Loot in a Lootless System
One of the things I really enjoyed about the ‘City of’ games was the lack of loot, lack of spam about loot, and lack of people asking for loot. One of the things I hated about other games was having all of that to sift through in the chat channels. “Selling _____ PST” and other such nonsense. My main gripe against it was the breaking of reality.
Now that we have loot in the invention system and I’ve had a chance to see how people react to it, it seems to be more of a good thing than bad.
While Invented Enhancements aren’t better than Single Origin Enhancements, they are pretty darn close. For the lower levels, this is a boon. SO’s are rare drops below level 12, and having the inventions available really helps when you are struggling. The fact that they don’t expire if you out level them is simply fantastic. No more dings and freaking out when you outleveled almost everything in your slots.
Chat channels can be opened to search for that elusive final ingredient to your invention, and then closed after you’re done with them. You can even have them on their own tab that you can ignore until you need it. That is wonderful. There are occasional shouts in broadcast, but I’ve seen other people give them flack for not using the correct channel. Don’t be surprised when you get flames if you do it.
The new costume pieces can either be a headache, or a money maker. Opening week had many of the new recipes going for millions of influence/infamy. That will most likely die down after a while. I haven’t seen any of the recipes for them drop for me, personally, but other’s have said that they have a decent drop rate. I just want the rocket boots for my android, as flapping tech wings is a bit strange.
Overall, I think the developers did a fantastic job in introducing loot in the lootless system. I was really worried that it would have damaged the game, but it’s good to be wrong once in a while.
Your Altoholic Lunatic
~Hewolf
Published: May 9, 2007 04:12 pm