A quick discourse on ‘Dynamic Loot Economies’

Hello all!

For starters, I know this is an issue for WAY DOWN the production pipeline, but it got me thinking about Dynamic loot spawning and the player experience:

Nikita mentioned that he's wanting to implement a 'Dynamic Loot Economy' at some point. A two fold system where certain items would shift spawn locations and as more rare loot is looted/spawned in the game's overall economy, the less common it becomes. This sounds great in theory. And I look forward to it's implementation as a great shake-up for the loot meta.

However, I see two glaring flaws with this system.

1) Our experience with dynamic pricing of vendors reflecting Flea Market pricing shows how easily dynamic systems can be abused by malicious parties.

2) The power gap between 'Weekend Warriors' and 'Perpetual Players' would grow substantially. It's great for increasing an item's rarity and worth, but a good case study for this would be DayZ

DayZ Standalone tried to implement Dynamic Loot Spawning in the hope that it would create an interesting flow of certain items (weapons, ammo, meds, food, packs, clothes, gear) fluctuating in rarity/usefulness as the game aged. 'No M4 ammo? guess I better trade with people to scrounge some up or swap up my play style.'

What actually happened? Perpetual Players end up hoarding LITERALLY EVERYTHING and Weekend Warriors are spending their entire play session to scrounge up even a basic kit. Towns were barren. loot sparse to non-existent. Much of the common items, let alone the fabled 'End Game' equipment, never saw the light of day outside of the top thousand or so players.

IMO, the focus should be upon shifting spawn points/locations instead of an arbitrary numbers game that will never balance out in an acceptable and organic way. Mitigating and reducing 'hot spots' and encouraging map exploration seems more ideal to me.

Thoughts? (As I said, this isn't a NIKITA FIX NOW thing. Just food for discussion)

Gamer

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