Amusing GW2 review - light profanity

Within a fantasy setting, I can see where the vendor trash loot comes from. It is not uncommon for D&D players (let’s face it, most fantasy MMO designers are crazy about D&D) to collect as much loot as they can carry, and after the play session is over go to town to attempt to sell the loot to make as much money as they can. It's just part of those games and the sense of victory to play the whole "and in the morning, they sold their loot" thing.

Despite how action oriented these games go, at their core they are just trying to streamline the feel and satisfaction they are used in D&D, and this is something they feel must be part of any such game.

I don't like it, but I can see why it's there on almost all fantasy MMO.

Still no clue why it even exists in TOR, though. Even with companions taking care of it... it still is a chore that has no room in the Star Wars universe.

Didn't Anakin sell his loot (pod racer) before heading off for Jedi training? He gave the proceeds to his mom, but still.

Didn't Luke sell his speeder and other junk to buy passage on the Millenium Falcom?

I don't know that I agree that selling your salvaged goods has no place in Star Wars. It's not the main activity of the heroes, but it happens.

Did they do this after every single fight? After the battle in that icy planet of the Hoth system, did Luke start picking up useless junk loot from the defeated enemies that he then sold to buy a ride to another planet?

Selling the old pod racer, or old speeder is more akin to selling your trustworthy equipment and possessions. They had meaning; they were never "junk loot".

Even all the junk at Watto's shop was useful parts that can be used up to build or fix droids. But junk loot? The kind of loot that is only useful to dump into a vendor?

I agree selling useful stuff is not only something that fits the Star Wars universe, but it's the core of the existence to the extremely highlighted smuggler profession. But the key there is "useful stuff". Things others will find meaning on.

I might have dozed off during that part of the movie, but I don't recall Luke heading into town to sell all the bantha ears and tusken raider gall bladders he'd been collecting in the Jundland Wastes.

Then again, I've also never seen a D&D group do this. Valuable stuff like magic items? Sure. Wolf teeth and troll phlegm? Not so much. I'm very happy I didn't play in the D&D group of the Developer who thought that was the norm.

To be fair, TOs dropping at level 30+ are vendor trash. Thankfully we got rid of that (mostly?)

Fair enough. SOs too, I suppose on an IO'd 50... but there sure is a lot less of it then the stuff I get that is actually labelled 'this item has no use, but you can sell it to a vendor' that constantly comes to me SWTOR

And the image of a Jedi bending down to loot someone is just... peculiar to say the least.

I did have a necromancer that had some... interesting... body looting practices in one campaign. But I was only ever getting spell components.

Actually, probably 70% of the recipes that drop, a good bit of the salvage, and all the enhancements that drop for my characters are, for the most part, thrown on the CH or a vendor. I'm constantly having my trays/tabs fill up and flash red at me until I can stop and take the time to go throw them away. I IO my characters frankenslotted at 22, then at 35 then at 40, so almost nothing that drops for me is anything other than vendor trash.

A lot of the junk loot in SWTOR does appear to have a use. Not to the player, but in the secondhand market sure. Exotic animal parts fetch high prices here in the real world. I can't imagine what uses there could be for a Nexu Claw!

For me it depends on how convenient they make it. If I have to go find some special NPC to do it, I get really annoyed, but when every vendor can do it, it's fine.

Sure, but if it's realism we're going for, you should have to track down someone interested in Nexus Claws, instead of just selling them to the nearest baker.

I mean, I get the core idea of "trash loot". Really. It's much more realistic for a wolf to drop a 'wolf tooth' worth six coppers, than it is for the wolf to drop six coppers. But... that wolf also dropped a full set of magical platemail, so I think we're already beating 'realism' in the face with a shovel as it is.

Yes, very true - WoW does this right and GW2 doesn't. Diablo 3 also gets this right. I forget what other games use at the moment.

CoH does it best. *sniff*

In general, I find it problematic when non-intelligent creatures drop magical items. No problem when a dragon (or similar intelligent creature) does it, because hoarding treasure is their bag. But otherwise, no.

Actually... no, it doesn't. The game still rips you off if you take SOs to a vendor it isn't intended for.

How is that? With both COH and GW2 you have to find the nearest shopkeeper to sell your stuff, or go to the auction house to sell it to a player. The only difference is that in GW2 you can put stuff on the AH or in your bank from ANYWHERE in the world, where in COH you can only do that if you've earned enough vet rewards.

(Gotta say, getting /vault and /auctionhouse made my game SO MUCH BETTER, I was thrilled to see that functionality baked into GW2)

I think, in general, we are speaking more of the trash loot than the auction/marketable items. CoH had it sorta with TO/SO, but those were at least slottable and usable depending on your circumstances and were a holdover from pre-IO days to a large extend.

And as I pointed out, once IOs were added, ALL enhancement drops became (potentially) vendor trash (seriously, I still get DOs into my 40s, wtf is that about?) as well as about 70% of the recipes which aren't worth making or CHing, and a good portion of the super-common salvage drops. COH is NOT exempt from vendor trash. It has buttloads. Sure, the COH vendor trash is theoretically usable, the way a grey "goopy goo" trash drop isn't, but anyone who's been playing COH has vendored more Trap of the Hunter recipes than they could count :P

Expand that please a bit more.... TO's were usable by anyone... however DO's and SO's were *not* usable by everyone.

Before the market came along, i spent more time vendoring the stuff that i could not use or just destroying them (thanks for limited storage guys!)

They were potentially usable - just randomly dropping on someone that couldn't happen to use them.

Not an ideal by any means. But better, IMO, than other games' loot drops that have no purpose (for crafting or power slotting or what have you) other than specifically existing for no reason other than vending.

Yep, and I think I'd already alluded that too. I never said CoH was perfect, but those from the get-go no possible value except to carry and vend items are just so shake-the-head silly from a game play/design stand point.

...I was responding to a comment about repairing gear. Or, rather, I was responding to a response to EvilGeko's comment on gear repair. If that's not what we're talking about, then go ahead and ignore me.

(Also, I suppose you could consider enhancement degeneration a form of gear degeneration, which was absolutely horrible before IOs were introduced.)

Haha, oh, the memories of making sure you returned EACH DO/SO DROP to the correct vendor, to try and scrape together enough inf to replace all your red SOs...

I remember when a high-level friend dropped 1mil inf on me. It was like HEAVEN. I almost replaced all my SOs with green!

On the topic of vendor trash, I was referring mostly to grey items that you can't use. Not, say, a blue item that you just have no use for (which you could always sell to someone else, or give to an alt or whatever).

Most of the IO drops fall into this category. I think the worst offender in CoH were the TO/DO drops when you were way past their level. And I know they introduced a fix so they eventually stopped dropping when you were far ahead of their usefulness. Maybe that fix didn't get far enough, but at least it's a developer acknowledging an annoyance factor.

Honestly, considering the number of good ideas and overall convenient systems in GW2, I was a little disappointed that they had retained the vendor trash tradition.

I should note, however, that if I'm occasionally fairly harsh on GW2, it's because they have set the bar pretty high. And in a few situations they decided to limbo under it.