Wednesday 10 June 2015

Personal loot changes

These changes to "Personal Loot" in 6.2:

"rather than treating loot chances independently for each player—sometimes yielding only one or even zero items for a group—we’ll use a system similar to Group Loot to determine how many items a boss will award based on eligible group size"

Source: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/19162236/dev-watercooler-itemization-in-62-5-20-2015

Let's imagine that our 10-man raid is set to "Personal Loot" and will get awarded 5 items of loot. Just how will this be distributed? Does Blizzard look at the first team member and decide "Well that's a 50% chance of them getting personal loot. Let's toss a coin. Heads! You win". Then the next person in the group has a 4/9 chance of being awarded loot? I.e. 4 items left to distribute among 9 players. Is that how the mechanics of this will work? I don't know, but I'd like to. Do you know for definite?

3 comments:

  1. What? Why would you do that?

    The way you handle this kind of randomness is akin to a deck of cards. Take the list of the eligible players. Shuffle the list. Then draw the top 5 players on the list and award each of them an item.

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    Replies
    1. Sounds very plausible, Rohan. Sort of distributing the players to the loot rather than the loot to the players. Much better than that rubbish mechanism I mentioned!

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    2. The thing is the loot part is a red herring. The basic problem is "pick X players from group of Y". WoW does this *all* the time. For example, 3 random ranged players get a debuff. Same problem. So the general strategy is the same. Filter the list to find eligible targets, shuffle the eligible list, and take X off the top.

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