It would be possible to design a token system that allowed for competition, with the top guild receiving the most tokens as a reward for their effort.
At the same time, casual guilds could still spawn a limited number of mobs, which would at least allow them to make progress on epics. Hell, if you wanted to, you could make the lowest level tokens spawn mobs that ONLY dropped epic parts. The effect on the economy would therefore be nil, save for putting a dent in TMO's plat-for-epic trade, which if we're honest at this point is more like an extortion racket than a legitimate business.
And there really are a ton of very cool and non-obtrusive ways you could make a token system work. You could have the server randomly pop a raid mob every X days in a random zone that would drop tokens. The guild that mobilized the fastest and downed the mob would get the extra tokens. You could make certain tokens purchasable to act as a plat sink. You could implement a VP/epic style quest that guilds could do that would result in more tokens rewarded based on the number of people in the guild who completed it. You could have code in the server to randomly drop 1 token of each raid boss off any mob in the world once per week. Guilds would scramble to locate the tokens and players of any level would have a chance to strike it rich by selling tokens to high end guilds.
These are just ideas off the top of my head. With more serious thought and with collaboration from multiple experienced players, you could design a truly badass token system that would result in an improved gameplay experience for the vast majority of the server (including most of TMO) and that would still be closer to the spirit of classic than what exists now.
The result would be a server that operated in a fashion much closer to classic in terms of the raid scene than it does now, and certainly more than it would with no variance and 200 people sitting on spawns.
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