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Gear Drops

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
Everybody is aware there are no unique items in this game. You can get any other gear someone else has without ever having to craft it or receiving it on a drop. There is this game called "Borderlands", its a single player and or multiplayer up to 4 players at a time. Its not a very exciting or epic game but it had one awesome quality. The total randomness of drops. Just about every drop in that game would not yield the same stats as another. I would imagine that Borderlands could easily generate thousand of stat combinations. So my question is why is Cryptic not introducing such a system?

Thoughts/Suggestions/Concerns?
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    i dont know if id like that but it does sound interesting
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Pan420 wrote:
    i dont know if id like that but it does sound interesting

    Why would you not if you don't mind explaining.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    SWG does it as well for ship part loot.
    You have litterly trillions of possible different items with it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Why would you not if you don't mind explaining.

    I can see where 'my phaser +3 is better than your phaser +3' could cause any number of 'problems.' Its a trade off really. Either you have vanilla flavored eq that is the same no matter where you pick it up, or you introduce a bit of stat variance where sometimes the drop is just better than others. Sadly the number of people that complain about inequality would jump sharply if someone suddenly got a better item and all their drops 'sucked.'


    With all that said I would be interested in seeing something like this implemented. The down side is also I have no idea what this would do to the economy, what we have of one at least, as it stands. Though, I suppose if you could take your vanilla or vanilla with a hint of strawberry item to memory alpha....and tinker with it and maybe make it on par with the drop.....
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Interesting gear drops is what's kept me playing D2 LoD for years,, even though I have what I need it's still neat to see what drops. I, for one, would really enjoy more varied drops.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Thoughts/Suggestions/Concerns?

    They have some pretty rare drops, but the math leading to such drops is pretty skewed against them appearing unless you play an endgame mission in a certain way. For instance, beating the first part of Infected without destroying the hubs will net you a purple item that tends to be better than decent.

    As for the difficulty increase : better drops ratio, I'm reminded of the GDC speech Sid Meier gave. He said that players will always complain when it comes to math because they always expect to be rewarded for their actions. In the case of Civ Revolution, his basis of comparison, he noticed that players were complaining when losing 2:1 battles or 63:21 battles, but were ecstatic when winning 75:100 battles. The math doesn't click in the player's head that in the first case, they would only win two times out of three or three times out of four, while in the final example they chances of victory are greater than their opponent's in the previous examples. Such is the case when complaining about item drops in STO.

    STO doesn't shift the math involved in item drops so that batteries or small hypos no longer drop and only high-tier white items, greens, blues, and purples appear. Instead, the math is such that the chance of a high-tier item dropping is greater. Consider this:

    Ratio of item drops in STO by difficulty and type
    ........................ White..... |......Green......|......Blue......|......Purple
    Normal................10.......|..........5..........|........3.........|..........1
    Advanced............10.......|..........6..........|........4.........|..........2
    Elite......................10........|.........7..........|........5.........|..........3

    This is of course just an example of how the difficulties might have stratified the ratio of drops, but you will notice that there is always a greater chance on each drop to get a white item versus a green, blue, or purple item. I personally think that the ratio of purple to other drops is too high in my chart, but as I said, it's for scale only.

    There are plenty of rare items in this game. Within the first month someone got an Efficient Mk VIII engine. I've never heard from this person again and I haven't found any on the exchange, but there's a reason these items are "rare."

    To conclude, Sid Meier warned developers to be aware of player reaction to probabilities. In a game as large and mathematically dependent as STO, it's no shock that the psychological principal of 'the law of large numbers' makes players upset that they don't get more purple drops. I'll admit that I'm one of them, and that if we are going to play on advanced or elite difficulty in the endgame, the drop rate should be skewed towards purple drops instead of a balanced probabilistic chance for every color-type drop. In sum, Cryptic should consider reducing the chance of a white drop in enhanced difficulties rather than just raising the chance for a high-color drop.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    One problem with totally unique items is that it doesn't make sense in the Trek universe. In a world with replicatiors and mass production there is little justification in why one ship can't have a phaser suite just as good as another.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    castmodean wrote: »
    I can see where 'my phaser +3 is better than your phaser +3' could cause any number of 'problems.' Its a trade off really. Either you have vanilla flavored eq that is the same no matter where you pick it up, or you introduce a bit of stat variance where sometimes the drop is just better than others. Sadly the number of people that complain about inequality would jump sharply if someone suddenly got a better item and all their drops 'sucked.'


    With all that said I would be interested in seeing something like this implemented. The down side is also I have no idea what this would do to the economy, what we have of one at least, as it stands. Though, I suppose if you could take your vanilla or vanilla with a hint of strawberry item to memory alpha....and tinker with it and maybe make it on par with the drop.....

    Yeah i see your point but at the same time Cryptic can still keep its Very Rare weapons at K7 and Gamma Orionis while adding such a system. I realize the benefit with having other players to play with in STO but do we really want to have people in this community who get upset that someone else has a better weapon? This kinda goes back to a quality/quantity type of playerbase and I personally think that encouraging some kind mediocrity with everybody being equal impedes STO's online evolution of being a quality game.

    Economy; as in all MMO's the rare items that are powerful are worth the most. You really can't stop inflation in these game unless you stripped everybody's money. As the playerbase gains more wealth the inflation continues and new players have to struggle economically while they level. Cryptic's current system makes buying gear more of a luxury rather then a necessity.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    DDO does this to some extent. An Item will usually have 2 stats/abilities, 1 from a column A and 1 from a column B. Sometimes stuff is so random you end up with a mix of stats that don't really help your build or stuff like "Blindness Ward Goggles of Remove Blindness":confused: lol.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Democratus wrote: »
    One problem with totally unique items is that it doesn't make sense in the Trek universe. In a world with replicatiors and mass production there is little justification in why one ship can't have a phaser suite just as good as another.

    I personally do not support pigeon holing a game simply because a TV show does not show the difference in technology as much as it is in real life. Star Trek is suppose to be based off the future of Earth and anybody who has worked with mechanical/electrical/ things knows that while all technology is similar it can be of higher and lower quality very easily. I never watched a show where it talked about someones photon torpedo being more accurate then another kind of photon torpedo but here we have it in Cryptic's game with common, uncommon, rare and very rare. So I still do not see a reason to not have such an idea in game based off the Trek Universe.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Personally I'd love unique items, and hopefully a big splash screen that comes up saying something like "Thou hast been gifted with BRAM, the legendary phaser array" and then I could go to Earth spacedock and spam the command that shows it in the chat window while yelling "Is this good?"
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    I personally do not support pigeon holing a game simply because a TV show does not show the difference in technology as much as it is in real life.

    In real life, the navy can't loot a weapon system from an enemy ship and just start using it. In real life there are no unique, one-off, weapon systems dropped by the explosion of an enemy.

    We live in a world of mass production even now. I may be able to get a very powerful CPU for my computer. But it was made in a factory along with thousands or millions of others like it. A future with replicators even further exaberates the issue.

    Ships in the Trek universe are military vessels created at shipyards and equipped with federation technology. The idea of blowing up a gorn frigate and suddenly having a disruptor system more powerful than any other in the galaxy - and completely unduplicable - doesn't fit very well in to the world portrayed in the media.
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