More Horizontal Progression please

[Ibi]

Did you guys somehow forget or decide to just conveniently omit the bcnm drops of the exact same boots with a different name (and other good items). You get the currencies to buy the orb to access a mini boss fight by the boat load and you can try it over and over until the loot you want drops. IIRC it was already there by the latter half of toau (when I came back after having to quit just before cop due to irl issues) and the drop rate wasn't even low.

Conveniently omit? No. As you noted, that was added later. Why? In response to the item being too difficult to obtain (partially due to them being very heavily camped by RMT).

I don't even get how horizontal progression == low random drop rate. Like vertical progression can't have that too?

You don't have to, but you run into problems if you don't.

Under vertical progression, the developer knows that the items a player is getting within any tier will be made obsolete in six months. As a result, they can set a drop rate such that a player will, on average, get all (or almost all) the gear they need within that six month period, because there will be something new coming in by the time they're done.

Under horizontal progression, the developer knows that the items a player is getting from any particular event could remain relevant for several years. If they set the drop rates the same as they were in the vertical example above, then their player base is done with that particular event in that same six month time frame. So far that's not, in and of itself, a problem.

In both cases, the developer is adding new content at around the six month mark. But where the vertical progression developer doesn't need to pay attention to the old rewards when creating their new event, the horizontal progression developer needs a way to add drops that serve some sort of purpose, while not making the old items obsolete.

If you make the items effectively equivalent, the players are effectively done with the reward from the new event before it even starts. If that's the case, the event needs to be entertaining enough to be worth doing despite the rewards, at which point the event would have worked equally well under a vertical progression system.

If you make the items better than the existing items in some situations, and worse in others, now the player needs to collect an entire second set of items and also hang on to all the old ones. In addition to now needing to carry around twice as much gear, the player isn't really getting any more powerful, they're just switching out one thing for another depending on the situation (and likely still not really having a choice in the matter).

The alternative to this is to make it take much longer to get all the items from any particular event, and then add parallel alternatives through which to (hopefully) obtain other items to fill in the gaps. Each event ends up with a much longer life span, but only because you need to run it more to get the same results.