Loot System Revamp - A look at the EQ2Live system

[ZexisStryfe]

Quite a bit has been said about revamping our current loot system lately, the primary reason for this being the inclusion of Smart Loot. Since elcapototal has expressed interest in taking a crack at this revamp I figured I would post some information regarding this. Everything I am posting here is from my knowledge of how EQ2 Live’s loot system functions drawn from both experience and a wealth of dev posts over the years.

Loot Tables

On live there are actually multiple loot tables available to the mobs. They are as follows-

Zone-wide Loot Table- All mobs in the zone share this loot table. This is for things like the antiquity and curious teasure body trash as well as the generic treasure loot like the Bonerot items in Darklight Woods.
Racial Loot Table- All mobs of the same race share this loot table. This is for stuff like deer pelts or Legend and Lore items.
Specific Loot Table- This is for drops that are specific to a particular mob. It is mostly used for boss loot or things like collection page drops.
Smart Loot Table- This is the “intelligent” loot table. It only drops items that are relevant to the classes present. This table checks for class, inventory and in the case of master spell drops, scribed spells (if you have the master scribed for a particular spell, it won’t drop). It does not check for level.

Now, some of these (Zone and Racial) have the potential to drop chest items, but the majority of their items are body loot. Specific loot and Smart loot tables are always chest drops.

Chest Drops

One other sub-system we need to deal with is chest drops. The chests are as follows:

Small Chest- Common in frequency, these chests often contain crafting tomes or other low value treasure rated “Uncommon” at most. Small chests are never trapped, and as such do not require a Scout to disarm them. This is the only chest that will drop off grey mobs, but only if they contain quest-related drops.
Treasure Chest- Adept tomes are the most common items found in these chests, although some decent armor will sometimes appear. They contain at least one item tagged with the "Treasured" title, although they may contain rare crafting ingredients, depending on the tier.
Ornate Chest- Contains at least one "Legendary" item, and usually drops from named creatures. However, there is a chance that one will drop from epic "trash" and heroic "trash" mobs from many zones.
Exquisite Chest- Considered the motherload of drops, these chests are rare and will contain generally two to six pieces of total treasure, including least one item of "Fabled" quality. This includes Master spell books.

The hitch is it is possible to drop items from several loot tables, even split between body and chest drops. In addition to this each item not only has a percent chance of dropping, but each table has a percent chance to be pulled from. For instance boss mobs will pull from their specific loot table (general the chest drops) 100% of the time will an additional chance to pull from the racial and zonewide loot table as well (for body drops). In the case of chest drops, we will also need the ability to determine how many drops are normal for the mob. Most raid bosses will only drop 1-2 items in their exquisite chests, however the big guys (like Munzok) can drop 5-10 items in one chest.

Shinies!

An extension of this system is the “shiny” collection nodes, which actually adhere to loot rules and pop up in the traditional loot windows now. The content of a “shiny” is actually determined at the time of spawn, unlike harvest nodes that it is determined at time of harvest. This is because if you don’t want a “shiny” (ie- you already have it) you can elect to leave it for the next person to collect.

Wrap-up!

I think it may be in our best interests to break this down into stages because this is a massive system with many complications (some of which I am sure I am forgetting). Sample stages breakdown-
1. Basic support for multiple loot tables
2. Smart loot programming
3. Chest Drops
4. Shinies

I will leave the development to the guys who are best at this sort of thing (ie- not me!) however if you have any questions regarding any further details of the live system, just ask!

[John Adams]

Excellent info as always, Zexis. Please spend some time referring to this discussion as well, since it is what started the whole revamp idea.

A few comments from the data side; I want to make sure we do not confuse the SOE label of "tables" with a table in a database. They are more than likely referring simply to the organized data in memory at the time of the spawn/kill, and not having 12 tables to manage Loot. Though, they may =) we certainly do not.

Our existing DB loot tables are probably a good base to start from:

loottable.jpg

Here you can set up the loot "tables" mentioned, which is the parent record that gets assigned to the Spawn.

The loottable.id then becomes the FK into lootdrop:

lootdrop.jpg

Here you set up which loot_table_id contains which items, and set the probability of which item might drop from this one loot table. Combine that with the probability in loottable that the loot table itself will even be used, you have yourself a fairly dynamic loot system.


Where we needed the revamp was not so much in the storage of our data, but making that data "on the fly" configurable. Ie., spawns do not necessarily have to be assigned a precise loottable at the time they spawn, but when the kill occurs, some magic happens to randomly generate the needed loot on the corpse/chest.

This is where the Smart Loot conversation came in as well... because if we're generating loot distribution at the time of kill, we then can inspect our killers to see what they "need" and ensure the loot drop is Smart.

One other thing to consider is, we might want to implement a system where this Smart Loot is available globally, rather than restricted to just upper tiers (see Nalandial's first post). Maybe SOE changed that already, but if not I'd like to see EQ2Emu Admins be able to "flip a bit" and make every spawn Smart Loot-able vs just a specific set. Let me know if this last paragraph makes no sense


Hope that helps a little to get you going.

[ZexisStryfe]

Everything John said!

Yes, this is why I didn't go into specifics as to what was currently working, because I didn't have the DB infront of me and I didn't know any of the details off the top of my head. I just wanted to outline how the system works on live and leave the explaination of the current implementation to those who know better than I (is it wrong that I know John always follows me with such things? ).

In reference to loot "tables" I was definately using the generic term "tables" and not specific database tables.

As for smart loot, it has been expanded on live. Currently if you are under lvl 10 there is smart loot in effect for adept drops.

[John Adams]

(is it wrong that I know John always follows me with such things? ).

"Actually"

[ZexisStryfe]

Exactly

[John Adams]

Here comes revamp re-re-re-re-request number 2. Another thing we've been looking to do for over 18 mos. Can we get to it, please?

See the referenced link above (the Nalandial Post) for the original discussions.

[Scatman]

Nal's post was quite a while ago. I still have my live account but I haven't actually played live in quite a bit. It'd be really awesome if we could get some people that play live (ahem!) to go through, critique, and let us know what is valid, what's not valid, and what's new with Naladniel's post on loot.

[John Adams]

Poking around Zam's today, I found a spawn that blew my mind... check out this dude's drop table... is this even possible?!

http://eq2.zam.com/db/mob.html?eq2mob=6 ... ffc0b4c582

[Zcoretri]

Yes...you can get a lot of drops off epics.

In raiding epics, the named will usually yield:
1 armor or weapon
a master spell
an adept spell
and some other crap loot.

[ZexisStryfe]

Almost all mobs in raid zones have drop tables like this- even the trash mobs.