Difference in loot spawns?

[riggsx 0]

Hi everybody. I've started playing this game together with a seasoned friend previous week and we play on some private server, which we settled upon as the loot drop was fairly balanced. There is enough of everything whilst no cornucopia.

However, I tried to play on the public servers (it's nice to have options to use your geared characters on more servers than one!) but the loot seems very weird. I find no food or drink whatsoever, but the industrial loot is extremely plenty (over 10 items in a small industrial building!). Why is it like this? And why do so many play on public servers when you can't even find food?
Also, how can this situation be so different from private and public servers?

I might be doing something wrong here, and if so please let me know.

[Evil Minion 943]

The difference between private and public servers? Server hopping! Players join one server, loot an area, join another server, loot the same ares and so on because it's much faster, much less risky and costs much less resources than moving to another area on the same server. Because of this many places tend to be picked clean as if a horde of locusts went over them (which is actually not that far from the truth).

Then we got loot spawning itself which is not very balanced at the moment and might spam one place with loot while other places barely got anything.

Also at some point private servers had issues with loot spawns and got additional resets which might cause a more "balanced" loot distribution.

And finally the game dynamics themselves as people pick up loot. So an area visited by many players tends to have much less loot. So servers with a higher regular playerbase tend to have less loot, servers with a lot of killing and/or many coast rats tend not to have that much loot in spawn areas, etc. This also tends to leave behind items players usually do not need in great numbers - like industrial loot.

Edited June 3, 2015 by Evil Minion

[riggsx 0]

I see what you mean. However, it can not be a result of server hopping and looting. A small industrial shack containing sometimes over 30 items (with many duplicates) and nothing in the residential houses even after reset out in the countryside?
The scale is too large to attribute to players, I think, but I may be wrong, of course.
The main question is why there can be such a difference between servers and their mode and geographical spread of loot. It bewilders me still.

Anyways, I will give public servers another chance and try the countryside a bit more. We'll see how it is : )

 

edit: Does "per" on or off have anything to do with this perhaps?

edit2: Also, it seems zombies on public servers hit me about twice as many times within the same time as on the private server I usually play on :s

Edited June 3, 2015 by riggsx

[Killawife 599]

Theres a reason for the weird loot spawns. All public servers have persistance on while private servers can have it on or off. Having it off means that every time the server restarts the loot is renewed and you can survive and gear up a player normally. Having it on mean loot will be in the same place even if the server is restarted(in a perfect world) but it also means that if a town has been picked clean, it will be a long time before anything of value spawn there again. Persistance also creates a bug called lootsplosions, which basically means an enormous amount of loot grouped in the same area. Usually crap loot but sometimes really good stuff.

 0.57 will most likely continue this trend of persistance and its problems if its anything like experimental.

 

 The zombies should be the same. Theya re not different on private or public servers.

[riggsx 0]

Ok, that makes perfect sense. Thank you very much!

As far as the zombies go I assume my observation was simply wrong : )