
It’s not just ‘bad guilds’ you can look out for, it’s most guilds. It’s almost always the biggest most populated guilds. Even ‘good guilds’ will have nepotism and favoritism and ego-bloated officers. That’s why I don’t want anything but the game itself determining who gets loot and who doesn’t.
Maybe a defeated boss will give a buff to craft faster, maybe a boss will increase your moving speed, dmg, walk on water, immunity to "something", etc, etc. " GET your buff boys!, let's go!"
The buff would be applied for a specific period, hours/days, and you can't have more than two active buffs from the bosses. This way, during node wars, guilds can chose to have an extra buff advantage by killing a boss first, before the battle. This will give bosses a reason to be grinded over and over, even if the loot lacks in quality.
That would actually be very appealing as a reward system. It’d also encourage groups to keep people away from a particular boss’s spawn area in the days leading up to a siege.
His idea is by far the best we got nowadays, if we can gather such materials then making furniture is just a consequence from this