'Tiered' loot buildings...

[L0G!N (DayZ) 149]

So Rocket mentioned a 'tiered' system for loot in DayZ, but he didn't realy elaborate on it ... so i already speculated on a possible way to do this in various threads. This thread is talk about my take on 'tiered loot', which may or may not be the same as Rocket intends, i personally like 'my' way a lot, so here it goes:

Every lootable asset (be it building or cabinet or pile of rubble) has not one list of loot with chances that can spawn, but it has a whole bunch of them. Every list can be considdered as a tier, and the higher the tier of the list with items/chances, the more valuable the items on that list, while at the same time, the difference between tier5 & tier6 for example, may only be the chances of a certain item dropping, while the actual items in those tiers are exactly the same. Tier0 would ofcourse be various 'junk' with the odd chance of something usefull, while tierZ would have all sorts of valuable items with a reasonable chance. Each asset would obviously hold items in those lists that make sense for that particular asset to drop.

Now as the server is setup, the setup process rolls a 'Z' sided dice to determain the starting point of every lootable asset in the tier system. It would also roll a 3 sided dice to set the 'tier-up' moment. This 3 sided dice determains if the location is tiered up to the next tier in 1,2 or 3 lootrefresh cycles. And if the loot is refreshed, it would roll this dice again, and set the next tier up moment, untill tierZ is achieved. If left to run without players, all lootable assets would eventually reach TierZ level, and drop TierZ loot, when ever they refresh (obviously as tierZ is the highest level in the tier system). On a server reset, the game would take the current tier levels and save them to be used when the server is back up (if possible) else the Z sided dice will have to roll after a reset aswell.

So now a player comes along and loots this location (no matter at which tier this Asset is at that particular time), the looting system will now again roll a 3 sided (f/e) dice, and now degrade this particular asset in that many tiers. So loot an asset of tier6 and the dice rolls 2, the tier is set back to tier4. The 3 sided dice that determains the tier upgrade now rolls again, and in that many lootrefresh moments it will (drop loot and then) upgrade the tier by one, roll the dice again to see when it will upgrade to the next tier. etc and so on.

Players when looting now slowly reduce the tier of lootable assets, making it drop ever lower value loot, while places that are hardly ever visited currently, al of a sudden become places of great interest as they 'may' have a high chance on having high value loot. Camping the NWA or any other place, for particular loot becomes way less interesting, as once looted you do not know howmany tiers the NWA is set back, nor how long it will take to get back to it's highest tier. While at the same time, it becomes interesting again to camp out NWA for a long time, since if you can guard the NWA long enough it will eventually reach that highest tier again.

This way of improving lootspawning, makes it so that the situation at a lootable asset is somewhat authentic, as people will always take the most valuable stuff first, and if a place hasn't been visited for a long time (somewhat resembling it never having been looted) it will have good stuff in there. I think this will make the landscape of cherno a lot more interesting, and totally oblitarate people from being able to gear up in 20min, unless they are extremely lucky, which i think pretty much resembles something that plays a large part in the DayZ scenario.

tnx for reading i hope you have good questions, feedback or comments, so the idea may be clarified more, or extended upon

Edited July 17, 2012 by L0GIN

[L0G!N (DayZ) 149]

So nobody thinks this is good or bad then? Not even a can of beans for the effort ?

[ltr 0]

If this were the case, I would just take my group and camp some random place killing everyone on sight until all the loot spawns had tierZ loot. Cool idea though. Might work if tweaked a bit.

[L0G!N (DayZ) 149]

If you have enough supplies to do so, then i think that should be a viable strategy, but you and your friends will have to sleep at some point...

And i think the key is to have basic needs spawn at low tiers and not at high tiers, so you may be tempted to grab that can of beans b4 ever getting to the goodstuff ;)