Frans Luck Based Loot

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14212

Just wanted to mention that I'm joining the 'Caliper Club' as well. It started a few days ago when I met a naked bandit with only calipers in his inventory. Afterwards I found dozens of bandits with no calipers so I thought it was just a coincidence. Then I closed the Bruma gate and most of the containers in the Oblivion plane had calipers instead of loot (enemies had weapons and armor though). When I went to Sancre Tor the undead legion soldiers all had no weapons and calipers instead...deadly! The containers in Sancre Tor were full of calipers as well. Funny thing is that bandits still wore armor and weapons. I now went to my house and did the 'FranMenu' trick. I reset to defaults, saved the settings and waited for seven days (respawn time is set to 6 days in my setup). So far it seems to work, I only tested for twenty minutes though.

BUT....it would be really great to have a permanent fix for this problem. There has to be a reason why it happens. Some faulty trigger in one of the (unnecessary...grumble) scripts that messes everything up. Otherwise it would happen right from the start or never at all. I had a quick look at the scripts, but unfortunately there are a lot of scripts interacting with each other and the leveled lists, so it's a bit confusing. Why does luck based loot fix it (for some at least)? What does it change? Would be a good starting point to find out why it happens.

I will keep looking into it, hope I can find out why it happens. Problem is that testing a possible fix is almost impossible since you never know whether it will happen or not. Unless you find a bug in the scripts that stands out like a sore thumb.

The one thing that occurred to me was that the scripts have a check in them to make sure the quest is not already running before starting the current round. I assume this is so that each bandit gets to run the quest sequence for himself, then the sequence runs again for the next bandit.

If any of the quests don't get stopped properly, I'd imagine that would prevent them from starting again for any bandit, which would explain why the problem gets progressively worse.

I'd like to see someone write down the quest IDs, and when they see a naked bandit check to see if those quests are running or stopped. If they are running (and they should only run for a few seconds upon entering the cell) while the bandits are naked, stop them and see what happens.

"Is there a mod that lets you use calipers to gouge out your own eyes?"
Roflmao Best quote ever

That sounds like it could be the reason. I will try to wrap my head around it, but like I said, the scripts interactions are a bit confusing to me so far. But seeing whether the scripts are running or not is a good idea for a start.

Since the fransmenu trick with restoring defaults and saving the changes definitely worked for me (didn't find any calipers since then in places where I found almost exclusively calipers before) I've made a quick fix that may or may not help. It simply sets the three variables that are set by using the Fran menu everytime you load a savegame. May not work well with luck based loot (at least the version that takes five minutes to update) and requires OBSE (due to getgameloaded being used):

http://www.mediafire.com/?y2ozkmyxmzl

I don't claim that this helps in all cases. It is just a quick fix for those who had good results with the FransMenu thing and don't want to bother using the console all the time. Obviously you can't use the in game loot adjustment anymore if you use it since it will always be reset to default values on load.