Mags

The thing to remember is that loot distribution is key to the replayability of the game, and hence Blizzard's continued profit. Uncertainty of reward (the slot machine principal mentioned up thread) is a key part of that. If you look at the progression of loot allocation in the game, Blizzard has consistently created *more* ways of handing out shinies.

WoW 1.0 loot sources:

Mob drops
Quest rewards

Wow 2.4 loot sources:

Mob drops
Quest rewards
Reputation rewards
Token drops
Badge rewards
Pvp "currency" rewards (honor/arena points)

I wouldn't be surprised to see some developments in Wrath of the Lich King, but I think you'll see a continuation of the same trend: a combination of immediately usable "jackpot" style rewards (standard mob drops for example) and "earnable" items that offer fractional rewards for time spent even when the RNG doesn't go your way (faction rewards, badge loot). You can mock the badge system for making the game "world of casual craft" but it does allow Blizzard to offer rewards in very flexible ways (think of the badges of justice that sometimes randomly pop up in SSO goody bags).

I think there's certainly scope to develop the badge system in a way that rewards raiders. The vendor could sell items that would require badges plus an instance drop. Or maybe the instance drop item would reduce the price of the badge reward (so for example those bracers would cost only 30 badges instead of 60).

 

The Grog

I really, really wish that final instance bosses dropped an IOU redeemable for any non-legendary item from any loot table in their instance.

No more stupidity with Destroyer Drapes, or Madnesses, or Tsunami Talismans, or item X that just never goddamn dropped.

 

Grizzly

A problem i didnt see mentioned would be the issue with people having to sitout raids.

In the current system you can award sitout DKP to appease those not able to actively get loot that day (or take into account their attendance for when they next raid in loot council). Whereas a full badge system means every raid you have to sitout means falling behind your peers.

This could lead to much more disgruntled players after being told to sitout and certain classes gearing up faster than others due to there being less competition for raid slots.

 

• Playered

Another thing about Badge and Token systems, it feels like something which could be better used by being incorporated into the crafting system which is already mostly lack-luster.


Regarding Dungeon 'Tokens' and Dungeon specific 'Badges';
If you look at Sunwell, you have 2 pairs of gloves, chests and such of which one is clearly inferior to the other - resulting in a mass rush for one (perhaps given a profession too) and the other being sent to offspecs as no one wants them, Sunfire Robe being the example.

Consider if Sunfire Robe was a drop from say M'uru, but you could also craft the same Sunfire Robe from tailoring (375 Required to wear) provided you had the pattern and enough 'Sunmotes' to do so.
This would have 2 different effects:

• 1) It would remove 'clutter' from the item pools, you would just have one good item instead of one good and one inferior one.
  2) It provides some essence of Badge/Token system, you would in essence be able to 'earn over time' items on some people if they had the profession instead of leaving it completly open to the RNG.

No one would be penalized for not having the Profession, but having it provides a nice incentive and it helps deal with some of the RNG problems.

The only issue left for this kind of system is the Pattern and 'Resource' acquisition.
The Pattern which you could derive from a Quest initiating item (ala Head of Onyxia), allowing you to give one crafter per boss kill to learn how to make the item of choice for themselves.
The Resource thing, well something like Hearts of Darkness and Sunmotes generally suits this fine.

 

thedopefishlives

This issue already sort of exists, depending on the level you're raiding at. As a guild that's just pushing into 25-man content now, we constantly have to battle to keep people from getting too upset when we fill two Karazhan groups and there's still people sitting on the bench wanting to raid. There's really no elegant solution to the problem no matter how you drop the loot, because unless you have exactly 25 raiders that are always online at the exact same time every raid, someone is going to be left behind, and they are going to miss out on something.

 

Grizzly

Indeed kara will have this problem already as with 25 badges each per run the value of the badges could be considered worth more than the dropped loot given the quality of badge bought gear. Thus Kara is about as close to the "badge only" system that you can get at the moment.

However previously when bosses only dropped gear you could award dkp so that those sitting out can catch up by being able to afford more loot in the future, potentially being able to buy multiple pieces on the nights they are allowed to raid. Whereas a full badge system offers no options to allow members who are told to sitout often to catch up.

Another system like this would be to not have the pattern require a tradeskill but essentially be a "key" plus "badges" to get an item.

Each boss would essentially drop a key for everyone in the raid which would "unlock" a "chest" near the boss, at which point you would get a vendor window that allows you to buy items from the loot table of that particular boss for badges.

Quotations were used to allow for lore changes in names. For instance if your looting a chest to buy gear, the "badges" could be in the form of runes that you would have to apply in order to decurse the items inside in order to retrieve them (anything can be explained with lore).

I mention the tokens changed to keys so that you wouldn't have tons of tokens hogging your inventory (you could even have single keys that upgrade as you progress similair to the frostwolf insignia to avoid keyring clutter). The keys could of course have other uses to get access to the loot other than a chest.

This would get around the randomness of the RNG while at the same time providing a real reward for progress. Admittedly this makes selling raid spots much more profitable however since you can guarantee loot to whoever has enough badges that you bring (less so if you use a tiered badge system however).

 

tedv

I'm surprised no one has brought up the issue of gearing up new recruits. It's helpful to run a quick Black Temple or Hyjal and have an alt collect most of the loot rot. In one run, they can easily get 40% of their gear slots upgraded. That simply wouldn't be possible if all bosses dropped badges, since there's no way to say "let this person loot all 25 badges that dropped".

 

Wunlastri

I think mounts could be there. For a grotesque amount of badges/renown. I'm still of the opinion that legendaries should be handled like A'tiesh. I wouldn't mind helping our rogues get legendaries.

 

• frmorrison

Randomness is important for the longevity of the game, so that people will "farm". While it may not always be fun (see DST), Blizzard is business that makes money.

Therefore, Blizzard is likely to continue the current system, mixing randomness + "sure-thing" items. The increased "sure-thing" seen in Sunwell is a good thing.

 

Vhex

Introduce job system, have boss mob drop everything on his loot table but each member can only select one item, add single-drop 'special loot' for beating the boss in some sort of hard mode (make glaives in P2 Illidan attackable and half half the AC/health of fire elementals, give fire elementals a 200 point damage shield. If you kill the elementals instead of the glaives to get past P2 Illidan will drop a warglaive).

High-five eachother, call it a day.

 

Incoherence

That's really not what I'm saying. My concern is that if the next tier of instance gives you the same loot more quickly, you'll have to figure out a way to incentivize the large number of people motivated by loot to actually learn it.

I used the BT example to show that in order to even make this time-reward tradeoff close to balanced, you'd need a fairly large ramp-up between tiers: at 6 badges per boss, BT is roughly the same badge/hour ratio as Karazhan, while requiring quite a bit more gear, quite a bit more learning time, and 2.5 times as many people. So yeah, each tier could give N times the badges of the previous tier for large N (10 or 20) to get around this problem (since the new "tier" of badge loot is not realistically attainable using the old instances), but at that point you basically have per-instance tokens with a conversion factor.

Waving your arms around and saying "tell me what's wrong with this idea other than the numbers" is a very difficult position to argue against, for the record.

 

Maeltne

If I were in charge of itemization for a game, I would do the following:

1) Progression (killing new bosses), would unlock new armor models. You could use any armor model you want at any time.

2) Progression would yield a specific amount on <RESOURCE> for each player. This <RESOURCE> would be used to improve the characters gear.

3) Characters would have complete control of the stat distribution on their gear.

Example:

Bob is a character in my MMORPG.

Bob kills random creature X. Bob gets <SMALL AMOUNT OF RESOURCE> used to improve his gear. Bob spends <RESOURCE> to increase the level of his helm. Helm increases from 12 to 15 points. Bob assigns 30% to stat1, 30% to stat2 and 40% to stat3.

After killing Y random creatures X, Bob notices that he stops getting any <RESOURCE> to improve his gear. I.e. There is a cap to how far this method of improvement would increase gear level.

Bob complete quests X, Bob gets <MEDIUM AMOUNT OF RESOURCE> used to improve his gear, this resource would be able to increase gear level higher than killing random creatures, but would also have a cap.

Bob kills bosses in small group instance X. Bob gets <LARGE AMOUNT OF RESOURCE> used to improve his gear. Once again with a higher cap than questing.

Bob kills bosses in large group instance X. Bob gets <MASSIVE AMOUNT OF RESOURCE> used to improve his gear, and a <NEW ARMOR MODEL>. Once again with a higher cap than small man instances. More difficult tiers of large man instances could be introduced with higher gear caps.

Cuts out all the DKP, who gets geared first, ninja, and poor itemization QQ.

 

Wunlastri

That makes people find the best allocation of stats and atleast functionally means a lot less diversity in setup for characters. Basically all the threads in the Class Mechanics forum would turn into blueprints.

Kind of hard to market homogeny despite this being an MMO. The armor model is cool though. Paladin T2 model as a hunter would just be funny.

 

Macblade

That's a fair point that it's a difficult position to argue against. However, it is still the case that the counter argument to "BT wouldn't be worth the effort given the Badges/hr" is simply, okay so instead of BT bosses dropping 6 tokens they drop 10 or 15 and instead of a BT level item being worth 50 tokens it's now worth 100 or 150. So basically you haven't said anything about the plusses or minuses of the system per se, except that the numbers would need fine tuning. Though I'm inclined to agree with Garak and say that they should probably be multiplicative between levels, though I would guess that probably doubling or tripling would be enough to make moving up worth while, while not ruining efforts to gear up chars behind in progression. I also like his idea about using rep to keep people coming back and the idea about fine tuning the rep. Although perhaps a more graduated scheme than all or nothing, e.g once you reach honored the lower level bosses give half as much rep as they used to. If you want to guarenttee that people kill the last boss or what not, then you could simply use attunment quest chains.

As fas as the "rng is necessary because it keeps more people playing" there is nothing about this argument that is necessarily true. If you want to say that people are only playing for gear and once they get their gear they stop, that's fine. If that's the case however, then you are just as likely to have someone complete a given gear set early as they are to complete it late. That is, over enough samples (players in this case) some average will form, thus half the people will be above that average and half the people will be below it. So if it takes, on average, 4 months to fill all your slots with best in slot items from BT, then some (lucky) outliers will have filled all their slots in 2 months and some (unlucky) outliers will take 6 months. Thus, if you want to argue that rng is good because it causes some people to want to play longer, then you have to accept that it also allows some people to quite earlier. Essentially what I am arguing is that if the average time Blizz wants someone to spend at a given level is 4 months that's fine, I just don't think that the system should be set up in such a way that there are outliers of 2 months on either side. Thus, badges, rep, tokens whatever, would serve the underlying purpose of grouping together the people in the guild so they all finish clearing an instance within a month say, instead of a 4 month interval.

There could be problems with people sitting out. However, that could be overcome and/or it is a problem now as well. It can be overcome simply by having some way of letting the people outside get a reward. E.g. a sack of token drops as well, and the raid leader can pass these out as they see fit, once passed out they are bound. Also, some people do get gear earlier than others even with DKP systems. Our fury warriors are always the lowest DKP in our guild but all that means is that they end up have a set of full off teir T6 while everyone else is running around in mostly T5 with some T6 because a peice of plate DPS gear that's split between 2 DPS warriors has about the same chance to drop as a peice of DPS leather that is split between 4 rogues and 3 feral druids.

@Maeltne I think this would end up doing two things, A it wouldn't be as fun because as Wunlastri mentioned, it would just be a question of math and an optimal distribution. B, it could end up causing a lot of headaches in a game with as many stats as WOW. That is, right now the game designers don't have to worry about how to design an encounter around someone with 100k +healing or a tank with 100k health but low avoidance because those are outside of the range of what is possible. Fights that are difficult now because the damage is spikey would be meaningless if a tank could stack that much health and the healers could sacrifice all there other stats to land a 50k heal every 5 seconds. Or a fight that is burst/DPS fight could be won with 25 destro locks, all with enough mana to fire off one shadow bolt because they've stacked their crit to 100% and their +damage to 20k. Maybe not perfect examples, but I think the idea comes through.

 

Maeltne

I note that my idea would be, more or less, impossible to fit within the WoW framework, and so our debating it is somewhat moot.

I disagree that my idea would destroy variety. Compared to what the game currently is, it would *ADD* complexity. There is only so many combinations of pieces of gear that is possible, but if characters had complete control of their stats the number of different combinations is orders of magnitude higher. Who knows maybe the agi/mp5/spirit feral druid some +energy ability (ala Wolfshead Helm) helm might be viable.

There is already more or less one (and not often more) optimal gearing paths with existing gear.

Increased variety and robustness of encounters, to deal with the increased combinations of stats, would be a good thing.

As would the need for increased balance in the scaling of stats.

Also I would have less headaches from banging my head against the wall of how poorly Blizzard understands my class itemization.

 

Incoherence

I happen to disagree. Maybe you're lucky enough to be in a guild where everyone there is motivated by content, but my experience tells me that if it would take you 2 1/2 hours to clear Karazhan, and 5 hours to clear BT for twice the badges, or even three times, people would rather run Karazhan and not even bother with learning BT and praying for That Guy not to get Shadow of Death and so forth. The difference now is that you can get items from BT that you can't get from Karazhan.

I thought we learned that attunement chains just led to people complaining about Kael, and caused issues with backflagging alts/new players.

The question is: what's the goal? I'll propose the following:
1. Create a correlation between the level of content you've cleared and your gear. Not a strong correlation necessarily, since badge loot in general implies that you want a way to blunt the gear differential that large upgrades between tiers and to some extent the RNG create, but a correlation. This allows higher raid tiers to have higher DPS/healing/tanking requirements rather than just more elaborate gimmicks.

2. Reward people for trying new content. If the new content weren't rewarding to someone, the only people who would run it are the explorer archetypes who want the thrill of new content, and to be perfectly fair to a lot of the posters around here I don't think that those types are a large fraction of raiders. So you need some reason to learn TN+1 rather than farm TN some more.

3. Make a given raid instance last enough time before you're "finished" with it that you keep playing until the next big thing comes out. In an ideal world where puppies ride unicorns in a field of rainbows, this wouldn't be necessary because there'd always be more content, but that's not the world we live in (I'm not saying Blizzard can't churn out content faster than they do now, but there's a point of diminishing returns at some point).

My argument is that your idea, as stated in the original post, fails goal #2 unless you add some other element to it: boss-specific tokens or boss-specific items, or instance-specific tokens, or a reputation requirement (which would in effect mean that the reputation is the important "loot" from the boss). So unless you're very careful with tuning the reward curve, and this is where the hand-waving comes in so I'm not sure exactly how you plan on tuning this and you seem intent on making me argue this point without it, people don't bother running the new content and the work you put into it is less effective.

Current-day example: All heroics other than Magisters' Terrace give the same caliber of rewards. All heroics are not equally popular: in particular, people tend to go for the easier ones (Slave Pens, Mechanar, and for an overgeared group Black Morass), unless the reward is higher (the 2 badges and bonus reputation from the heroic daily quest, or the various heroic-only quests).

 

Barkskin

I don't know why more people didn't take notice to this idea. Quite frankly, I think it solves a lot the issues that have been mentioned (items hardly seen, gear relative to content). Utilizing this system would mean that a fair rotation of gear acquisition could be put into place. No longer would you run the instance 8 weeks in a row with only Plate dropping. essentially, it'd be up to the guild to make sure that everyone receives gear fairly. Every time you kill a boss, you are guranteed that two people would be able to make use of 'items dropped'.. or in this case, the chests.

One abuse I can think of is stacking gear to push progression faster, but that already happens today. You could give the tank both keys so his stats increase faster thus aiding the next boss' progression, but who doesn't autoloot items to specific classes in these situations.. so that's moot.

Legendaries should still be a RNG or put on an Atiesh type system due to the distinction that they hold.

 

glowacks

"Badge loot" only is awful; as has been pointed out, some of the excitement of downing a boss past the first time is seeing if what you need managed to drop this time. This is true even if you have different tiers of badges, or are tokenizing all non-set drops. There should be some RNG element to loot or the game would not be the same.

However, it sounds like folks want to be able to accumulate something and after awhile have access to a reward that they "must" have. Given Blizzard's awful ideas as to what sort of things each class "must" have (or just not caring), they shouldn't be rep/"badge" rewards only. What I would envision is that you would work your way up in Rep and acquire "badges" in each dungeon/tier, and at a sufficiently high enough Rep level you could turn in some number of "badges" to get any off-set item for a boss that has been previously killed. Lore-wise it could be explained that some NPC adventuring group got it and left it with the rep leaders for those that needed it, NPCs not being restricted by BoP items as PCs are. When one looks at the lore of reputation, the rep leaders know you're going back in the dungeon and "killing" the same guys over and over; clearly you're just "incapacitating" them and taking whatever stuff they have on them, so having unseen NPC adventurers do the same thing isn't a huge stretch. Unavailable items could open up on servers after some large amount of time has passed, reflecting the fact that maybe NPCs are capable of more than any PC guild in that version of the World of Warcraft.

 

Valerian

If stacking for progression was a problem delay the key drops for a couple of kills. I doubt people get too upset at "randomness" the first couple of times since rarely does stuff go to waste. Its after you've farmed a boss for a while and you only want ONE thing from the loot table that killing the boss becomes tedious. Like say after 4-5 kills the boss now drops 1 random item and 1 key. After 8-9 kills he drops 2 keys. Or whatever number would be "appropriate". A method like this would also allow added offpsec gear to a bosses loot table without worry that it would rot frequently. Its kind of annoying that there are barely any offset tanking pieces for feral druids, for example.

 

Emily

The Sunmote trade-in system we see in Sunwell is a rather elegant solution that could be extended further to more items. It combines the fun and frolics of random loot with a small amount of flexibility.

It's clear that Blizzard are aiming for a point somewhere between the RNG and the ability to pick and choose loot, but different people will have different ideas of where the perfect balance between these two poles lies. I recall reading a quote saying they're looking to expand the ability to work steadily towards rewards in WotLK, so it's clearly something they feel will be good for the game and the players.

 

Faldrath

Lithose's idea is interesting, yes. I sometimes find myself thinking about a less radical idea that could perhaps lessen drop frustration: why not give guilds a choice to *exclude* one item from the loot table for the kill?

It could work more or less like this: after a boss is killed, and before loot was displayed, the raid leader would see a window with the boss' loot table and s/he would choose one item that would surely *not* drop - and then everything else would be randomized normally. Of course, I don't know how much work that would imply on the programming side (since loot seems to be generated when players enter an instance, and this suggestion would obviously change that), this shouldn't be allowed for tier tokens, and this might put too much power in the raid leader's hands - but, hey, if you can't trust your raid leader, s/he shouldn't be raid leader in the first place, right?

This would keep loot random and "exciting" enough, and would likely make it more rewarding. Just imagine being able to never see [Antonidas's Aegis of Rapt Concentration] again...