The perfect looting system: looking for a Phoenix?

Massively Multiplayer Online (Role-Playing) Games (MMORPGs and MMOs) are highly complex socio-technical distributed systems. The thickly knitted web of relations among players is the backbone upon which their success (or failure) lies. For this reason, both game designers and managers should be aware of how - even the thinnest - features of the environment will impact on players. We can enlist among these apparently “minor” aspects Looting Systems (LSs), which help allocating valuable in-game objects, as fairly as possible, among the players. In the present work, we try to cast some light on the medium/long term effects of the adoption of different LSs on players' satisfaction (and hence on their “fidelity” to a specific game service). We adopt an agent-based approach to simulate the effects and drawbacks of LSs on different player bases (according to Bartle's player types), demonstrating that a relation among LSs and players' satisfaction with the game service could really exists, and that an appropriate choice of the LS could affect the distribution of player types in the game community, thus offering hints for reflection and further investigation to MMOs/MMORPGs developers.