I am currently writing my thesis for my final exam at the university of skövde in sweden. I am to design a loot system with a real cash economy, ie a player can use his debit card to put money into the game and then get loot by using the tools he can buy with his money he deposited, he can then get loot and sell it and if he makes a profit withdraw that money if he so wishes. However gambling is not allowed without a license in sweden so my main point for the thesis is how to get around this. The law says a system like this can not be random as it would then be classified as gambling. I do have quite a few ideas on how to possibly do it but still interested in how other devs would do it. One of my main ideas is that you actually tell the players where loot is with skillgains. Ofcourse this have to be hard to figure out what the skills mean exactly and so on. Any dev has any other ideas how it could be done?

Quote:Original post by NineYearCycle
The site has a general rule (it might even be an official policy) about helping with things that can be considered "homework" which this probably falls into that category!

With that said lets think how we can help! :)

What have you tried so far? This would be good to know just so that our first 30 ideas aren't a repeat of your own.

Second, market forces affecting the price of items aren't random. They're just affected by so many externalities that anyone attempting to predict from within the system is unable to do so reliably/accurately. This is why the markets work, some places can make something cheaper than others due to real world conditions such as labour costs, technology, material cost & availability. If you reflect that in the "game" then you can take a chance on a material, transport from where you bought it cheap, sell it where it's in demand and profit... of course if someone has the same idea then they may get there ahead of you and flood the market thus lowering the value of your material investment. Net result is that you lose money.

This isn't random, it's just not possible for you to predict.

Andy

Edit: "is" vs "isn't"... a slightly different meaning!

well sure it might be considered homework. But i am to research differnt possibilities to do this and thus i need to read and study and i think that studying what others might have done would be the same thing as study a book. Sadly i havent found a single book on the subject of loot systems :P

So far i havent tried anything, i'm mainly just trying different ideas in my head. What i think would be a good way to do it is to in some way using math, perhaps numbersiprals or perlin noise in some form and in layers form "veins" sort of. These veins would then spawn loot multipliers in a grid system. Mobs and ore etc would then be attached to these points so that mobs get a loot value. the more perlin noise in one spot and the more layers the higher the loot would be.

Now to not make it random a player would have different skills, for hunting for example he could have rifle, and damage and weapon usability. These skills would all have differnt meanings. Rifle could for example mean you have loot somewhere in 360* around you in a certain range. Damage could then mean you have loot somewhere 180* in front of you and weapon usability could mean 180* behind you. Then when the player get's a skill and has figured out the system he would know where to go. Ofcourse how often and what skillgains he get would have to be balanced but the balancing is not the important part for my thesis, it's how the system works that's the imporant thing and that it will not break the swedish lotterylaw.

Quote:Original post by Sandman

Quote:Original post by iller
well sure it might be considered homework. But i am to research differnt possibilities to do this and thus i need to read and study and i think that studying what others might have done would be the same thing as study a book. Sadly i havent found a single book on the subject of loot systems :P

Well yes and no. A key difference is that you can't really cite your sources/references on a forum where people are effectively anonymous. Even if people post their real names, there's still an issue of authority. Many - probably most - people posting on this forum are not employed as games designers. Many are not even in the industry at all. Many are not even out of school yet. Citing a 14 year old student who may have no practical experiences of actually designing games doesn't sound very impressive in your references section, regardless of how good that student's ideas may be.

For that reason, I think it would be better for people to limit their replies in this thread to information about where to find suitable resources, e.g articles, books, existing games etc.

well i wont be citing anyone from here, i'm merely looking for ideeas on how to approach the problem.

Quote:Original post by Tom Sloper

Quote:Original post by iller
well sure it might be considered homework. But i am to research differnt possibilities to do this and thus i need to read and study and i think that studying what others might have done would be the same thing as study a book.

That's a stretch. Your assignment is to read and analyze, but you're asking us to write "on demand" (on request) the reading that you need to analyze, and that's an attempt to force a loophole in the rule.
You have to look at other games, read up on how their systems work, and work out this problem for yourself.

well the thing is there is one other game doing this concept, and nothing is written about making a real cash loot system. So i sort of have to come up with ideas myself. But we are allowed to get design "help" from a teacher at the school so in my eyes this could be considered the same thing sort of. I'm not asking for a full write up of a system, just some basic ideas on how it could work and what you think of my ideas and such.