Goblin Squad Member
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I'm kind of curious why someone would care very much about this.
Not that I would do it. Devil's advocate mode right now. But being able to sneak after a party and then sneaking up to a dead or unconscious PC and looting their body while their teammates are busy finishing off whatever they are fighting ....
If you are going to play a bandit, this might be another way to go ... Scavenger.
And if you meant the original post, there are times you have more stuff than you can carry. Dropping some stuff and then coming back later for it to sell isn't a bad idea, unless someone finds your stuff first.
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Goblin Squad Member
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"Will it be possible to drop items on the ground and retrieve them or will they only exist in bags and inventories?"
If you can, can anyone pick it up? Hmm ... rogues will be able to pickpocket stuff out of people's bags, won't they?
Yes, unattended meaning that it isn't on a person and doesn't belong to anyone. It is simply an object on the ground that anyone can pick up.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Always fun in Everquest when there was no such thing as a shared bank yet, when you wanted to twink an alt with some item.
If no one was online that you could trust to do the transfer, you would find a remote location or an empty room in some building and drop the stuff on the ground. You then had 6 minutes to log out, and log in with your alt, who you had parked in that same room first off course. He could then pick it up.
There are stories of people who found such "stacks" and took them. PvP! ;)
I remember the thrill of a large transfer,when you had put the stuff on the ground and the logout timer was running (30 sec) and then you suddenly heard a door open downstairs. Everquest has a lot of rooms and doors and they make a typical creaking noise. Made me jump everytime, cancel the logout(sometimes with only 3 seconds left) and see if a player was maybe coming up the stairs. Thing is, a lot of NPC's having elaborate pathing scripts in Everquest so often it was just an NPC going through a door. I think there was this rumor that NPC's could pick stuff up, not sure, they do not do that now anymore though.
Anyway, it was always a thrill if you pulled off the transfer which was pretty much always.
You hardcore PvP-folk must probably laugh at this "PvP-lite"stuff. :p
You could also give items to mobs, who would then drop these as loot when they were killed. They nerfed that, only Enchanters can do it now, when they first charm that mob, give item, then release the charm. ALso, you used to be able to throw Coin on the ground too but they disabled this because people were spelling dirty words with it, and those hundreds of coins caused lag.
One last fun thing you could do: a Chanter could throw a coin on the ground, then cast Minor Illusion which makes the Chanter take the form of the nearest asset in the game world. A tree, a chair or in this case, the coin. He would then pick up the coin he threw on the ground and would then lay in wait, as a coin, untill some player tried to pick it up(which they could not). Always good for a laugh!
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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I am pretty sure that most MMOs avoid this so they don't have to worry about people throwing a bunch of stuff on the ground and slowing down the server and/or client is it keeps track of every item and renders them all for everyone.
This is a major factor. Also people drawing obscene things on the ground with dropped items is a smaller worry.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This was a minor problem in early Everquest when coin could be dropped on the ground, some dirty words too. But I only ran across coin-writing once. You can still drop any items on the ground to this very day, most items (like a cheap tradeskill item such as a muffin) appear as a brown bag on the ground. So you can still lag out a zone completely if you would write something with bags.
However nobody ever does this anymore in Everquest, so I am not sure wether the EQ population either has grown up, or has gone completely braindead. :)
To be honest, I think people make way too much of the "griefing" that is been done with mechanics like this. Off course in a game like pFO, players could come up with completely new ways to disrupt a Siege or Raid, so I think its best not to do that here. :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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A lot of Wurm Online is based on placing objects in the world, whether they are lamps or storage bins or log piles or what have you. Every object can be dropped. To offset this the game also has decay which occurs when an item is used. Decay is multiple times faster on abandoned objects not placed in a deed (settlement) to keep the world from becoming cluttered and looking like a trash heap.
If PFO does not have a decay feature than it can be a simple timer as Tyncale mentioned that removes the item from the game once the time is up. It's going to be hard to spell inappropriate words if they keep vanishing.
I strongly encourage Goblinworks to look into being able to both trade directly with players as well as drop/retrieve items from the ground.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am pretty sure that most MMOs avoid this so they don't have to worry about people throwing a bunch of stuff on the ground and slowing down the server and/or client is it keeps track of every item and renders them all for everyone.This is a major factor. Also people drawing obscene things on the ground with dropped items is a smaller worry.
My new goal is to draw obscene things on the ground with corpses. I am assuming, of course, that something visible will be left behind as players will need to return to their corpse to get items.
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Goblin Squad Member
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My new goal is to draw obscene things on the ground with corpses. I am assuming, of course, that something visible will be left behind as players will need to return to their corpse to get items.I am pretty sure that most MMOs avoid this so they don't have to worry about people throwing a bunch of stuff on the ground and slowing down the server and/or client is it keeps track of every item and renders them all for everyone.This is a major factor. Also people drawing obscene things on the ground with dropped items is a smaller worry.
You can always "draw" obscene things with live characters, standing or laying in formations.
Where there is a will, they will find a way. I'm sure some of these antics will be worthy of a good laugh, especially for the really creative ones.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I personally miss the feature of being able to drop items on the ground. Or drop them into publicly accessible containers. It was a great charity tool. But I understand the concerns that prevent this from appearing in most games. I do really like it though.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You can always "draw" obscene things with live characters...Requires much more coordination since you have to have an active character for each stroke, rather than a single guy dropping his corpse over and over again.
We used to fly with 30 or more ships in formation (funeral processions) in Star Trek Online, synchronized a 45 degree turn, in order to face the central column of Fleet Admiral's ship and shuttle representing the deceased. Then off into the Wormhole the shuttle would go.
Spelling words out would be a cake walk.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Honestly, avoiding the look of a trash strewn world is of more concern then people making the effort to spell things out.
Decay rates are usually the way to take care of that. If I remember correctly, 'junk items' are not going to be very prevalent. We won't need to grind through crafting. There simply should not be as much junk to be tossed around as might be found in other games. Throw a 10-minute decay timer on it, and we should be good.
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Goblin Squad Member
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All the junk discussion aside, I would be immensely disappointed if I cant buy a Decorative Water Clock, and set it up in my house because of "Decay."
Good point.
One of my favorite things was to be able to decorate my character's apartment in Anarchy Online.
Would be nice to have that in PFO, which decay would make difficult.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If there will ever be personal housing and decorative items in this game then the devs will easily be able to make a distinction between decorative items, and corpses/other items that they do not want littering the world.
As in tag the item as "non-decayable". I am also sure that if we get personal housing, that this will be the only place where we can put those things, so we will not get a world littered with Decorative Water Clocks.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I loved being able to drop items on the ground. Even without item decay, noobs were always picking up trash items as soon as they were dropped to vendor for gold.
I always assumed the reason newer games did away with dropping items on the ground was because they were too lazy, or it was too expensive, to make the 3D model for every item in game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As mentioned above, this is not an issue for EQ (was taken for granted in UO) and likely would not be an issue for PFO.
TL;DR: Super good for immersion and world building, make it happen! Scribing too!
Draw distance, filtering and item decay (I would hope this would be more along the lines of 3-7 days than 10 minutes) can help a lot with performance concerns. Generic item models are acceptable if that is what it takes, but again, not something that should really be an issue in the long run.
Not being able to leave books on a shelf (if/when scribing becomes a thing) would be a travesty for the kind of world building I think a lot of people want to take part in. Not being able to leave notes in discrete locations for others to find and read or respond to would also be a big loss, particularly if you could leave a contract laying around in this way.
A lot of entity systems advertise millions of entities on screen at any given time, and that is just for what the client can render, nevermind that the server is doing pure simulation. Each hex is going to have its own server instance, a few thousand extra entities on the ground should be relatively trivial per hex. Even though it would add up across the board, it would be doing so for a great reason.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I enjoyed "cast off" collecting as a safe way to get some gold when starting a new character in UO. If I remember correctly (not positive here), they didn't have timers on loose items. The items persisted until the daily "server down" maintenance. Maybe the timers for thousands of junk items is most of the problem? Then again, detailed rendering was not a "requirement" then, as it is now.
Didn't someone mention "little brown bags" further up?
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Goblin Squad Member
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It depends on how tightly GW wants to work character Reputation and associations.
They could, for example, have some Reputation mechanic that kicks in when a low Rep character does a face-to-face trade with a high Rep character. So when Louie Low-Rep can't enter a town to sell his goods, he logs on his second character, Susie Stalwart to act as his fence. But when she trades face-to-face with Louie, she takes some Rep hit for "associating with persons of low repute." (It only needs to affect the higher Rep individual; Louie doesn't gain Rep in the trade.) Eventually, Susie can't enter town either.
If (a big If) they want to control Rep like that, they might make dropping items to the ground impossible.
It would be pretty interesting to see the effects resulting from a large test of such a mechanic. The trading affect on Rep thing...
"Relative" Homogeny or Pariah culture?