Friday, February 22, 2008

New Loot Options + Game Update Previews

GU43 is coming up soon and in addition to the G15 support that I already mentioned, I worked on adding 2 new looting methods.

Need Before Greed looting is something thats been on our list to add for well over a year, probably more like 2 years. Now groups have the ability to choose Need Before Greed looting which will present each member with a Need, Greed and Decline button. All players that submit "need" requests will be rolled first. If no players submit "need", then all "greed" roles will happen next.

We've also added an item rarity threshold to the group options. This will allow you to specify, Treasure +, Legendary +, Fabled + or All Items. Any item above the specified tier will use whatever loot option is chosen. Any items BELOW the tier will be automatically assigned via Round Robin.

The main reason for using Round-Robin versus the existing free-for-all, is that we'd have to wait for the lottery to finish to know which items were left. Also, people would have to click the chest once to initiate the lottery and than anyone wanting to loot the free for all items would still have to click the chest to see if something else was in it. This is why we decided to go with an auto-assign option like Round Robin. Now when you click the chest, all low-tier items will get assigned automatically, then every group member will see a popup loot window for each item above the tier.

Just be sure you set the tier high enough if you are concerned about No-Trade items being assigned to the wrong people. I would assume that most players in raiding guilds with fabled armor don't care about treasured items, so they may set the tier to legendary and above, and just let No-Trade treasured be auto-assigned as vendor trash. However, any groups where people think you might want some of that treasured gear just needs to be sure that the tier is set low enough to that it gets lotto'd.

Its a very difficult balance to strike between providing way too many options, and just enough so that everyone is happy. Hopefully these options will provide enough flexibility without being too confusing.

On a side note...

Lots of people responding to the GU43 Preview post flaming about how small the update is. First, keep in mind this is only a preview, everything is not mentioned here. Second, remember we're coming off of an update that introduced LOTS of new content. There is always bug fixing and balancing associated with the new content, and that can easily bleed into the next month's update. Also, when we spend lots of time on bug fixes and performance improvements, those items won't always show up on an update, but it doesn't mean we aren't working hard to make the game better. Then on top of that, we are already working on features for future updates. Our development schedule has to run far enough in advance so that we have time to test and bug fix features before they are released.

Since we went from a 6-month to a 12-month expansion cycle we've been able to release some pretty big features as game updates. Unfortunately now many people have taken this for granted and expect EVERY update to have huge features in them. If a specific game update seems small, just keep in mind all of the things I mentioned above.

8 comments:

Tiffany said...

As wife of an EQ2 programmer, I can attest to the fact that you're working full days, and then some, all year round. :)

If anyone questions that, point me to them and I'll go give 'em an earful about how you end up working til 9:00 on non-raid nights for your guild. ;)

Nick McLaren said...

Hmmm... so if I'm REALLY greedy, I'll just click "Need" every time. =)

Perhaps "Need" should perform a class check if not a level check too.

Then again, perhaps it's just better to know who you're grouped with.

..and in regards to planning a long enough Development cycle for testing.. One word.. and depending on your opinion of it, you may hate me for mentioning it but... SCRUM! It's working very well for us =)

Anonymous said...

Nice, I like the NBG option :)
Hopefully it won't be exploited and people will hit need anyway.

Greg Spence said...

I can't imagine it being 'exploited' anymore than people that already hit Lotto when they can't really use something.

If you see a healer in your group, and he's hitting Need on non-healer items, I'd kick him out. To me that's no different than someone taking a No-Trade item that someone else can use with the existing system.

Anonymous said...

I just have one question. I've been on eq2 for over 1200 days now, playing regularly. In all that time, I have seen 2 ledgitimate mythical drops. Over the past four days on Nafagen, I have seen nearly 60 mythical drops by what people say, are two guilds run by dev/gm's. Alot of us in the community are looking at this as the "last straw" for either sloppy hackable code, or just lack of comon sense for allowing a single community raid this much reguardless if the rumors of dev/gm involvement have any basis in fact. Most of the three guilds I run, have expressed an interest in leaving eq2 for AoC when it's released, as they feel that SOE has done a poor job over the years, of addressing concerns about speed hacking, bots, and other exploits, that we all still see daily use of. Since our guild rules are very strict about such things, we all report these things when we see them, but they must all end up in some black hole posting box, that never gets opened. I would highly recommend that someone take a look at whatever exploit is being used, before it gets so widespread that you have massive disinterest because of inequality. Just my C02

Greg Spence said...

The reason you've only seen 2 mythical drops in the past is because they were extremely rare and only dropped the FIRST time certain raid mobs were killed.

With the introduction of the epic weapon quests, we created a Mythical weapon for each class. The reason you've seen so many of them lately is because people are completing their epic weapon quest, and like any other mythical, when that happens its announced across the entire server.

There is no exploit here, and it has nothing to do with Devs or GMs.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the explanation. I will inform my guildies of what you said, and I think it will be taken well, as a promise that they too can get a mythical when the time comes, if they work hard for it. A simple request from myself would be, that alot of us leaders like splitpaw to harden up our new recruits, and teach fighting tactics, but the acheivement and equivalent drops seems to be lacking. I commend whomever updated the npc attacks and spells there, as they are more inline with all other zones. It's an unexpectedly refreshing change.

And thanks for the honest, and quick reply.
Silverhammer

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