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One thing that I have always found slightly annoying in MMOs is the loot drop system. Most games will drop just about anything from any mob. A mage that is wearing a robe drops plate armor and a two handed sword instead of a robe and a focus/tome/staff.

Also, a quest to gather 200 crab eyes results in hours of killing crabs that clearly have two eyes, but only drop 1 some of the time, with the occasional crab being a mutant and dropping 3. This is nothing more than a grind used to slow the player down, and is generally not fun. Instead, if a character's story says they need something that you should be able to realistically expect to get off of X number of mobs (200 eyes = 100 crabs right?), then have it be at least something close to that number (200 eyes = 100-110 crabs, because I accidentally smashed a few), not 5-10 times the number of expected kills.

I realize there will be cases that tying into the visual appearance of a mob may not include everything needed in an area, but that can be worked around by having the mob guarding a chest containing the items they are clearly not wearing/holding. This does not account for smaller items that could be in a pocket or satchel. Those can drop from any mob they would normally drop from without you thinking "Where the **** did they have that at?!"

One idea I think would be fun is if there were skeletal mages that could drop their own skull as a focus.

Now, as we are going for an emulation of the game's state at sunset, this isn't really a suggestion for the current development cycle, but possibly for a custom server that someone (possibly myself) hosts at some point, or for any fresh new content we create a few years down the road.

Thoughts and ideas?

Since Loot is something coming soon to our design board, Xinux and I had been discussing various options for "Loot" (and I don't know if I am confusing what everyone else calls "Itemization", but loot to me is any means of acquiring an Item).

Loot is one of the areas we were hoping to update; to make better-than-live. Xinux presented a Diablo-style loot system, others have suggested manually generated loot tables based from various websites, and my own personal preference is a "Smart Loot" system; one that considers player race/class/tier/needs before randomly offering a Plate Belt off a sand snake as a reward. I have a lot of design ideas in this regard but haven't reached to the point of presenting them to the team for discussion. We will be doing that soon(tm)


Note: The trouble with changing the Loot system to anything other than Live is that much of the game hinges upon things working exactly like they did in Live, including drops, though I agree "trash" drops, not so much.


Regardless of suggestions, we will likely develop a loot system based on our best reflection of Live, with any other loot system concepts being "optional" (Rule based). What goes into the loot tables is all up to us. Just wanted to let you know, we are willing to listen to better alternatives.

If I recall, EQ had a bit of what you're talking about; where if you saw a mob wielding something they were likely to drop it.

I do like the idea of a 'smart loot' system and with the way crafting is in this game (base+component+tier+grade) you could probably make a pretty good random item generator to go with it (a-la say Borderlands' gun drop system). Could be pretty nifty.

A factor to consider about loot, is that while getting something you can use is nice, getting loot you cannot use, is what fuels both the auction house, and getting coin off vendors, and getting items for your guildmates later on. Being able to immediately use said item is not the only reward that a loot drop represents in that context.

As such I lean towards a "smart" loot system that remains generally agnostic in terms of class/race. If one wants a guarantee of having gear that is appropriate for race/class/tier, that is what crafted goods, vendor sales and the auction house are for. Loot is luck of the draw, and the system should not be steeped to offer guarantees of types of loot drops based on group composition.

I think smart loot system might outsmart itself in terms of making it harder for guilds to equip its members if loot system is slanted to drop stuff based on player or group class/race composition.

The exceptions would be for class or specific quests which should guarantee items for the quest holders race/class. Its ok to have tier of loot scale on the level of the mob (doesn't make much sense to fight a 4-dot mob, and have it drop stuff that 1-dot has)

The EQ loot system was neat..where if the mob actually dropped stuff it had equipped was a nice touch (like if it had an axe, that axe dropped).

[quote="Kinshi"]A factor to consider about loot, is that while getting something you can use is nice, getting loot you cannot use, is what fuels both the auction house, and getting coin off vendors, and getting items for your guildmates later on. Being able to immediately use said item is not the only reward that a loot drop represents in that context.[/quote]

I don't think my suggestion would really have much of an impact on this aspect of the game (but thats just a guess, would need lots of data to analyse to make a more solid observation). My backing for this is that in most games (probably in VGO, but its been quite a while since I played), you don't normally see groups of just Mages or just heavy armor fighters. They are normally fairly evenly disbursed, with a few exceptions, normally based on the story around the physical location you are at in the game.

For a group of say, 3 mobs, I would expect to see one of the following group compositions:

• 1 Fighter (Ranged or Melee), 1 Mage, 1 Healer[/*jjy1787a]
• 2 Fighters, 1 Mage[/*jjy1787a]
• 2 Fighters, 1 Healer[/*jjy1787a][/list:u]
  
  There are obviously many more combinations to how a 3 person group could be composed, but the above three would be the "most likely" in my opinion, based off of observations of several games.
  
  The point is, that even if a mob dropped items geared after it's arch-type, there would still be plenty of opportunity for loot that your character doesn't need/use to be sold or gifted to guild members, etc.
  
  The main exception to this would be boss mobs, as they would be fairly static. A solution to this would be as I mentioned above with the loot chest, so not something the NPC was actually wearing/using at the time of the fight.
  
  [quote="Kinshi"]The EQ loot system was neat..where if the mob actually dropped stuff it had equipped was a nice touch (like if it had an axe, that axe dropped).[/quote]
  
  This is exactly what my suggestion was getting at, I just couldn't remember where I had seen this before.

Regarding the loot system, I am not sure it needs to be changed. The grind itself is part of the main game loop in MMO games. This is mostly how you also keep players invested in the game (carrot on a stick tactic). I am yet to see a team able to develop fast enough sufficient content story wise in order to maintain interest in a MMO game purely by means of content.

Most of the points that come to mind have been said above (especially the auction house / friend help issues). You are not playing a single player game in this case (population size disregarded here), so you need also to consider the social factor. You go out with a group of friends, all communicating via some form of voice chat, and you start killing mobs in a certain area. Now everyone gets to loot the corpse(s) and gets something based on a loot table (for example). You don't use this item, but your friend is ready to wet their pants just by seeing the chat link. You can then hand it over with a smile to your friend and say: "Here you go, now lets see what we can get for me." It might sound "mushy" and cliché in text, but this is how most times groups of friends play (at least in my experience). If everybody gets exactly what they need, this kind of kills a portion of the interaction with the group.

As such the only change that I would suggest and really found it to be beneficial, is that everybody gets their own loot from a monster. This will on one hand increase the chance of a certain item drop in a group (the more loot rolls on the table there are, the bigger chance of a specific item to appear), which in turn would promote grouping as well (pretty much what Diablo III did with the chance to find magic item). On the other hand this will also promote the social interaction between players to exchange goods/loot between them. Why not even services, if a specific crafting material drops.
In addition a benefit of this would be also the fact, that no one feels like being ripped off for loosing 5h in a dungeon and not getting anything at all to even cover repair costs.

The EQ loot idea is awesome, but here comes the problem of having sufficient graphic models. Does the game really feature sufficient monsters having wearable items, that actually can be even remotely linked to the items usable by players? I am not sure, if Vanguard has been even designed with such loot system in mind. If new 3D models and monsters can be implemented at some point, this could be possible (depends on what the server supports, team size and abilities, etc.)

On the other hand I totally support the idea of a monster dropping required body parts based on anatomy. While I can to a degree understand that sometimes one of the monster eyes could be so damaged in combat that it is unusable to the quest giver, having to kill 500 foxes to get 5 bushy tails is a bit too much (if anyone still remembers the Barrens' raptors in vanilla wow). Maybe make it a 70% chance to drop two eyes and 30% for one eye?

A lot of the drops from the named mobs are supposed to be some of their stuff. This is especially true for raid bosses. For example, Varking drops his cool ass club that has all the skulls on it. Nerksawl drops his loincloth that is a cloak of questionable cleaniness for adventurers.

I know there are some regular group content mobs that also drop their weapons and gear, so it's already in game. For example, Raffen drops an entire set of his own armor.

You just won't see regular mobs dropping it.

These random loot systems have been in place since even before MMOs. The earliest devs based these games of the random chart systems in pen and paper games like the old DnD. In that setting especially very much promoted group content and sharing around to gear ones companions for the next battle ahead. I do agree that items for quest drops should be fairly forthcoming. My bank in EQ was stuffed full of 95% completed quests, each needing one nearly unobtainable object to complete. I skipped some quests in WoW, one for ape guts that was a rare drop from a rare mob. Really the time invested was not worth the reward. Both scenarios not very fun. However the loot from mobs in this game- both trash and named, seemed pretty spot on, save the occasional quest grind. You also don't ant to flood the game with the perfect magic item for all because it devalues the craft system. Its always been my belief that crafting should be one of the strongest sources of gear in a game, especially one that requires so much effort and rare resources to obtain the best items.

This is an old thread but I thought I might chime in - I see random loot on random mobs being more random with the smart loot making more sense for quest rewards. I don't remember if this was a later Vanguard change or some other game but a quest might offer X gold plus a choice of either item A, B, C or D. Extra money might also be on that list of choices for the person who already has better. I remember looking at items to see which sells for the most in those cases and I would have rather taken the cash up front. As for the eye stalk example in the O.P., I agree except occasionally, (rarely) a crab might only drop 1 eye stalk to represent the chance that an eye was destroyed in the fight.