Loot Distribution in Massive Online Games: Foreseeing Impacts on the Players Base

In these last years, we have assisted to a skyrocketing diffusion of Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs or MMOGs). In these environments, which are complex socio-technical distributed systems, a huge amount of players interact to have fun and develop their characters. Looting Systems (LSs) help allocating valuable in- game objects, as fairly as possible, among the participating players. The medium/long term effects of the adoption of different Looting Systems on players have not yet been adequately investigated, in spite of the fact that they could impact heavily on players' satisfaction and hence on their "fidelity" to a specific game service. In the present work, we simulate the impact of several LSs on different players base, offering hints for reflection and further investigation to MMOs developers.