Loot Biasing Deep Dive

newworld.com:

Greetings, Adventurers!

Loot Biasing offers you better drops to complement your current equipment. Join Lead Seasons Designer Patrick Smedley and Systems Designer Blake Philley for a technical overview of how it works, the development process, and more.

Loot Biasing is a system that gives you more loot geared towards on your current character’s equipment. It focuses on two of the biggest pain points for players—Attribute Perks and item type (things like armor weight class of armor and specific weapons).

Our primary goal was to reduce bad feeling results. Stuff like “I keep seeing Great Axes but the only weapons I use are an Ice Gauntlet and a Fire Staff” or “how am I supposed to use this new chestpiece? It has Focus on it, but I’m a damage dealer and don’t use any Focus on my character.” Those moments don’t feel great, especially after going through difficult content like Mutators or competitive modes like Arenas and Outpost Rush.

We understood our loot system was great at giving lots of stuff, just not always the items you specifically wanted. So, our implementation focused on removing less desirable options. We made other changes in the past as a guideline. For example, weapons previously had a pretty equal chance to drop with any Attribute Perk, even ones that wouldn’t be useful for their scaling. We couldn’t really do that in practice for all loot in the game, but it was a helpful starting point.

Loot biasing focuses the odds of certain item types from your potential drops. For instance, if an AI out in the world can drop any weapon from a bucketed source (a type of generic ‘container’ that we can attach to a loot roll so that there are lots of potential options when you get loot from a specific source) then loot biasing comes in and actually removes certain entries from that bucket. Let’s say you have a Great Axe and a War Hammer equipped, then that bucket of potential weapons becomes weighted towards Great Axes and War Hammers.

It’s a complex balancing act