Hi,
Firstly, TL;DR – Increase loot quality odds based on the creatures life time.
We all know there are a lot of players moving from Champ to Champ boss, farming them for their new exotic loot drops. The new dynamic Invasion event also spawns a lot of Champions, if there are a lot of people so inherently there are even more exotic loot drops. The difference is event Champions are expected to be very short lived compared to the Open World Champions which should for the most part be wandering.
My suggestion to loot drops is very much the same as Experience rewards.
From http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Experience
Killing creatures
- An exploration bonus is earned based on how long a creature has been alive in the world
Using this same mechanism, a creature starts with a certain quality drop (a ‘bag’ most likely) still maintaining the odds of no drop:
Dynamic Event
- Normal – base white
- Veteran – Fine
- Champ – Masterwork
- Lieutenant – Rare
Open World
- Normal – base white
- Veteran – base white
- Champ – Fine
- Lieutenant – Masterwork
For each minute the creature is alive, there should be a small percent chance that their loot quality increases plus an increase in that chance.
For example using +1% every minute, a DE Champ freshly spawned would drop a Masterwork quality item. At each time interval per minute it would ‘roll the dice’ with 1% chance of changing the drop to Rare quality, while increasing to +2% chance.
So if we were lucky, a minute-1 aged DE Champ could roll into that 1% and have a Rare quality bag. In minute-2 it would have a 2% chance of rolling that Rare bag into an Exotic bag. Keep in mind, some of the Champs and definitely Lieutenants often take more than 1 minute to kill already. The result would look very much like the experience graph:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:GW2_ExpPerLevel.png
with ‘Age’ replacing ‘Level’ and ‘Quality’ replacing ‘Experience’
The benefits I see are a reduction in the constant farming of the same Champ loop, while encouraging people to spread out and kill creatures in less-travelled areas for a much higher chance of good quality drops. Dynamic Event creatures will already spawn at a higher quality, thus encouraging people to pro-actively complete the events.
At the same time, a scaled event with more Champs will give more Masterwork quality items but not the exotic items that long-lived Champs would exact. Any DE that has been running some time and has a definitive Champ spawn still gives great rewards for an exotic bag.
In terms of server load, you might be thinking “That’s a lot of work for the server to calculate on every creature every minute”, but keep in mind this mechanism is already in place with the experience bonus, so it might be very possible indeed.
Any thoughts, positive or negative? I’ve not posted/frequented Suggestions before, so this could have been suggested already 