Thread: Top Provisioner Ranking

I wanted to know how everyone feels about it, as I myself have confused feelings about it.

For one thing, it's great to see how SE has FINALLY implemented server wide competition. Having missed out on serious XI and WoW competition, this is a welcome first to me, I'm excited to see how it plays out, and am eager to see some rivalries develop.

However, at the same time, I find it somewhat hilarious that the "competition" is how many materials a person or group can gather/craft, and turn in on a 2 day period. While I was expecting it to be something more along the lines of Regional Conquest from XI, I am enjoying with what we have now. I can't say I'm not having fun trying to collectively gather things with my LS so we can get into the top 20 provisioners/providers/whatever. This leads me to my main question:

How do you feel about the de facto necessity of having a Top Provisioner in the party to earn Hamet Seals?

First off, while I do enjoy competition, I'm not really sure how a test of how long and how often some sits down and farms mats should be determining their position. This problem can exacerbated by the fact that is extremely vulnerable to exploitation by botters.

Moving on, the trend I've noticed is that ensure a high place in the provisioner list, most linkshells will give all their mats to one person, and then turn it in. While yes, this is fine, however, this greatly shifts the balance toward larger linkshells, leaving smaller ones to the mercy of the larger ones. One idea is to make all the tradeable mats Exclusive, however, I think that would just hinder community building and teamwork, and actually encourage using bots in some way or another. So let's ignore that.

Unfortunately, from my limited experience, I may need some help on the details. Currently I believe that if the 1st place Provisioner ensures a 100% drop, top 3 ensures 60%, and top 20 ensures 40%, and those are complete the 60k point requirement without any of the top provisioners have a 20% chance. All of these are to any one random member of the party.
If someone could correct me on this, I would greatly appreciate it.

While yes, I would hate for SE to make this TOO easy, and I think the arduously long time dedication is a good thing for long term achievements (AF weapons need to be stronger if we're busting our asses for them! but that's another thread entirely...). However, as I said, I feel like the top 20 system is significantly biased towards larger linkshells. I myself doing this with a static of about 10~ people, am somewhat concerned.

I do not wish to detract or penalize larger groups for having a higher rank. That's fucked up, unless they got to the top by botting, at which point I hope Dalamud lands on them and can't play 2.0 because their characters are stuck under it. Just the same though, I think it IS stupid for rewarding people LESS, even though they have essentially completed the same relatively challenging content but without a handicap (of about 3000-5000 points?).

--my proposition--
Without a top 20 provision in the party, 60k points ensures a 40-50% chance of one seal to anyone in the party.
With at least 1 in the top 20, it ensures a 70% drop rate of one seal to anyone in the party.
With at least 1 person in the top 10, it ensures a 100% drop rate of one seal to anyone in the party.
With at least 1 person in the top 3, it ensures 1 seal to the provisioner, and 50% chance to another member in the party.
With the top provisioner present, 1 seal is guaranteed to the top provisioner, and the entire party gets a 33% chance at seals. If any of them are in the top 20 (regardless of position) they get a 15% bonus.

Looking at this after writing it, I feel like that is too easy, but if anyone has any suggestions to make it somewhat more challenging (without actually going back to the system we have now...), please voice your ideas. I would love to know if the devs are planning on changing the system for 1.22c or even 1.23.

Also, I realize this still is open to exploitation by botters, but I can't think of any plausible way to stop this without penalizing people who actually put the time in to gather some inordinate amount of mats.

Anyway, thank you for reading. I look forwarded to be told I'm stupid, casual, and/or trolling.

tl;dr QQ botters QQ make provisioning easier