Guild Wars Mini-Interview #15

ArenaNet has answered another small batch of questions about their upcoming Guild Wars, and this time the interview is over at Jeux Online. A snip:

Q: How do the loot’s distribution work ? Is there an automatic distribution ? Does the gold only get looted by monsters or we can find it by exploring the map ? What’s the regular loot rate, will we have lots of loots we can sell or will it be rare to find something other than gold ?

A: Loot comes from monster drops and may also come as a reward for the completion of certain quests. Loot drops do not happen as frequently as gold drops occur, but they happen on a fairly regular basis. The dropping of rare items is pretty unusual though; I haven’t seen one drop in the last several sessions I played. When a rare item drops, it does make people sit up and take notice.

The distribution system works very well in Guild Wars. The system we have at present reserves each dropped item for a certain party member. He or she has a set amount of time, presently about 30 seconds, to claim the item by picking it up. After 30 seconds, the reserved status ends and the item becomes available to anyone who wants it. Now, some of our testers and fans worry about this, and think (What if I’m in the middle of a battle and an item drops, but the battle takes so long that the reservation ends?) The answer is that both in-game chat and messages are logged, and it will be very easy to check the log to learn which party member was supposed to receive a certain item.

At this point, the trade interface for Guild Wars has not yet been finalized, and we’re looking at a bit of time (a few days or weeks at most, I would estimate) before it is incorporated into the game. That interface may play a role in dropped item distribution, but I don’t have details of how that might work. Discussions about the best possible way to divide loot amongst the players on a team have been long and lively on our private alpha forum. It seems that everyone has an opinion about how this should work! From (let everyone grab for the items, and the best grabber wins,) to (keep a reserved system and never let the timer expire,) we’re reading all the thoughts on the systems and will take them into consideration as we complete the final design.