Quote Originally Posted by Seddrinth View Post
Any ideas on how we can make rolling on loot somewhat performance-based? I'm mainly talking about the non-savage duty funder type stuff like dungeons, normal raids, trials, etc. It would be nice to reward people who perform with a +20 to whatever they would've rolled so that there's an incentive to do your best instead of letting people carry you. It's kind of annoying to see players die to easy mechanics 4 times, contribute nothing, and then win the loot with a 95 roll while the people who actually did the work lose out.
I don't think it'd work very well with anything that doesn't have granular rewards, especially without an accurate by-ilvl benchmark comparator.

Consider: you're trying to get actual gear from the dungeon. A Savage raider is also attending, looking for some glamour pieces. Having 50% more ilvl beyond the base for a level 70 than you do, he also does some 40% more throughput. You both roll what would have been 50s. He gets the loot. That wouldn't feel great.

And then there are the less just but still obvious issues. The truly bad players aren't going to be encouraged not to slack off by this. Unless they are almost literally prevented from getting loot -- at which point they throw a (in a significant way, deserved) fit here and/or unsubscribe -- they'll just do more runs, likely chalking it up to RNG as always. So, we just get to experience that poor play for more runs, while getting good players for fewer runs, accentuating the skill pyramid.

Should there be other ways to better encourage our players towards competence and some modicum of effort? Certainly. This just isn't one of the viable ways.

If anything, we probably just ought to see some silent normalization via bad luck protection, better player training and in-game support therefor, a more reasonable and continuous difficulty curve, and the like.