Speculation about "coming" loot system(s)?

[Judopunch 523]

This thread is full to the brim with assumptions on how the system will work with very few facts. 

 

That being said let's keep on the idea of how a loot economy across other servers could effect how the game is played, good or bad, and ponder solutions. 

 

I wonder how the loot management will be different on private shards. If you have a shard of between 1-4 servers does that mean that there could be, for example, one helicopter able to be assembled between the four? How does that compare to the hundred servers that aren't in the shard?

 

We also need to ask about the impact of even one helicopter on a server, private shard. Does it matter? Does it give a huge advantage to a group with access? Can we even speculate without knowing its implementation?

 

As I work through this thought process I find that at this point we simply do not have enough context to have a reasonable discussion about how the loot system will work. When the game gets harder and peoples priority's change I bet there is going to be more 'where is all the medicine' threads that replace the 'where are all the guns at'. At least I hope.

[Judopunch 523]

 

 

For example, you can't really say that you're limiting in-game resources if I can just plop a persistent tent on an empty server and be able to transfer the stuff I store there to a fully-populated server with zero consequence. And if you are limiting in-game resources (i.e. the loot economy) then you have to be okay with some degree of server hopping.

 

Conversely, you can't really have a "cross-server loot economy," or even a vibrant community (I don't fully agree with this second bit, just using it as an example) if my character is only limited to interacting with one particular server/hive/shard/whatever.

 

Simply put, if everything's on a private shard, you're compartmentalizing (i.e. dividing) the community and the experience into small microcosms. Which is fine, if that approach is actually followed. But you lose some of the integrity of a broad cross-server dynamic. And it's not really enough anymore to say "We'll include both! Let the players decide!" because it results in two fundamentally distinct games being played. Which would require two different experiences to be created by the developers. A centralized cross-server hive-based loot economy can't really function as intended within one server.

 

 

Just a couple thoughts on this.

 

You say '"you have to be ok with some degree of server hopping". And as this unfolds we will see what degree that is. Right now server hopping is 'log in at NWAF, run through tents, logout repeat. Thats not ok, no matter how many times they have to do that. Now if the loot economy makes items rare enough that even if you join 20 servers your not going to find anything at the tents, then they can hop as much as they want to, and play the newest version of login simulator 2014. The idea of playing in different servers should not be the same idea as 'server hoping'. If you log into server A and play for 3 hours and log into server B and play for an hour are you hopping? I dont think so. I think  you are playing the game.

 

As for the shards and the community I think that the idea of NOT compartmentalizing the community is more damaging to the experience. Withouth 'that masked bandet on green mountain who keeps stealing my pants' everyone is just anonymous. You dont develop a relationship with the other survivors. "oh its those guys I helped hunt that deer a couple days ago, wonder what they have going on now".

 

Now yes there is an advantage to having open servers and multiple experiences with random people but if I had to choose Id try for the private shards experiance over continually random experiences every time I log in.

 

Bringing me to the point I spoke about in my previous post. Its simply to early to tell or suggest how loot should be distributed because we dont have a good grip on how the game is intended to be played. We have possibly half the survival mechanics in the game, functioning in various states. How hard is it going to be to just get by, let alone worry about where the next M4 is going to be...

 

To put it in perspective, what if you could no longer sprint for more than a minute at a time before your character begins to pass out? In .5 the first version you could drink water in one town and be thirsty by the time you got to the next.... It changes the way you play, and the texture of the game.... 

[thznutz 112]

None of it matters.

 

Soon as private shards and private hives are out nobody will be playing on the public servers.

private hives....please soon...so i pretty much agree

i'm sure i will occasionally jump on a public hive server just for S&G's, but 99%of my play time will be on my own server/hive. i wonder how the loot distribution thing will be with a private hive? i guess really it wont matter, as Mod's will allow for tweaking of loot dynamics sometime down the road. 

[Jex 1104]

This mechanic doesn't bother me. I'm not the type of player that needs to find every single piece of gear because that isn't the game here. NVG's for instance I couldn't care less about. I sleep at night so useless to me but certainly nice to have in the collection.

 

It would be a bit like in the real world meeting a guy who just had to collect every single item he could find and stash it - that would be weird.

 

But if you are the type of person who wants to grab everything, this would drive me nuts knowing I'd have to dig through every....inj fact why even bother finishing the sentence. Who's going to go server hopping just to try and find a pair of NVG's whereby first you have to find the player who has them or the stash they're stored in and it could be in one of 5000 servers and quite possibly the server you just checked now has it but you've left it. This makes finding such items a luck only thing (much like RL) and hunting these things down a near impossibility.

 

Someone just gave me beans for this comment NOW??????

[Finchtastic 50]

Yeah, let's make a few thousand pieces of gear spawn across the entire game that over 2 MILLION people own...Yeah, that sounds like it would work...Wait, let me guess...You want high end loot to be even RARER than that?  Dumb idea.

[The Feral Kid 13]

I think there is a huge misunderstanding about this system.  

 

If there are only 10 of  "ultra rare item X" spread across all the servers in the world, that doesn't mean they'll always be on the same 10 servers. If one of those items is destroyed then another one will spawn, and it could spawn on any server.  It could spawn on your current server. Or some player might bring it to your current server.

 

There is no particular reason to believe that you are more likely to find the item on some other server than you are to find it where you are currently.  If you hop, how do you know you're hopping towards the item rather than away from it?

 

The exception to this would be if you had specific information about a player or base on a particular server.  I don't know what I think about that, but it's meta-game information and I'm not sure if it is reasonable to expect the devs to control the meta-game as well as the game.

Edited October 21, 2014 by The Feral Kid

[sausagekingofchicago 4711]

I'll support any system that limits the current infinite amount of any given item in game.  As the game is now, given enough time and a couple tents each, we'd all be equipped exactly the same and have stockpiles of the "best" gear, whether we're connected to the main hive or not.  That will get stale really quickly imo.

[svisketyggeren 662]

Im so glad I dont care about finding high end loot in this game. Must be a shitty life spending time looking for those uber items all the time.

Edited October 21, 2014 by svisketyggeren