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[Column] General: Does Loot Matter?
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
As MMO gamers, we’re conditioned to expect a handful of specific tropes in our favorite genre. When a new game hits the shelves, we’re certain to line it up against a series of checkboxes to determine if it represents our cultured interests. For some, that means an MMORPG has to have a solid character progression system and an open world worth interacting with and exploring. For others, a new game had better incorporate community-dependent features like crafting, a player economy, or a fully realized PvP system. Furthermore, most all of these hallmarks of the MMO genre are reliant upon one of the oldest RPG tropes: loot.
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loot is my main motivator
loot is an essential part of the dopamine feedback loop that creates your addicting experience.
Loot = rewards. Rewards are essential.
Poor tuning of that feedback loop can lead to a game like Destiny. Good tuning can lead to the success of candy crush, Diablo and lots of MMO's.
Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women...
Real question should be Is loot all that matters.
Do I really kill that overly difficult boss for the sheer fun and excitement? No, I want to see what pops out of his dead carcass.
Do I do it for bragging rights? Good Lord no. Again, all about lewts.
Achievements are also a motivator for me but I would play a game with loot and no achievements but I would get bored of a game with achievements and no loot.
Loot for me is the carrot on the stick. Only reason I'd keep playing with maybe the exception of socializing with the Guild (but again, without Loot i probably would not be playing with the Guild in that game)
I like loot to be analog as opposed to digital.
What this means is that items would go in a range instead of being discrete.
Raid X can drop a helmet of wonders, but that helmet of wonders can range from being +30 to armor to being +40 to armor. Now when a +36 drops, it is a bigger question of whether you want it because if you wait you might get a +38 one and you aren't going to get two of them because some other member of your guild would be better served with the upgrade.
This also means you can do group and raid content that you might not normally do because a +25 to +35 armor item might still be useful to you if it happened to roll high end. Plus just that you have all the items from raid Y doesn't mean you couldn't get an exceptional version of the item.
It also makes crafting more useful. When you can craft a +30 armor item and every item is the same, then it is a commodity. If you can craft a +30 to +40 item then the best crafters in the game are going to be using the +40s. In essence it allows a bridge to content for a crafter that is not as obtainable from a crafter. The ones you see on the market are going to be +31, +33, and the +39 version will sell for a ton more.
Marvel Hero's give you a shortcut to town with a low timer to quickly go to town and manage your inventory, sell your trash, and return quickly to the fray. It's refreshing how they give you to much loot which has a side effect of keeping the gold sellers away. ESO does the opposite small inventory space and small number of waypoints, makes inventory management more critical. GW2 gives you lots of waypoints and charges a small fee to use them which is nice, they also give you lots of loot from doing boss rotations which is also nice.
So the short story is I prefer games that gives you lots of stuff. Lots of loot, lots of ways to do quests, lots of ways to increase your inventory. I see it all as ones and zeros anyway, so why be a miser with the stuff. MH does a good job of managing their economy.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Loot does matter indeed but character progression > gear progression. We can get rid of both levels and mindless gear grind and still have an in depth char progression that doesnt suck. Instead of looting an epic piece of gear I would rather loot a raid boss from its epic schematics so i can craft his epic weapon/gear piece myself, and maybe add my own tricks as a crafter to make it look different from what other players loot from the same boss.
This. I find most games these days are on a lazy universal loot table with no rare spawns with their own unique loot. The loot ball has really been dropped in the last 10 years. They put all the effort into group/raid mob loot but open world loot is a real afterthought, unfortunately.
I liked the way loot worked on some really old the 4th coming servers. On T4C, the "best" equips are somewhat rare and require a bit of working, questing, grinding, going throug mazes a lot of times... but the loot itself is rewarding! And on those servers I used to play back in the end of 90's and early 00's, the pvp had some small degree of equipment loss on death. Something like 30% bag loss and 10% body loss, that means you have a 30% in each item of your inventory droping due to a pvp death, and 10% on each item equiped! And as itens changed appearance (what you see on your inventory is what you see equiped, if you wear a plate chest and a leather leggings, you'll see ur char using a plate chest and a leather leggings), everybody could guess what you were equiping, thus preventing you from geting ganked or making em want to gank you, bringing lots of action to the game!
But nowdays, we'r separated in 2 kinds: full loot pvp games where loot dosen't matter that much, as you can craft a really nice sword just after loosing one, and pve games with litle to no pvp, where you lose NOTHING when getting killed, and loot only matters on the hardest raids at the lvl cap of the game (like world of warcraft, where you must grind the same raid a hundred times with a 0.0001% chance of getting a nice equipment). There's no balance at ALL on good itens requiring some hard work to get, but still being something you can achieve on a fun gameplay way.
In Darkfall, if you loose a good greatsword on a pvp fight, you just go on ur guild town and craft a new one! On world of warcraft, you play a entire year to get a single pair of gloves that drops on a raid boss, and have no risks on loosing it! There's no more risk vs reward in mmos today! And that's why some new indie games are coming based on the 90's mmos like ultima online, the 4th coming and even tibia! Because indie devs realized that the gaming industry in mmos is stuck, giving outno fun for the players!
Character progression is the #1 principle MMOs are built upon. You can chuck levels and gear but your character always has to be progressing.
The reason so many players quit at max level is their character either stops progressing or has its progression locked away behind time walls.
It depends.
I despise vendor fodder. Loot that is generated purely to sell at some npc and is not useful for anything else. I think it is one of the dumbest ideas taken foothold in nowadays MMO's. It is only good for cluttering inventories and making extra trips to some npc.
I do like it when a MMO uses loot that kind of makes sense. Where an animal doesn't drop a rifle, but hides, meat, bones or whatever is used in crafting. I prefer it that it needs to be picked up using a gathering skill though. And then gear or certain gear related mats dropping from humanoid npc's. Anything that caters towards a player run economy with everything crafted.
Anything else, meh. I prefer MMO's now that take place in a virtual world that is consistent. And not some themepark world with neatly placed mobs in something that looks like herds, but is actually dumber because they don't even notice each other. And then with rodents dropping hammers or silly things like that. (Wish more MMO's took Ryzom as example for mob placement and how animals act).
EDIT : The way The Repopulation uses loot is more what I like.
It wasn't always that way. EQ was a very loot oriented game but then in DAoC all the best gear was player crafted, until the clusterf*ck that was ToA which completely ruined the game in many player's opinions. SWG was also based on crafted gear but the very best gear was made from components looted from PvE encounters.
Krayt Dragon pearls were highly sought after to make light sabers and the very best T21 rifles and the bones looted from the NPC Ackly were used to make a very potent baton, which I used myself to very good effect.
With WoW's success and the influx of players to the genre that accompanied it, the loot treadmill became the norm but it certainly isn't the only way to go. It's never been my motivation to play. The main problem with these loot treadmills is that they usually result in crafting becoming obsolete. Not a problem for players who hate crafting but there's a huge audience that actually like that kind of thing.
Loot only matters if the game is designed around it. There are other options.
Having played games that increased loot or changed how loot dropped like GW2, Diablo 3 and others, YES it matters. They are soooo much better now when the loot is a dropping. I think WoW did well in the early years and may need a rehash. I remember being excited to get greens and blues in Vanilla and BC from World drops and the Purples were a nice surprise. These days, purple drop too much and I feel no real difference between the gear anymore, even the aesthetics seem the same, no real flair and pinache to look forward to.
That being said, playing a game like TSW where loot is....different to say the least, I secrety wish it had a regular tiered "gear" system like other MMOs. I like collecting armor and what not, but at least they appease this a bit with costumes, still no replacement for gear with stats though, I'll always love gear with stats.
So have infinite progression? Unfortunately I don't know how that can be achieved. I think the reason so many people quit at max levle is because 90% of the content has been exhausted. You have seen all the zones and played all the content. Then all it's left is some super grindy dungeons/raids. But that has always been the MMO way of doing things. I think the main problem is that developers simply can't create content fast enough to keep up with the players. And I am not talking about no lifers who can play 5-6+ hours a day. I am talking about casual people who play 10-15 hours a week.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Loot matters a lot but the quantity of loot that only gives you a minor advantage and is replaced by something slightly better in minutes as in Diablo, or the painful grinds to get them as in any raid-based game are both crappy systems.
My first MMO was Asheron's Call and I really liked their loot system - especially from chests -- although it often provided goofy items with random combinations of attributes that often didn't work well together even though they were epic in many respects. Despite those issues (which could have been fixed with better itemization) it was very satisfying when one of those items dropped for you.
I get a lot more satisfaction from getting a great random drop from an unexpected source than pursuing a known item that is identical to what others who suffered through the grind got.
So something like a lesser quantity of the Diablo variety of quality and attributes in RNG drops but with more permanence would be my ideal loot.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I don't think loot matters anymore.
There has always been "epic drops" from bosses since the rpg genre started, but nowadays you get so many useless items you end up just selling trash to vendors.
Loot needs to make sense.
Loot needs to have a purpose.
This whole "epic loot for the sake of epic loot" mentality is pretty depthless.
Loot shouldn't matter, but it does.
We've been conditioned to expect it, and we feel happy every time we get slightly better loot. It's the skinner-box model at work, keeping gamers hooked by the ever decreasing chance of better rewards.
It's entirely possible to make a good game with no loot, or very little in the way of loot. However, that's not what currently sells. Which is why nearly every game has some kind of reward progression system tacked onto it.
The most fun loot in Marvel Heroes is not the equipment. It is the eternity splinters, relics, and omega orbs. Each one that drops is an incremental increase to one or all of your characters.
If I were to design an MMO today... I would get rid of the paper doll. Your equipment would be whatever you bought from the cash shop, and it would not affect your stats. The loot would be stuff like Marvel Heroes relics, stuff that stacks, and that would be what you are grinding for.
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
A sense of progression is honestly the best way to do it. Often it is through loot this is accomplished but I can see it being done in other ways. Having a good progression system providing stats or even special abilities or perks can really make things engaging both giving gameplay and a reason to play without even needing loot.
That said, I do feel loot can be great when done right. Inventory management can be made interesting having players pick up valuable things and having to debate what to keep and leave as they explore some dungeon far away from town where they can sell their goods. The issue mostly comes down to how it is handled as to not feel too punishing or distracting. Having the loot appear interesting can help to make it feel less like a burden and perk a lot more interest in it.