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Comments
It's clearly subjective. For me, it's more or less dependent on how much time I sink into the game; rather than difficulty.
I could see doing double drop if 3x is too much. The thing is, let's take FINM and DS2 Lowers for example.
You run FINM hoping to get some Sea Ash or a Ghostly Seal. One of each drops in the run, that's it. Turns out your RNG is crap today, and you roll a 15 on the Sea Ash, and a 13 on the GS. Other than Vanguard Rewards, and the few pieces of T8 feedstock and MWA you get, you essentially come out empty handed.
So you run it again. Except this time someone rolls a 100 on each of the items. You're screwed over again, as are the others who didn't get anything.
Pop an Instance Scroll, run two more times. You finally get one Sea Ash on your final run. That's it, one piece of 20 you're going to need for your weapon for how much time spent? This is excluding if you get a trap run and have to kick/recruit.
Yes, you can do an LFG, and in most servers, it takes over an hour to fill, especially if you try to do something like, "FINM - Pass Ash" or "DS2 - Pass Heart"
Good luck forming a team in a reasonable amount of time.
All of this changes with 2-3x the drop rate. You run FINM and 3 ash, and 3 seals drop. Now if you have a team that's coordinated, you can actually call out, "Everyone gets 1 item, last is FFA" and so everyone comes out with at least one Sea Ash, or one Ghostly Seal. It still takes 20 Sea Ash and 30 Ghostly Seals to make your weapon, so you're going to have to run this dungeon at least 20-30 more times to get these materials if you don't get 2 or more on some runs. That's just for one weapon for one character. What if you are like me? You main 3 characters? It's going to still take a pretty significant amount of time to get all these materials, but at least now you have reasonable progress.
Same with Deso Heartbeats on FIHM or DS2. Only 3 drop, so at least 2 people are going to come out empty handed if everyone is going for a heart, but at least its not four out of five people getting boned. But even with a coordinated group looking to gear up. You can run 6x FINM/DS2 per character if you have elite and two reset scrolls. That's still going to take several hours out of your day for one person.
Yes, one person can get 12-18 hearts in a day if you have a static group, and everyone passes all hearts every single time. That one person can come onto the forums and claim, "See? This is so easy! I got all my mats in a few days!" But you have four other people who are looking to gear up too, so each person is going to require a full day of dungeon running just for everyone to have enough hearts for a weapon.
Yes. A team DEDICATED to getting the VM materials is going to get it quickly. Those same people already get their VM gear much faster than the rest of the game's population anyway, so what changes?
I don't think double-drop weekends is a bad thing, triple might be pushing it but honestly for anyone who isn't in a Guild that has static teams ready to go do the VM materials grind for days/weeks on end, it's still going to take time and effort to get this equipment for your characters.
You can't buy spars, Sea Ash, or Hearts, so people are still going to be competing for these materials each and every dungeon run. There will inevitably be runs even during a Triple or Double drop rate that you won't get anything. Still, I can't see this idea not increasing the number of people running dungeons/BGs to gear up or just simply play the game.
Those with Starfall will inevitably vocally push back on this as hard as they can. Why wouldn't they? They put a huge amount of time and effort into getting their materials and equipment and don't want to see others getting it any easier than they did.
Fact is, people are getting sick of grinding for days, weeks, and months on end trying to get these materials because only one item drops per run and they don't get it 2, 4, 10 runs in a row each time before finally getting one. The grind is getting stale, and it's getting boring. I know I'm not the only one here who is sick and tired of putting in 4-5 hours of dungeon running to get a single piece of VM material to show for it.
The addition of a DPS meter has long been a topic of discussion in the forums. I don't see any reason not to. Yes, you will of course have people that use it as an excuse to berate and kick other players, but it also serves to benefit people looking to explore how to better optimize their skill rotations and gain further insight of their preferred class.
Triple drops can only be occasional special events so that they don't generally get factored into the speed of progression, and these events usually occur near the end of a content cycle when they're less worried about prolonging it. There's a logic to why they do this, even if people consider the game "too grindy". Ultimately, a main reason the game feels grindy is more because there isn't a large enough variety of things to do, and speeding up progression speed with constant events won't solve that. As you say, it'll just make the lack of content more apparent in a different way.
I'm not sure why people willingly want to grind as hard as they do for their +15.
If you think that the current grind is ok, then you are in a tiny minority. This game's enchant grind is the worst, and is losing them more customers than it's keeping around.
I know many people that have quit because of the enchant grind. I even quit for like 2 years because +15 was introduced.
For example, first week is KDNM triple drop. Lame, but gives new 65s their schisma if they don't want to do two runs of CW. Whatever.
Second week is KDHM. Now those 65s have had a week to prep and can now gear up! Woot.
Third weekend is FINM. Fourth is FIHM. Fifth is DS.
Rinse and repeat.
Or we could do two a week, FINM and KDNM, FIHM and KDHM, DS and...random? Maybe leveling dungeons? IDK. I think spreading it out would do less harm to the economy and keep people interested even longer
(I'm personally more for double/triple credit pvp weekends
I've had days when I wanted to quit too just because I got 0 things out of 6 FIHM runs... T_T
But the rotation should be one easy and one hard mode dungeons, as many people are still unable to clear FIH (skill cap is real o.o)
Or including PvP battlegrounds in the rotation, to channel the currently low population we have.
Week 1: battleground credits
Week 2: dungeon drops
Week 3: enchant rate
Actually you know, that sounds a lot better than increased drop/bg credits every weekend. Every month averages four weeks, so have four events that cycle out every week in a rotation. I'd be cool with that and I think it'd address the problem of making gathering materials too easy a non-issue since it'd only happen once a month.
Point is that having BiS (or getting near) is a major goal for most players. If it's too easy, there will be no sense of achievement.
Also, I don't think +15 should be common. It should stay as a ridiculously difficult and expensive luxury... Otherwise, no one would accept Dreadnaught in runs. :P