Bringing Master Loot Back to Retail WoW is a Long-Term Goal

Live Опубликовано 28.04.2022 в 16:45 Archimtiros

interview with AsmongoldNow that we're talking about loot. Why do you not want to bring back master looter?

What if I told you... I kind of do want to bring back master loot, and the team does? It's something we've been reflecting on a lot in the last year, year and a half, looking at places where we and the community have differed over the years and reevaluating some of our thinking. Loot is a tricky one. Going back to Legion, we had personal and group loot in parallel, and maintaining two versions of loot in terms of how the data is setup, the UI experience, the code... was a mess. That was something we wanted to get out of for a bunch of reasons, and at the time we were looking at group loot, saw a bunch of problems with this structure we'd built, and were like "lets tear it down, lets lay new foundations, lets build a new system that's all personal" and over the last few years we've been iterating on it and refining it and adding rules and exceptions, but there's a lot of problems with it. Clarity around what's tradeable is pretty bad, the feeling of "hey an item just dropped and it's technically an ilevel upgrade, but I'm not going to use it and I can't give it to my friends" - that feels pretty bad. We certainly haven't solved degenerate behavior from world first guilds, if anything it's gotten worse with all the cross server stuff and buyers. So yeah, we're taking at hard look at where we want to land going forward. The challenge is, well we spent a solid six years building new foundations, and so it's not just something where you can flip a switch and say "alright, everything works the way it did," but I think there's a lot to be said for keeping personal loot in some spaces like outdoor world, trash in dungeons and raid, I don't think anyone needs group loot trappings there. But the core experience of killing a raid boss, there's four things on the corpse, figure out what you want to do with those four things - that's something we'd like to get back to. I don't have the ability to promise that all the work to make that happen can occur in just the next few months, but in terms of a long-term heading, that's what we're thinking.

So it's not that the team is necessarily ideologically opposed to this, it's just that there is a lot of tech problems and the dissonance. I think it was Antorus whenever this happened, just caused problems?

Yeah, we had our tools, our code, every assumption we made in how we build loot tables from 2018 onwards has gone in one direction, and now we'd need to just turn back around. There's a lot of questions to figure out also, we should also bear in mind that going back to group loot means you could have a bow drop with no Hunters in the raid, and sometimes that's a thing that will happen and that feels bad, but that's kind of ok - it has to be. The thing we can't have happen is a world where loot is still smart and if you stack a group with like 6 Warriors, you're only going to get Warrior loot and it's completely tradeable with no restrictions? That just kind of breaks everything, so we need to just figure out a middle ground going forward, but... that's something we want to do.

I guess that does definitely make sense logistically, that seems like it would be very very easy to stack a raid in that regard. I would advocate for that, but that's a little bit too much my own personal interest.

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