How many MORE years is loot going to suck?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Lord Tachys al`Fahn, Dec 18, 2019.

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  1. evillego6

    evillego6 Avatar

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    No. Loot is generated from loot tables, not loot bundles.
     
    Last edited: Dec 21, 2019
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  2. Barugon

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  3. Adam Crow

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    I agree with Barugon here. Making gold is pretty easy in this game currently. If you are struggling with it, please feel free to send me a pm and I will gladly give advice tailored to anyone's playstyle on the subject.
     
  4. Xee

    Xee Bug Hunter

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    Well if you look at SOTA Math in crafting and compare that to % chance then we can fully understand why loot is so hard to get. If you can fail at 50% to get a MW or Enchant then at 1% to 10% drop rate I can only imagine the chances of getting something. As you said people are counting kills not thinking that each kill rolls that dice for that %. So saying 10 in 100 for 10% may not really hold true at least from what I see in SOTA Math and Crafting :)
     
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  5. Lord Tachys al`Fahn

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    I have not said anything about the inability to make gold. It has always been fairly easy to make gold, but it has NEVER felt rewarding to do what it takes to do so.

    Starting off, you made a handful of gold from every thing you looted.

    In the beginning, that would have been fine if the world had been set up in gated zones that separated newbie areas from more advanced zones. You know, newbie zones that had newbie economies that could be quickly outpaced, but not so quickly that you were left wondering how to hell to progress in this game with the limited resources you could actually acquire.

    Instead, you were faced with an immediate uphill battle the size of Everest.

    Then you finally find the crown store, and see what is for sale there.

    And Shroud loses another player almost before they started playing.
     
  6. Gamician

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    Thanks Barugon, It is easy to lose track of time when your on a mission.
     
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  7. Oakenhammer

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    Chris seems to use the terms interchangeably. In numerous livestreams, when Chris has talked about updating the core loot on creatures, he's referred to the technical mechanic as bundles.
     
  8. Vladamir Begemot

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    Been thinking and saying this for a while. The game never tells you you got something cool, and there's not time to dwell on the loot window. Just tonight I discovered I had 18 dropped crowns from who knows when! Now, that was a missed opportunity by the game. If I had seen it happen, boy oh boy! I'd have been pretty happy! Happy chemicals would have positively surged through my body.

    But I didn't see it, it was when I was trying to clean out my cluttered inventory I saw them. And not being able to associate it with a given moment, it was like "cool, wonder when that happened?" No big dopamine shot.

    Boy oh boy! vs. Cool, wonder when that happened.

    Loot must suck. Or maybe, maybe it's the communication?

    I'll have to check out that mod. But again, if it isn't telling me I got something cool right when it happened, it missed the mark.

    Just imagine casinos telling you that you won as you leave for the night. Casino loot sucks.
     
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  9. Adam Crow

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    I agree that the communication and presentation of collecting loot could use some help for sure. At the very least finding cotos should give the same visual/noise as when you find an artifact. It is however your choice to quickly loot items and not have the info displayed in chat. Im always at least glancing at the chat window so I can honestly say I've never missed a coto drop before. It doesn't cost anything to pay attention.
     
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  10. Vladamir Begemot

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    Pictures (and noise) or it didn't happen.

    I have no idea how you can keep up with what you've got amongst all the noise.

    I've heard that some are fine with the chat window, but I am absolutely not, and thus don't even consider this game to drop loot. There is barely time to loot the bodies at a control point, even with the new, very nice, AOE looting. Being able to see what it was in the window or the chat window aren't even an option if I want to be helping in the fight.

    Anyway, it isn't going to change. Lua. But if I were designing a game of my own, and it had loot, you can be damn sure the players would know when they get something.
     
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  11. Adam Crow

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    I totally understand. Sorry for my sarcastic response. I play solo most of the time and that makes it much easier for me to see what I'm getting I'm sure. But that doesn't make the problem go away. You are definitely right that something needs to be done to address the situation if we ever hope to start retaining players better and create a larger base of players.

    Hopefully some tweaks can be made by the devs in addition to lua in the future. Loot is such an important part of a game like this. Sure gold might be easy for some people to obtain, but don't get me wrong, overall loot and the presentation does suck. You've all made some very good points, and this remains to be another big issue that needs to be addressed.
     
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  12. Vladamir Begemot

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    :)

    No worries, I hopefully am not to sarcastic either.

    I have high hopes for Lua, but the base UI still has to be good enough to keep players around long enough to find the mods.

    OR has to have a download button on the login screen. Integrated mod managers are amazing, Surviving Mars has one, and it makes mods and modding for that game a lot more beneficial to the whole player base.
     
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  13. Cora Cuz'avich

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    I don't know, that just seems one step closer to offering LUA mods through the crown store...
     
  14. Gageman

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    I think the answer to your question is inescapably tied to the question, How many years does SOTA have left before it goes dark? Its tied to that number, so if the game has 2 years left, loot will suck for 2 more years. See where I am going here!
     
  15. Animosh

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    you forgot how he brags doing it while afk
     
  16. Fetid SirDidy

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    post title is misleading. Should read “
    How many MORE years is loot going to suck for new and low level players”
     
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  17. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    Baloney .... loot suks for all except a few very, very high level players.
     
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  18. kaeshiva

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    The problem for me personally is that some things are just far too rare, requiring weeks/months (or in my case, well over a year of play) to get build-defining artifacts for which there is nothing else even close relying on "random world drops" most of the time. If I wanted a specific arti, in most cases, its just "kill thousands of things and hope you get lucky" instead of these being distributed more logically, i.e. lich rings dropping from liches, sage's sashes dropping from humanoid caster mobs, etc. And I know its not as simple as just cranking up the drop rates, because there are players who can grind for unreasonable amounts of hours. Some of the newer additions - taming artifacts dropping from destroyers, for example - is a decent step in the right direction. At least you're able to target something specific and go kill it. But when you need 64 of each piece, and you might get one or two in a 4-5 hour murder session (assuming you win the rolls for them, if you're in a group, more likely you walk away with nada) loot acquisition just approaches the point of despair.

    99.9% of everything I loot essentially translates into "gold" - crap that's going straight to the vendor. And that's okay. But its not exciting. Once in a blue moon, I might see something nice drop. But even then, its probably not something useful to me (and I probably didn't win it...) which means its going into a box until I find someone to give it to or sell it. There's no sense of progress. If I log on for a game session of a few hours, I want to feel like I accomplished something in those few hours instead of just breaking even on the reagents I used to kill stuff (as is most of the time.) An example - Sieges used to give out a decent amount of wood, so when I spent nearly a year of doing a half dozen sieges a day (without seeing a single hood of any kind drop, ever) at least I walked away with something and didn't just feel like I'd accomplished nothing all evening.

    Personally, I think we need more things that function like the totem-essence - get a bunch of things that drop fairly reliably, and use them either as ingredients in a recipe or as currency to buy the things you need. Leave the rare drops in. If the determination is "we want this to be a 1% drop chance" that's fine. Make it drop something every time that you then need 100 of. At least that way there's an end in sight, and you can see actual progress, instead of just logging in and thinking "well, maybe I'll win the lotto today" but knowing you probably wont. Consider adding scene specific drops to particular monsters - those in the mines dropping a few bits of ore, those in the forests dropping bits of wood/bark.

    Consider using quest mechanics to limit loot outputs - I'd be much more inclined to log in daily and complete a daily quest that gave me 1/20th of something I actually wanted, instead of logging on to be disappointed by loot 20 days in a row. Quest flags can help limit certain things from being overfarmed without screwing less lucky (or more casual) players into eternally getting nothing. Yes, people will use alts. You aren't going to stop the hardcore people from hardcore farming. It simply can't be done without making loot suck for the other 95% of players. But if a player wants to log on and do something, then log on another character and do it again, repeat x20, they're putting in the time, they're playing the game, they're online doing stuff as opposed to not - that's certainly a better scenario than "loot sucks, not going to play."

    Bottom line - my playtime's dropped significantly because I log on and think "right, what shall I go do" and nothing sounds exciting or lucrative. Lets go spend an hour grinding a scene to get ...what exactly? So I reiterate - figure out however long you expect a player to grind to get X item, and add a mechanism by which it can be earned incrementally rather than relying on luck and luck alone, and I'll put in the hours again.
     
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  19. Cora Cuz'avich

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    I think that sums up a lot of the game's issues.
     
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  20. Numa

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    Adding to what @kaeshiva said, I would very much prefer going for an artifact on the full moon of the ninth month on a night with clear skies (which may be on a specific mob in a certain corner of Novia ) as opposed to mindless grinding.

    As suggested by her post you can build an entire quest around that which gives the artifact meaning, history and depth.
     
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