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First off, this is not another one of those suggested bandaid fixes to unique like simply removing the twitter messages or excluding people from the loot if they've been part of a slaying within the last x days thinking that it'd be a reasonable approach and would fix uniques. They are broken on a way more basic level than that. Secondly, i'm open to feedback, discussion, questions and criticism as long as it remains constructive. If a post seems like it's trying to derail this thread into the usual unique drama that 90% of these threads derail into over at most 2 pages i will ask for the forum moderators to delete said post. Last but not least, this post is gonna be a long one. If you do not have the time to read it fully or simply do not care enough to read a long post about uniques you might want to stop reading now. What is actually broken? There's many claims that this is bad and that is broken but first lets look at numbers first. Specifically, the spawn distribution of dragons, drakes and humanoids on every server. You can check those numbers yourself on niarja but i've made it easier and summed them up in a table. Server # of uniques # of dragons # of hatchlings # of humanoids Expected 55 19.64 19.64 15.71 Xanadu 52 14 21 17 Release 55 15 24 16 Pristine 55 18 13 24 Independence 55 16 17 22 Exodus 55 12 25 18 Deliverance 55 14 19 22 Celebration 55 17 16 22 As we can see, none of the server is actually roughly where it should be at according to the default distribution of 5 adult dragons, 5 hatchlings and 4 humanoids, all of which have the same spawn chance. Some servers are WAY off the chart, especially looking at exodus 25 hatchlings which is over 20% higher than it should have been or pristine's humanoids, which are OVER 50% HIGHER than they are supposed to be. There is a second number of interest. And that is the spawn frequency. I could've done the same and listed all spawn times on niarja here, yet i think for this case it makes more sense at what the code actually does. The unique spawn code has a cooldown period of 14 days after the last unique spawn in which no unique can spawn again. After these 14 days are over, it periodically checks all uniques every 8 hours. For all 14 uniques it rolls a 1/300 chance on wether they spawn now. Spread out over all uniques that means every 8 hours there is a 4.6% chance for a unique to spawn. Yet at the same time there is no forced spawn of a unique after a certain amount of time either. So currently exodus for example has had 27 days pass since the last unique spawn, meaning the WurmNG failed 13 * 8, a total of 104, 4.6% chance rolls in a row. So now let's step back from these specific numbers on actual spawn behaviour and look at other problems that are still in the range of actual mechanics and can be directly altered by the developers. First off the "worth" of a unique. We can pretty much tier those into 4 different categories. 1) Adult dragons. They are worth the most, considering they drop both scale which makes the best armour in the game as well as bloods. Not one of the adult dragons actually has a useless blood. 2) Hatchlings. They are worth considerably less than adult dragons. However, they still drop drake hide which makes up the second best armour in the game as well as bloods, quite a few of which are useful. Their main problem is the fact that the amount of hide dropped is considerably less than scale, so while their armour set is a little more than half the weight of a full scale set the amount is less than half. 3) Humanoids. They have the most useful bloods in the game. Mining and Woodcutting are by far the most commonly used imbues in the game and noone wants to miss their imbued tools. They also have a 50% chance for a 3 charge valrei tome, some of which can be worth a fortune. However, it is a gamble on wether or not the item actually drops and then there's 15 different items that can drop. 4) green and white hatchlings. Or how i like to call them the red headed children of the unique family. Their blood is worthless, the amount of hide dropped is still too small and overall most people consider those two not even worth the effort to go out and look for them. Poor little neglected creatures. Secondly, one of the biggest issues with public slayings, overall game client performance with multiple dozen characters within a small area. Third, the ability to pen uniques underground. Some people say its bad, some people say its good. To my knowledge the developers consider it bad. Next up a problem that is bordering between a mechanical issue and a community issue. That is, 'loot soaking' on alts. Currently, making a unique event public will result in a far bigger local count than the actual number of active fighters by multiple times. The current loot distribution mechanic spreads out the scale and drake hide evenly amongst everyone in local and gives them a blood to go along with it. This is one of the main reasons why noone does public dragons or hatchlings. Lastly, a problem is one purely coming from the community. The general toxicity, drama and group vs group mindset that come with a public slaying. If people already go through the efforts of finding a unique, penning it, organising a public slaying and deal with the lag that comes with it, certain people will still find reasons to trash talk them and act unfriendly in general. How do we actually deal with the mentioned problems? That is after all what a suggestion is all about. Suggesting ways to deal with problems you see in certain mechanics. So let's handle the problems mentioned above in the order of their occurrence. Spawn distribution I would suggest using a rotation to handle this matter. And by rotation i mean a reoccurring spawn pattern, such as: dragon – drake – humanoid – dragon – drake- dragon – humanoid – dragon – drake – humanoid - drake – dragon – drake – humanoid and then start over again. The purpose of this is to guarantee an equal distribution of all unique kinds. Currently there are 5 adult dragons, 5 dragon hatchlings and 4 humanoids, and so every iteration of the pattern would spawn 5 dragons, 5 hatchlings and 4 humanoids. Which one exactly is spawned would still be RNG-based, however it would eventually even out amongst all possibilities. Spawn frequency Again, I would suggest cutting down on the RNG involvement here. The cooldown period of 14 days seems fine to me, yet the fact that there is no fixed timer for a forced spawn seems like an oddity. As such there are two possible suggestions on how to handle it. 1) set the respawn timer to a fixed 14 days. 2) keep the current minimum respawn timer at 14 days, keep or slightly increase the frequency of respawn checks after the initial cooldown period and add a forced respawn 72 hours after the initial cooldown passes. Also slightly increase the chance of a unique spawn for checks after the initial one to equally distribute respawns across the time zones. While next up would be the general loot balance between different uniques i will keep this back for a bit and mention it together with the 'loot soaking' problem i mentioned as those two are closely tied together. Client performance So next up is the general performance of the stable client 3.99 in bigger gatherings. The current stable client just performs horribly in those situations. I haven't yet had the chance to test unstable in situations like this, however seeing its current performance after the recent performance boosts i'm quite hopeful for this and think it will be resolved in the near future, or at least will get a lot better than it currently is. Unique penning Penning uniques underground. This is indeed a certain thing where views divide very heavily. As i stated, to my knowledge the devs think that this should not be a thing at all and it was never intended for them to be penned the way they currently are. HOWEVER at the same time, what they and certain other people might not be fully aware of, the one and only reason why public or semi-private slayings are even able to be a thing is exactly this: because uniques can be penned. If uniques would not be pennable at all it would be a rush to become the first group of roughly 15 participants to arrive at the location, you would slay it, and the unique would be gone as quickly as it came. What this means is that, looking at the last bunch of uniques slain and their slayer counts on niarja, for most uniques the participant count would drop by 30-75%. In other words, most people would no longer be able to participate unless they are lucky enough to be around at the time they were found. So, the ability to pen uniques should remain. However, at the same time, the possibility to pen uniques for prolonged times should be removed. If a unique has been penned for more than a week he should despawn and randomly reappear anywhere else on the map. The only uniques not affected by this should be uniques hatched from dragon eggs. They are a relic of old days and still a possible reward from finishing all of a players personal goals (albeit with a very small chance of 1%). The same behaviour of despawning and reappearing on another spot of the map should also be applied to uniques that have been around for a long period of time and are most likely in spots noone might ever find them, and so blocking the servers spot to respawn this exact unique. Due to this i would suggest having any non-penned unique do this as soon as another unique spawns, in other words, every 14 to 17 days after its initial spawn until it has spawned in a location where it was actually found and slain. Community problems/drama Now let me quickly talk about the community problem i mentioned before i go ahead to the last and biggest part, the loot distribution. The behaviour i described above opens up two big questions for me. Why would anyone want to deal with this kind of behaviour? And why should the devs bother to build mechanics in a way to sugarcoat friction between certain groups of the community? I don't see a reasonable positive answer to either of those questions. So in my opinion those are not things the devs should focus their time on. Those are problems the community has to deal with themselves. If you want to be included in peoples kills of uniques that they spent their free time searching for, you should act like someone who they would want to bring along. Of course, now you can see this two ways. You can either act on mutual benefit, saying i will include you in my kills if you let me in on your kills, or they might just invite you along randomly because they've met you before, notice you when sailing to the location and remember you to be a cool guy, or you're a friend of a friend. There are a lot of ways to go about this, yet the least thing i would suggest is sucking up to someone just because you know that they could help you get in on unique kills. It's just not the way to go about this. So, now after all this was already said, let's get to the fun part. Which also just so happens to be the one with the most different views on what is right or how it should be done. That's right. Loot distribution. For this there have actually been two problems mentioned in the initial part about problems i see with the current system. On one hand we have differences in loot value as well as how the loot distribution works in general and allows for the mentioned 'loot soaking'. So here i will present a few ways in which i would redesign unique loot distribution to encourage actual fighting rather than just standing around on 20 alts with 1 fps on every char just to get as much loot as possible. First off, there are two things i would not change about the current loot mechanic. The skull, bone and meat should remain a butchered product just as they are now. This is due to the reason that the corpse ends up with the party that initially found and penned the unique. In other words, the people who usually used a shaker to trap and silver to found the deed it was eventually slain on. Also, bloods should remain a local wide loot for everyone who has premium time on the character. However, drake hide and scale as well as tomes distribution should be changed. For hide and scale distribution i would recommend the following: 1) Pre-generate an amount of hide/scale based on the dragons type and condition. Every active fighter will have an invisible damage counter adding together both the damage he dealt to the unique in successful hits as well as the damage he recieved from the unique. Once the unique dies, the pre-generated amount will be split according to the fighters contribution and added to their inventory. 2) The uniques will no longer generate a fixed amount that is evenly split between everyone in local but instead will distribute a scrap based on their type and condition to everyone who is also eligible for the uniques achievement. As you can see, the main objective with both loot distributions is to remove the 'loot soaking' aspect of alts. If you can handle having multiple characters in the fight then you will be eligible for multiple scraps, however simply driving up a knarr full of alts will no longer make you get the biggest scrap. The first option, however, is still plagued by the current problem that increasing the number of participants reduces the loot by every single participant which would favor smaller groups. The second one would possibly allow increasing the loot to levels way higher than expected if you just have every alt hit the unique once. Wound tracking would probably allow to prevent this, so that you will only be eligible if at the time of the uniques death he has to have a wound of the player for him to be rewarded. Next up, humanoids. For them, my suggestion would be to remove the tomes from a drop and instead roll it out between the highest scoring participants based on total damage dealt and scaling based on the total number of fighters. Instead of the current 50% chance to drop a 3 charge valrei item, the unique will roll a 50% chance for every 10 fighters to roll out a single charge valrei item. I imagine it working similar to this: The unique dies with a total of 52 slayers. So he does floor(52 / 10) rolls of 50%. Let's say we get lucky and get 3 charges. Now the system will take the highest scoring participant, Player A, with a score of 1700 damage. The system will not roll off the charge unless the amount of players in the pool is higher than, for example, three times the amount of charges being rolled off. So the system will take Player A's score and multiply it with 0.95. It will then include all players whos score is higher than this value. It will now have, for example, 4 players total. So it will go down another step and multiply Player A's initial score with 0.9 and include all those people. As soon as it has 9 or more players it will do a random roll for the first charge, distribute it to the player, remove him from the pool and continue with the next charge. The charge the player gets is not determined beforehand but after a winner has been chosen. He will just receive any random charge out of the total pool of 15 possible valrei charges. One last thing about loot changes are the mentioned green and white dragon hatchling. They really need a change to their potion. Acid and Frost potion in their current state are somthing noone would ever use. So either the potion effect itself needs a rework or they should give a blood that can be crafted into a potion that already exists yet can only be obtained from valrei creatures (eg carpentry), or they should have a new imbue potion made (eg jewelry smithing). I think that's it so far about all the problems i see in the current unique mechanics and what i consider possible solutions to these problems. Of course, it is quite possible that i missed something, so if i did let me know. Also, feedback and other people's views on this are welcome, just keep it constructive. I guess here's a TL;DR: change spawn behaviour to fixed pattern to prevent server-specific inequality in spawn rates adjust spawn frequency and force a spawn after uniques failed their spawn check for x amount of time keep short-term penning, remove long-term penning for all non-hatched uniques have non-penned uniques change their location every time a new one spawns so they aren't stuck in unreachable locations don't expect the devs to tailor their solutions around community problems such as dislike between certain groups changes to the loot system keep currently butchered items that way keep blood a local wide distributed loot remove drake/scale scraps from local wide distribution change scrap to either be based on damage score or a fixed amount of every active fighter roll off valrei charges as single use items based on amount of active fighters to the highest scoring participants give white and green hatchling some love