[PATV] Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 6, Ep. 10: The JC Penny’s Effect

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[PATV] Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 6, Ep. 10: The JC Penny’s Effect

This week, we examine the pros and cons of Firefall's loot system design.
Send your survey vote to survey@extra-credits.net!
Come discuss this topic in the forums!

Read the full story here

Brikoth

If the materials are color coded based on rarity (like many games already do), then it's still going to "feel good" to find them. Monster Hunter does this very thing, giving essential crafting materials for your work, letting you decide what to do with them. Time wasting randomness is still in the game when you're hoping for enough of that one material you need to go to you in a dungeon run/hunt/grinding spree, but always being able to do something with those materials makes you think "Yeah i'll just store this away, i'll probably need it", or "Oh man I got a <Rare Thing>, sweet". Unlike the JC Penny ideal, perspective is still there as long as random chance is still there. People go to stores with sales to essentially test their luck and see if they'll find something they want "on sale". I'll admit I don't know much about Firefall's loot system beyond the explanation of material instead of processed gear popping out of dead wildlife, but if it's random, the same elements are in play.

Wwen

That story about JCPenny was super depressing.

Titanium Dragon

I have to admit: No matter how much I would appreciate the honesty from JC Penny's, I never shot for my own clothing - it is all gifts from other people. So it does them no good with people like me.

As for the crafting versus drops thing... honestly, I think the real problem is the grinding in the first place. Beating a dungeon once is fun. Beating a dungeon ten times is much less so.

Dorkmaster Flek

Well my faith in humanity has fallen thanks to that JCPenny's story.

dejavu,again

Yet another weird psychological hole in human brains. Of course, this isn't a huge revelation- it was because these holes were found in the past that marketers (and MMO developers) aim for them. It turns out, we like feeling like we got a good deal more than getting one, we view 4.99 very differently than 5.00, and skinner boxes/gambling are both highly addicting.

toreador91

@Wwen: It is very sad to know that price gouging has seeped into corporate marketing strategies so deeply that it has given those abuses a nice homey feel for most consumers.

I find the tension between the compulsion to grind endlessly in order to attain that one ludicrously rare thing and the desire for the instant gratification of "a cool little picture of something with stats that you can equip right away and see numbers go up" to be quite confusing. I would like to think that if you are the type of person with the dedication and foresight to invest time in both the big grind itself and all the little grind preparation for said big grind and are aware of the ludicrous rarity of the gear you want for your character, then it shouldn't be too big a leap to have the patience and strategic thinking that would come with an intricate crafting system for extremely powerful items.

@Brikoth: And I agree that color coding the materials based on rarity would help to provide the best of both worlds.

rahkeesh2000

Funny to see Guild Wars up there in the "traditional item loot" category. Yeah the old "ooh nice stats" is a big part of leveling up, but once you hit the relatively low stat cap and get into endgame, you're mostly grinding crafting mats/cash to make your uber pretty armor, since it can't even drop at all. Still at least you could occasionally score a rare skin/stat combo weapon that was worth something. While the sequel has a much longer progression curve, the top stat items are such rare drops, that you're far more likely to earn them via crafting mats or fixed amounts of nontradable tokens for completing content. In that game people get excited by yellows purely for their value as crafting fodder.

Sure from a casual glance it's fine to stick GW by WoW/EQ. But if you wondered how crafting over RNG is going to play out in an MMO, you don't exactly have to gaze into the future to find out.

discrider

I think Path of Exile nailed this type of system.

In Path of Exile you still have weapon drops alongside the ingredient drops, but the weapon drops are far more frequent than the ingredient drops. As a result, most weapon drops are vendor trash, because the majority of weapon drops pale in comparison to the few that drop with 2 or 3 perfect modifiers for the weapon/build and the right colour sockets for your skills all linked together nicely and on the appropriate weapon/gear base type for what your class/build needs at the time. But the ingredients allow you to bypass the grind by removing some of the randomness from the process by allowing you to incrementally improve your weapon in a directed fashion.

So finding rare ingredients in Path of Exile carries much of the same charm as finding a great new weapon because it has so much potential to bypass the grinding system (even though it is a product of the grind in the first place!). And if you don't feel like potentially wasting the ingredients by rolling poorly, you can always trade these rare items to other players for the rares that they can't use. So it's still a win even if you never craft.

Finding rare powerful ingredients that can improve your game substantially still feels great, even if you can't just slap it immediately on your character. So long as the game sticks to this, and not "FIND 100 THINGS UPGRADE YOUR SORD" it should be fine.

Recettear is another game that was not adversely affected from rare ingredients instead of just standard adventuring gear. It just needed an inbuilt spreadsheet to help you learn how much you could squeeze out of all the Little Girls so you didn't have to do all the price recording yourself -_-'

Specula

Would have preferred to have been given a third option for the survey: "I don't care, as long as it's well done in the end."

Luftmensch

You included the J. C. Penney logo in your video and still managed to misspell it in your title.

KoopahTroopah

Good episode. I personally have no opinion, but I can see exactly why "The JC Penny Effect" is a real thing.

Also holy shit, that outro song. I'm in love.

Mnementh818

Your survey idea has a major problem. If someone had sent out a survey before J. C. Penny had implemented their new pricing, the response would likely be overwhelmingly in favor of the fair pricing idea. I would be willing to bet that this is why that put the idea into practice in the first place. However, people always like to think of themselves in an ideal sense and are not likely to be able to give an honest answer to this question. I think you'll just have to wait this out to get any idea of people's preferences.

RatherDashing89

I may be an outlier, because I much prefer stores without sales. But in RPGs, I like the feel of crafting because I love improving my character. When I craft a piece of gear, I'm improving doubly because not only do I get a new piece of gear to equip, presumably my "crafting" skill or stat will go up, opening up new crafting options. Also, Skyrim isn't much of a loot-based game, but it is a game where crafting generally gets you better gear than what drops off of enemies. I loved the feeling of knowing I had earned every piece of equipment I wore.

Mythmaker

I'm sort of an instant gratification kind of guy, so crafting systems never really appealed to me as much as item drops. I've always thought, though, that someone could fix that by giving components in-inventory bonuses, like Charms in Diablo II. That'd give you the instant gratification of improving your character in the short term, then allow you to upgrade your equipment later.

Kargul

I'm not so much voting for what I like here as much as I'm voting for the opposite of what I dislike... loot treadmills are a big problem in RPGs and I think part of what defines this problem has to do with killing an enemy and having them drop something lesser than what you have equipped the vast majority of the time.

Now, I realize this is part of what makes picking up a rare item feel special, but if you have to swim through eight thousand lesser items like in Diablo III or something like Dungeon Defenders you really begin to hate this system.

pable28

What about Warframe? It's a free-to-play third person action game that combines the two factors. You can get random weapon and "armor" drops, but the best ones are crafted. To do so you need a lot of materials that are regularly droped by normal enemies and a "blueprint" that indicates the kind and ammount of materials needed, and can be obtained as a boss drop or bought with in-game currency.

Atavax

I prefer TF2's system. Gear drops but if you don't want the piece of gear you can refine it into components for the gear you do want. Best of both worlds, the good feeling when the loot you want drops, and if you're unlucky enough to not get it to drop, you can craft the same thing instead.

grygus

I would prefer a more sensible, organic system. What I mean by this is that drops would make logical sense within the game's world, e.g., a dragon may well have a sword in its hoard, but would also give scales used in crafting. A lion would never drop a hat, but would give crafting mats. A guardsman would always drop a piece of armor, but never/rarely crafting materials. Drops could be salvaged to reduce them to crafting mats. Lots of games do some of these things, but I don't think any multiplayer game has really tried to make their loot system fade into the fabric of the world rather than being an obvious game system running on top. Skyrim comes close, but I do think that an MMO would gain appeal with this mindset.

Oblivion_Necroninja

Here's the problem I've had with Firefall's drop system:
I have NO IDEA what the "best" way to use my materials is, especially now that they've released the modules that reduce non-core constraint costs in exchange for cores. Like, what's more important: good stuff or high levels of Mass and Energy?
There really needs to be an in-game "how to craft for MAXIMUM AWESOME" thing.

Lockvir

I have come from a different angle, where i come into a new MMORPG and think cool crafting. "I'm going to craft everything I'm gonna use." Only to be disappointed because everything i can craft is extremely sub par to anything i can find. And, so i feel stupid for wasting my time. By taking the items out of the loot drop there is actually room for crafting in the game world. Wouldn't it be spectacular if the greatest items in the game world was created by player artisans.

My method of making it more interesting would be:
That when you kill a boss you do not get a loot piñata(maybe something), but instead you gain access to a "forge" the boss was guarding. A place were you can craft and the items gain specific properties unique to this "forge". In this case i think you can have craftingItemDrop and still preserve the feel's of getting rewarded.

Another thought. This concept should work in reverse when fighting regular mobs, where you get rewarded with regular loot. Big turn of getting a shoddy dagger when you have a epic burning longsword. Maybe that is were crafting comes form in the first place, as an answer to the question. "All this crap i have and just keep getting more of, what the hell am i going to do with it?" In this case just getting the crafting materials would "feel" much better.

ender1200

I verry much liked what Hellgate London did in that matter. You find gear as loot, but all gear can be broken down to crafting componenets. This way if you find crappy, ill fitting gear you can use it to craft better one or upgreads for your favored gear.

It also worth noting that even crafting games such as terraria have gear dropes, which are very fun to find.

Conniption-Fit

I have spent the past two months hooked on Monster Hunter which uses a crafting system as well. It just has rarer crafting items. For example I need a Sand Barioth tail to upgrade my fire damage sword. My friends don't mind coming along because they likely have bits from the Sand Barioth they can use for something else. After two hunts last night I ended up not getting the tail. I will go back in for it again tonight. There are even things in the fight we can do to improve the chances of certain drops like cutting the tail off during the fight, or trapping the monster versus killing it. Also MH wisely gives us each our own loot nothing is shared so nobody fights over anything we all get a pay out from a fight.

I don't know what will lead to more success, but as a person who left MMOs super disgruntled because either the sword I wanted never dropped or I had to fight with more active players for the right to get the rare item. I don't think I ever got a set or weapon I wanted out of a raid. I have been able to achieve my goals in MH and going into the smithy and making a grocery list of new monster bits feels great to me.

blazearmoru

I think if the minerals have differing rarity then it's ok because I personally feel this system would be something my mind would get addicted to... For example : getting

garbage mineral > garbage drop (maybe I can do something with this)
good mineral =(ish) good drop (I wonder what's possible)
great mineral = great drop (what can I make/do to abuse this lucky find?)

Grinding for countless repeating* material to make something, however... is as you could say... saddening.

mostawkwardguyever

My first MMO was Star Wars: Galaxies, and I think it just ruined crafting for me. Every other crafting system I've tried has felt like Lincoln Logs next to SWG's Erector Set. So I don't like the no loot structure, because I'm going to hate the crafting in that game, and thus resent leveling up.

blazearmoru

Lockvir : Ragnarok Online used to have an amazing crafting system. It got me HOOKED. I couldn't play another MMO after ragnarok died because it expanded out of it's box.

speedplay

I'll second what ender1200 wrote, and say that I much prefer systems that offer a blended approach. Other similar examples are Tera (use the "junk" gear as an upgrade component of other gear), Diablo 3 (although that game had some woefully designed other gear issues), ... and that's all I have right now.

The metric we really look at in acquiring loot in games is time. With the components system there is very little derivation in time spent to acquire something, because of the very linear progression of component acquisition (unless there are rare drop components... which then functions very much like a standard gear system). If I want piece of gear X, then I can calculate about how much time it will take... and maybe that calculation alone turns me off of ever wanting to try.

With gear drops you get to throw in serendipity. Sure, it won't always work in your favor, but now there is a meta-game with how much time I'm going to spend to get X. There is an unknown, and when that variable is finally resolved it could wind up being much shorter than the known quantity above.

So the big drivers for gear, in my mind, are the serendipity factor - the sense that I can get lucky and spend less time doing something; and the meta-game factor of random rolling - the sense that I can "win".

Epsilon Rose

I've already responded to the poll, but I just realized there's a third possible paradigm beyond craft or loot. Namely fixed drops.

Basically, the idea would be to heavily depreciate enemy loot. A few things would drop and these could either be components, gear or other items, but the vast majority of gear would be found in fixed locations/guaranteed drops. Most pieces of gear could only be found once and would be fairly generic until upgraded.

The only game that I've seen do this is Dark Souls. I'm not entirely sure if it would translate well into an MMO. But, if it did, it definitely cuts out a lot of the grind and leads to a more dignified character. After all, when was the last time you read a story where the knight strips every body they come across?

themilo

More proof that consumers are idiots who fall for even the most obvious money making tricks.

Now If you excuse me I’m going to pre order rome total war 2 so that I can play as Sparta when it comes out.

HRDSalami654

Thus proving consumers are idiots. I include myself in this to by the way.

zegota

I don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but Final Fantasy XI had a similar system (some enemies dropped items, but it was the exception, not the rule). And it was very popular ... in Japan. I loved it. The player driven economy was fantastic, and it actually detracts from my enjoyability from standard WoW-clones where all the equipment upgrades come directly from loot. But it's WoW that's wildly popular, and the skinner box looting is the primary reason. So which do I like better? Player-driven crafting, absolutely. Which do I think is more popular? Looting.

franksands

I remember that in Mass Effect 2, when you were scanning planets for minerals, when you have enough of a mineral to purchase a research item, the game would display a message "research X unlocked". I thing this way it's more tangible what you can actually do with the bunch of minerals you got.

b33f3r

i vote for the crafting system. i feel that it would shorten my grind, even only in my perception. and now the grind would be rewarded throughout by small progress along the way rather than 1 big payout at the end, that may never happen. crafting guarantees that i will be able to acquire the gear that i want. and in firefall the gear that i want can be unique to me.

@oblivion_necroninja: that would defeat the purpose of firefall's balance system. they try to make everything a give and take rather than this build is demonstrably better than that one.

@speedplay: are you familiar with firefall's crafting system? as far as i know there is – intended at least – variability in the components required for crafting an item. you can get a recipe and use low quality materials to get the item fast and cheap, or you can take the time to gather really nice materials, or a subset of nice materials that focus on a specific stat to raise the quality of the end product and influence specifically how it functions.

curintedery

Kmart in Australia did the same thing as JCPenny, and they've succeeded drastically :S.

Kalnaur

It might be strange, but the "crafting items" drops to me at least sounds better.

I suppose this also comes across in my playing of RaiderZ, where everything is crafted, but the quest tracker can be set to track the items you want to craft; the items you need are checked off on the tracker, and the game alerts you to when you can build things even if you aren't tracking them in the quest bar. This is something I love because generally speaking, every component or almost every component has meaning and a means of being tracked.

I'm not against super cool legendary item drops, but in that case the game should be programed with the player in mind, in other words having a script that checks for classes within a party and drops only what the party can use. Some might complain that that isn't realistic, but then again, how is a giant wolf boss that drops a sword and some gold in any way realistic?

meseejos

The games not likely to get millions of subscribers, but games like Eve Online have shown that resource gathering is a workable solution. Its not your standard MMO though, but that's not always a bad thing either

Thanatos2k

I would of course prefer the component system. That said, it won't work in an MMO setting. All it means is everyone is going to fight over EVERY drop because everyone can use it.

Usually drops would be useful for only a subsection of the group, so those fewer people had to hash it out. With common crafting components available for everyone it'll be a bloody free for all.

empath

I'm for the materials drops.

The 'appeal' of getting a rare item drop (even a 'mage hat of wizardry +5' when you're a barbarian) is just what you said, an illusory emotional 'trick'...and that trick CAN STILL BE APPLIED TO THE COMPONENTS DROP SYSTEM.

You hit on some ideas - 'progress meter' for a specific epic item you want to make, or 'new component unlocked'...which could be taken a step further:

"NEW MATERIAL DISCOVERED: Unobtainium.
Unobtainium is a rare mineral that is only found in <locale players can't go to>. It is used in strengthening the structure of objects, and can be used to craft such things as <epic armor> or <rare vehicle> or <weapon of awesomeness>"

Whether you give the player finished items they may or may not be able to use, or raw materials that they can all use to make a variety of different items (that they still might not want), YOU CAN STILL ADD PIZAZZ AND HYPE TO EITHER SYSTEM to keep your players interested.

Nevajas

I'm a fan of crafting. I like it much better than "drag the un-need, dropped loot back to town in hopes of selling it" strategy.

Bluarggag

Regarding the drops, imo both ways can be exciting.
Depending on enemy type (monster/humanoid), a lucky drop can either be the centerpiece of a powerful armor tailored for any class or the armor for a single class itself. At best make it craftable on the spot with a bottomless components bag to carry around.

I see a different problem with the component system, and it is similar to "randomness in games". At first sight you would not want things like critical strikes and chances on success because its not fair and people in general remember unlucky situations more. But it also gets boring and repetitive if you always deals your average damage and get your average loot which is very important in time sinky games. In the long run, the old formula time = power would hit you in the face.
In addition MMOs are social games and the differences between players (classes, specs, and also loot) creates diversity and individuality. Players also should depend on each other to get stuff with individual value and not fight about every "purple" crystal because everyone can use it.

Bluarggag

Regarding the drops, imo both ways can be exciting.
Depending on enemy type (monster/humanoid), a lucky drop can either be the centerpiece of a powerful armor tailored for any class or the armor for a single class itself. At best make it craftable on the spot with a bottomless components bag to carry around.

I see a different problem with the component system, and it is similar to "randomness in games". At first sight you would not want things like critical strikes and chances on success because its not fair and people in general remember unlucky situations more. But it also gets boring and repetitive if you always deals your average damage and get your average loot which is very important in time sinky games. In the long run, the old formula time = power would hit you in the face.
In addition MMOs are social games and the differences between players (classes, specs, and also loot) creates diversity and individuality. Players also should depend on each other to get stuff with individual value and not fight about every "purple" crystal because everyone can use it.