[2019] Solak Balance problems

Hey, worth noting its 1/200 per player, not 1/29~, and we've kept the existing mechanic where every player rolls, so a team can get multiple crossbow per kill.

This isn't a huge buff, I have the numbers on a spreadsheet with gp P/h and it was thought through.

It's definitely worse per player in 7 man (live), but the GP across modes isn't as bad as the difference between the bow drop rates because as a team you have more rolls on the misc table (Stave, pet, pages etc), and those drop rates don't differ across modes.

I'll be happy to explain how we came to those numbers and the the data we have to calculate gp & kills p/h later when I have more time.

Correct, and you can't roll both a crossbow and a grimoire. As for the MH & OH crossbow,
Crossbows are in a nested table, so if you roll 1/200 to get a crossbow, it'll then roll on the mainhand crossbow and if that roll fails you'll get an offhand.

So a few worthy mentions:

• We have data on kills times for players across the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles for every boss, and that includes both duo and group mode Solak.I was also supplied some more information by a fellow 'Scaper (high level PvMer), with some of their own recorded data of average kill times which I could verify on our backend, so I have a reasonable idea of the kill times of the top ~1% of players.
• Not to state the obvious... but we have the numbers for every item dropped, min/mean/max quantities of those items dropped, which items you can/can't get if you succesfully roll one item and so forth.
• We have data on the average sell prices of items over a period of time, as well as every buy/sell over on the market.

With all that, and more, we can accurately calculate the expected kills per hour; GP per kill; items average contribution to a drop table, and ultimately the GP P/h per player and team. In this case, we (primarily myself and Mod Shogun (lil shout out, thanks pal for all your work and help)) decided on these drop rates, with a few other considerations in mind at the time, which I'll touch upon of them now (though I won't go into much detail, or I'll genuinely be here writing for another half hour).Our main objective was to incentivise larger groups at Solak, but trying to maintain that fine balance between incentivising larger groups whilst also not discouraging smaller groups. With the data we have, and the rebalanced life points across all NPC's in the fight, we can expect a 16% kill difference at the in the 10th percentile between 2 and 7 man, which should hopefully be rewarding enough for those coordinating and organising larger groups, and then hopefully the smaller groups are more welcoming to players joining the team, including bringing learners as there is benefits in doing that.
Just to touch the surface on one our reasons for encouraging larger groups... it was designed as a 7 man encounter, which we then reworked some mechanics so that we could provide the accessability of duo mode.

I fully understand and respect that some players prefer solo/duo content and don't want to feel punished for using small groups, so I hope the MAHOOSIVE Crossbow split between 2 people is still enough to encourage that, as the GP P/H won't differ too much.

My final point, and an important one - this is never the end. Solak means so much to myself and Mod Ramen, and we'll never just let it sit in an unhealthy state. It might take us time to address the issues but we'll get there eventually as seen with this announcement of scalable Solak. Once these changes go live, we'll continue to review the data on somewhat regular intervals and if we need to make changes, we'll find the time!

We sure did, and that was part of the reason to reduce it in 7 man rather than upping duo, and as I mentioned, we have taken the data into consideration with the balancing.
My final point, I haven't start testing it yet so I might still find some issues/balancing concerns as I run playtests as so forth, so one or two things might still change. :)