New World Bosses revamp + multiboxing and other issues

"We will be revamping how world bosses work in order to drop crafting materials as well as build points. In order to balance this, we will be changing the way they spawn such that they randomly spawn and, when they do, a system announcement will go out to everyone and another will go out once the world boss has been defeated."

I don't really like that world bosses are going to drop build points. The problem is that undoubtedly these bosses will be difficult to defeat, and so it's going to be heavily slanted towards boxers with full groups that are capable of taking them down solo, since there is very few actual groups with multiple people running around. This is going to leave new or solo players so far behind the curve and exacerbate the issue we have now with the economy; end game content is so hard to do solo or without boxes that only people who run multiple characters will ever see the good drops, so the rich get richer and the poor stay relatively poor and have to work that much harder to get what they want, and then of course if it's something really good, the price is so high that it takes weeks of farming for a solo player vs these people that can run full groups and ruin heroic content with ease for as long as they feel like it - and this is made worse by these longtime players who have millions of gold to throw around and keep prices in their favor by limiting quantity available (which, in turn, is made worse by these players hoarding these items with the intention of using them on more of their boxes or waiting for a better price, etc etc, on and on it goes).

In short, the content is just not balanced properly for varying styles of play and all you're really doing is making things hard to give a challenge to these people that have stuck with the game so long and invested time in many accounts, under the impression that they "need" something to keep them interested, when in fact, if you just made content all around easier and scaled vs party size, people wouldn't need multiple boxes and then this problem would never have become an issue in the first place.

In actuality, allowing boxers in this game is a detriment to longterm stability in a variety of ways, and this is why you see some popular MMO's limiting accounts - off the top of my head, two popular WoW private servers (that I know of), Everquest official (time-lock progression) and one of the most popular EQ free servers (trying to not name-names here lest people think I'm advertising or something), and a major Dark Age of Camelot private server; all of these have restricted multiboxing for the sake of getting people to actually work together instead of the game just devolving into a solo-online experience. In short, multiboxing is giving industrious players free reign on dictating how content for this game is being developed, and that's not what this game should be doing, imho. A good first step to changing this is to not include build points on world bosses and find another way to go about it, so that even solo players can accomplish these things to get stronger. Maybe make a long quest chain or something with many parts, or something else… just don't lock this behind a nigh-unbeatable fight for anyone outside of mass box groups.

I agree 100% that World bosses shouldn't drop any of that stuff, but for different reasons. All you do there is make people choose between finishing a dungeon they've been working hard vs. the chance they'll get to the boss first. It's just a half baked idea that conceptually doesn't fit at all within the realm and the way it's played as it is.

We will be adding BPs to world bosses as a first pass, not necessarily the only means to acquire them.

The World Bosses will be the same as they are now. You will not need more than one character to defeat most of them. For example, there is a boss in ratling run.

Right now we cannot limit boxing. We tried to do it on MistWalkers but it proved impossible to police. With the antiquated client we also don't have many options. In the future, with the new client, we can revisit things like being able to log in X characters on a single account instead of having many game accounts. Right now, though, that is out of reach for us.

We are actively trying to make this game more accessible to many group sizes (e.g. dungeon scaling), which is something you mentioned. Have you tried that out yet?

So world bosses would be like the group of trolls with the 5k hp (high health for the region) patriarch that roams near Caer Fandry?

Yup, that's a world boss.

Instead of world bosses always spawning, they will now spawn on occasion with a system-wide message informing players that "Bossname has emerged in Zonename", and another message once the boss is defeated, "Bossname has been defeated by Playername".

edit: I will add that on my mortals, I have no problem soloing most of the world bosses. The exceptions being the ones in Ascetos desert and in The Downs.

Just tossing in there, that you can beat the world boss in ADD (the giant, cade or w/e the one that drops anvil bounties) with a hitter and wiz fairly easily if the hitter has 8 or 9k hp.

The idea is to create a unique user experience that a single player or group of two can complete and feel rewarded. This public announcement of the defeat will be the "gamification" of the task and be a sort of achievement for players. Currently the only reason to kill zone bosses is an extra chance at bounties.