It is my belief that the reason for having loot drops be "random" is due to human psychology and the fact that Blizzard wants people to continue playing the game.
I think this is very insightful, and very well worth considering. The "carrot on a stick" model only works if you don't feed the carrot to the horse right when he wants it. There is a psychological aspect to random drops that creates incentive and excitement for players. I've really never seen anyone stop raiding because "my damn trinket won't drop, I'm done!" - no, they are always there for that next kill, hoping for the drop.
There is something as appealing about random drops as they are infuriating, and I think that Blizzard knows that and maintains random drops specifically for this reason.
Officers and Main Tanks get their loot before anyone else! Never get the opportunity to try some interesting off-spec gear! Less incentive to raid, resulting in more account cancellations!
If you're in the kind of guild that would do that, then nothing I suggest will make the game any more fun for you.
I'm definitely not in an "Officers get their loot first" kind of guild, thankfully, but my experience has been that an awful lot of raiding guilds are structured to benefit the officers, possibly over half. Regarding the issue of gearing up the main tank, that's not a guild culture question. That's a min/max question. Regarding this you said:
Originally Posted by Hudini
Smart raid leaders understand the holy trinity of Tank, Heals, DPS. Nerf one part of the team and the others fail.
And I agree with you. There's just one problem. The tanks average 2 raid slots, the healers average 7, and the DPS averages 16 slots. Yes, success in most fights is based on one third tanking, one third healing, one third damage. But giving loot to tanks benefits half of the tanking, while giving loot to DPS benefits one sixteenth of the damage. You get far greater benefits by giving gear to tanks.
This isn't an issue with fight design or or pre-expansion anything. It was the same in other MMOs-- It's just numbers. It's better to give someone an item who is doing 50% of the tanking than someone who does 15% of the healing or 8% of the damage. And it will be this way until Blizzard makes fights where 16 people tank, 7 people do damage, and 2 people heal. I don't think they will make many of those fights if any.
Evaluate the reward process from the Arena with those of Raiding and there is a massive disparity.
Arena rewards:
Require as few as 1 other person
Require as little as 1 hour a week
Are 100% non-random, ie. each player decides how to be rewarded by selecting items from a vendor
Raid rewards
Require at least 9 other people
Requre substantially more time per week than Arenas
Awards themselves much more random.
To sum up, the Arena is much more rewarding in terms of payoff vs effort. They could go a long way towards fixing this by putting the players more in control PVE rewards. Tokens and faction based rewards are just a baby step towards that.
There is something as appealing about random drops as they are infuriating, and I think that Blizzard knows that and maintains random drops specifically for this reason.
But carrot on a stick also only works if you eventually DO feed the horse, right? Frustration takes its toll and leads to burnout. I can understand randomness in the "top tier" of progression that a guild is currently foraging through - that is, not feeding the carrot to the horse right when they want it. However, once an instance tier is complete and a guild has moved on to something higher, is there a point to most items continuing to elude players?
Case in point, is there really a reason DST must continue to remain out of reach to a player who is downing Illidan on a regular basis?
This is why I personally believe that Tier 6 bosses (Illidan?) should contain an item that can be turned it at either Vashj or Kael'thas (perhaps a "scroll of commendation" from Illidan?) for a single item of choice from SSC or TK respectively. In other words, once you're clearing Tier 6 instances, you should, as a side effect, get a fast track to items of choice from Tier 5 instances. How fast that track should be is very debateable, but the goal is, if you can farm the next tier up, you shouldn't be needlessly frustrated waiting for a drop from content that is very much behind you. By all means keep random drops on the leading edge of content, but why instances that are dead and gone perpetually refuse to drop long sought after items is beyond me.
The situation would be better if they were just a little more intelligent with itemization. For example, maybe trinkets that 15 or so people want should drop a little more often?
Overall Blizzard is not very good at itemization, which is perplexing to me because I honestly don't think it's all that complicated or challenging. I get the impression there isn't really one 'itemization guy' at Blizzard with the sole responsibility of designing items and deciding where to put them in the game.
Many items are designed poorly and/or placed into the game poorly and/or given drop rates that don't really make sense. If itemization is a full time job for someone at Blizzard, they're really not very good at it. This isn't really a complaint, it's more of an observation. I mean I could go over the itemization in BT/Hyjal and fix almost every mistake(and there are a bunch of them) in maybe a couple of hours, so the fact that it seems to be so hard for whoever is in charge of it is really confusing to me.
Evaluate the reward process from the Arena with those of Raiding and there is a massive disparity.
Arena rewards:
Require as few as 1 other person
Require as little as 1 hour a week
Are 100% non-random, ie. each player decides how to be rewarded by selecting items from a vendor
Raid rewards
Require at least 9 other people
Requre substantially more time per week than Arenas
Awards themselves much more random.
To sum up, the Arena is much more rewarding in terms of payoff vs effort. They could go a long way towards fixing this by putting the players more in control PVE rewards. Tokens and faction based rewards are just a baby step towards that.
This has been answered already. Raid drops are yes random, but in return you get more loot per week, more slots covered, more options per slots, gears for many roles and so on. That more than balances the reward aspect. I agree with others. Some slots as tokens are fine. All slots as tokens would take the fun out of raid loot for me. Sure its annoying when crap drops, but it does create excitement.
Its items like trinkets, rings, cloaks, and necks which are the main problem. A system for them would alleviate a lot of the RNG pain. One item a month from outside the RNG would be enough, because one is greater than zero.
Well Magtheridon and MH along with Kara takes care of rings really. Necks is from Kael, although the demand does outweigh the supply. I would like if Kael dropped 2 quest items instead of 1, especially given the scarcity of necklaces. Trinkets there is a fair deal of them, from 5 mans, rep, badges and from 25 mans. Now sure some really excellent ones like DST are amazing and have huge demand, but I know from my spec that the difference between epic ones and non epic ones aren't that huge in many situations.
Cloaks I do agree is an issue at times (along with necks) but that should be solved by just having more itemization. Heck just make it that more of the trash drops are in jewelry/cloak slots. Or make it that there isn't one necklace in T5 and one in all of T6.
The situation would be better if they were just a little more intelligent with itemization. For example, maybe trinkets that 15 or so people want should drop a little more often?
Overall Blizzard is not very good at itemization, which is perplexing to me because I honestly don't think it's all that complicated or challenging. I get the impression there isn't really one 'itemization guy' at Blizzard with the sole responsibility of designing items and deciding where to put them in the game.
Many items are designed poorly and/or placed into the game poorly and/or given drop rates that don't really make sense. If itemization is a full time job for someone at Blizzard, they're really not very good at it. This isn't really a complaint, it's more of an observation. I mean I could go over the itemization in BT/Hyjal and fix almost every mistake(and there are a bunch of them) in maybe a couple of hours, so the fact that it seems to be so hard for whoever is in charge of it is really confusing to me.
I think you more or less hit the nail on the head. By shrinking the Tier sets from 8 and 9 pieces to 5 they have destabilized loot. How many complaints where there pre-bc on a large scale? Sure individual guilds had their own item that became the joke ("lol Harold of Woe didn't drop for the 23rd week in a row"). But for the most part everyone was able to attain their "dream set" or "wish list" with the exception of maybe Hunters missing their DS gloves. If you could farm the boss that dropped the Tier items, you were going to get your full Tier'd sets but those off-set pieces and weapons were a different story.
Now however there are only 5 stable slots and by stable I mean if your currently farming Illidan, you and everyone in your guild will get all the T6 they want before Sunwell goes live. This leaves everyone to vie for the same items because there are no other suitable alternatives. By increasing the competition over those slot items and offering no real substitute Blizzard has created stress on raiders to the point where it doesn't drop, they get annoyed, upset, etc... because we all know in the back of our minds that as soon as Sunwell comes out we will probably never get an upgrade for that slot.
Potentially there will be casters in Sunwell who are in full T6 but using a Fang of the Leviathon or the Bloodmaw Magus-Blade because a Tempest of Chaos only dropped once or twice for their guild or tailors will still be using Frozen Shadoweave Boots because they are better than Blue Suade Shoes and not enough Slippers of the Seacaller dropped for their guild. Is it right that people will be using 105 ilvl items in Sunwell because they never saw the upgrade drop or because there wasn't enough to go around?
So we have gone from needing 9 non-set items with T2 to needing 12 with T4-T6. The numbers might not seem that impressive but in terms of time and competition, those are huge.
Well check the naxx loottables. There are almost no offspec items.
With offspec i mean the cloth healing set etc. from bt/mh.
Almost all bosses in naxx drop such things like cloak/neck/rings and weapons. There are very few offspec items if not none. The only non set items i can remember are usually the best item for that slot.
In bt/mh we get shitload of those t5-t6 "meh" gear that nobody wants because he has t5 or is waiting for t6.
Off-spec items are not the problem in my opinion. There aren't very many of them and they all have low drop rates. There are quite a few main spec items that are just terrible and should not exist at all. Example: [Vest of Mounting Assault] why does this item exist? We don't need shitty BP's from non-end bosses clogging up our loot tables.
Another example would be all the haste rating items. Did we really need a whole line of terribly designed 'haste' items? Can't haste rating just be a normal stat that we use on normal items? How much room do we free up from our loot tables for highly contested items like rings, necks, cloaks, trinkets and weapons when we get rid of all the random shit that nobody really cares about or has any desire to use for any extended amount of time?
This discussion should also include how the random loot affects the progression of guilds, which some people touched on briefly before.
If you don't get the DPS upgrades, if you never get caster weapons, if you never get a DST (or if you're like us, you never got a DFT, and now no DST's...) the damage you can produce is going to be lower than blizzard requires you to have for an given encounter.
My guild is struggling with constant bad luck on key dps drops, (we've been unusually lucky with our tank drops, thankfully), which means that our DPS is lower than it "should" be, compared to other guilds. (Thanks to WWS for letting me directly compare.)
So what you have is that guilds come up against brick walls that given the time they've put in should be passable, but due too low drop rates, are simply not. And this frustration will cause account cancellations.
I like the idea of quests and rep giving rewards, I just wish it was more than one or 2 slots that didn't have other upgrades.
Fixed that for you. As has been stated before: Raiding for specific drops sucks. Raiding for overall average gear upgrades per person is far better.
Not only condescending but confusing...
Let's look at how quickly the top 2% of arena teams can get gear. If you look at a 2000 rated 5v5, you'll see that they get over 1050 points a week. At this speed it will take them less than 3 weeks to get a weapon and 1-2 weeks for any other upgrade. Up to 10 people can get these upgrades at the same pace in the same team, even if 5 of them are benched 70% of the time. These people will get precisely the items they want in precisely the order they want.
Look at a raid. WowJutsu Statistics suggest that the top 2% of raid forces have Hyjal on farm and the first 5 bosses in Black Temple down. 1 boss in Hyjal drops 3 pieces of loot instead of 2, and Archimonde drops 4, so this raid force will get 8*2 + 2*3 pieces of loot weekly, or 23 pieces. In reality, much of the non-set loot will be disenchanted or given as off-spec so 18 or so is probably a more fair estimate.
You can bring only 25 people to a given raid, but guilds will have more than that rostered. The more you have rostered, the more it slows down. However, we can probably say that 35-40 people is a fair estimate for most guilds. We'll go with 35. With 18 items and 35 people, you're already looking at nearly a 2 week minimum on an item. Let's suppose we take the arena analogy though, and bump it up to 50 people rostered (as many benched as actively working to acquire items at any given time). The comparison gets even worse! Not only that, the people in raids are not getting precisely the items they want, and certainly not in the order they want--as you mentioned.
As for point 2, it is very easy to fill out an arena set if you want to. Your amendment makes no sense. The fact of the matter is that after you kill boss X the first time, you'll only kill him a small number of times after that... We're talking about completing sets here. People like to complete sets. Every arena player has the ability to complete a set if they want to. Only a select few raiders do.
As far as point three... again, your point is nonsensical. Adding people to your arena roster, assuming equal skill etc, just means more items overall are earned. Adding people to your raiding roster, assuming equal skill etc, slows down the rate at which everyone currently rostered gets items and will in fact prevent people currently rostered from acquiring items they would otherwise have received, over time.
I'm not saying that raiding should work like arenas--I don't think it should. But I do think that there should be some benefits from working on the RNG and so forth, and that it shouldn't make guild members feel like they have to screw their teammates in order to get upgrades.
Weapons are annoying. 1 in 6 or 7 chances at items are annoying.
But the worst in my eyes are the trinkets. Nearly everybody in a particular role uses the same trinket, so there is massive competition. They are stupidly rare, with generally only one for a role in each tier. And the drop rate is SO LOW. Most raids could use 6+ Madnesses and 6+ Skulls, but most will only ever see 2-3 at best. We did Gruul while we were working on Kael, and probably should still be doing him with Illidan on farm. All for the trinkets. When we go back to SSC, what do people wait with baited breath to drop? The tsunami talisman.
In general, a raid can use more copies of a good trinket than any other single item. The BT trinkets finally started filling the gap, but several ashtongue trinkets are rather weak. They're guaranteed, unlike the class trinket round in T5, and stronger on average and overall a good improvement. But there is still room to get better.
To get to a 2k rating either you need to spend 1-2 months working your way up the ranks and BG grinding or play one of the few classes (and in the right bracket) that gear doesn't matter as much or of course play with people better geared than you and they pull you up. The people rated that high will sure get a weapon in 3 weeks, and well 7-8 more weeks to get a full set of season gear. Someone raiding and killing T5 and some of T6 will get just as many upgrades.
Of course there are things you forgot to mention. That people raiding BT will get a nice trinket down the line. That everyone in MH will get an amazing ring. That people will get gems better than any alternatives. And that such a raid will get much much more than 23 pieces of loot, due to the large number of trash drops that drop from both instances, especially MH though. Now sure those items don't cover all slots, but they include some damn fine items, some that aren't replacable yet in this game.
Sillia's point was that while yes a Raider does put in more time in this game than your arena goer, they are also rewarded with far more loot per week then them. Now sure if the raid is just starting or struggling they get very little. Then again so does the 1500 rated team. But for a raider in a guild making good progress, the loot literally rolls in.
Let's look at how quickly the top 2% of arena teams can get gear. If you look at a 2000 rated 5v5, you'll see that they get over 1050 points a week. At this speed it will take them less than 3 weeks to get a weapon and 1-2 weeks for any other upgrade. Up to 10 people can get these upgrades at the same pace in the same team, even if 5 of them are benched 70% of the time. These people will get precisely the items they want in precisely the order they want.
Look at a raid. WowJutsu Statistics suggest that the top 2% of raid forces have Hyjal on farm and the first 5 bosses in Black Temple down. 1 boss in Hyjal drops 3 pieces of loot instead of 2, and Archimonde drops 4, so this raid force will get 8*2 + 2*3 pieces of loot weekly, or 23 pieces. In reality, much of the non-set loot will be disenchanted or given as off-spec so 18 or so is probably a more fair estimate.
You can bring only 25 people to a given raid, but guilds will have more than that rostered. The more you have rostered, the more it slows down. However, we can probably say that 35-40 people is a fair estimate for most guilds. We'll go with 35. With 18 items and 35 people, you're already looking at nearly a 2 week minimum on an item. Let's suppose we take the arena analogy though, and bump it up to 50 people rostered (as many benched as actively working to acquire items at any given time). The comparison gets even worse! Not only that, the people in raids are not getting precisely the items they want, and certainly not in the order they want--as you mentioned.
You're only using the top end, and you're ignoring lower tier raids. The situations are not analogous at all. On average, it is much more difficult for all arena players to get items per unit time than it is for raiders. For the very top end, it may be out of whack. That doesn't mean that it is out of whack all the way down, it just means that at the top end, the reward scheme may be better overall. It's like the people freaking out over ZA gear. Just because the [Carved Witch Doctor's Stick] is better for shadow priests at the hit cap than the [Wand of Prismatic Focus] doesn't mean that all ZA/Badge gear is better than all BT/Hyjal gear.
As for point 2, it is very easy to fill out an arena set if you want to. Your amendment makes no sense. The fact of the matter is that after you kill boss X the first time, you'll only kill him a small number of times after that... We're talking about completing sets here. People like to complete sets. Every arena player has the ability to complete a set if they want to. Only a select few raiders do.
Trying to complete sets is still raiding for specific drops. You're getting offset items, trinkets, rings, necklaces, cloaks, weapons, etc. in the meantime.
As far as point three... again, your point is nonsensical. Adding people to your arena roster, assuming equal skill etc, just means more items overall are earned. Adding people to your raiding roster, assuming equal skill etc, slows down the rate at which everyone currently rostered gets items and will in fact prevent people currently rostered from acquiring items they would otherwise have received, over time.
Actually, adding more people to the arena team dilutes it, because most of the time people are not as interchangeable as they are in pvp. Look at the top arena teams. They don't dilute their teams with alts and such; they focus on their 'main team', and play with it that way. They may keep a bench, but they have their starting players, and those are the ones they expect to carry the team.
I'm not saying that raiding should work like arenas--I don't think it should. But I do think that there should be some benefits from working on the RNG and so forth, and that it shouldn't make guild members feel like they have to screw their teammates in order to get upgrades.
I don't think that the RNG system is terrific either. However, it is flawed to assume that the arena system is that much better. The arena system forces people to pay with the most important currency - real time. Raiding for a [Dragonspine Trophy] off of Gruul will leave you with useless items most of the time, but that's because you've got a deep loot table, and only want one item.
We've all had those situations where we go for weeks without getting any items from raiding, and we've all known folks who came in to a raid for the first time and had N drops all go to that player. Overall, raiding is buying lottery tickets. Arena is getting a (smaller) weekly stipend.
Ninja Edit: Really, Blizzard *is* trying to alleviate the issues with the RNG. They've brought up the token system (tons better than the stormrage/nemesis problem), and now they've introduced redundant loot tables (badge gear that also drops from bosses). They're working towards it. The only thing I would like to see more of is weapons available not from direct drops, but from raid dungeon quests or even tokens. Make the tokens part of a common loot table among some/all of the bosses, and then allow people to choose [Zhar'doom, Greatstaff of the Devourer], or the [Blade of Infamy].
Random drops must stay in successful MMOs, because a "carrot" needs to be there. However, I do like ZA's system (many random drops, yet there are badges as well).
That way, at least you got something, but of course make the random drops better than the badge rewards.
Right. The RNG is fine, and necessary, as long as you're intelligent about how you implement loot into the game. However, whoever is in charge of itemization at Blizzard is not doing a very good job. The super-rare trinkets that everyone and their dog wants are some of the best examples. They had a chance to alleviate some of the frustration over trinkets with the Ashtongue trinkets from BT. Unfortunately they're really bad at designing items, and many of these trinkets are really bad. Like, what were you guys thinking with some of these? [Ashtongue Talisman of Valor] Do you think anyone is going to use this? The non-enhancement effects on the shaman trinket are absolutely terrible, and the enhancement effect is being nerfed in 2.3 which will make it worse than Tsunami Talisman. It doesn't. Make. Sense.
They don't seem to have a very good understanding of the various wants and needs of each individual class, which results in a lot of bad items popping up, and they don't seem to have a very good understanding of loot distribution in a raiding environment. I have a laundry list of itemization mistakes from Karazhan to Illidan. Blizzard has gotten a lot better over the years, but they still have a lot of room for improvement as far as itemization is concerned.
RNG definitely needs to stay. It is not RNG's fault that you don't get item X, it is Blizzard's fault for making item X the only good piece of gear for your slot. If they come up with broad loot tables where there are many, many alternatives for each slot, all very good, then this won't be an issue.
Keep the loot slots low 5-6 items so its never less than 15-20% chance for an item and drop lots of items. Karazhan drops what like 23 items for 10 people, yet 25 man raids SSC is 19 drops for 25 people. Keep the number of items relatively even from tier to tier and 10->25 and then there will be far more spots available on loot tables to put more items. If there were 3 drops in BT/hyjal as good as madness of the betrayer, but different, do you really think you'd be having the same trinket issue? Rare cases would still exist but they would be just that, rare.
Tokenizing everything would be pretty lame. Half the fun in killing a new mob is wondering what will drop, if you know exactly what will drop ahead of time well...
Whether or not arena players maintain a bench or not (I know most maintain at least some bench) doesn't matter at all to the items obtained per player... that was the point I was making. If it is beneficial for them to have a bench, they'll have one. If not, they won't. I don't arena seriously but a friend has offered several times to put me on his team to get points. A group of us would play the first X games and do okay, maybe lose some, and then the "A Team" would play the rest, easily earning back any points we scrubbies lost until they got back to the level where most games they played earned them 1 or 0 points.
I chose the top 2% because that's where the comparison between arenas and raiding seemed the most even. You're comparing equal quality rewards for time spent. If you go down to the Karazhan level, you'll get more epics per player, but none of the epics will be as good as the epics available from arena--hard to compare there. You could say "much more" or you could say "much less" depending on your underlying assumptions. If you go to the people starting raids in SSC/TK who can only down Lurker/Void Reaver (~30%) and spend the rest of their raid time wiping on A'lar they're getting about 6 items a week from raiding. Players at the 30% mark in arenas are getting about 550 points a week. That is, top 30% arena teams get a little more than half the reward of "top 2% arena teams" while top 30% raiding guilds get 1/3 the amount of lesser quality loot than top raiding guilds.
It's arguable that this would be a better data point, being closer to the median, than the 2% example I gave. Would you prefer it?
I chose the top 2% because that's where the comparison between arenas and raiding seemed the most even. You're comparing equal quality rewards for time spent. If you go down to the Karazhan level, you'll get more epics per player, but none of the epics will be as good as the epics available from arena--hard to compare there. You could say "much more" or you could say "much less" depending on your underlying assumptions. If you go to the people starting raids in SSC/TK who can only down Lurker/Void Reaver (~30%) and spend the rest of their raid time wiping on A'lar they're getting about 6 items a week from raiding. Players at the 30% mark in arenas are getting about 550 points a week. That is, top 30% arena teams get a little more than half the reward of "top 2% arena teams" while top 30% raiding guilds get 1/3 the amount of lesser quality loot than top raiding guilds.
The people who wipe on A'lar aren't only getting T5 loot though. I can guarantee you that they are still farming Gruul and Magtheridon to shore up their itemization holes for all of their characters. These items are not useless, nor should they be ignored. Arena players can't go back and farm lesser instances for nearly-as-good gear. They typically turn to raiding to shore up holes in their itemization. I'm actually a bit curious, since I haven't ventured that far myself. Do the BT/Hyjal guilds ever go back to the T5 instances outside of attuning people?
The people who wipe on A'lar aren't only getting T5 loot though. I can guarantee you that they are still farming Gruul and Magtheridon to shore up their itemization holes for all of their characters. These items are not useless, nor should they be ignored. Arena players can't go back and farm lesser instances for nearly-as-good gear. They typically turn to raiding to shore up holes in their itemization. I'm actually a bit curious, since I haven't ventured that far myself. Do the BT/Hyjal guilds ever go back to the T5 instances outside of attuning people?
The people who wipe on A'lar aren't only getting T5 loot though. I can guarantee you that they are still farming Gruul and Magtheridon to shore up their itemization holes for all of their characters. These items are not useless, nor should they be ignored. Arena players can't go back and farm lesser instances for nearly-as-good gear. They typically turn to raiding to shore up holes in their itemization. I'm actually a bit curious, since I haven't ventured that far myself. Do the BT/Hyjal guilds ever go back to the T5 instances outside of attuning people?
Guilds like DnT have never taken T5 off their raiding schedule from what they've said. We've been in T6 for at least 4-5 weeks, and we still raid T5 weekly, although we're getting to the point where we'll probably only do one of the two T5 instances a week.
I really liked the AQ system. Each of the set bosses dropped token guarenteed that any class could use. It made the other random loot much more insignifigant since you knew that you would at the very least get shoulders, helm, boots, and maybe chest and legs if you were killing ouro/c'thun. I also liked that there was randomness in the weapons, but they were still tokenized. If an armament dropped, it was an awesome little bonus, but it was still random if it dropped, but the loot from it was useful to all classes (or many classes) once again.]
I would love to see t6 bosses drop 3 set tokens, one of each every week. It provides a strong motivation for every class to show up.
10/25/07, 2:39 PM
Similar Threads
