Setting up a "reasonable grinding time" during an anniversary celebration seems pretty awful.

Thank you for the work you do, but I'd rather not encourage this kind of behaviour from ZOS.

I agree with most of what you say @furiouslog, (I can't speak to games I haven't played such as Lost Ark, ESO is my only MMORPG) and also thank you for running the maths. And as you have already stated, it is possible to run 1,000+ dolmens/geysers/vvardenfell bosses and still not get a single drop.

I love ESO. My husband's been playing it consistently since early 2018 and me since summer 2019. We both love this game and put hours of our leisure time every week into enjoying it, solo and together.

When the event was coming up, we both checked out what was going on. We saw the style pages and got excited. We thoughtr "Oh, this will be fun! We'll hang out on mic, do some dolmens, do some WBs in Vvardenfell, do some Geysers, this'll be nice!"

A few days later, I know people who have done 264 Dolmens and nothing. 167 Geysers and nothing. 7-8 hours camping Vvardenfell WBs each day for three days and nothing.

I'm assuming that Zos just wanted to give us something nice and put it behind some effort? I do sometimes wonder if they forget what it's lilke to be an actual player and have to deal with RNG. And also how percentages work.

This event is supposed to be FUN. My husband and I were looking forward to groupng with each other and friends for Anchors, Geysers and VVardenfell bosses. We were both also planning (solo) revisting various fun dailies for nostalgia (like the Guild dailies, Jee-La's, Zahariah's etc.)

What should've been a joyous, fun celebration of a truly amazing game, has become an RNG nightmare. Committed players, instead of enjoying the celebration, are becoming frustrated and miserable.

Took me 20 hours in a cave in Vvardenfell to get both style pages. But at least I got a couple hundred event boxes from the boss. Plus I got to tab out and play other games for four of every five minutes spent.

If the drop rate is about 1/100 as you said, which I'd say it is or close to it given how many people I've seen that have done 100s of WB or Geysers/Dolmens without getting the drop, it really bothers me that alongside waiting 5 minutes for a new boss to spawn in say Vvardenfell you're looking at a 1/100 drop rate for an item that's not tradeable. The only style page I'm really interested in is the Barbas mask but with only about an hour to give to farming world bosses during this event each day (my timezone is really bad unless I want to stay up super late and the other few hours I can put in a week are for my raid group) I'm not even guaranteed to get the drop during this entire event length.

If they halved the drop rate to 1/50 it would still be too rare given how long you have to wait for each world event to activate. Currently, they spawn every 5 minutes you probably get 12 world boss kills an hour, likely less if you're a player with low DPS, It would take nearly 10 hours to even HIT the drop rate if you got loot every time, for an item that's from an event, that is untradeable and only offered for a limited time period. After all that, you realise that there are 5 of them that are farmable with the same odds.

I'll be honest if I ran dolmans enough times to be at a coin flip percentage and continue to not get a drop I guess my luck is just really terrible I guess based on your percentages. I think the average I've been seeing at the very least is around 150 dolmen runs for the Ulvor and worm staff. So I think it kind of works like this: The first 100 dolmens you complete the percentage is 1% for a drop. After 100, each subsequent dolman increases the chance of the drop by 1%. I feel this is a bit more reasonable based on other accounts I've been looking at. I still think its silly if that's the case. Mindlessly grinding for this would burn me out if I wasn't taking breaks. Its the main reason why I'm commenting on some of these topics involving this since if I feel like I may burn myself out doing this WHILE taking breaks others that feel they need to grind until they get the item will probably end up getting them but will probably put the game down later or look back and find the time wasted on doing the same task for so long was just not fun for them. I've been there before and took a 6 month hiatus from the game and I'm worried others may fall into that same hole. I came back because I enjoy this game and the lore but others may not feel the same.

I don't think these items with the drop rate they have should be locked behind doing the same repetitive task over and over without an alternative. I said this in another topic but I wish they had the option to buy them with event tickets. I said about 10 since if they want to encourage players to do certain activities during the event I think the cost should still be high to encourage them to participate to try to get them. But if they still want the desired item they have another option of obtaining it so they can go back to how they prefer to enjoy the game rather than burning themselves out.