I still don't see why there is any griping about this other than "oh noes, I didnt gets a rare!!".
It was made perfectly clear how the system would work. There were no secrets:
http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=29997
"Serverwide Rares
Beginning with the unlock of Kunark and lasting only throughout that night, every mob on the server will have a very rare chance to drop high value classic items, such as the Guise of Deceiver and others. To promote fairness for all levels, and to prevent high level characters from slaughtering low level zones,
these items will only have a chance to drop if experience was awarded for the kill (aka, the "Trivial" loot system). We may turn this feature off after enough items have dropped, so don't miss your opportunity!"
There was no mention of "appropriate percentages will be adjusted for the toughness of the mob" or "you must use your main character to kill stuff for these". These were all artificial restrictions created by the user, that the devs should not be held accountable for. Just in CASE the design was flawed, Jorg pointed out in the same thread:
"I would like to suggest that while the ultra-rare loot is dropping, the corpse never unlocks for those outside the XP group (even after the decay countdown breaks the 5 minute mark). Otherwise level 50's are just going to use level 1 "proxies" to mass-kill and then take the rare drops for themselves. This would discourage such behavior and leave more mobs for the lowbies that are actually trying to kill stuff with nothing more than a splintered club and burst of flame."
Several people admitted this was "a valid point", and even after a few posts, Kvappe attempts to clarify:
"Rogean did you guys consider the masses off people killing in low level zones with a twinked level 1 and DS? will there be better chance for loot at higher level monsters or will all newbie zones be empty of monsters?"
There was no GM response to this concept. In fact, just in case there was STILL any question about the design of the system, Rogean made the following thread:
http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=30102
"That nobody has posted a WTB for Guise Loot Rights in the EC Forum yet."
Which implies that he fully understands that the no-drop Guise was intended to have the ability to have someone else other than whoever killed the mob be able to loot it.
So at this point, leading up to the event on Friday, if there are any questions about how the system is designed, that is ridiculous. The system is clearly: "if you get XP from the mob, it has a chance to drop one of these items."
Then, all that's left is for the min-maxers to devise whatever strategy they think will maximize the number of XP kills in a given time to let probabilities/statistics take their course. Let me stress that we all had the same information and the same opportunity to devise whatever strategy we felt would be successful. We all had the same choices to make about how we wanted to spend Kunark launch night.
I know because I had to make these same choices. I chose the "newbie zone sweep with a level 1 pal" method because it had the highest chance of success based on the system that we were presented. As a ranger, it was less important to me to be one of the first to re-experience Kunark content, and more important to me to have a chance at a Mistwalker. In fact, I contend that any ranger would suck cock for a Mistwalker and then claim they were still hetero afterward because "they didn't like the taste." Luckily for me, however, this was not part of the loot system.
The only "flaw" in the system was the initial drop rate, which was quickly adjusted to be more in line with what the devs envisioned. And it's not like they don't have the numbers on database transactions to go from to understand what the average number of XP kills per hour was on the server. I'm sure the initial rate they set was perfect for that. They perhaps underestimated the large spike in XP kills from all of the min-maxers increasing the number of low-level kills to maximize the kill rate for this system.
Was it an exploit? I submit that the devs fully knew it would play out like that, from the post examples above. Maybe they wanted 200+ people on the Oasis Barge when Kunark opened instead of 600 and needed a way to spread out the population in the old world. If so, mission accomplished.
Either way, we all had the same info and the same opportunity to act on that info. Any assumptions about the intended design of the system were artificial restrictions that we placed on ourselves.