142519-world-boss-pve-contract-the-rant

== Content ==
			Okay, so today I've noticed this nice 450 point PVE contract that stated: "Kill Metal Maw in Deradune, King Honeygrave in Auroria, Dreamspore in Ellevar, or Zoetic in Wilderrun" 450 points. This is one of the most problematic contracts that I've ever seen. And the points that it rewards is far too long to be worth doing. As to why? Let me explain:1. 3 out of 4 bosses are dominion bosses. Meaning as an exile, you travel over the sea in order to land in enemy territory to constantly patrol trough 3 zones. One of which is only accessible if you cross Illium. 2. Unlike Guild Wars 2 world bosses that spawn every 2 hours, these world bosses spawn once 24 hours. Meaning you can find this contract and get REALLY lucky. If you pick it up just at the right time and your factor has found one and decided to kill it, awesome! It's worth pretty much exactly what it says it will award you! wait.. Now what happens if you're outside that spawn time? What if the world boss has already been killed? Well fret not, as there are things called "progenitor access particles". You kill 5 man enemies and once in a while your party will get a drop. The problem:in 15 minutes of farming in a 5 man party going 5 man mob to mob we got 1 (!) drop. You know how many you need to summon the boss? 75. This IS the kind of grind that people are talking about. The kind that give very little reward for farming HOURS upon HOURS upon HOURS. What do you get for farming spiders all day? You get to do a 450 point PVE contract. That won't reward you any more than other PVE contracts, such as completing events that are up approximately every 2 hours. Proposed solutions:1. Spawn world bosses on a 2 hour to a 6 hour timer. If spawning is consistent, someone will make an API to track it, or even better, do as ArenaNet did and put a timer up on your website. "King Honeygrave spawns every 6 hours, at 12 UTC, 18 UTC, 24 UTC, 6 UTC.". There you go. You immediately made it clear for your players when to seek a boss out if they need it. Meaning that you could miss the spawn and it would still be humanly possible for you to plan your time in such a way to be there for the next spawn. 2. Reduce the amount of progenitor access particles needed or increase their drop rate. You won't have the whole server killing the same spiders for hours. Realistically you will have a 10 to 20 man group (the folks that want to kill the world boss in the first place) doing this for at most an hour before they give up. 3. Include ALL world bosses in said contract. Why as exiles do we have to fight our way to dominion territory to circle their world bosses when the world has like 20? With each having close to 24 hour respawn time, it would be much more sane for a megaserver to be hunting different world bosses, instead of everyone circling the same one. 4. With these steps implemented, increase the rewards for doing said world bosses. Why do people run world bosses in Guild Wars 2? Because it's profitable. Will I get more loot for killing Aggregor that forms multiple times an hour even in Crimson Badlands, or the 20 man Metal Maw that I'll need to cross Illium for that spawns once every 24 hours? Aggregor. Well something isn't right in this system then, isn't it?	
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or why not get a group going and collect the items to force spawn one of the bosses... just sayingAlso the contracts also include 1 that have the WB in the exile continent, the dominion face the same struggle, this helps to people to make incursions into enemy territory. World bosses are gonna be killed however,  because they drop the BiS items before GA gear (itm lvl 90)
 
Maybe lowering  the amount or getting more drop percentaje would be good but the other is just unnecesary	
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			24 hour spawn rate? man that's gotta sting >.<	
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A couple of notes:
 
There are teleporters in Wilderrun for Exile (their foothold on Olyssia) and Whitevale for Dominion (their foothold on Alizar) that will take you close to the world bosses in hostile territory on those respective continents. No need to jump through hoops to get to them. We knew this would be concerning for folks and made sure you could get there hassle-free without dodging guards.
 
We're also taking a look at the drop rate of the particles, so you're aware.
 
Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass it along to the other multiplayer guys.	
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or why not get a group going and collect the items to force spawn one of the bosses... just saying
 
Also the contracts also include 1 that have the WB in the exile continent, the dominion face the same struggle, this helps to people to make incursions into enemy territory. World bosses are gonna be killed however,  because they drop the BiS items before GA gear (itm lvl 90)
 
Maybe lowering  the amount or getting more drop percentaje would be good but the other is just unnecesary
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My bigger issue with world bosses right now - the group that tags it gets the loot. So, you can farm farm farm for those particles, another group comes along at the end. They get first hit on the boss, and you get nadda (except the individual loot bag). None of the stuff the WB drops shows up for your group if you don't tag it first. THAT sucks.
 
I like that it's spawnable. I do agree it could use a tweak to drop numbers, so you don't have to farm quite so looooong.	
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			With the removal of exceptional runes from contracts they are just not worth the time investment anymore. The only reason I ran them before was so I could rune batter in my gear, but as usual Carbine have neglected to recognize this.	
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or why not get a group going and collect the items to force spawn one of the bosses... just saying
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or why not get a group going and collect the items to force spawn one of the bosses... just saying
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			I've pretty much written the world boss contract off as one I'll never get done. -_-;	
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I agree that World Bosses should be on a consistent and faster spawn timers. The only way I could get this done the last time it popped up was by constantly watching a well populated player-made channel. Some folk were nice enough to call people to the boss they were summoning. I imagine having a large-ish guild would work similarly, too.
But that doesn't really solve the 'grind mobs for a 75 things you need for a contract and little else'. Do those drop from any level 50 Prime or just from the ones in the Designated Particle Areas? Me and a couple of friends ran into one of those areas and I think we got a grand total of 7 in about half an hour, maybe? I can't tell exactly because we had to pause in the middle of it for dinner, so take it with a grain of salt.	
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or why not get a group going and collect the items to force spawn one of the bosses... just saying
 
Also the contracts also include 1 that have the WB in the exile continent, the dominion face the same struggle, this helps to people to make incursions into enemy territory. World bosses are gonna be killed however,  because they drop the BiS items before GA gear (itm lvl 90)
 
Maybe lowering  the amount or getting more drop percentaje would be good but the other is just unnecesary
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			As you come of the port in Wilderrun you will see a building being built, they are behind that.	
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A couple of notes:
 
There are teleporters in Wilderrun for Exile (their foothold on Olyssia) and Whitevale for Dominion (their foothold on Alizar) that will take you close to the world bosses in hostile territory on those respective continents. No need to jump through hoops to get to them. We knew this would be concerning for folks and made sure you could get there hassle-free without dodging guards.
 
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I did not take part in the downing the world boss today but I can recount what I saw through several chat channels.
First, I think the whole idea of having people group up to kill smaller bosses to then summon a world boss is a brilliant one. I honestly said it was one of the awesome upcoming changes. Having people banding together and coordinating an effort that ends in an epic world boss? Awesome stuff. However, the drop rate of the items or the number required really needs adjusting. I don't expect people to spend all day long doing it to be frank. Working on the goal is good, but people might need to feel like they are making worthy progress towards it.
 
And the most important factor of all. This is really my personal advice for Carbine: I know it's always good to expect the best from people, but if people can steal the kill, they will. This is the internet, if people can be jerks, they will be jerks, it's sad, but it's just the way it goes. Luckily they are not the majority, but this is the "Movie theatre situation", everyone in the theatre can be nice people just wanting to have a good time, all it takes is one jerk or a small group constantly talking or walking in front of the screen to spoil the experience for everyone. With that said, locking the loot of the boss to the group that did the summoning is not just a good idea, in my opinion it's a necessity. I've seen this in other games, as more people reach lvl50 and this loophole is widespread there will be campers just waiting to steal the kill as soon as someone spawns it, eventually discouraging people from even bothering to do the summoning. Unless of course the boss spawned by itself, in that case the "first to attack gets the loot" makes sense.
 
Thanks for reading my thoughts.
			
				
	Edited October 11, 2015 by SubSidal	
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			Everyone who hits the boss should get loot IMO.	
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As you come of the port in Wilderrun you will see a building being built, they are behind that.
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Here's my two bits on it:
 
Each player who contributes to the event should get a chance at the loot that scales according to their contribution. If you did a ton of the heavy lifting, you have high odds of a reward whether you did damage, soaked up damage, did healing, or contributed to event requirements. If you did a tiny bit and then went AFK, you have a tiny chance. The collecting particles to summon is a contribution to event requirements that should figure in to your rewards. The encounter does calculate those rankings and aspects of the encounter already, it's just a question of applying them to the loot distribution.
 
Solves the kill-stealing issue completely by making the work involved in doing the summoning part of the loot distribution, while not excluding people who did help down the boss simply because they weren't on the summoning team.	
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Everyone who hits the boss should get loot IMO.
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Where are they? :(
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Everyone who hits the boss should get loot IMO.
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Here's my two bits on it:
 
Each player who contributes to the event should get a chance at the loot that scales according to their contribution. If you did a ton of the heavy lifting, you have high odds of a reward whether you did damage, soaked up damage, did healing, or contributed to event requirements. If you did a tiny bit and then went AFK, you have a tiny chance. The collecting particles to summon is a contribution to event requirements that should figure in to your rewards. The encounter does calculate those rankings and aspects of the encounter already, it's just a question of applying them to the loot distribution.
 
Solves the kill-stealing issue completely by making the work involved in doing the summoning part of the loot distribution, while not excluding people who did help down the boss simply because they weren't on the summoning team.
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since those contracts are aimed for casual content i dont get why its so complicated to summon them.
this system is way too slow since the droprate of those (whatever it is) summon items is a joke.
 
the average player does not want to wait forever, he wants to log in accept the quests, queue up for the random dungeon and in the meantime go and do the contract in 15-20min till the bg/veteran content he grouped up for has found a group. Now if summoning those world bosses take forever the dungeon/adventure groups wont go up since the player who is queued for them but wants to do the contract first does not want to lose his progress there. -> even longer queue times for casual content -> more unhappy people standing around.	
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My bigger issue with world bosses right now - the group that tags it gets the loot. So, you can farm farm farm for those particles, another group comes along at the end. They get first hit on the boss, and you get nadda (except the individual loot bag). None of the stuff the WB drops shows up for your group if you don't tag it first. THAT sucks.
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We're also taking a look at the drop rate of the particles, so you're aware.
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For what it's worth (and I appreciate this is anecdotal evidence only :)), yesterday on Jabbit there was a sizeable amount of people at the Wilderrun boss (Zoetic) for this contract.
Given that the mobs that drop the particles only spawn there, and were being killed rapidly, it's fair to say that it would've been impossible to get them much quicker.
 
It took perhaps 15 minutes at most to get all 75 and summon him. That seemed pretty reasonable to me (and vastly preferable to the old "go and sit in Scorchwing's plateau for an hour, doing nothing, and wait for him to spawn" rubbish!)
 
Obviously if we'd had less people, it would've taken longer, but like I said, I can't imagine it would've been THAT much longer, as really the time taken was entirely dependant on the spawn rate of the enemies, and if you've got a raid group there (and if you're trying to do a world boss without a raid group... what do you expect?) then they're not going to last long.
 
It's possible that Zoetic is a special case, as he always had these much bigger enemies there to summon him, and that other bosses with their 5-man's that need farming do need their drop rate sorted out, but he seemed to be working fine to me.
			
				
	Edited October 12, 2015 by Laeraneth	
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With the removal of exceptional runes from contracts they are just not worth the time investment anymore. The only reason I ran them before was so I could rune batter in my gear, but as usual Carbine have neglected to recognize this.
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It took perhaps 15 minutes at most to get all 75 and summon him. That seemed pretty reasonable to me (and vastly preferable to the old "go and sit in Scorchwing's plateau for an hour, doing nothing, and wait for him to spawn" rubbish!)
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A couple of notes:
 
There are teleporters in Wilderrun for Exile (their foothold on Olyssia) and Whitevale for Dominion (their foothold on Alizar) that will take you close to the world bosses in hostile territory on those respective continents. No need to jump through hoops to get to them. We knew this would be concerning for folks and made sure you could get there hassle-free without dodging guards.
 
We're also taking a look at the drop rate of the particles, so you're aware.
 
Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass it along to the other multiplayer guys.
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Proposed solutions:
 
1. Spawn world bosses on a 2 hour to a 6 hour timer. If spawning is consistent, someone will make an API to track it, or even better, do as ArenaNet did and put a timer up on your website. "King Honeygrave spawns every 6 hours, at 12 UTC, 18 UTC, 24 UTC, 6 UTC.". There you go. You immediately made it clear for your players when to seek a boss out if they need it. Meaning that you could miss the spawn and it would still be humanly possible for you to plan your time in such a way to be there for the next spawn. 
2. Reduce the amount of progenitor access particles needed or increase their drop rate. You won't have the whole server killing the same spiders for hours. Realistically you will have a 10 to 20 man group (the folks that want to kill the world boss in the first place) doing this for at most an hour before they give up. 
3. Include ALL world bosses in said contract. Why as exiles do we have to fight our way to dominion territory to circle their world bosses when the world has like 20? With each having close to 24 hour respawn time, it would be much more sane for a megaserver to be hunting different world bosses, instead of everyone circling the same one. 
4. With these steps implemented, increase the rewards for doing said world bosses. Why do people run world bosses in Guild Wars 2? Because it's profitable. Will I get more loot for killing Aggregor that forms multiple times an hour even in Crimson Badlands, or the 20 man Metal Maw that I'll need to cross Illium for that spawns once every 24 hours? Aggregor. Well something isn't right in this system then, isn't it?
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			Sounds like another casual player complainging the game is too hard...	
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Sounds like another casual player complainging the game is too hard...
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just skip the contract. 
 
i used to enjoy the contract system but now its pointless as all the rewards are lvl80 - This  has no value to me at end game.  
 
There are still a couple of fluff items i would like from the final reward box but after doing that 20 or so times its beyond boring.  
 
This particular contract 450 point reward  just isn't worth the time and effort.  
 
Its simply too much effort - unless you get lucky and see someone else advertising it on a plate. 
 
if im looking for fluff items my time is simply better spent trying to farm discovery spots and ive made 40x the money doing that than the boring repetitive contracts. 
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Sounds like another casual player complainging the game is too hard...
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just skip the contract. 
 
i used to enjoy the contract system but now its pointless as all the rewards are lvl80 - This  has no value to me at end game.  
 
There are still a couple of fluff items i would like from the final reward box but after doing that 20 or so times its beyond boring.  
 
This particular contract 450 point reward  just isn't worth the time and effort.  
 
Its simply too much effort - unless you get lucky and see someone else advertising it on a plate. 
 
if im looking for fluff items my time is simply better spent trying to farm discovery spots and ive made 40x the money doing that than the boring repetitive contracts. 	
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i used to enjoy the contract system but now its pointless as all the rewards are lvl80 - This  has no value to me at end game.  
 
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Sounds like another casual player complainging the game is too hard...
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A couple of notes:
 
There are teleporters in Wilderrun for Exile (their foothold on Olyssia) and Whitevale for Dominion (their foothold on Alizar) that will take you close to the world bosses in hostile territory on those respective continents. No need to jump through hoops to get to them. We knew this would be concerning for folks and made sure you could get there hassle-free without dodging guards.
 
We're also taking a look at the drop rate of the particles, so you're aware.
 
Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass it along to the other multiplayer guys.
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In case you missed the memo, these boss are intended to be casual content. And anyway, as she has already pointed out, not that it is too had, but just not fun.
 
These were fun yesterday on a server that was able to field a large raid to do them in a reasonable timeframe. Definitely a large sense of community and was much cooler than the old WB. But on a smaller server or on days when it isn't the T3 contract, obviously the intended effect is not happening. This suggest to me that the idea has merit, but the drop rate needs to change.
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there is no need to look at drop rates ... the issue these people have is that they are farming in the wrong places , In the last week since i found my location I have farmed close to 150 particles while raiding, rbgs, random dungeons and dailies in between. Its not like all i do is farm those things 
 
Some times if u pull enough mobs together to cleave them all down (i go at about 10 at a time) they will drop 2 particles and a couple of epics too
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not the drop rate but the farming location... you need to find the correct 5man mobs to farm my man
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I'm not sure I trust Carbine's "contribution" counter. I hardly ever get any contribution points on events, even though I'm whacking on mobs and healing people.
 
 
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Pretty sure these things only drop from primes...? How the heck are you pulling 10 primes at once... o_0
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They are going to be adding a way to "trade up" runes in the future.
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I'm not sure I trust Carbine's "contribution" counter. I hardly ever get any contribution points on events, even though I'm whacking on mobs and healing people.
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That's great news, but where did you see this? This is the first I've heard of it.
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I honestly don't know. We were doing dreamspore and pulling the spiders in the cave. Like I said, the droprate was fine for us, but we had a lot of people farming.
 
In my gear level, I was soloing those mobs when they popped in my area. But then again, I'm not at the gear level this was intended for.
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And again, King Plush.
This is me right now. I wish I could trade places with the poor guy in the guillotine... at least that would be more fun. =/
 	
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That's because--as I understand it at least--the contribution points aren't obtained by damage or healing, they have separate categories for those and you should have "damage done" and "healing done" credit. the contribution column is for stuff like being the person who goes and sets the bomb while the others are keeping the mobs off of them--or in this case, collecting the materials required to spawn the boss. No damage done, taken, or healed, but still an essential component of the event.
 
That being said, I could be wrong about how they're crediting that column.  ^_^
 
Edit: And to be sure, I don't have any real problem with just giving everyone who has a non-zero total contribution--event marker+healing+damage done+damage taken--an equal shot at the loot, but I also suspect that there would be a lot of resistance to that idea in some fairly influential circles.
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I can't imagine trying to tie rewards to contribution would ever work out well without someone getting hosed. It would be hard enough for us to define "contribution" and agree on a definition, much less have a programmer nail it down perfectly in code in an exploitable way.
 
This is the issue you'll face with open world content.	
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Take the Star-Comm event, for example. In the Ikthian invasion, there are three holdout locations in the first phase, and only one person can grab the thing that spawns at the end of each holdout. I've never managed to place a bomb, no matter how hard I try to race people to a mob - the couple times I finally managed to collect three pieces and construct a bomb, the event moved on to the boss phase. And then it's just killing the boss... I get 0 contribution points. Same thing happens for the event boss for the technophage daily. When my husband and I spawn a mini-event with a discovery, he gets all the contribution points and I get zero.
 
Not really sure what I'm doing wrong. I'm there. I contribute. But a system that rewarded world boss loot based on contribution points would be a terribly flawed system.
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			Doesnt the contribution get shared if you are in a full raid?	
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Just adding my voice here. I used to like doing world bosses. If someone called for more people in LFG, I’d often go to help out. That was when they didn’t even drop anything! Now though, I wouldn’t bother unless it was already spawned in. Particle gathering is just stupid. They don’t drop often enough for me to want to spend my precious little gaming time farming them, when I could be using that time running dungeons, farming loot, or going on a pug raid. And since only the first raid to hit gets the good loot, I’d never get anything. So why bother?
 
The particles need to drop way more frequently (One guaranteed every other mob or so), just not exist at all and go back to the old timer lengths, or drop at their current rate and make the bosses’ natural spawn timers much shorter. Why in the sam hill would you increase the bosses' natural spawn timers? That's not going to alleviate the problem of too many people fighting them! The tagging problem also needs to die in a fire. Every single person that hits the boss should get loot, and every party should get to roll on the good stuff, not just the first one.	
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