New game releases of May 20-26
Killzone: Mercenary shoots onto Vita on September 10
Trion Worlds hit with more layoffs, Defiance team impacted
Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault defending Vita next week
Game & Wario was originally going to be pre-installed on Wii U
The Last of Us digital download lets you start playing sooner
Weekend PC download deals: Borderlands 2 for $11
Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection coming to PS3 in July for $50
Madden NFL 25's $99 'Anniversary Edition' includes Sunday Ticket
Final Fantasy 8 getting PC re-release (in Japan)
Blizzard Details Secret World of Warcraft 'Progressive Percentage' Item Drop Mechanic
by Nick Breckon, Mar 26, 2009 4:06pm PDTFormer World of Warcraft lead designer and current next-gen Blizzard MMO director Jeffrey Kaplan today detailed a behind-the-scenes system of drop percentages secretly added in the WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King.
The system, called "progressive percentages," was cribbed directly from Blizzard's own Warcraft 3, which used it for critical hit mechanics. It relates to how and when quest items drop from creatures--an important issue to all WoW players.
Originally, Blizzard settled on a standard WoW quest item drop rate of around 35%, with no system in place that would tweak the percentage as players killed more enemies.
"We found that this had a lot of problems where players would run into streaks, and they only remembered the shitty streaks," said Kaplan. "So what we decided to do was we took a page out of Warcraft 3, which had a very elegant design which they referred to as 'progressive percentages.'"
In response to this frustration, the developers quietly rolled out a change to the system with last year's Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
"So what we did recently with Wrath of the Lich King, and it's something we've never really talked about before, but in Lich King, every creature that is part of the collection quest has the item 100% of the time," continued Kaplan. "But we do a progressive system where we up the chance the player [gets the item] each time he kills it."
The percentage at which an item drops can eventually reach up to 100%, or a guaranteed drop, according to Kaplan.
"The problem was, when we put it live in the beta--and we didn't tell anybody this--we found that while it was great that it got rid of the bad streaks, it also got rid of all the good streaks. And overall we needed to raise the base drop percentage to around 45%."
Comments
For me that would be because while I ground out quest, the only pleasure I got was from being able to complete a quest fast. Tthe lack of pain was good in other words. The longer it took, the more painful. Rarely could I be doing a quest and enjoy it.
I kind of think it could be represented as a numeric sliding scale. The scale starts at zero(emotionally neutral) and then as the quest starts it starts ticking down from zero.... five quest later you think of your experiences as "shitty" with really bad spikes of, "Shitty streaks".
Quest items, quests and leveling used to be something that was interesting the first go around before we knew what "end game" stuff was... Now its just a grind. The quest have no bearing on what kind of character you are going to make. Meaning that if a GM came up to your guy in-game and hit him with a magic lvl 80 wand, or conversely, if you just level him up normally to lvl 60, you would find they would be close to identical(If you don't count reputation... then identical).
Just a supporting fact, one of the most popular WoW mods right now(and for awhile before) is called QuestHelper. What this mod does is make it easier to do quest. It does this by pointing you in the right direction using X-marks-the-spot type map icons. No more reading where to go, now you can just connect the dots to lvl 80. In essence, a mod was made to help you get past the leveling portion of the game.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 7 replies.
YES MY THUNDERFURY, KAPLAN. YOU HEAR ME? MINE. THE PRECIOUSSSSS.
The percentage at which an item drops can eventually reach up to 100%, or a guaranteed drop, according to Kaplan."
Am I stupid or did they say the chance is 100% and eventually reaches 100%? WTF? How are you guys getting information out of this article?
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 6 replies.
If I have a quest to get bear paws, I should be able to get 4 off of each bear. Having a chance to drop maybe 1 paw from a bear is... just idiotic.
On a related note: if I kill a named mob who is a target for a quest I have not yet picked up, their head/necklace/big toe/whatever should drop anyway, so when I go to the people offering that quest they can say, "Oh, you already took care of that problem. Have some gold and XP."
But of course that would defeat the purpose of the timesink that most of these quests are meant to be.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 4 replies.
Fuck.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 4 replies.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 4 replies.
You must be logged in to post.