Mischief- consistent loot tables, or huge range?

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Stefen, Apr 26, 2021.

  1. a_librarian Augur

    This is the solution that makes the most sense to me. Mobs within brackets swap entire loot tables as a unit, so players discover the Spore King's loot is on Emp and then are able to reliably farm spore king loot from emp.

    What I expect on top of that is frequent shuffles using the same procedure. I expect they would shuffle regularly but not so frequently to truly disrupt farming. So players discover the high value camps and they are blitzed for the next couple weeks until the process repeats.

    Seems like the simplest random loot solution they could implement. It's different enough without actually preventing players from farming high value camps into the ground, which is more or less the end game of early era TLPs. I think one massive pool is too disruptive to the familiar dopamine reward loop and players would hate it dearly
  2. Protagonist Tank


    Once it's launched, the stupid is fossilized and will never change. They've repeatedly shown they're open to realizing their mistakes before launch, but never after.
  3. yerm Augur

    The thing is, the server as advertised should be completely fine even if nobody ever once sets foot in vp, st, or vt. Literally fine. Since you can get anything in those zones from outside of them and likely much more easily due to being able to use dz splits on easier droppers, you don't need them. Now it'll for sure suck if some quests like these are either broken or insurmountably difficult to get past, but it won't break the server.

    I'm more worried about the possibility for dud loot drops because of how many rare flagged mobs there are that aren't rare for loot. Luclin will be horrendous if the many goofily-named alien and robe dudes each count as a possibility and each drop their "loot" which is an essence of darkness if you are lucky...
  4. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

  5. a_librarian Augur

    So what you're getting at is players don't want random loot, they want good loot
  6. Niskin Clockwork Arguer

    They called it Mischief, not Cereal Box Surprise. If you kill Nagafen and Nagafen loot always drops, but some other loot drops too, that's the cereal advertised on the box, plus a surprise that may or may not suck. That is lame, and not worthy of the name Mischief.

    They literally talked about not wanting people to know where the drops would be. So it would make sense that it's either totally random from a pool, or the loot tables rotate in some way. Either way, if you kill Vox and get Vox loot, that should be the equivalent of hitting the lotto in terms of rarity.

    Quest items may be another matter, but if gear is anything but a huge surprise, they might as well rename the server to Meh.
    Kywen likes this.
  7. yerm Augur


    Not always. What I'm getting at is that there a couple of expansions early on and then most expansions later on where all of the good loot is consolidated in 1, maybe 2, final zones. Random loot means that you cannot trim your raid schedule down to just 1-2 nights focused on only the top content and be done with it. It's easier to get top tier loot from low tier content, but the reverse is true too. In an expansion like pop where people typically skip 95% of it and just grind time, you can't do that, so while it'll be awesome potentially to farm fishlord for stuff it may also be super frustrating to never be able to slow down your raid schedule because you simply cannot get dozens of time items in one sitting either.
  8. Protagonist Tank

  9. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Not necessarily.

    We don't know all the details yet, for example it is perfectly possible that "flagged or keyed" zones do not share loot tables with raid mobs outside of areas with a barrier to entry. Open-world raid mobs may share loot tables with keyed zone mobs, but they may not to encourage players to still have to get keyed.

    Once you are keyed for VP, perhaps every mob of the same level range will then have a shared loot table with everything else in that zone though.

    Similarly the touted idea of a rapid-respawn raid mob like the Spiroc-Lord in Plane of Sky will be able to be perma-farmed for everything on the loot tables of every mob of that level in the same era/expansion may be countered by that mob not having access to the full loot table & will either have partial or no access to it at all due to his easily respawned status.

    Quest drops may not be on the shared loot list or can/will be excepted from it on a case-by-case basis.

    Well there are upsides and downsides, some of the named that drop great loot will also potentially drop undesirable loot items, but so too will previously unattractive targets now become attractive as their previously lacklustre loot tables will now have potential very desirable loot items on it.

    I think overall the "knowledge" of what drops where has led to a focus on farming only the perceived "good loot" mobs on prior servers, there will actually end up being a lot more loot overall on Mischief but it will inevitably have a far higher percentage of mediocre drops than you would typically find on a TLP as a result of the far broader list of mobs getting killed, on the bright side there could be some real surprises popping up on this server among that broader range of items.
    Waring_McMarrin likes this.
  10. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    So you don't like the ruleset? Don't play there.

    Where I agree with you is there could be some clarification about the loot rules - but as regards the following:

    Quest items - will they be sticking to their current named so that you know where to find them or will these also be part of the shared loot tables so you can find them in many places.

    Keyed/Flagging required for access raid zones having loot tables shared by raid events that do not require that barrier being overcome - why even bother to key or flag if they do (except to increase the number of available targets).

    Custom rules were indicated in the announcement but here's just two examples crying out for a custom rule to be applied (i.e. Special case scenarios)
    The Spiroc Lord: can be endlessly respawned, being able to farm the shared loot table via that one mob repeatedly seems like a giant problem, presumably each mob can be removed from the shared loot table on a case by case basis but it would be good to know for sure especially in this case with it being so clearly vulnerable to abuse.
    Phinigel Autropos: as it has a relatively short respawn timer.
  11. Nebby Lorekeeper

    My thoughts all Rare mobs get 1 addition drop. It pulls from the General loot table of all rare mobs of that level range. It will have RNG so it won't always drop loot from that new table. So you may get lucky and get a piece of gear that doesn't belong. Or just Rare mobs loot. Thats how I see it going down. I hope they flood the market with rare loot. Thats the only way to get rid of the box armies. Only thing they will be able to make krono on is PLing and Epics.
    Orsenfelt likes this.
  12. Protagonist Tank

    Those are literally the same questions I've been asking, and you've been whining that I should just go elsewhere or wait and see. But unlike you, I don't have faith in DPG that they'll make good decisions in answers to those questions, nor that they'll be willing to change the answers if the server launches under bad answers.

    The longer they take to answer the questions, the less likely they are to fix it. This is a dev team that has "change that one lightbulb" written in to their billable hours. They do not have significant spare time for last minute changes.
  13. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Sorry if I lost track of your whining, you've done so much of it the past day or so it's hard to keep track of where you are with it.

    My initial disdain for your cynicism was because you didn't really seem to understand what had actually been posted with regards to the Random loot system.

    Most of this is actually covered by what was already posted, but what you were asking for was a lot of extra in-depth detail that is really not needed and doesn't require drastically changing the overall concept of the ruleset itself at all. this really is stuff that should simply be "discovered".


    Here is where I agree with you, and just posted to say so, are you annoyed because I agreed with you about part of your initial post and said so?

    Do you need people to wholeheartedly agree with every single thing you say for you to not be insulting towards them?

    Presumably the same logic that FV uses for these items will be applied to Mischief, Free Trade Rules rules imply that at least and I would imagine take precedent over Randomised loot.

    Well I would expect some customisation for these as covered by:

    The initial post was a "concept" post, I would expect "some" additional information will appear later as is typical with the TLP launch process, which often have follow-up announcements after the initial announcement.

    Again I just posted to say I agree with you about this part and elaborated some.

    But again this is "details" oriented, rather than some disagreement about the ruleset in the general principle - perhaps you have a problem with anything that is described on a conceptual basis and always require details to be comfortable with it at all?

    When it comes to the details, there will I am 100% sure be plenty of discussion about how things have been implemented but the general ruleset as a concept is unlikely to change at all, my linking the patch notes page was an example to show you that "mistakes" are rectified all the time with the particulars, your point about TLP ruleset changes after launch is indicative you cannot separate concept from details.

    Maybe I just think you should try not losing sight of the broader concept by allowing yourself to get bogged down in obsessing over the finer details too much.
  14. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh

    =The Oracle presents=
    How to predict the future 101:
    While this is super secret stuff I use to predict the future, if something were to happen to me, I guess some of y'all could learn how it works. There is much more to learn, but this is the foundation.

    -The 3 Fates- Your guiding prinicipals.
    1. HISTORY
    2. Occam's Razor
    3. Shortest path to completion

    By this alone we know:
    1. Mistakes will be made
    2. Loot tables will be merged into one big table, done.
    3. The random choice from a loot table is already coded. Adding new code to do this in any other way, is more work than just merging tables.
    Skuz likes this.
  15. Accipiter Old Timer


    Put me on record as saying I don't think it's going to work this way. That would just be... well, dumb.
    yerm, Orsenfelt and MasterMagnus like this.
  16. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Yeah that's not how I see this working either.

    Conventional loot is a loot table on a per mob basis - think of that table as a cup of salt, table salt if you prefer

    Now on Mischief we create a loot bucket, into this bucket we tip the cups of table salt for all the named mobs in classic that are level 30-35

    You kill a 30-35 named in a classic zone & the code chooses which items out of the big ole bucket-of-table salt you will get, voila random loot system.
  17. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh



    Behold! The Oracle Jr.

    See how easy?
  18. KrakenReality Augur

    The usage of salt in this analogy is on point in more ways than one...
    Skuz likes this.
  19. Kahna Augur


    No, you would not need to do it 10 times to get all your shards. You would actually only need to happen upon 1 shard, assuming they don't have these mobs still drop their key pieces. There is only 1 shard dropped of "rare" mobs. All the other shards are dropped off normal mobs and will be found on the mobs they normally drop off of. Only the gorangas are "rare". Emp keys might be a bit hinky, but again, that is assuming that the key items even get randomized.
  20. Trevalon Augur

    I suspect it will be the huge loot table, it makes the most sense.

    That being said, if they really wanted to do it right, they would make sure to ONLY use actual rare items in that big loot table so it isn't junked up with quest items or crap loot or anything like that. But I am not holding my breath.

    I do hope its the big loot table though. The rotating loot thing is really dumb imo and the extra item also is kinda meh, but I think some care needs to go into what drops where, but again, I am not holding my breath of Daybreak doing that.