Concept — LootFeed

LootFeed — creative concept

Historical identity: Octo Loot → Loot Feed.

Giving rewards a moment on screen

LootFeed is a small interface experiment about the feeling of getting something. The ordinary game chat tells a player what was looted, but that information is easy to lose while traveling, fighting and talking. This addon makes those moments briefly visible in a compact stack of softly animated notifications. Rarity colors, item art, quantities, money denominations and genuine quest-item labels are placed close together without taking over the game.

The default design has five short rows for regular loot, set against a dark translucent backing, with a small entrance pop, smooth vertical movement and a fade-out. The player can move the anchor, choose direction and adjust scale and duration. Hovering pauses the stack so an item can be inspected. It is a deliberately temporary visual memory, not an inventory manager or an item database.

The initial September 8 release already carried this visual identity. The exact original brainstorming conversations are not present in the inspected Git history; Babuni.dev retains authorship of the creative direction. This document describes the result rather than inventing an origin scene.

From receiving loot to understanding group decisions

On September 11 the addon expanded beyond personal loot. A group Need/Greed/Pass roll is a shared decision whose details often disappear into the combat or chat stream. LootFeed added extra, longer-lived roll rows with a small drawn die. Hovering the die reveals names, choices and roll numbers; once the outcome arrives, the winner is shown directly on the row.

This is an important change in scope. Five short personal notifications are a stream. Roll decisions need state over time and sometimes more than five visible rows. Rather than replacing Blizzard's buttons or triggering a roll for the player, LootFeed observes the game's roll events and messages, preserving the player's agency.

Make uncertainty visible

Vanilla loot chat contains an item link but not a unique roll identifier for every identical concurrent drop. The implementation does not pretend to match a player's response to one indistinguishable copy. It marks those cases as ambiguous in the tooltip.

Similarly, a missing winner does not justify inventing one. The row can say “Ended (result unavailable)” when the original deadline is exceeded. If a late genuine result arrives, that status is provisional and may be updated. When a local roll prompt closes, that is not automatically evidence that the group has completed the roll.

The small interface thus carries a broader creative principle: give the player useful feedback without claiming knowledge the client does not provide.

The project's boundaries

LootFeed doesn't auto-roll, compare another player's fairness, rank loot recipients, redistribute items, or save an archival database of group behavior. It uses old-client Lua UI primitives and optional local chat hiding, with all remaining item/roll decisions made through normal game UI.

Potential improvements—reduced motion, more localization or different roll privacy—remain options for Babuni.dev rather than approved changes. The portfolio should show this as a compact interaction-design work, not expand it into a conventional loot-management dashboard without permission.

Document information