This is correct. Section IDs being awful is one of the very few things that (as far as I know) we all 100% agree on.
That said, I do like how PSO handled common drops; look at the drop charts on PSUpedia sometime, practically every monster below level 100 (and several above!) have their entire chart filled exclusively with 1-9* weapons, often boards. Not only does this mean that progression was entirely
backwards for much of PSU's life (grind until you hit 80 so you can start to find... items that you really could've used 40 levels before?), but various areas ended up dropping only two or three weapon types at a time (bear in mind, a given block will have no more than 4-5 enemy types in it, and most missions shared at least a few monsters between all their blocks and were in the 2-3 block range), and... yeah. Not really good for anyone. The PSP2/i system seems like a nice compromise, although it'll still likely have the same problems PSO's drop system would in that AotI standard really doesn't have that many rare items.
Krigo wrote:If it's also possible I'd like to bring in a lot of the event exclusive reward and trading items into usual play with lower percentages. Why? This promotes the idea of everyone being able to freely obtain an item but at the same time it doesn't take away the rarity of the item. Of course, we're talking very low percentages for extremely overpowered items but it's something that would add far more variety into the free missions of the game.
Percents are getting
heavily nerfed compared to PSU/AotI (having not played the portable games, I can't really compare for them). They were the single most overwhelming stat in all of PSU, to the point where even the weakest possible striking-focused race/class combination (female newman acrotecher, for the record) would need a weapon with at least 516 ATP in order to do more damage than a 50% element
0 ATP weapon. Doesn't seem like all that much, but... this is the absolute lowest value, and there are still weapon types that never reach that point (or don't until high grinds, high rarities, or both).
Sakarisei: PSU's way of handling item drops is no more intrinsic to the game than any other system is. This early in the planning stages, almost anything is likely to take just as much effort to implement.