Towards Smarter Loot Systems

The typical way that I see loot working in ARPGs is simple randomization of attributes based on item type and a percentage chance. Roll a many-sided die and look up the result in the table, repeat this several times and you have your loot.

I don't think this is the best way to calculate what drops in an ARPG.

What matters is that players have interesting decisions to make with regards to gear--decisions that aren't as simple as seeing that 10% more damage is less than 15% more damage. You can generate interesting decisions here in a much more directed fashion than just dropping fully randomized but scaled-by-level loot.

When designing a loot system, we have to answer two questions:

• How often should you be upgrading your equipment?
• How often should you see a piece of gear that you have to consider as an upgrade?

We can think it through and exert control over it, or we can put some percentage chances in a loot table and hope that everything turns out OK. I'd prefer to design the loot system to guarantee as fun an experience as I can. That means taking more control over the kinds of modifiers that appear on items dropped for each class.

I think that if you have to consider a lot of loot and a high percentage of that loot has no value to you even before you put it in your inventory, you feel like you're wading through crap. The longer you go without interesting drops, the more bored you will become. This produces a feeling of "farming", which I don't think is a positive experience. It has negative connotations because gamers don't like doing it--farming is a reduction of the game to a tedious harvesting task that you could easily hire daylaborers to do and be better off. Tasks like that don't belong in games, they're an artifact of artificial difficulty and/or poorly or underdesigned gameplay.

The game should be aware of what would be an upgrade for you and what wouldn't. Upgrades should be dropped based on what you fight within a certain number of minutes of "challenging" combat. Don't even bother dropping trash. Only drop loot that is a sidegrade or an upgrade, and only drop loot that is equippable. Based on statistical and forum feedback the algorithm can be tweaked.

The game should be able to learn what modifiers people tend to pick on their items, and what people tend to put together. Based on these patterns for each, sidegrades can be generated that suit the kinds of builds that people actually use. In the beginning, such as system would need to be seeded with playtester-approved build information, and some noise would need to be added to the weights in the randomization of items in order to ensure that every character isn't siphoned into one of a few builds.

I think the current set of modifications and the way they work in Diablo III is well-suited towards this kind of system. If the longevity of the game is predicated on farming, as Diablo III's seems to be, my idea can still be effective, but may not be in the developers' best interest. What you really need is an end to the game--a feature that makes roguelikes great and has been lost along the development of ARPGs away from the roguelike foundation. But that's a topic for another post.

The Specialization Trap

A trap that many ARPG designs fall into is overspecialization in the face of relatively permanent character advancement decisions. Path of Exile is a great illustration of the pitfalls of optimal play revolving around specializing your character using permanent decisions over a long span of play time.

PoE has an extremely large and intricate skill tree which allows significant specialization: down to the weapon type level--swords, axes, etc and element (fire, lightning, etc) level. You'll need to look for specific weapons and items that suit your specialization choices.

This is damaging to the ARPG model. ARPGs are a combination of various treadmills that complement one another: loot, character level, ability levels, and perhaps a few more (Din's Curse had "reputation" which would grant you a relatively viable rare weapon upon leveling up). An emphasis on specialization limits the character construction decisions (once you've picked the specialization, you jump pump points into that indefinitely) and loot decisions, cutting off significant branches of the decision tree. The more equipment-related specialization, the fewer pieces of loot a character will find that can possibly be upgrades. A character can easily go from having a 20% chance of finding a relevant piece of loot because he specializes in one-handed weapons, to a less than 5% chance because he has been forced to specialize further, perhaps into one-handed swords, in order to continue getting damage and/or accuracy bonuses from new passive skills.

ARPG players are familiar and fond of systems that involve an extreme amount of character choice permanence. Diablo II's attribute and skill points were non-refundable, and the pattern of severely punishing the uninformed by making character decisions irreversible does not enter the consideration of the majority of ARPG-players who grew up playing Diablo and Diablo II. Titan Quest and Din's Curse made a step forward in this regard by allowing point-by-point respecs at escalating prices. Torchlight, the most casual-friendly ARPG I have played, doesn't have respecs built into the game at all--the only way to respec is to use a console command to spawn a respec potion.

Overspecialization leads to minute-by-minute play being less interesting. If you need to invest a high percentage of your points into a very small number of abilities to make them effective, then you're naturally going to be filtering your ability choices by which abilities you have spent points on. Abilities available are further filtered by what loot you have available to you. In the majority of ARPGs you end up in a situation where you have at most two or three useful abilities--sometimes you'll only have one. When you have no more than two or three tools to work with, it's harder for combat to remain engaging.

Spamming a single ability and watching everything die can only remain fun for a little while unless you are specifically looking for a relaxing experience. Unfortunately, the theorycrafting involved in making an adequate character often is beyond the interests of a relaxed player, so they wouldn't get to the point where they could effectively do one ability spam. The mechanical systems thus lead to patterns of play which are not appealing to the kinds of players that have the capacity to use that style of play.

Permanent point-investment schemes also lead to perverse incentives for building characters. You really shouldn't spend points on skills beyond what you specifically need to get to that highest level skill that you want to specialize in. When optimal play is to not participate in the character advancement and be underpowered for tens of hours so that you can be somewhat above average later, the game clearly suffers.

The reasoning and evidence above would indicate that specialization-focused design is poor design.

So why do players seem to like it so much? A game like Diablo II is a complexly layered system of rewards that vary in intensity and frequency in such a way as to draw us in and addict us. Players have trouble separating the fun and not fun mechanics of a game when they are layered as they are in Diablo II. The rewards systems are strong and interleaved into all other mechanics of the game, so it's hard to separate skill tree manipulation and loot sifting from the enjoyable feeling of character progress. Those activities do contribute to character progress, but their design isn't trivial to separate from that positive feeling.

Good ARPG design is much more than simply causing the player to have the positive feeling of character progress, it's optimizing that feeling to happen in as intense and frequent a way as possible without it being diluted by overexposure. It's a difficult balancing and timing act, and different players have higher engagement at different points along the spectrum between constant rewards and rare rewards, large rewards and small rewards.

In games that feature overspecialization, you'll notice that combat tends to reduce to the repeated use of a couple of skills at most. This trivializes combat and turns it into a chore. When combat is a chore, in order to enjoy the game you must enjoy the minmaxing of character construction, which in ARPGs is done via loot sifting and planning/spending skill and attribute points. So the games' fanbases naturally require their members to enjoy that minmaxing and not mind somewhat boring combat.

ARPGs can have exciting combat and enjoyable character advancement. Diablo III is proof. I hope to discuss Diablo III's success in a future article.