The Great Public Quest Scandal

If you've missed it, over at Warhammer Alliance they're having not a little scuffle over Public Quests.

A forumite by the name of Czechmate writes :

contribution means almost nothing, and everyone stands a chance of getting loot. In tier 4 content, whats to stop people who already have or don't want their influence loot, from entering PQ's, hitting a mob once or twice, and waiting on the rest of the people to finish the PQ for them so that they stand a good chance of taking the rewards from the people who earned them?

If you're not familiar with the public quest "scoring" system, it's pretty simple. Doing the quest gives you contribution, at the end of the PQ the game rolls 1d1000 for everyone and adds it to their contribution. The top three or so get to pick loot or money as they prefer.

It's up to 138 posts now. I posted a response last night and it took me so long to write that little post I didn't write here and I broke my 11 day blogging streak. I checked traffic today and it's almost equal with yesterday's (which was barely a record for the new site). So I know what sells with you people : not writing. You guys were visiting my site out of gratitude : thank you boat, you not writing is the gift that keeps on giving.

Anyway, here's what I wrote :

There are two possible situations.

1. There are a bunch of people in your PQ
   
   Say there are eleven people in a PQ. Ten of them try and each get 205 contribution points. One of them is a scrub and gets 5 contribution points.
   
   What are the odds that the scrub will win? (warning rough math ahead) Well, there's only about a 11% chance that none of the ten 205 guys will roll 800+. There's only about a 3% chance that none of them will roll 750+. And then the scrub will still need 20 of those rolls to win.
   
   Sorry I'm killing the math, but I think we can see that the 5 point scrub has less than a 1% chance of winning. Suppose it was 1% -- it would take the five point scrub about 100 PQ's to win, while the 205 point guys would have each won ten times by then.
   
   So the scrub is not a big deal.
   
   
2. There are not a bunch of people in your PQ
   
   As seen in the example, if there are not a ton of people in your PQ, then randomness plays a bigger factor.
   
   However, if there are only 7 people in your PQ, guess what? You're still better off than the 205 point guys in the above example, who only have a 9.9% chance of winning.
   
   So again, the scrub is not a big deal.

Which pretty much sums up my views on afk'ers. Can afk'ers win PQ loot? Yes. Will they? Yes. Is the system still somewhat fair? Yes.

At any rate I think the fixation on the treasure chest is misguided. To take a Paul Barnett example, the chest is the cherry on top. You have this big, meaty, public quest you can do with other people just by showing up. You're basically raiding without a schedule, which in my mind is so awesome it's cheating. You're also getting experience and you're having fun. Plus, while you're doing the quest you are gaining influence, which gets you closer to getting uber influence loot. To top off this delicious gameplay sundae you then have a shot at the chest loot, the "cherry", if you will.

An afk'er who only wants to take that 1 in 100 chance at the cherry is just not going to get that much out of the public quests.

In my mind itemization is going to be what really makes or breaks the public quests. But that's another blog.