New Root Abyss Equip Drop

It is not difficult to weight loot drops for the players participating in e.g. cRA. The only question to ask is: how do you want to weight it? That question still stands regardless of how the drop mechanics work, be it an individualised loot like what we're arguing and being unhappy/happy about now, or whether it's an FFA of sorts (which people are also arguing and being unhappy/happy about).

While I'm not versed in programming or computing, several options come into play that are fairly common-sense (not all are necessarily applicable). All of these will be subject to both RNG and normal/something distribution...

 Drop rate suggestions... might be a little gritty on the details

- Have a base seed drop rate, of which the seed increases by a given amount/function for every additional player participating in the game. So for example the base seed could be 5 drops for a single player, and linearly increasing by 5, geometrically/arithmetically increasing, or even a tailing-off increase blah blah (the last isn't likely IMO, not very fair).
- For individualised drops, they could make the drop rate seed a function of your damage e.g. a standard base of 1 and a variable component as a function of your damage.
- Extrapolating the drop mechanics, if the earlier point (on no. of players affecting drop rates) does affect the drop rates, then it would make the core DPSer get most (increased) loot and leechers get nothing (the latter being the intention of the damage-drop function but the former being a type of abuse).
- As a form of counter to the just-mentioned point on leechers boosting drop rates (a.k.a. drop rate mules, much like our current Party Play Zones' EXP booster mules), there are ways to go around this, such as a normalisation function that affects the total drop seed based on the fractions of damage each player does. In fact, an individualised drop system solves this problem innately if coupled to a damage-seed function.

Personally, I don't feel that one person dominating the DPS should get virtually all the drops, in that a weak player would want to feel fairly rewarded for at least surviving a top-tier boss fight and contributing to it in several ways such as contributing to the DPSer's damage via buffs and auras.

 More details

Consider a situation e.g. if it's a base of 5 per player, and 2 players means 10 drops which gets distributed as 9 : 1 for a DPSer : leecher/drop mule, then there should be a function to tail that down to 6 : 1, such as one that weights the fraction of damage dealt to the no. of players. So for example:

Base seed = 5,
bonus seed per player (linear) = 5 * (damage fraction 1)*(damage fraction 2) / [1/no. of players]^(no. of players)

And so for an FFA team, the greater the disparity in damage dealt (with the extreme being leechers = 0, DPSer = 1) then you get no bonus seed for your drop rate. Note that the function returns 5 per player if the damage fractions are approximately equal. The problem then comes when you as a weak player invite a strong DPSer, in which case the large disparity is still very strong and the strong DPSer loses out.

This is when the individualised drop system solves things, by introducing a base seed for everyone. It then gives programmers a chance to tailor drop rates per person without affecting everyone else. The variable component could be a kind of exponential function, or some sort of sigmoidal function with a diminishing returns for super-high damage fraction.

In fact, I feel that this is a great chance for Nexon to implement machine learning, which would recognise how much a player contributes to bringing a boss down e.g. if your aura increases someone's DPS by 20%, you should be rewarded as though you yourself did that kind of DPS. It doesn't need to be complicated, such as a quick background check on how much your buff/aura increased someone's range by, and then somehow add that to your range.

I know I'm just throwing many ideas here that probably are implemented, are not implement, or are just fantasies. But I feel that the individualised drop system is really for the better on the whole, not so much for the economy (because that's when abuse comes in and GMs etc. have headaches... like we're not supposed to have mule accounts by right, but about every Tom, plantain and Harry down the street has some number of mule accounts...).

You develop ideas for the desired end-result; you don't trash an idea for what would happen if abused (to a reasonable extent, that is), but rather you work around and improve it.

Hadriel