Transparency

Sou7hernReaper

Along with most people I believe the encounter rate of the boss should be used as a guideline on drop chance. However, I also want to emphasize that transparency in those drop rolls should be put out in some form or fashion. Whether it be through a drop table we can check for the specific rates or through a general guide like “common, uncommon, rare, etc” given to us. If the rates are known I feel like that helps in making a decision on if the boss is worth grinding for that one particular drop for people or if they would be better off going to grind a similar drop with a higher drop rate somewhere else. For instance, if a boss has a blueprint for a sword that drops at a rate of 1/256 rolls but respawns every 6 hours, or another boss drops a similar sword blueprint at a rate of 1/50 but spawns every 48 hours then people can make a more informed choice on which one they would want to spend their time on.

Edit: this was supposed to be in the discussion for the drop rates but I messed up.

Kilion

I think I get why you want this and I agree that it would help, but at the same I think information advantage is something that Intrepid tries to actively promote in the game as part of the exploration and economic cycle. Meaning: Knowing what boss can drop what might be part of the games exploration cycles. Finding a particularly sought after material, blueprint or piece of gear and being the only group/guild to know about it, becomes an option for profit. With the information advantage the group can farm the drop and then sell it for profit after shipping it to far away Nodes. This will at some point inevitably lead to the information leaking if it is not sold of to a bigger faction for something else of value.

But maybe - and this is me speculating - we at some point have access to something like oracles, mystical guides or an information guild that sells us rough locations of certain items.

In general I personally am opposed to the ideo of letting players look beneath the hood of the game so they can min-max the hell out of this game. Having all this information ready at hand means there is much less need to interact with other people in the world, you can basically skip to the point where you only rally your guild/group members to get the drop off a soon-to-be-corpse. And that seems like a significant reduction in social gameplay.

Depraved

well we will either get that info in game (probably not) or on a website X_X