What should we loot on mobs ?

Gromlof

I have been comenting on youtube vidéos livestreams , here and there but i tought it would be better to create a discution dedicated to the subject: What should we loot when killing mobs ?

My ideal system :
Each monster have a loot table with ressources ranking from very comon to very rare. for exemple you kill a wolf you have 100% chance to get wolf skin 50% chance to get a claw 25%chance to get an eye 10% chance to get a toth and maybe something like 0.5% chance to drop a mana infused wolf tooth.

Each of these ressources belong in a craft like the skin can be refine to leather the claw can be use in jowelry the eye in alchemy and the infused wolf tooth is used in a legendary set of weapons.

Same goes for bosses exept you have more rare ressources and they belong in more recipes.

So if you fight a monster and you loot the rare ressource you are gona have the same sensation or even a better one that when you loot a piece of gear ! Because you are 100% sure it has value.

Also it's obvious but it makes the farming gameplay loop feed the crafting gameplay loop and if it is the only way to get gear and the crafting is correctly design the crafting loop will feedback the farming loop and the pvp and the pve.
So everyone is connected.

And in top of all that it makes farming monsters extremly valuable and rewarding wich is good to create endless content with no effort and can create player friction around some farming areas once the corruption system is fixed.

That's for my opinion on the loot and the craft, i don't really like the glint system. I think with the upcoming crate system coming soon the whole glint situation can be reevaluate and maybe remove ? It feels like a temporary solution to me not a fully intended design. OFC i don't like looting ready to use equipement, not because i don't like the sensation of looting it but because i like it when a mmo have a well integrated crafting system.
Also this type of system makes so robusts gameplay loops that it almost replace questing. No need to implement artificial content and weird guidelines throught the world, people will do what they want and feel good about it.
And i will finish with the fact that if you have resources only obtenable on a certain area then it will gain a lot of value once moved on another area wich is one of the intended gameplay loop of AOC !

What are your takes on looting, farming and crafting and how thoses loops should work together ?

MrPockets

I totally agree that loot from enemies should all be crafting materials. There are ways to balance the economy around full loot drops...but I think generally speaking it is just better long term to have all equipment player made. Give players a reason to interact with the economy and crafting system.

Either find other players to help you craft what you want, sell the resources to buy what you want, or level a crafting profession yourself.

I haven't really thought too much about the glint system - to me it is just a way to get raw gold into the economy.

SongRune

I had a little trouble following this post, and I found myself thinking about why that is. I reread it once or twice and realized that the problem is that I find it difficult to focus on a feedback that doesn't read like a thesis because that's how I'm used to seeing it presented.

There's nothing wrong or off about this poster's feedback. They're clearly expressing the theme of their feelings, but because Ashes is so 'far out of phase' the same problem happens all the time. The post ends up being "talking about 'obvious things'" and my mind wants to gloss over the obvious things that I know most people are thinking to evaluate if to engage with the post, but since everything is basically obvious things, it's difficult to engage with feedback discussion.

I'd love to talk about drops, or how things could work, but I'd just end up talking about other games that have already built their systems, or trying to describe an entire system, because Ashes isn't far enough along to have even really defined what sort of thing they want to build outside of 'committing to poisonous structures that they will have to work the rest around' (glint, certificates, etc). This is my pet peeve with Intrepid's economic design. It's nearly impossible to build a real economy after you commit to building the foundations of a fake economy. I could rant on the reasons for and results of this for hours. ...anyway.

So my response to the feedback is to yet again remind Intrepid that I really care about this, but that doesn't really mean that I am in a position to discuss it effectively given where they are in development.

MrPockets

SongRune wrote: »

So my response to the feedback is to yet again remind Intrepid that I really care about this, but that doesn't really mean that I am in a position to discuss it effectively given where they are in development.

I agree. I will add something; what worries me is the fact that they have full gear drops in the game already, and I've heard them mention loot drops before. It makes me question if this is something they would even budge on when they start digging into their final economy design. I just don't think their complex crafting vision can be healthy in a world with full (viable) gear drops.

Ludullu

What you're asking for is pretty much the plan, but simply hasn't been implemented yet. We miiiight see parts of it after the upcoming crafting change, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Loot
Loot (loot tables) from mobs and bosses have a RNG chance of dropping glint, completed items, recipes, and materials.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

It is more likely that materials and unique recipes are dropped that can be used to craft items of equitable value.[9][4][5][6][7][8]

Azherae

I'll make this post pretty later for people who tune out my walls-o-text, it's coming. (EDIT: Now with colors. It didn't help much.)

Optimally enemy groups of 3, each has a drop chance of:
Group 1: Crafting activation/reagent requirement item (Ashes will probably use Currency here, unfortunately imo)
Group 2: Same
Group 3: Progression (personal or in some games Trade-enabling) item (food ingredients, especially on early/weak enemies, are ok here, I wanna say 'best' but that's not a debate I feel like having)
Group 4: Material or weak gear piece, or reroll of some other lower group (to simplify something related to recipe drops)
Group 5: Good Material or stronger gear pieces, or reroll of some other group (can only drop to one person in a group so this only 'rolls' once per mob)

All groups have independent chances of 'being rolled at all', and those are the chances that 'can be set' most easily while still allowing for some defaults within the groups.

i.e. you can set a default of 'if the players get a Group 5 roll at all, generally they will get a 50% chance of a material, 30% chance of a reroll of a lower group, and 20% chance of a [cloor='purple']good gear drop[/color]', but then can easily set 'the chance of Group 5 roll' from a specific mob or mob type separately, leading to less work.

From my data the psychological effect of this, if the Group 5 droprate is set to 10-15%, is that the playergroups get one 'good drop' on average every 3 groups, i.e. every 9-15 mobs. If intending to reduce droprates for over/underleveled characters, can easily drop by 2-3% per level 'over'.

Progression items that double as Trade-enabling items are optimal, on the principle that it lowers the falloff of player satisfaction relative to drops as they get closer to the end of base progression, allowing designers to 'delay' needing to add new ones or create zones where players can receive progression items that are not helpful in any way. This also allows development to limit the 'vertical progression' of certain types of progression/crafting related item, e.g. the problem of 'these low level enemies drop this Green Grade Fuel and these high level ones drop a 100x stronger Purple Grade Fuel, which both have the same purpose'.

The tuning of the droprate dropoff is up to the gameplay, the optimal feeling for my group seems to be:
'Together we kill these enemies in just over 45s if all focused on one at a time' (i.e. they do die relatively quickly if focused, around 15-20s each, but just AoE is risky).

For solo those same enemies take 45s each even if you manage to pull them all separately. This fits with the 'usual' concept of 3 main highly boosted DPS contributing 80% of the damage.

With the alternatives being '2 full DPS, 3 Hybrids, 1 Support' and the popular 'Tank, 3 AoE DPS, 2 Full Support'. This paragraph is obviously biased to games that use 6-person rather than 8-person groups. In an 8-person group we'd just start one enemy group and start moving to another when only 1 enemy is left (or 2 are left but one is very low).

Players in my group like to get a notable drop for the group (let's assume only 'good gear' counts here) from 'meaningful' enemies every 7-10 minutes when all together and committed to a full adventure. 0.15 *.20 is 3% droprate, and in 10 minutes, roughly 18 enemies fall. Technically this is still slightly 'too much' for us, because MMO Droprates outside of pure progression are always relative to the drops the rest of the playerbase is getting.

To clarify what I mean by 'Trade-enabling' item, in a complex game like Ashes it is 'whatever allows you to put the items you collect into a caravan'. I'm not sure what this should be in Ashes exactly, but Glint is 'fine'.

• FF11 doesn't have this because it's Free Trade style with a mostly-fixed core economy loop (back in the day, still works on Private Servers, I'm told).
• BDO doesn't have this because it controls all prices.
• Throne and Liberty doesn't have this because it doesn't have the ability to sell Gathered items yet since one must limit bots. I cannot stress enough how much you must work this around bots.

TL would have to use Precious Omnipotence Parchment and then remove it from every open-world mob so that you could only get this 'use item to prep other items for trade' from Dungeons, and even this would still require some additional dangers being added to some dungeons to stop most bots (but the Eclipse holder on the server would get to go bot-hunting again which would be a ... plus?).

Point is, seed packets, wood bundles, wrapped fish, all this stuff is the stuff you connect to 'a non-tradeable item that is used to make tradeable items' which you can then control because it does wonders for your monitoring of the bots that appear as soon as someone thinks 'I can just grind forever and sell things to other players?!'. Ashes already has the right ideas of 'making this dangerous' and 'hinging it on a specific non-tradeable', I'm just saying that the non-Tradeable item should double as a progression item and therefore Glint is ok for this purpose. It'd be better for the economy if it didn't have an NPC value at all (note I didn't add 'in my opinion' there) but Ashes doesn't yet have any equivalent 'use Glint to progress in a way that caps out' mechanic (Social Orgs could work) implemented.

And since it bears repeating yet again, we also prefer that even the material drops make sense for the mob or gathering point. Seeds and fibers from plants, meat and hide from beasts, weird reagents and trinkets from incorporeal undead, bone and old armor/jewels from corporeal undead, random stones from Golems, etc. To help distinguish areas and drops beyond 'go here for a chance at this gear drop'. Experience tells us that this doesn't work because it causes the wrong mindset/incentive for the player, they go thinking about a thing they want and end up disappointed at filling their inventory with 'random junk' instead of 'going with the aim of getting seeds to grow or sell and 'being happy when they also get a good drop'.

Do seeds count as something that drops when another player kills you? Ah well.

Gromlof

Dude that's a lot x) but ty for participation, i apreciate your passion