I have been going to the rolls for about a month now and have made some observations. I was logging data because i wanted to quantify some of the anecdotes I was noticing but got lazy a few weeks in. So here I am, resurrecting this thread.
I think Loramin is right that a clickfest can be obnoxious but that the roll agreement creates a secondary problem: removing the already fairly trivial barrier to completing the quest that is organizing enough people to kill the captain. The result is an unclassic amount of people showing up to contest because the risk to reward for loot is not balanced, simply because of the artificial raid force. The idea of creating a /roll but the rollers would have to bring their own raid force seems to be one way to solve it.
I toyed with the idea in my head of amending the agreement proposing some sort of scout DKP system where you would have to attend so many scout rolls before you'd be eligible to roll as a way of balancing it out in favor of those who went to and helped with more scout rolls. The problem is this would always be subject to corruption by those maintaining it and thus, the potential to increase server drama rather than reduce it. It also would fall apart if no one chooses to administer it.
What I'm about to propose would require help from the devs, who I'm sure are already busy, but I see as a way of using existing game mechanics to require some sort of investment beyond just showing up and rolling. The goal is to reward attendance/persistence, which is a classic EQ paradigm. It also is strictly Unclassic, but as the devs have stated and shown, classic environment trumps classic mechanics and in this case, I believe the agreement may be a candidate for degrading said environment.
Firstly, to acquire the scout tools, require max ally faction with CoV. This is prerequisite is fairly simple to achieve due to the current environment on blue with faction pulls, frequent vindi, statue, and AoW pulls to WL ZL.
The second would be to make scout on her own faction which starts indifferent to everyone. The turn-in of tools to her would then require some level of faction with her beyond indifferent. She is only NPC on this faction, call it Scout Charisa faction. The way you raise this faction? By tagging the Kromzek Captain. This basically makes you attend a certain number of scout rolls before you can even do the quest and help others to get your own shot. The tricky part will be determining how many tags would be required. Say Max Ally w/ her is required to turn in the tools, then maybe it takes somewhere between 20 and 50 tags to get there (a little over a week, to over 3 weeks if you attend every single roll) or 'n' such tags. This is why I was logging data, to get an idea for both the average attendance for each roll and the average number of rolls people attended before winning. Winning roll doesn't have enough faction? No harm, she eats the tools and the next highest roller turns in. This is easy enough for the players to self-police. I haven't seen anyone ninja-looting or trying to train or otherwise disrupt the current agreement. A couple of accidental bad pulls is all, one of which I am personally responsible for and apologize.
But the problem with this is, no one would be able to turn the tools into her initially and thus would require some sort of way to seed this faction. There are a couple of ways around this. One would be to having a secondary way to grind and raise faction Scout Charisa, bad enough that going to the roll and helping kill captain would be the preferred way to raise faction. The other would be to implement these faction changes but then wait some number of scout spawns / time (maybe 2 or 3 x time minimum number of spawns for the first people to become ally) before changing her to check for faction for tool hand in.
Additionally, since melee often will want two bracers, and I doubt anyone is in favor of making them lore (punishing those who already grinded 2), maybe turning in the quest would drop your faction with her by n/4 or n/3 or so tags. Enough that you still have most of your initial attendance investment, but it will require some additional contribution to get this secondary bracer.
Just an idea, feel free to poke holes in it as I'm sure there are some logical faults that might make this not work or at least require refinement.
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