Teams

[Karl G.]

I found something interesting on the Project Entropia website about how their team loot-distribution system is set up. I think they have a pretty neat system we may be able to emulate.

Team Looting

When a team leader creates a team, he also chooses a set of rules that determine how team loot is distributed between the team members (the teams settings window is displayed on the right). The various loot distribution rules are:

Item Distribution

* Damage Decides Order: The team member who inflicts the most damage receives the highest valued item (if present) in the loot, the member who inflicts the second highest damage receives the second highest valued item (if present), etc.
* Leader Takes All: The team leader always receives all items found. Most Damage Wins All: The team member who does the most damage receives all the items present in a loot.
* Queue: The first found item is given to the topmost team member, the next found item is given to the second member, etc, going through the roster of members. The queue position is saved every time looting occurs.
* Random: Any item present in a loot is randomly distributed to a random team member.


Money Distribution

* Damage Determines: Any PED and/or PEC found is divided among the team members, in accordance to the damage inflicted by each member.
* Equal: Any PED and/or PEC found is divided as equally as possible amongst all team members.

[Joe M.]

hmm. I've never much liked the damage-determined loot distribution. I like the idea of the queue.

Perhaps a modification of the "Leader Take All?" The items go into a "pool"--nobody has them. Then the leader (or lieutenant designated by leader) distributes items.

I'd say default to a random distribution of items, maybe weighted to the leader, and gold distributed rather evenly.

If we build up the idea of a "pool of loot," then we could do things like not have it distributed until the end of the quest (or at the leader's discretion)--so anybody who leaves in the middle doesn't get any loot; or maybe they get their share of the gold found up to that point, but no items.

An interesting question. What do y'all think?

[kuba]

Damage-based looting is yucky. If your getting a team together your going to need support classes that aren't focused on dealing damage, such as any healer class or buffing class. Having a master looter works well if he/she proves to be trustworthy and distributes items appropriately. Random looting is the norm and works well. What I really liked was how World of Warcraft used a Need/Greed system of looting. When an item of rare quality was looted players were presented with a need and greed button. So if you looted a rare bow, everyone but hunters might choose greed, but if there was more than one player who chose need the server generated a random number from 1-100 and the higher roll won. If there were no need's and everyone selected greed then the server generated random numbers for each of those players and the highest roll won the item.