What is everyone's take on "No Drop"?
 

Recently had a discussion on Skype with some friends about No-Drop, and how it has essentially destroyed any real loot progression, or trade, on live servers.

How do you guys feel about No-Drop? Would you play on a classic oriented server (Pre-Luclin, max) if it had No-Drop removed, or does that cheapen the overall feeling of the server?


Thanks for the feedback :) !

Personally I think it is needed, what's the fun of just buying (in game currency or real world) the best gear instead of having to earn it.

I generally prefer a balance b/w No Drop and Trade-able items. I always liked that Big Raid Items like teh Blade of Carnage and Ring of Destruction were able to be traded. But at the same time I've always been one who enjoys some exclusivity. I enjoy that there is itemization available only to those who put the time in to get organized, and raid. I know there's certainly an entirely separate argument available there, and its not necessarily something that applies fully to EMU servers (i enjoy offering alternate ways to get some items for example).

Personally i find that removing no-drop in its entirety does cheapen things a bit. When your taking the time to raid targets/kill difficult mobs and then you see everyone running around with the same items it sort of makes you go "why did i bother?".

I've tinkered with various takes on global loot for a few years now and I really think that some kind of permanent gear removal or deprecation mechanism is necessary.
Attuneable can be helpful but depending on drop rates it might not be enough.

My first global loot iteration gave every mob a chance to drop something, and even at reasonable probabilities it doesn't take long for the world to become saturated with gear. A new player can be charitably geared to the teeth within their first ten minutes of play, and when you're level 3 and unable to find an upgrade until the high-end, things get boring quickly. Just as demonstar and dungeonmastr have said.

I put no-drop flags back in on my server and moved a smaller bracket of high tier items with attuneable flags to no-drop as well. It's a bummer when something really nice rots but without that precious rarity everything is cheap and easy. I left everything that was originally without restriction as it was since I think it's nice to have a rare set of decent twinking items, it just has to be controlled. Even with this setup the server still has quite a bit of gear bloat.

On a semi-related note, I do like to remove required levels for everything but very specific quest items. I will use a recommended level in a limited capacity but I think no-drop is an all around better solution for rampant twinking.

This isn't quite true. Live's current design is such that each new expansion is arranged in tiers. First tier will have everything or nearly everything tradeableand attunable, with the exception of visible slots, those will be a combine where the base item is tradeable. The past several expansions have each had a decent amount of upshift in gear power, so it is nice that you can purchase these items as a quick power-jump when coming back if you are of the appropriate level.

As far as EVERYTHING no-drop removed, as Tabasco stated, over-saturation would be a very quick concern. Banks become shoved full of stuff, and as nice as some people are, it really does ruin your experience if you are decked out in the best stuff from day one. Also, with no-drop removed, the economy and loot progression is more destroyed than without it.

Also someone mentioned Blade of Carnage, that's a great item that is still in high demand on live, at least on the server I play on. It was a wonderful addition, and that kind of thing could see more introduction, but it should be the exception, not the norm.

Even everything as attunable isn't a fix, items tend to go into the economy faster than they'd go out, so there would still be an positive item flow over time. I almost think games with item repair and/or item breakage had the right idea, even though it is horrible from a player's standpoint to lose an item.

As far as a pre-luclin server, with everything no-drop, I would feel that it would not be that enjoyable for late comers. You could just piggyback off of friends or even stranger's accomplishments. I know me personally, I lose enjoyment in a game quickly if I can no longer improve, but each person enjoys the game differently.

Interesting thoughts!

This was very helpful, thanks :D! Hopefully others who might see this post developing a new server will find them helpful too. :)


ps: Has anyone seen a way to add "Durability" to an item in-game? I'm not sure if hard-coded stuff like that can be added by normal means without making it incompatible for normal users to play or without them modifying their own clients?

Sorry to hop in mid-conversation, this is possible, you can make each hit take in to account the durability of an item by adding custom source for the items database, attack, and a custom column in the items table exclusively for durability that is used in said source to pull the durability left and even have another column for destroy, as in 1 means it will break upon reaching 0, 0 means it will not break, however it will do 0 damage, just my twist on it.

I feel a certain quantity of no drop is needed, but you need to have a good balance between items which can freely be traded and ones which cannot. I also feel the quality of crafted items should play a larger role than they do in most MMO's.

It might be better to make crafting play a larger role and be used for items that you can freely trade and have found items strictly no drop though they might be used for materials for blacksmith items. Everyone is inclined to there own personal views and ideas on the matter though and I'm certain it varies quite a bit amongst players and developers.

So I have to modified the source code? Hmmmm :cool:. That may be something for another day to look into.

Never done a server before so right now it is baby steps :-D!

I have no idea, but I would be great to have the durability system in place UO utilized especially if it could be coded slightly different between items which you can freely trade and no drop items.

Personally, I feel "No-Drop" means it took some major work to aquire. Either it means it was a really long/hard to get quest item (Epics?), or it was a raid drop. So I don't think No-Drop items should ever be breakable.

However, anything that isn't strictly no-drop should be breakable over time. :)


Though, that is far outside the scope of the server I'm currently planning :-D !

Attune-able system works wonders. Use an item, it's now bound to you for the rest of existence.
The problem with non-attuned items is that most systems, even modern MMOs, do not have more than about 800 items for use and most are rewards for quests.
There's no modern-day camp system so everyone gets equal loot, thus why that was introduced.

If you were to make a system set up like Classic-era EQ where you are lucky to find an item that is equip-able, keep equip-able items on merchants or very rare drops, and allow for NPC trash loot in abundance, that would work just fine.
Two solutions: Non-attuned items and little equip-able gear in general from all sources or Attuned items and equip-able gear drops in abundance.

o7 Secrets, haven't seen you in about a minute.



Don't suppose anyone whom knows the DB and source well enough would mind chatting with me over some sort of voice comms like TS3, Vent, etc with questions I might have :-D?

Seems tutorials and the like are rather scarce, for what I need to do anyways, or i'm being a blind dork :rolleyes:.


-Faded

I noticed attune-able items lose the no-drop if you loot it off your corpse.. (for servers with corpse retrieval)

The system is great though other than that bug

Yeah I will look into fixing that if that's something that is an issue. I don't normally host servers with corpse runs so I have never seen it.

Fadedspirit, I sent you a PM.

I know there has been some talk about this issue in the past.

I'm sure you're well aware of the reason why, Secrets, but for anyone who doesn't...


It's basically that the corpse blob does not store the attuned flag.

Either the blob will need to be updated or the it will need to be deconstructed into a field-based system..there's been some chatter
about the latter, especially since I need to change the single slot format into a 4-property struct for the inventory rework.

I have not seen anything posted but i know another of the devs was recently writing the SQL loop to explode the corpse blob data out to an updated table.

I think UO's item decay was one of the best item designs implemented to date. Everyone had gear they'd reserve only for very special occasions (Heavy Xbow of Vanquishing!).

For those unfamiliar - weapons and armour had a maximum durability, as this reduced so did an item's damage or armour properties. You could repair an item, but it lost a little of its max durability each time dependent on your skill - so eventually you'd have to replace the item altogether.

You could do something simple with Procs and Item charges to depreciate items in EQ. Otherwise you could implement some fairly simple source changes for a more elegant approach, e.g.
- add a 'condition' field to the item class (representing a % of condition)
- use 'condition' to multiply damage/ac/stats in the relevant functions
- include a chance to reduce condition in combat events

Then you can remove no-drop, and while items will be tradeable, there will be a constant flow required and people will tend to keep 'spares', and/or sell part damaged items.. restricting the flow of godlike items to the undeserving :)

Personally it depends on your outlook on the server, if you think about it, lets say you are playing with some friends on a server, and some random joins the server, and say you have gear just sitting in your bags from the highest progression, and the person is like 'Hey can anyone help me out?' and you're bored and like, 'Oh yeah here's this,' give it to them, they progress through the server seeing that it's the best gear, they are likely to get bummed and just give up...

Me personally, I believe in locking all zones that you aren't attuned to so you HAVE to get a certain item from that zone, yes it may have a 100% chance, but zone2 gear takes zone1 + pattern from zone2, making it virtually impossible to get the best gear quickly... -shrug-...

I've seen servers with NO-DROP disabled, I played on it for all of a week, and boom, it was GG for me...

Something i believe 90% of emulator servers lack is server wide selling and ecomomy.. When it comes to server with No Drop off. people horde loot for themselves or give it away to people. I just want a server that has an ecomomy where money means something.

That's what I meant no drop items should probably be the exception and be indestructible.

Without reading everything.

Here is my ideology on items:
Everything, bar a few very special (artifacts, epics, and special quest items) should be tradable.

Here is how I limit the use of said items:
Level REC and level REQ, as well as zone-level restrictions (temp deleveling when going to prime material plane zones, etc)

all of my items have a level REQ where you can't even weild it unless you are of a certain level, and a level REC for the max level of that tiier

there are some fancier things i've done in some zones and will be doing in more zones... like special encounters that happen for powerful players trying to slum it...


regarding economy.. i have some very special incentives to sell your loot toe vendors

i have a massive (20 line sql query) that does some magic to the item db and prices everything based on special rules - also there are alot of things buyable if you have loads of pp. granted you can probably exploit the pp a little if you are powerful enough.. but that is intended... as to max out your toon you will need 100s of thousands of AA or 10s or even 100s of millions of pp (read: my god-worshipper system is expensive for the god side of things but free for worshippers))