Mount Farming and the 99 Totem Issue

[ICountFrom0]

There's something about it being 99 no matter what. It's a nice implementation to try to fix the "long tail" of bad odds and just how random numbers work.

Notice that some of the "harder" ones drop 2 totems? How about if that became the general fix?

Lets just ... bloat... the concept of harder, make more of them drop 2 at once.

Course, on the other hand, keeping completionists playing the game is kind of the point of the game, if more people get the rewards faster, less people who actually know the fights will be there to teach others, and this will actually make the fights even harder.

It's an intersting tossup, aint it?

[Deceptus]

I’ve been farming extreme mounts since late HW and I’ve had more than my fair share of 99+ grind. I’ve been saying for years that it’s absolutely ridiculous and you’re too right about people here defending the grind.

“You are lucky, I remember when there was no totem trade in!” So what? It’s 2022, the game is like 10 years old. Be better, SE.

Definitely think after an expansion they should either increase the totem drop rate to 2 per encounter or drop the cost by half.

There's something about it being 99 no matter what. It's a nice implementation to try to fix the "long tail" of bad odds and just how random numbers work.

Notice that some of the "harder" ones drop 2 totems? How about if that became the general fix?

Lets just ... bloat... the concept of harder, make more of them drop 2 at once.

Course, on the other hand, keeping completionists playing the game is kind of the point of the game, if more people get the rewards faster, less people who actually know the fights will be there to teach others, and this will actually make the fights even harder.

It's an intersting tossup, aint it?

At a certain point with unsync difficulty becomes meaningless. I was helping someone get their mount today and Suzaku was dropping in 2 min. 30s of that was her phase change.

[RyuDragnier]

What is your justification for it being 99 until then?

It's current content. Plus if he's referring to main and half patches, that means an EX released at 6.0 would become easier to farm at 6.35.

[Midareyukki]

Daft question, but why does it have to be 99 tokens? Bit much considering what 99 runs actually entails. Even 50 is already a hefty amount. It's literally just a mount, it's not like the game isn't teeming with those. Hell, you can literally spend real money and get a party-wide mount, doing a fight 99 times for bragging rights feels sadder than it's worth.

"Oh look at me, I spent 99 tries doing this fight for a mount"

:| weird flex but okay.

[Toutatis]

You don't "need" the mount. I personally couldn't be bothered running something so many times. I find that it is simply not fun redoing the same thing ad nauseam. There are lots of mounts in the game anyway.

[Themarvin]

There is no one defending the grind... I defend you should not be rewarded for every time you do an extreme trial.... let the drop rates be as they are, poor, also this closer you are on max ilevel content this longer it will take.... compared to eg. doing some of he ARR ones in less than a minute solo, where you can just do like 10 down 1 maybe 2 mounts in 10-15mins.

The op want everything handed... you are 8 people... if you are persistent a mount drop per maybe 10-20 runs, each run take 6-8minutes and most run out stamina once you cleared 4-6..... the odds is perfectly fine, it is like those that wanted even losses counting towards the pvp mounts, which is a big nono.

So no thanks... I had plenty of 99+ runs too here... sometimes I got it on 6th clear... others it took 60... and you can stop once you reached 99 tokens and just wait it out for the new content that is.

[Deveryn]

There's the real problem. The groups generally aren't static, so the odds never actually get better.

[DrWho2010]

why 99? probably cuz it's close to an even round 100 and that it being an mmo they want you to keep stickin around longer. 50 you would be done quicker and gone faster. 200 would be too much.

[Deo14]

Let's do quick math - I'll use very optimistic drop rate of 5% (seems to be more around 3-4% for EX3) with 8 people in party.

5% * 1/8 = 0.625% chance that mount drops and you get it. EX3 with okay-ish party takes about 9:30 minutes. Even in god-like party, with re-entering, loading, pull timer and occasional breaks, one kill would take approximately 11 minutes. Now the fun part - PF experience. If you take in account idiots who think that "barely clearing once" = "ready to farm", this could take significantly longer. Also, setting up party etc.. I would say that realistically, with wipes and trap parties, this could easily end up being 15-20 minutes per kill.

So in overly optimistic scenario of 5% drop rate with always great parties (11min/clear) you end up with 160 kills in 29.33 hours of farming.
With realistic 4% chance and occasional trash parties (15misn/clear) you end up with 200 kills in 50 hours of farming.
Pessimistic: 3% chance with 20 mins/clear: 267 kills in 89 hours.

This is obviously just quick demonstration - can't really be accurate without knowing actual drop rate and recording average time for kill. But it's somewhat realistic approximation.

So do you really think that spending 50 hours on average doing same thing over and over again (I hate this phrase after farming EX3) is "respecting players time"?
Getting 50 kills in any encounter is IMO sweet spot between not going insane and also helping keeping it alive for other players. And if content becomes too dead, just release material drops when content is still fresh, so people with mount have something to else farm. However my main problem is that dumb system of activating pity 2 patches (8 whole months) later, which is just incredibly long time.

In the end, the old school Need/Greed/Pass system will be inevitably unfair for every item that is either time-gated or has low drop rate. System is failing and needs fix - and no more band-aids.
Even without major reworks, SE could start slowly solving other problems, like cutscenes in fights - farming Castrum Marinum EX without 2nd monitor is just masochism.

[Moonlite]

Two things and I have went to 99 totems for some. I feel your pain. If they reduce to 50, I worry drop rate would be lowered. I do wish that after each expansion they make just a HWs totem, so i could collect some but not have a bunch of inventory slots taken. I just pitch them now after I help someone. Just put the totems on poetic. I know people are saying "they can't do that". They already do to some degree, mogtomes. Turns out I had never done Byakko, I still had the mount. If they are earning poetics they are doing some content. They might be helping more people by farming poetics then running old trial X 99 times.