Guild Wars 2

I don’t think this is intended, but it works and needs to be corrected:

In a battle with many players and many monsters, if you fight just one creature, you get at most one drop. This could be despite the fact that it was the most important creature to keep at bay or whatever.

As a player, my first goal in a mob is to make sure I land damage on as many enemies as I can, so I have overall better drops. If there are 10 creatures to kill and I do damage on 8 of them, I will get 3-8 drops. If, however, in the same battle I instead focus solely on creature, and kill it (leaving the rest of the players able to handle the rest of the mob), I cannot receive more than 1 drop.

This is a silly way to operate, and needs to be corrected. If a mob of players kills a mob of monsters, everybody should have a chance of drops equal to their participation in the battle. Whether that participation was in damaging opponents, reviving allies, or whatever, they were part of the battle, and should be rewarded accordingly.

The way it is no, players are rewarded for bringing weak AoE skills over strong single-target skills. A thief excels at neutering and killing single targets. But, if he brings that skillset, he’ll get fewer drops than anybody else. Eles, on the other hand, are disproportionately rewarded for bringing their AoE skills. And, any character who tries to operate as a buff-bestower/healer gets nothing.

Instead, each character should have a tally of damage delivered, conditions imposed, and damage healed added together (not necessarily linearly) over a time interval. Then, the same tally from the whole “party” during that interval should be compared, and the character given an appropriate chance of loot from every dead creature that died in that interval.

It would be nice to have something better than “weak aoe spam = win”. Problem is: I’m not sure you could construct an algorithm like this and make it sophisticated enough to work right without impacting server speed.

Well, they have to be tracking it already, because they know as a creature dies who all damaged it. So, it’s just a matter of counting them rather than just flipping a switch.

Another possibility would be to have a “character took part” variable. Once a player does a certain amount of “stuff” against an enemy, his bit gets turned on, and he gets rewarded at the end of the battle (or, during battle if they can track things that closely).

treat groups of enemies as a unit.. if you do damage to the unit, then you get drops for the unit, no matter how many in the unit you actually killed.