The past few months, since Wrothgar, I have been putting a toon on the vMA boards. In the process I have begun watching the boards, specifically the NB one, reasonably closely through the week. At the end of the week the board will cut off at something like a 430k score which is either a lot of sigals with few deaths and a bit over an hour or well over one and a less sigals but more deaths. In either case it is a pretty competent but by no means clean run. The interesting thing is that beyond that last score on the board few scores at all will be posted. It certainly appears to be less than 25 based on how the scores progress over the week. Often on Saturday the board isnt yet full and you can see just exactly how few scores lie between 0 and the eventual final score on the board.

What I take this to mean is simple. Almost nobody is farming the thing, at least not in the one go that is necessary to post a score. There are plenty of folks who can beat there way through the thing and not have the reasonably smooth run that 430k represents. I should also note that the cut on the overall board is 546k which is like 40min, no death, no sigal. What all this means to me is that a few folks running pretty well or better run it once a week for the 2 for one loot they get for leaderboards and maybe (I know I do) to stay fresh for the next level cap change, lots of folks who do it very well don't bother to run at all, and lots of folks who can do it but only poorly don't run it at all.

This is all very interesting to me as NB, specifically magica NB is one of the best toons to farm the thing with. Presumably, if you were going to farm the gear even if you weren't going to make the boars you would choose that or one of the sorcs. Yet clearly not a lot of this is happening though it was during the Wrothgar event when the boards went up to 505k and tons of completes registered that were no where near that.

My conclusion is simple. The reward of the content in gear and gold is so low that despite the fact that it is solo and so can fit anywhere in folks playing time, it is rarely run. Since I know very very few who have all the gear they want from there and the gear is unquestionably good, I can only conclude that the RNG is so bad, and so well known to be thus, that people are simply deciding not to try for the gear they want as I did for the first 6 months after my first complete. Even now I only run once a week to stay fresh and get a weekly drop. Often I opt to motif farm or do other meaningless tasks when I could be running vMA for gear I would like. Mostly I hope to stay fresh so that when the difficulty is buffed with the next level update I have a shot at getting the gear early assuming the RNG is improved and the difficulty is not made cheat engine only (ZOS, apparently in denial about cheat engine use, I think likely will buff things to this level.)

Moral of the story, I think vMA RNG (and also weapon RNG in general) is so bad that ZOS is well past the mark at which people will run the content more because it takes a while to get the gear and into the relm where they, rightfully, never expect to get the gear and stop running at all. That is what my data suggests. (This coming from a magica guy who has his sharpened flame by the way.)