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.