I'll make this post pretty later for people who tune out my walls-o-text, it's coming.
Optimally enemy groups of 3, each has a drop chance of:
Group 1: Crafting activation/reagent requirement item (Ashes will probably use Currency here, unfortunately imo)
Group 2: Same
Group 3: Progression (personal or in some games Trade-enabling) item (Recipes are ok here). This can include food ingredients, especially on early/weak enemies
Group 4: Material or weak gear piece, or reroll of some other lower group (to simplify something related to recipe drops)
Group 5: Good Material or stronger gear pieces, or reroll of some other group (can only drop to one person in a group so this only 'rolls' once per mob)
All groups have independent chances of 'being rolled at all', and those are the chances that 'can be set' most easily while still allowing for some defaults within the groups.
i.e. you can set a default of 'if the players get a Group 5 roll at all, generally they will get a 50% chance of a material, 30% chance of a reroll of a lower group, and 20% chance of a good gear drop', but then can easily set 'the chance of Group 5 roll' from a specific mob or mob type separately, leading to less work.
From my data the psychological effect of this, if the Group 5 droprate is set to 10-15%, is that the playergroups get one good drop on average every 3 groups, i.e. every 9-15 mobs. If intending to reduce droprates for over/underleveled characters, can easily drop by 2-3% per level 'over'.
Progression items that double as Trade Enabling items are optimal, on the principle that it lowers the falloff of player satisfaction relative to drops as they get closer to the end of base progression, allowing designers to 'delay' needing to add new ones or create zones where players can receive progression items that are not helpful in any way. This also allows development to limit the 'vertical progression' of certain types of progression/crafting related item, e.g. the problem of 'these low level enemies drop this Green Grade Fuel and these high level ones drop a 100x stronger Purple Grade Fuel, which both have the same purpose'.
The tuning of the droprate dropoff is up to the gameplay, the optimal feeling for my group seems to be 'Together we kill these enemies in just over 45s if all focused on one at a time' (i.e. they do die relatively quickly if focused, around 15-20s each, but just AoE is risky). For solo those same enemies take 45s each even if you manage to pull them all separately. This fits with the 'usual' concept of 3 main highly boosted DPS contributing 80% of the damage, with the alternatives being '2 full DPS, 3 Hybrids, 1 Support' and the popular 'Tank, 3 AoE DPS, 2 Full Support'. This paragraph is obviously biased to games that use 6-person rather than 8-person groups. In an 8-person group we'd just start one enemy group and start moving to another when only 1 enemy is left (or 2 are left but one is very low).
Players in my group like to get a notable drop
for the group
(let's assume only 'good gear' counts here) from 'meaningful' enemies every 7-10 minutes
when all together and committed to a full adventure
. 0.15 *.20 is 3% droprate, and in 10 minutes, roughly 18 enemies fall. Technically this is still slightly 'too much' for us, because MMO Droprates outside of pure progression are always relative to the drops the rest of the playerbase is getting.
To clarify what I mean by 'Trade Enabling' item, in a complex game like Ashes it is 'whatever allows you to put the items you collect into a caravan'. I'm not sure what this should be in Ashes exactly, but Glint is 'fine'. FF11 doesn't have this because it's Free Trade style with a mostly-fixed core economy loop (back in the day, still works on Private Servers, I'm told). BDO doesn't have this because it controls all prices. Throne and Liberty doesn't have this because it doesn't have the ability to sell Gathered items yet since one
must limit bots
. I cannot stress enough how much you must work this around bots. TL would have to use Precious Omnipotence Parchment and then remove it from every open-world mob so that you could only get this 'use item to prep other items for trade' from Dungeons, and
even this
would still require some additional dangers being added to some dungeons to stop most bots (but the Eclipse holder on the server would get to go bot-hunting again which would be a ... plus?). Point is, seed packets, wood bundles, wrapped fish, all this stuff is the stuff you connect to 'a non-tradeable item that is used to make tradeable items' which you can then control because it does wonders for your
monitoring
of the bots that appear as soon as someone thinks 'I can just grind forever and sell things to other players?!'. Ashes already has the right ideas of 'making this dangerous' and 'hinging it on a specific non-tradeable', I'm just saying that the non-Tradeable item should double as a progression item and therefore Glint is ok for this purpose. It'd be better for the economy if it didn't have an NPC value at all (note I didn't add 'in my opinion' there) but Ashes doesn't yet have any equivalent 'use Glint to progress in a way that caps out' mechanic (Social Orgs could work) implemented.
And since it bears repeating yet again, we also prefer that even the material drops make sense for the mob or gathering point. Seeds and fibers from plants, meat and hide from beasts, weird reagents and trinkets from incorporeal undead, bone and old armor/jewels from corporeal undead, random stones from Golems, etc. To help distinguish areas and drops beyond 'go here for a chance at this gear drop'. Experience tells us that this doesn't work because it causes the wrong mindset/incentive for the player, they go thinking about a thing they want and end up disappointed at filling their inventory with 'random junk' instead of 'going with the aim of getting seeds to grow or sell and 'being happy when they also get a good drop'.
Do seeds count as something that drops when another player kills you? Ah well.