Isolating Loot From Armor Decay

I'll try and edit tightly. If you're not interested, go have fun.


The background:

The other day I was running around and to get to the point, I wound up at a revive, receiving loot from a shared mob that I had not shot at, killed by a hunter I had not buffed or healed in any way.

I was wearing Mah'ketta and 6a at the shared bot event at Fort Lahar because I was busy in chat and didn't care to deal with the event mobs. I didn't think much of it at first, and my armor was already partially damaged, so I really have no idea how much TT was consumed while I stood around chatting in a hail of minibot fire.

There was no global or anything so I have no idea who killed what mob or how big the multiplier was to generate loot for me after a few shots from a little droka.

I made a joke in chat about getting loot for standing around, and moved on.

The point of this:

Over the next little while I realized that this had some heavy impact on my own thoughts about healing loot, and also some scanner decay testing that another player had discussed with me. I'm not sure how many other test scenarios or data could be changed by this. A few key points:

• This is probably measurable.
• This should be relatively easy to at least prove or disprove with a manageable number of events.
• This would provide another easily controllable way to manage overall TT input into a loot event.
• This has clear implications to test scenarios for things like scanner decay, healer loot, or ???

Other Thoughts:

• This is a clear financial reason for MA to cut any minimum damage or duplicate damage from all armor equations.
  You could feed a cloud of rippersnappers 100 ped of UL armor/plate decay and then rocket tens of multi-ped loot events into 1-5 seconds. This might still be possible. Little atrax, the poor things
• This may have implications, or be a partial explanation, for "This loot is claimed by another player."
• This can't show that team damage share and shared loot damage share are the same system, but it could show that they aren't.

Things To Test For:

• Repeatable binary proof that (some Armor TT) = (some Loot TT) with no other known inputs.
• Verifiable effect seen in team or shared loot damage share.
• Does overall TT output seem to be added, or split. (maybe the hardest to nail down)
• a) Does a vehicle or other accessory serve as well as a suit of armor as TT input?
  b) Does the driver or the owner get the loot?
• Can we generate "This loot is claimed by another player".

Why I'm Posting No Data:

• There may be data please let me know of you have relevant info or links to related testing.
• Others may just have thoughts and I'm interested in discussion.
• I may be missing points that are easily tested for.
• ** I could really use a capable/interested hunter. **

Hunter Wanted:

This is basically going to involve me feeding a lot of armor TT and (maybe) some car TT to a bunch of mobs. I need someone that can kill these mid level and high level mobs, perhaps also some low level ones at a slowish pace while TT is measured and whatnot over a period of time. Quickly and within a few moments of the need.

Nothing to stop you hunting mobs in between but we'll probably shoot a few mobs that aren't best suited to you, and whatever else. I wouldn't be providing ammo for this - the interested shooter will be doing 100% of shooting and looting and will be willing to stop after the kill and share details regarding the per-mob loot. You'll have input into the mobs but they'll need to meet some parameters.

I'm GMT - 7 so matching of flexible hours are best, I'm pretty flexible.

If there's interest and especially if someone wants to do the shooting part we can probably get some answers here pretty quickly and the observations will be shared. If nobody really seems interested then I'll just peck at it on my own

If the addition to the TT input on the loot event is noticeable enough, we might also be able to get some information on whether or not a mob "forgets" TT input, and possibly how long it takes.

I like doin' stuff like that o/

I'm GMT-6

Legends said:

I like doin' stuff like that o/

I'm GMT-6

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I, ahh, corrected the typo in my time zone

I'm grinding some materials back into peds at the moment but I'll drop you a PM soon.

Ha ha! Ok cool, this should be fun!

That makes me remember...

I was out hunting Maffoids. Whilst killing one, got jumped by 4 respawning. Never shot any of them, just let them kill me.

Within the next 5 minutes, I got 4 notices of loot, .03 to 5 PEDS. I guess other hunters killed'em and I got "armor decay" loot.

Scanner decay doesn't seem to get any part of the loot.

We did something along these lines a few days ago. The results were... unremarkable.

Naverith said:

...That makes me remember...

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Yeah I didn't think much of it at first.

Xen said:

Scanner decay doesn't seem to get any part of the loot.

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I wouldn't expect it to. I was trading some crafted scanners for sweat and somebody started talking to me about trying to get bigger scanners, as someone they knew had tested with a couple guys in team, etc...

Completely anecdotal but he was convinced enough to want to do his own testing as well. Scanning was always tt/skill but if it impacts looting, I guess people are gonna check it out.

Haruto Rat said:

We did something along these lines a few days ago. The results were... unremarkable.

Click to expand...

I won't ask for remarks then I'm curious though.

I don't expect much from this, it should just take a few kills to confirm that armor decay alone can repeatably generate loot in both team and shared. "This loot is claimed.." as well. That's my expectation.

It depends on how boring it is it might be worth keeping track of a mob for a little bit and seeing if there's a reasonable timeout before the TT is forgotten. If that works it might give an easier indication than trying to sort it out with loot totals.

I expect zero results from the car but if that shows any effect it will definitely be worth looking into. I've mainly been crafting today but if I ID a mob that can do some fast damage on the car and I can still kill pretty quickly I might give this a shot. Otherwise I'll wait until I can meet up with Legends.

I guess we'll probably use gremlin and 5b the set has a nice tt. If it seems like there's anything worth digging into I have some other armor and plates. Nothing revolutionary will be going on here, I assume.

As long as it's verifiable, it's eventually quantifiable, but I don't plan to dig far into that.

Atrax said:

Scanning was always tt/skill but if it impacts looting, I guess people are gonna check it out.

Click to expand...

if i remember right, Darkaruki tested and found out it is skill per click now.

Orion said:

if i remember right, Darkaruki tested and found out it is skill per click now.

Click to expand...

As far as I know this is how it's been since I joined. Size of the scanner determines TT/click. TT/click determines the size of the skill roll. There's no effect on the scanned object that I'm aware of so no way really to correlate loot.

The logic presented to me was "it directly affects the looting profession so it might be accounted for".

I'm not against anyone trying stuff out, sometimes MA puts in an odd change. If he or his friends wers scanning a mob in a team and then getting loot when the shooter killed it, I suspect they might have been using armor.

I went out with Legends for a while last night, mostly we hunted bots. I would go round up a few and try to hold their aggro near the outside of his range while he picked them off and killed them. No healing or shooting for me, not even healing myself. The results of this session were clear and direct:



Second pic is just a nice multi. We weren't comparing loots per kill during the hunt but whatever multiplier or other factors were applying to the overall loot were roughly consistent. I.E. when he got nice loot, so did I. The team loot log is in my chat log I haven't tried to pull the data out.

We went over to the shared maffoids and dropped the team. I wrecked the early results by shooting a maff. I aggroed another one for a few minutes though, and Good Guy Greg killed it, to this result:



There doesn't seem to be a lot of mystery here at all

- We did not encounter "This loot is claimed by another player." after I aggroed a couple of mobs and he killed them with no team or shared loot. I'm currently assuming that my share of the damage share loot generated by the mob was discarded as I had no valid claim during the loot event. This seems like it would be incredibly difficult to prove and not really worth anything. If anybody thinks otherwise let me know.

- No observable difference between team and shared loot mechanics in this very small sample size. None are expected though and anything else we do will probably mostly be team activity I would think.

- I aggroed a mob and he killed it with no team between us. We joined into a team and he looted the mob. I did receive loot for this so it seems the check on the validity of a claim is made at looting time not shooting time.

• 2018-10-01 03:40:45 [Team] [] Inherent Marxus Legends joined the team.
• 2018-10-01 03:40:56 [Team] [] Atrax received Shrapnel (455).
• 2018-10-01 03:40:57 [Team] [] Legends received Shrapnel (6643).

- It doesn't look like there's currently any ratio or multiplier between TT decay and TT input to the loot other than the normal loot engine effects we see with ammo burn. Again, so far a small sample size. For some reason I was expecting it to be compensated at a significantly reduced rate. I always figured armor decay (loot 1.0) was a fair part of MA's hunting revenue. I wouldn't expect them to just discard that entirely.

- I'm also assuming tt input info is stored on the mob and that loot delivery is a push event, this seems a lot more efficient all around.

Legends and I will probably be doing a few more hunts he wants some observations about healer loot as well as just more data. I might pull the loot record out of the log and see if there seems to be any correlation between our loot amounts but this hunt involved a lot of little bots so there's no information regarding how much damage I deflected per loot event.

- "You deflected x.xx Damage" would be a more useful message but this only matters if the actual ratio is being calculated through a conversion to HP instead of as a direct TT input. If results continue to be consistent it might be worth switching to some low TT (heavily damaged) armor and seeing if there's a change I guess.

If anything interesting comes up, I'll post about it.

Right now it seems like if there's a set of armor you'ld like to burn the TT of, some looted pieces, etcetera you can burn that TT for loot pretty directly, subject to the ups and downs of your hunting. Also for tiering this is good.

It may be something to do with partial TT crafted bits. You can see if there's a multi or two on that TT value between the crafting machine and the TT.

Also it was kind of fun being a human tagger for a while. Legends was encumbered and the spawn was spread out so grabbing a few mobs, holding them ready, bringing a couple in range without getting him mob trained, it's all good skilling and fun. And tiering my armor (I swear I'll tier all these 0.9s one day...). I don't hire out as a healer, but I might be interested in this occasionally as a support role. "Mob Wrangler"

So far there's my thoughts and observations. It' seems there's pretty good compensation for armor decay going on. I heal people randomly but never hire as a healer. I thought I was getting some healer loot at large shared mobs but right now I'm guessing a fair amount of that was armor decay.