Endgame raid drop system revamp

I have a suggestion for a "smart loot" system where the game would be able to detect drops in people's inventories/armory chests etc. to determine drop rates. If no one had a single drop in your party the drops would be 100% random. If lets say a player in your group had a specific drop, the next time you did that raid, the game would detect that one player currently has that drop. This would slightly lower the chance for this item to drop again. The drop rate would decrease by maybe 1-2% and would be distributed between the other drops in the chest. The more players with a particular drop would further decrease the drop rate of this item. The drop rate could never reach 0% however if all 8 players had a particular item then the drop would be significantly lower than the other items.

This would keep the RNG in place while slowly decreasing the chances of seeing a duplicate drop 4 times.

And coding all that is so easy. Beside that may decrease seen duplicates 4+ times but can still happen just at a lower rate. So at the end don't resolve anything.

So you want an item for a class not in your raid group to be more likely to drop than an item for your second tank or healer? I don't think you've thought this through.

Tokens.

It's blows my mind that despite how successful such a system has proven to be in other MMO's, SE would still use an archaic system from the era of grinding for hours to get a level and losing it all cause you died.

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Originally Posted by Myrhn

And coding all that is so easy. Beside that may decrease seen duplicates 4+ times but can still happen just at a lower rate. So at the end don't resolve anything.

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I can't imagine SE making it significantly different than what we have now. As much as people want to be able to control drops with tokens and such that's probably not going to happen. The current system keeps people raiding by having 100% RNG. Chances are a lot of players who are still missing 1-2 pieces of gear for their BiS because they just can't seem to get lucky. While this keeps people coming back it just doesn't feel good when you go week after week without seeing a drop.

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Originally Posted by Kettle

So you want an item for a class not in your raid group to be more likely to drop than an item for your second tank or healer? I don't think you've thought this through.

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I actually had, but I forgot to put it in the original post. The game would also detect jobs currently in the party. Let's say you're settup was BRD DRG SMN BLM WHM SCH PLD WAR, MNK gear would also drop at a lower rate as well. Hell they could even code it so that the drop rates would all be equal until everyone on a particular job type had the drop. Aka the healer ring drops twice and the game registers that both healers have one so now the drop rate for the ring decreases by a few %.

The coding might be easy but the processing would not. That's a lot of calculations to do. The server would have to search each person's inventory then calculate new drop rates for each individual drop for each instance. Would probably require some hardware upgrades and a lot of development time to make sure it works well.

I'd rather they spend my subscription money on developing new content rather than reinventing the wheel. Every game has some form of RNG so if you don't like it stop playing video games.

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Originally Posted by Sequora

If lets say a player in your group had a specific drop, the next time you did that raid, the game would detect that one player currently has that drop. This would slightly lower the chance for this item to drop again. The drop rate would decrease by maybe 1-2% and would be distributed between the other drops in the chest. The more players with a particular drop would further decrease the drop rate of this item.

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Unfortunately, this only favors the first players to get the drop. The more people in your group have the item, the more a hard time you'll have to get yours. This would be a huge problem!

Elitist that can clear content faster would get their gear faster clearing more content faster and their faster, etc.
Casual players that are slow to clear content would have to play more to get their gear slowing them even more, reducing their chances for drop in the next content considerably more since they would be even more behind their peers, etc.

Honestly, only if everyone can't GREED on the loot should it have its chances reduced to zero. And that would be a pretty rare happening!
(People can turn duplicates for company seals by putting their first piece on their retainer, like I do.)

What you want is a wishlist.
In the duty finder, for each dungeon, you would have a list of possible drops and check the ones you want to drop more. That drop list would be empty at first and populate as your encounter the loot for the first time.

Thus it would be a double-edged feature. The more items you check on the wishlist, the lesser your chances to see newer items drop.
(As long as everyone has the same items ticked, only those items would see their drop rate increased so as to prevent hindering other players looking for new loot.)

Unfortunately, having everyone wanting the same stuff would be pretty rare and limited to general items.
Why would you check tank gear when playing another class? If everyone has the tank gear checked, you already know the tank's gonna get it since he checked it and can NEED on it.

The only wishlist that would work is this: you check the items you want and at the beginning of the dungeon, a general wishlist appears with everyone's desired items.
That way, you can pass when you know someone else wants and item.
That is, if you want to be kind. But then again, you can already pass on items if you think someone would want it... - you can even ask if anyone wants it.

So, yeah. We're still better off with RNG loot and just mention in party chat your wishlist at the beginning of the dungeon.