Tombstones and Variance on MVPs and (rare) Mini Bosses
I've done MVP rounds my fair share on this server, both very casually and very hardcore. Over this time I've come to a love and hate relationship with the idea behind both Tombstones and Variance. The idea behind these is to prevent monopolization of MVPs by the same person who killed it first.
The issue I have with these concepts is, both Variance AND Tombstone achieve the same goal, so they are redundant, and from these 2 mechanics, Variance is far more annoying than it is helpful. If you get to a map, and see the tombstone, you know when you need to come back, there's no skill or interactive gameplay involved in coming back and sitting around the tomb for anything between 1 second to 600 seconds; praying the Tombstone doesn't fade away while you are getting a new round of buffs. Having the Tombstone generates competition, having Variance generates boredom, just having to stare the chunk of pixels waiting for it to disappear.
Having Variance removed makes for critical decision making, you know how much it takes you to find and kill and MVP on average, if they are close to spawning with each other, it forces you to make a choice, right now, the variance doesn't force you to make a choice, but to make a gamble.
Now regarding rare Mini Bosses, like Ghostring, Angeling, Arc Angeling, Swords, Chimera, Mutant Dragonoid, etc. These monsters have HUGE Variances, and there's no way to know when or where it was killed, this allows for heavy monopolization of these monsters, and some of them have bigger impacts than most MVPs. There's no competition about these monsters, unless you are willing to spend anything between 40 minutes to 6 hours teleporting the map, hoping to find the spawn before the person who is camping it before you.
Suggestions
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Eliminate completely the Variance from these rare monsters, or reduce it to something much more manageable like 30 seconds or 1 minute. Adjusting spawn times would be needed in some cases like long Mistress, Orc Lord, Phreeoni, etc, probably going for the average would be a good solution.
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Remove or reduce Variance on all rare Mini Bosses.
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Add Tombstone to all rare Mini Bosses.
I think these changes make the most sense for the server, and it would make competition closer and more fun. It is not fun to know you lost an MVP just because you were switching your music at minute 8, second 36 and blinked because there was a mosquito flying in front of your face so you couldn't have your eyes glued to the Tombstone for the entirety of the variance.