I like these phases, although it could be interesting if during the "dropped loot is only available for pickup by the killer and/or his party members." phase, others could take the loot, but become criminal. Also any rough ideas of what "a prolonged time period" is, even just in terms of minutes/hours/days/weeks?

Still not sure about the 30 seconds thing, but I guess it remains till beta to see how it works.

Well, I agree with the timer of 30 seconds. I figured out the reasons for myself already like what got described in here.

I can only agree with this measure. Although I don't know how many windows a victim has to click..

I don't think when you loose a fight, you still have the " right " to take your time and consider it. Act now, or never..

Maybe it sounds abit harsch.. but well, it is part of the game in my eyes.

As with a few other posts we come back to this point, should a victim be punished for loosing and how much of a punishment that should be. Many would say that the 30 second loot timer combined with buyback and insurance is the soft option, not a fact I can dispute. But who says it can't be like that, who says that a victim has to loose everything, where is that written, this is after all a game and the mechanics of that game describe what and what are not peoples can and cant do, there are no pre-ordained rules of how it has to be.

I'm afraid to say the harshness you want is not part of this game, I can see where your coming from and could quite easily join you on that side of the fence if I so wished, but it will be the victims right to have 30 seconds to sort through there bag, that's just the way the game is set up.

Its worth remembering that though this timer and a few other mechanics may remove some of the items you can loot, its not flawless and there will always be times when you find something precious on a corpse. Also a lot of other "pvp" games (and I use this term loosely) either limit the items you can get to a random roll, or don't have loot options at all.

I think that appears to be the point....

I hope that we get back to the lore QoTW's soon... this seemed slightly non-plus to me.

I love the timer idea, but I have to agree with 30 seconds being a bit long.  Hell, if another fight happens while you're waiting for the timer to expire, and you are lucky enough to win, now you're looking at staying there another 30 seconds ... sooner or later, your number is gonna come up. 

Depending on variables such as load time after dying and the amount of work that has to be done to recover gear, 30 seconds may be an appropriate amount of time. Without knowing this though, 30 seconds does seem like both a long time to get back to combat readiness and to be able to loot your kills. I'll just wait and see.

In my oppinnion the mentioned system is flawed.

Dying and looting analyzed trough other games:

I have tried both EVE-Online, where killing and looting is very harsh, and Warhammer Online where dying isn't penalized at all.

EVE-Onlines looting system is as I see it also one of its biggest problems, assuming you have played the game for a while a ship and equipment is an expensive matter, and the further you get up the quality tiers the less equipment can be insured. At the same time, getting good loot of kills is inconsistent at best, this means for every kill, 80% ship value is lost for the looser and maybe 15% is gained for the winner. The result is that a person even with good scores has a hard time making up for lost ships and thus has to do a lot of moneygrinding to keep in PvP business. The effect, as I see it, is the way EVE combat works, it is ganked or be ganked because taking chances with even and fair fights are too penalizing.

On the other hand, no one cares about duying in warhammer, and building and aggro train to kill you as a mean of getting back to camp is common, as nothing is lost. This on the other hand, means that battles in warhammer feel less important than they do in EVE.

Where does this go then?

Well, analysing the current PvP loot model, a player is now choosing between loosing 80% os his value and keeping his stuff or loosing a 100% value (as far as I understand, if it is more like 100% and 120%, please correct me.)

Anyways, this means that a loosing player can grief his killer by for the mere cost of 20% of his item value, to deny the victor 100% of the spoils.
While allowing players to buy back their lost gear in the manner mentioned may at first look like it would encourage PvP, by reducing the loss a player suffers when dying, it will in fact do the opposite as winning offers you nothing but junk (as I see it people will buy their good stuff back because: a: it is good, b: the sod who killed you won't get it, alas win-win / loss). This means you cannot make a living off PvP and will have to resort to money grinding or worse (working outside the EULA) to  support your PvPing. This leads this post full circle back to EVE, where ganking is the name of the game as risking a loss is not worth it.


Having full, unopposable looting offers a different set of problems ofcourse, mainly that rare items will be pretty much useless as carrying them around won't be worth the risk. Such items in EVE fx. mainly used in situations where the risk of loosing is minimal as you are either ganking or blobbing.
Dropping the rare item in the loot and at the same time allowing the looser to buy it back is not an option either as this will duplicate items and is highly exploitable. As I see it common and medium quality items are bought or crafted, whilst rare items are found, rewarded or crafted with found or rewarded items.

A solution that will allow full loot without removing or granting access to previously aquired rare items for the looser:

I suggest you have full loot on everything, hear me out here. In this case common is stuff that can be bought more or less everywhere). You then have a free or cheap insurance system that allows you to get the stuff bought back for you at full price (again, while it seems reasonable for the insurance to get the stuff cheap, this is exploitable as it would mean your attacker got 100% value and you got 100% back for say 80%, having a friend kill you would generate cash for the both of you.)

With anything rarer than common equipment I suggest having a sytem I'll call DNA-Lock, atleast for working purposes.

DNA-Lock:

Assuming that the game will give equipment above common by a, crafting and b. looting, DNA-Lock will be a system that should walk the golden line between looter and looted.

Basicly once you aquire an item and bring it back to a base, you can have it DNA-Locked to you. DNA-Locking means that a DNA-Locked blueprint of the item is stored in your database. A DNA-Locked blueprint has the advantage of being easy to make (read: you wont need a crafter) but the disadvantage of having the item only being usable by the people who have the exact same type of item DNA-Locked (meaning everyone with a DNA-Lock for item XY, can use a DNA-Locked item XY, even if it wasn't made by or for them).
A DNA-Locked item will still be pretty expensive to remake and really high end stuff might take exotic materials to be reconstructed aswell.

This means that the guy who lost the gear won't have to a: go trough the extreme hassle it can be to reaquire a rare drop by farming, or b. wait for someone who can craft it to come online only so they can start getting the materials and start the crafting process. But the guy will still take a substantial money and/or material loss.
On the other hand the winner will get full loot, but won't get access to rare stuff as the item cannot be wielded by him without a prober DNA-Lock. This means if he has the same item DNA-Locked he has just scored another copy. Even if he can't use it he can still disassemble it for sweet materials or sell it, to someone who can use it, for good money.


This system can be molded into fitting your wishes for the crafting vs buying vs finding desires:
Say you want people to rely on shops for really low end equipment, drops and their neighboring crafter nonbody for medium equipment and rare drops and/or really skilled crafters and exotic materials for high end stuff.
You could chain the DNA-Lock to only the highest tier of equipment, to avoid the risk/reward balance tipping.

Ofcourse if there is no highest tier like officer drops in eve and purble/epic whatever in Warhammer, the DNA-Lock isn't needed, but for a game with full looting it would serve to balance out the risk vs reward. But the I know the feeling when find something really cool in EVE and go: "Awesome!.. Wait there is no reason for me to not try and sell this as loosing it will hurt too much."

Looting timer suggestion:

The looting ofcourse should take a like a 7 second focus, so you have to be sitting undisturbed next to your target for 7 seconds with a loot animation going. This will allow people to interfere with ninjalooters by interupting them and make it so a body must be uncontested to be looted. This way whoever holds the field when the battle is over can loot or you can make a daring distraction and keep a looter untouched for the 7 seconds even in battle.

EDIT: Seeing the need for a moneysink, looted items could need repair and/or risk being irepairably destroyed.

-NWS/Mav