Emeralds In Loot Chests Are Flawed And Here's Why

Hey all,

Wanted to do this thread to spread some awareness of how many potential mythics you've probably lost over the course of your lootruns.

A long time ago JPresent added a clause to loot chests that prevented newly generating loot from overwriting things already in it. (even though this is the cause of our problem, its still better than the alternative of having good potential gear overwritten by a random emerald)

As the chest fills up over time, the most common thing you will find is. of course-- Emeralds! however because they are as common as they are, they fill all the chest slots relatively fast, preventing further loot from generating in the chest. this problem is escalated further by emeralds having a certain stubbornness to stack above 32, they will do it if forced to, but will much prefer to start taking up another slot in the chest with a smaller stack.

Loot bonus multiplies the quantity of all items in the chest equally, but because of how emeralds act currently, they have a scewed advantage when it comes to loot bonus.

Below is an example of a typical full chest (i was running 200% loot bonus when i opened it). notice how prevailent the emeralds are.



There are 3 potential fixes i've thought of, though i strongly encourage everyone to reply with their own solutions. here we go:

1. Force emeralds to stack to 64 before occupying a new chest slot. this would on average, halve the amount of slots in a chest taken up by emeralds. below is an example of the same chest from above, but with fix #1 in place, i hope it conveys the message properly.




2. Remove emeralds from chests entirely. This would obviously remove all potential interference caused by emeralds, but may also have some bad side effects such as deflation, less "useful" loot for newer players, etc.


3. Let chests have an internal priority list to which items should be overwritten. what i mean by this is, when a chest rolls a certain item but the chest is already full, it would check if there's anything in the chest the game would consider less valuable than it, and replace that. emeralds and 1 star ingredients would be at the very bottom of this priority list.


Let me know what you think, personally i think the right solution is employing both fix 1 and 3, but i could be wrong. in any case i hope i got the point of emeralds taking chest slots across.

EDIT 1: I think it would also be cool if ingredients and powders were forced to stack, as one could assume they would start dominating the chest slots after the emeralds were fixed.

 

Good idea but I think the admins are happier if we find less mythics/good items
(imagine you find 2 mythics in 1 chest)

I personally think it would be too powerful if you lootrun a server that's already up for 2-4h and every chest is completly full.

Oh and option 2 would definetly be too powerful

 

I've never thought about this, good idea! I would choose the first option since new players get most of their emeralds from loot chests at the start.

 

I like 1 and 3, but 2 is too far. I think EB should also be a chest drop. Technically that chest has 6 EB in it. Putting 6 EB and 11 E in the chest makes a lot more sense, as it only takes 2 slots. This is especially useful for end-game players. I feel like identifiable items scale really well for loot running, but emeralds in chests have remained mostly the same for a long time. I hope higher level players stop seeing stacks of emeralds and start seeing bundles of EB in their future loot runs. Nice suggestion.

 

Yeah, straight emerald blocks as an extension of forceful 64 stacking would be awesome.

 

In my opinion, emeralds in loot chests are fine. Chests already are the most effective way to find good items and buffing them even further, which this thread is basically suggesting, isn't really needed.

 

Would putting all the non-emeralds in first, and then using the remaining slots for emeralds, work as a #4 solution?

 

That's a good point, but I think this has less to do with emeralds and more to do with nerfs to item buyer prices. People are now incentivized to take a stack of emeralds instead of an item in most cases, and this will likely continue until the upward pressure (versus ceteris paribus) on item market prices compensates for this.

 

Ingredients need to stack to
Finding 5 or 8 of the same stupid 0 or 1 star thing is just bs when its a t3/t4 chest