Trivial Loot Code

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Trivial Loot Code (or TLC) was an attempt to enforce a higher degree of roleplaying in the popular game EverQuest. In essence, the Trivial Loot Code made reward items from successful battles to be only retrievable by players of levels appropriate for that battle. It was designed to curtail slumming (high level players lazily collecting low level items as a means of quick cash), farming (repeatedly killing targets to collect items, often wasting an entire zone for lower characters), and ninja looting (uninvolved players harassing others by stealing their loot rewards).

The TLC was introduced into the Warrens zone on live servers. It proved to be a disastrous experiment, causing many heated debates in the player community. Many felt that players had a right to kill and loot whatever they could handle, no matter how trivial of a battle it may be for them. Others felt that the significant amount of griefing being experienced by lower characters was indicative of a problem requiring resolution.

The TLC was eventually dropped from the Warrens zone on all live servers, and was reborn as server-wide policy on the various "Roleplaying Preferred" (special rules) servers.

[edit] Cause and effect

In MMORPG's players strive to get better gear and equipment for their character, by going through dungeons and slaying some kind of boss monster and loot it for whatever good items it might have. If it is possible to find good items for a low or mid level character in a certain low or mid level dungeon, it will be a good incentive for a low or mid level character to go to this dungeon and try to get the desired item. It sounds obvious that a player would like to be rewarded to go through any kind of dungeon, but what happens when a high level character can go through the dungeon without any trouble? This makes it possible for the high level character to just grind the low level dungeons for a lot of these good low level items.

When a high level player starts putting this once rare item up for sale or just giving it to lower level characters, the dungeon starts to have less and less value for appropriately leveled players. In order to find better equipment, they will be forced to run dungeons that are much tougher or simply grind to the endgame. Furthermore, once rare item is being sold en masse its value will drop rapidly, resulting in an inflation of the game's economy. The high level grinding player gets money too easily and the lower level players will have no incentive to go to any dungeon.

To solve this you could remove attractive gear and equipment from lower level dungeons, but then again the lower level players will have no incentive to go to a dungeon and will likely just grind to the highest level and not enjoying the process of getting there.

A possible (and much disputed) solution is to introduce a Trivial Loot Code. This is a technique that prevents good loot from dropping from a monster if the player who killed it was several levels higher than the intended level for the area or monster in question. This is to prevent Twinking in any way that will ruin the game experience for lower level players, or inflate the player economy.

Another solution is what Blizzard has implemented in World of Warcraft, called Bind on Pickup (BOP). This means that once the player picks up the rare loot, it is bound to that character and cannot be sold or passed on to anyone else, including their own twinks. This means that if a player wants the item, they MUST be there when the monster is killed.