TRIVIAL LOOT CODES

I told you so.

Not only am I not above saying it, I'm going to rub your nose in it. I have ranted and raved for months that message boards are no place to gather information about what your real player base wants. The concerns that crop up on message boards are skewed towards professional gamers, because that is largely who populates fan sites and message boards.

SOE (Verant) thought for a long time that their player base wanted something "done" about "inappropriate looting", or characters "farming" greens to gain loot from MOBs that gave them no experience. They thought this was a very important issue in the community. Where did they get this impression?

Fan sites, message boards, their own site's input system.

I have also wondered publicly for over a year why SOE doesn't utilize its log-on polling mechanism to actually ASK what the players think about something. I have stated over and over that it would be a shock to them, because they would find out that the actual concerns and desires of the playerbase are far different from those expressed in the visible site media.

So they installed a special loot code in new areas, specifically the warrens and stonebrunt mountains, without even asking. Here is a major change in the style of the game, in game mechanics, and they base it on what any first year statistics class would find to be a ludicrous sampling system. They even state that their big new future expansion is going to follow the new looting code.

I guess someone at SOE had a flash of profound insight and decided, hey, before we change something so profound in the game for an entire expansion, how about we actually ask our player base? Good thing, too. They found out that their customers overwhelmingly disapprove of the trivial loot code.

What a shock that must have been. The playerbase doesn't think like the majority of the people that visit fan sites and engage in discussion on the boards. Who'da thunk it?

Hey SOE, here's an idea. Ask your playerbase what they think about requiring ubeguild raids to accomplish high level content. Ask your playerbase if they'd prefer randomized drops. Ask you playerbase if anything in the game should be out of the reach of 4-6 people with 2-3 hours to play. Ask your playerbase if they want the book screen while they meditate up to level 35. Ask your playerbase what is the least fun about the game : (1) corpse recovery, (2) lack of melee binding, or (3) your focus on keeping the game challenging for 5% of the playerbase and total condescending dismissal of the rest of us.

Congratulations to SOE for using some logic. Now, use some more. Ask us more questions and find something out about the 410,000 people that actually play your game. This is where you have it over your competition. You can actually ask 410,000 players how they feel about the game, what they like and dislike, what they want to see and don't want to see, if you get someone to present polls that aren't skewed towards preconceived ideas.

Your competition is still listening to the few; you can listen to the many. Think outside the box and find out what we really want. I guarantee it will suprise you more than you can imagine.

By the way, the reason most of us don't want the trivial loot code installed is because that's the only way most of us, casual players in core demographic groups, can get just about any half-decent loot - level up way past where the MOBs don't represent a significant threat, and where the dungeon/zone isn't going to be the scene of a lengthy or impossible corpse recovery (which we don't have the time for anyway). But I don't guess SOE has figured that out yet. They want to prevent most of their player base from ever gaining half-decent equipment for their level by coding it out of reach for anyone that plays in a way other than what meets SOE's "professional gamer" criteria.

Maybe SOE will wake up and figure out who they're getting rich off of before someone else figures it out.

Trivial commentary and whining HERE