The serious itemloot poll

[greatdane]

I always take itemloot to mean the traditional "one of the victim's items, not their primary/secondary slot". Looting an entire player corpse is an absurd notion. Even one item per death causes a number of problems, though. I won't go into another long-winded post about each of those problems, but the point is that the actual Everquest game isn't designed for itemloot to make sense.

If you gained levels and items through PvP, and if obtaining a good item didn't generally take such a huge amount of time and effort, I'd be all for itemloot. It would fit right in if the PvP game had something like:

- 10 zones with a base in each
- 3 hardcoded teams
- No real PvE game except maybe a few mob camps so you had the option of leveling alone in case you're online when there's no PvP at all
- Each base can be conquered by a team. Members of any given team are allowed to cash in x amount of items per RL week based on how they held bases that week, with a minimum of something like 3 items per week so you aren't completely fucked if your team is weak
- XP is gained primarily from PvP, with a few caveats such as no XP from someone you've already killed in the last 30 minutes

That's the kind of environment where itemloot would be great. When the itemization source is in the PvP gameplay and you aren't completely fucked if you're the underdog, the concept of winning/losing items through PvP is perfect. Not when levels and items are obtained exclusively through PvE and many classes can end up incapable of really doing PvE by losing their items in PvP. With a system that feeds items into the game on a regular basis, people - and especially players who are new to PvP or play weak classes - won't be so fiercely discouraged from participating in PvP. To counter mudflation, it could have a kind of tribute system as seen later in EQ where you could turn items in for an amount of points, and those points could then be spent on more powerful (but still droppable and/or temporary) items to gain a compromisable advantage if you do well in PvP.

I'd play the shit out of a server like that, and if I knew how to make a custom server and had the means to run it, I'd even make it myself. In classic Everquest, however, I don't think itemloot has a place.