I’m wondering if when players are looting it should be local or server-side?
Local
Let’s say Player1 loots a storage container, and now that loot is gone for them. But now Player2 can also loot the same storage container and it will have different loot.
Serverside
Let’s say Player1 loots a crate, and now that loot is gone for them. But now Player2 can’t loot the same crate and will have to wait for it to respawn
Locally may seem more fair for multiple players, but looting an overpowered area could give an unfair advantage to those who don’t have teammates causing them to get less loot it.
On the other hand, server-side play may not seem as fair causing teammates to get overall less loot, but it allows solo players to have a fair advantage and seems more realistic.
Which do you think is better for overall gameplay?
Server looting is way better than Client Looting, for many reasons.
One of the Main Reason’s People recommend Using the Server for this is because of Exploiters, Its best to take in that the Client is never accurate, or Correct with its Calculations, or with their Data, as the Stuff there can basically be altered by the Player, The Server would better Handle these than the Client ever will, as the Server is more Secure, and Players cannot Manipulate the Server.
Exploiters can just simply say to “Pick up” the item from very far away, or obtain ilegal Items while doing so, even with RemoteEvents its not secure, you would Have to Check a multitude of things to make sure that what the Client says is true.
Plus, with this System, People can just simply loot the Crate without the Fear of someone taking it, and with the Items gained, they can just give it to each other as an Advantage.
Another Thing, For your “Explanation” about the reason on the Advantages and Disadvantages, They arent really good reasons on why you should or shouldn’t use either, It’s not meant to be fair, it is more of a Luck Based system, you find it, or you dont, you either take it, or someone else will.
If Everybody can pick up a Item, then your Looting System will effectively be useless, as anybody who finds the Loot will have an infinite Amount of it, along with other people. you are intended to find objects that are hard to find, and you would have to continuously look for that item until you have enough, an Infinite Amount would remove that grinding, and make your game not as fun or challenging.
I wouldn’t use Local looting, as exploiters can access any local scripts and values, pretty much everything except non-local scripts, ServerScriptService and ServerStorage. And to use those, you need RemoteEvents which exploiters could easily just fire over and over to get endless loot. So this system could be easily abused to gain tons of loot unless you have a solid anti-cheat in place.
Server-sided may seem unfair, but players can always go to a different location, or join another server, or allow sharing of items, and if you have private servers for free they could use that too (only if it gets very bad). Just make sure the loot is not sparsely spread, and spawns in random locations so it can’t be camped and you should be good to go.
If you’re careful with how you manage local looting (to avoid exploiters and such by enforcing rules on the server, and periodically checking the data with the server), you can possibly use local looting for low-value loot, and server looting for others. This may also improve how the game’s economy works, and encourages players to work harder for high-value loot since it’s rarer.
You could do a fully server-sided system with locally-sided functionality by storing a list of players that have looted the treasure. Then, when a player loots the treasure, before awarding the loot, check if the player has already looted the treasure.
This allows every player to loot the stuff, while keeping all the logic server-side, preventing exploitation. It may not be the most performant to store every player that looted the treasure on that server, but it most likely would not affect the player.
You could also attach a time stamp to each of the values holding the player userid/name in the looted list, so the loot would reset for each player individually.
