Balancing and Rare Items

Now, this thread might already be somewhere but I missed it. Actually, I guess 40% of this whole boards whine about ... er, deal with balancing issues.

This game is full of nifty items that everyone would like to have. some of them have been made so they don't drop any more, but are still around and sell for insane prices, like:

- Low-Light Targeting Scopes
- Freedom Arms 3927
- NCU Robot Reed
and many others

Most other nifty items are dropped by some rare mobs with either insane spawn rates ...

- Mick "Nugget" Mcbullet
- Clan Modified A-4000
- Commander Kelly Frederickson
- Colonel Frank Kaehler
- Elian Zuwadza
- Professor Van Horn
- Torrith the Ancient
and others

... or which are almost impossible to kill. And if all this does not apply, their droprate is equals your chances at winning the jackpot in a lottery, like for example PPPEs: Shape Soft/Hard Armor; Nullity 1 & 2, Grid Armor 1 - 4, Sheets of Notum Saturated Metaplast and other items.

Though some items are nodrop, many are not, but the prices they go for are so insane that no one can afford them unless he's either engaging in farming such items himself or he got lucky and hoarded some of the pre-nerf items.

Now I keep wondering, all this was done for the sake of "balancing" the game but all it did was to further imbalance the game. Some of the items mentioned above cost 100 million credits, a sum that a normal player will hardly get at unless he gets lucky and actually finds such a piece of stuff himself, either by chance or ba farming those rare spawns himself.

Now, what do those 18-hour spawns do: Some powergamer guilds farm them, keeping the time of the last kill secret and camping the place, competing for the loot with other powergamer guilds by trying to outdamage each other. So you're either member of the powergamer clubs or your chances at getting the loot are meager if you will get to see the mob at all.

Effectively, all this works into splitting up the people into two classes - those that grab ph4t l3wt and those that don't. With Notum Wars, this means that either you win or you loose, thus resulting in either you have a tower or you don't.

Balance in this game? An illusion, obviously.

Now, I don't want to complain without offering a solution: Make items be available not through insane camping of rare mobs but by doing missions. Make the missions be possible to do solo - or if you make team missions for rare items, give everyone a reward. If you want, make a mission where only a tough team can survive, but make it a mission so it's not an 18-hour timer with a powergamer camp each one trying to outdamage the other to get the ph4t l3wt. Cause dis sux.