What is wrong with supply bundles?

What's wrong with supply bundles?

 

Brother; it is just a bad streak or the area you farm. I do a 2 hour xp run and end up with 4 or more yellows and a blue every other run, 2-3 arties a week and 100 - 200 crowns a week as well. I solo in party mode to avoid the crowds. I list my bags for sale daily and just buy what I want with the proceeds. R/Boris

 

lol! Several days of bad streaks. ;-)

after 3 days, finally a yellow bag. Ugg!

 

I went to Crag Foothills the other day to farm up embued bow strings and got several yellow bags. More yellow than grey in fact.

 

Just some fun API facts for the day:
https://sotagraphs.com/d/ZOFI9BGZz/...e=LootBundles/Drop/Bundle/SupplyBundle_Common
https://sotagraphs.com/d/ZOFI9BGZz/...LootBundles/Drop/Bundle/SupplyBundle_Uncommon
https://sotagraphs.com/d/ZOFI9BGZz/...ype=LootBundles/Drop/Bundle/SupplyBundle_Rare

According to the API, they always drop. It's just YOU aren't the one finding them... (Welcome to RNG Hell of the Avatar....)

Probably because @Barugon is stealing all the Yellow Bundles from everyone.

 

I'm certainly not stealing all the wyvern heads though.

 

Sounds like chaotic fishing as a group ;-)

 

Supply bundles go from most common grey, yellow, blue, to orange least common. I've never had good luck with the blue ones. They can drop some things that yellows don't, but I've had too many times when they drop only two or three lame items.

 

The core problem, not just with supply bundles themselves, but with the way that loot is handled in general, is "everything is rare."
It basically means that going and doing anything nets zero reliable payout, and it is possible (and, quite likely) that you'll spend hours churning through mobs and have nothing to show for it except (maybe) enough junk loot to usually cover your repair cost and reagents.

This was less painful when adventure experience was still relevant, so you could say, well, I didn't find anything worthwhile today, but at least I made some experience I can use later. As the game population matures and "experience gain" gets base-lined against fast attenuation zones, experience gained becomes less and less significant (when dumping 100 million experience into a skill no longer gives a noticeable benefit.)

The only "loot" system that really feels right is harvesting, wherein when you hit a node, or skin a creature, you have a reasonable idea of the expected outcome and can plan accordingly. Occasionally, you'll get a rare surprise. But the baseline loot expectation is solid, and consistent. If I mine gold nodes for an hour, I will walk away with a certain amount of gold ores. If I skin wolves for an hour, I'll get wolf carcasses, wolf heads, animal hides, etc. I might get a pristine head or cotos, too, as a rare prize. I still wonder about all the headless wolves, or talonless phoenixes that seem to infest the world, but at least there's some predictability here.

When it comes to combat, not even the junk weaponry is consistent. About the only thing you can reliably say is that you will "probably" end up with a bunch of junk to sell to the NPC for a few thousand gold, and you'll end up with a bunch of broken dishes and dirty cutlery to sort through or sell for 1-2 gold apiece, and "maybe" you'll get a supply bag or 2, and "maybe maybe maybe" you'll get an artifact and "maybe" it wont be one of the completely worthless ones. "Maybe" you'll get some weapons that can drop components for crafting, and "maybe" they'll actually drop it when you salvage it but most likely not. The reality is, nearly every time you "go out to kill stuff" you come back with an inventory management hassle and a certain amount of gold. Unless you're lucky. Which its possible not to be, day after day after day after day.

"Maybe" opening this supply bag will give you something decent instead of just hosing your inventory with crap nobody ever uses/wants.

I'm not saying that nothing should be rare. I'm saying that the baseline loot expectation is more often than not, a complete waste of the player's time and is little more than a cost recovery exercise. You can't simply "set out" to go get anything in particular without constantly running up against the brutal and unforgiving RNG. Killing hundreds of a particular creature to get 1 head drop is unreasonable. Its a trophy item for crap's sake, that they are going to use to decorate their house to show their accomplishment at killing the Whatever. The reality is all that these things end up being is monuments to a player's patience, luck, and/or and tolerance for tedium. Too many things are "rare world drops" where luck and luck alone matters. This is exacerbated by having this principle apply to the best-in-slot gear in the game. The result is that players who either aren't lucky, or don't have the time to just keep pulling the slot machine lever for hour after hour must resort to buying the items from the lucky ones, and to do that, you must simply grind cash on trivial mobs for days, and days, and days, and then spend an equal amount of time sitting through load screens and waiting for vendors to load that might maybe have what you want.

The cumulative effect of poor loot rewards and our current vendor system is a huge obstacle between the Player, and getting the stuff they want. And its not an obstacle they can overcome by any means other than "getting lucky." This combined with the "rolling system" discourages any sort of player cooperation, because if you're in a party of 8 when the once-in-a-lifetime drop happens well, once again you must rely on luck.

Yes, you need players to keep logging on and pulling that slot machine lever. But after spending several hundred hours pulling it and barely breaking even on the costs to keep pulling it, eventually, you're just going to stop. A player needs to feel like they can make meaningful progress each game session. The 'monster essence' for totems is an excellent example of a step in the right direction, wherein killing a certain monster type nets a certain amount of essence. You wont get a totem drop every day, but you can make noticeable, quantifiable progress toward one and set yourself a goal. Having something to work towards does a lot more for player interest and retention than "hoping I'll get lucky today, but probably not." If this same principle applied to more areas, we'd be in a much happier place.