LFR Loot Improvements
Come on, you had to know when I got back into blogging about my time in World of Warcraft, I’d get around to loot.
On Ghostcrawler’s twitter account , @Ghostcrawler , he was asked if he felt LFR gave out loot often enough. The crab responded.
Well, Ghostcrawler ole buddy I’m glad you asked. I've got two suggestions.
First suggestion: The Gallywix Coin
The Gallywix Coin would be a special coin introduced to the game. The coin is named after Trade Prince Gallywix, the leader of the Goblins. Gallywix ain't the type to roll the dice and hope for an epic reward. He’s the kind of guy that would stack the deck in his favor, big time.
Basically, a Gallywix Coin would be a guaranteed loot drop. You spend the coin, you are going to get something off the boss. I would set the price at 5 Elder Charms plus 4000 gold. There is no way I see Gallywix getting on board with this without you handing over some scratch.
Essentially, it let’s players choose if they want to trade in 5 shots that might or might not give you loot for one shot that definitely will give you loot.
So what you have to ask yourself is, do you feel lucky, punk?
Second suggestion: Lady Luck Buff (Blizzard later implemented something very similiar!)
Speaking of luck (segue ho!), my second suggestion is all about luck.The truth is that it stinks to go a long time with no rewards coming from LFR, especially if that is your only or even primary means of gearing up your character.
The way I see the Lady Luck Buff working would be every time you looted a boss, but only got some gold, you would get a stack of the buff. Each stack would increase your chance of getting loot by some percentage, let’s say 5%. Once you got loot, then your buff resets to zero. The developers would have the option of making this an invisible buff so they could implement and the player base would never know. Come to think of it, it could already be implemented in some form, but they have kept it a secret like the ancient aliens.
Aliens?
Humans?
Anyway, I actually think it would be more fun if they made it a visible buff. Can you imaging the epic stories.
“Dude, I got no loot and I have 90% Lady Luck!”
Maybe the Developers could even put in an achievement for getting your Lady Luck buff up to 100%. They could have it award a title The Unlucky.
I think both of these suggestions would address Ghostcrawler’s desire to help out perennially unlucky players, and I don’t see how either one could be exploited. But I know you guys are much smarter than ole Honorshammer so let me know what you think of these two suggestions and also let me know how either could be exploited.
On Ghostcrawler’s twitter account , @Ghostcrawler , he was asked if he felt LFR gave out loot often enough. The crab responded.
The numbers work fine overall. I do wish there was a fix for perennially unlucky players, which couldn't be exploited.
Well, Ghostcrawler ole buddy I’m glad you asked. I've got two suggestions.
First suggestion: The Gallywix Coin
Basically, a Gallywix Coin would be a guaranteed loot drop. You spend the coin, you are going to get something off the boss. I would set the price at 5 Elder Charms plus 4000 gold. There is no way I see Gallywix getting on board with this without you handing over some scratch.
Essentially, it let’s players choose if they want to trade in 5 shots that might or might not give you loot for one shot that definitely will give you loot.
So what you have to ask yourself is, do you feel lucky, punk?
Second suggestion: Lady Luck Buff (Blizzard later implemented something very similiar!)
Speaking of luck (segue ho!), my second suggestion is all about luck.The truth is that it stinks to go a long time with no rewards coming from LFR, especially if that is your only or even primary means of gearing up your character.
The way I see the Lady Luck Buff working would be every time you looted a boss, but only got some gold, you would get a stack of the buff. Each stack would increase your chance of getting loot by some percentage, let’s say 5%. Once you got loot, then your buff resets to zero. The developers would have the option of making this an invisible buff so they could implement and the player base would never know. Come to think of it, it could already be implemented in some form, but they have kept it a secret like the ancient aliens.
Aliens?
Humans?
Anyway, I actually think it would be more fun if they made it a visible buff. Can you imaging the epic stories.
“Dude, I got no loot and I have 90% Lady Luck!”
Maybe the Developers could even put in an achievement for getting your Lady Luck buff up to 100%. They could have it award a title The Unlucky.
I think both of these suggestions would address Ghostcrawler’s desire to help out perennially unlucky players, and I don’t see how either one could be exploited. But I know you guys are much smarter than ole Honorshammer so let me know what you think of these two suggestions and also let me know how either could be exploited.
Comments
The issue I see with the second is that people might "fish" when they have a high Lucky buff, trying to match up to the correct boss.
For example, let's say I have an 80% Lucky buff. My sha-touched weapon drops off Empress. So ideally, the next boss I do is Empress. The buff is actually a disincentive from doing other bosses. It would be terrible for me to do the boss before Empress, get a random bracer, and then hit Empress with a 0 Luck buff. In fact, it might even be more optimum for me to drop group before Empress and do some random other bosses in the other instances in order to build up the Luck buff again.
@Rohan - if folks are going to game the system, they're going to game the system, and not improving the odds for the unlucky because of that is a bit wrong IMHO. The same player is already holding their DKP slot for the one true drop too, and likely a shitty player to be raiding with.
The second one would see people dropping raid if it wasn't at the right boss for their required loot or even hearthing out and avoiding a fight until the last boss (although this may still give you loot). There are, after all, some fights where gold is your best loot drop.
Maybe if the luck buff was only tied to coins it could work, but then you get back to the "does this overemphasise coins" question. Particularly as coins can be used for any raid tier.
And how would you overcome the "I have 5 cloaks from this boss butr he has never dropped my tier piece" type of issue?
I still think the best solution would be to decouple rep from VP items. I had an alt who went over cap as I thought rather than do dailies, I'd just LFR gear and item upgrade him. No drops in the first three weeks (two of which were all raids), and I had to item upgrade a really poor choice or just wate VPs. Would have been fine if he could have purchased something. After all, VP purchase gear used to be what covered lack of luck with drops.
"And how would you overcome the "I have 5 cloaks from this boss butr he has never dropped my tier piece" type of issue?"
This system really isn't meant to address that. This is only to address the 'I've killed 16 bosses this week, but I've gotten no loot'.
Some players might not 'count' it if they don't get an upgrade, but I'm not sure how you address that and keep some element of randomness.
The last thing I want to do is give someone an incentive for dropping group. However, I don't think it would be that big of problem.
Most of the really exciting loot is one a boss deep in the instance. You have to kill one or more bosses before you can get to that boss. If you want something off Empress, you are going to have to kill (and risk your Luck buff) on Amber Shaper. Dropping group won't help that, especially since they removed the ability to see a group is 2/3 in the instance.
I think decoupling reputation from Valor is something the developers need to do. Essentially it puts a double gate on the items.
The thing is that people will do an awful lot of stupid things to maximize loot. Anything that even hints at negative behaviour in LFR should be avoided.
Although, I think you might be able to combine your two ideas. Every time you use a Charm and don't get something, the chance of getting something on the next Charm goes up. So if you start at 10%, the next Charm is 20%, then 30%, and so on.
Since you choose when you burn Charms, your increased luck chance always comes into play on the bosses you want. And it doesn't affect your regular chance to get loot at all.
That's a really cool idea. I like the way you combined the two suggestions.