Yeah I agree with you. I would suggest a possible random reset and variable timer so people couldn’t just let them age and then farm. Best setup would be to have players just take whatever color they see the champion/event with.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is the exact kind of toxic design that Arenanet sought to avoid with this game. I don’t mean to call it a bad idea on principle. It’s interesting. It has potential in some regards. But it’s very similar to the long-respawn competitive boss camping that plagues many more traditional MMOs.
To highlight why such a thing is impossibly unhealthy, I’ll use an example of my time from Forsaken World. There were mini-bosses that spawned on timers in the open world. Once killed – and they could be quickly solo-killed – they would take hours to respawn, but their rewards (in the form of rare pets) were potentially valuable. Wanting one of these, I went for it, only to find that another, higher level and better geared, player appeared out of nowhere – they had the timers memorized – and scored the last hit while quickly out-damaging me, stealing the mob and its rewards. Obviously, that was a bad experience for everyone. It was a bad experience for me – as I was robbed. It was a bad experience for anyone who would have liked to kill the mob at a later time. It was even a bad experience for the farmer – who was forced to abuse a nonsensical system to effectively grief other players for his own benefit (though he may not have seen it as a bad experience for his own sake). Similar “contested content” has appeared in a number of traditional MMOs, including Everquest, but it’s really hard to defend as good design (because it isn’t).
Despite the wonderful individual loot system of Guild Wars 2, such a mechanic would cause terrible community interactions. Players would once again dread to have other players show up to start their precious champ farm early and would likely go to such extents as sending in wasted reports on players for “griefing” mob spawns.
To be fair, it’s a well-conceived idea. It has good intentions and it certainly would be an interesting way to break champ trains apart and give players rewards for doing underplayed content. I would like to see such a thing work, but it, unfortunately, doesn’t take into account that players are a) often out to optimize their rewards and b) often toxic when said optimization is threatened.
Yeah I could see them abusing it. That is why I would suggest the random reset to the loot color, not the mob, also variable timer is for when the mob color changes not when the mob spawn.
They would still spawn at the rate they already do in the game. champs or events that have gone undone for a while have a chance gain rarity color.
With a random reset to their loot rarity color people couldn’t plan on making the mobs age for their exploitation. With a good variable timer on when it ages it would be impossible to predict when it flips, especially if its a random variable timer.
Best option for the players is to run around the world and doing the event no matter the color as instead of it ticking from orange to purple it could just reset back to white.