I don't suppose we could expect a quick server restart or unscheduled maintenance to solve this, could we? Being told to wait for scheduled weekly maintenance, i.e. several days, while we can't log in to do daily or weekly quests and bosses strikes me as unacceptable. To say nothing of the big summer event where we're expected to log in and perhaps stay logged in idling in that one map to cap coins, missing out on a good 350 coins per character per day at the moment.
I don't think I'll hold my breath expecting any compensation for lost time either.
The droplet drop rate problem wouldn't even be significant if there wasn't an obvious and strangely missing solution: dailies. Lucid and Will's arcane gear shops function much like Lotus and Damien's absolab shops, gather a bunch of one item from mobs, a few of another from the boss, trade those for coins to buy the equips. There's only two differences between the former and latter pair: a) Coin costs are horribly inflated for the Arcane gear (5 coins for absolab wep, 24 for arcane, nearly 5x the cost), and far more importantly b) Haven and Dark World Tree have dailies for their mob dropped items. Even if some theoretical daily quests only gave 3-5 droplets per day (or 48-80 days to get an arcane wep), that would be a far sight better than HUNDREDS of expected hours of grinding droplets for a single piece of gear, especially in this post-drop-rate-nerf world.
This lack of dailies for droplets seems incredibly suspect to me. Was this how it was when Lotus, Damien, and absolab gear were first added? (Seriously, I wasn't around at that time, were there dailies straight away or not?) The most generous reason for such a strange omission I can come up with is that KMS wanted to wait until all of the Arcane River content was available before making the equips any easier to obtain. Esfera's shop with the rest of the arcane gear only just came out in KMS, with only a Hard version of Will coming with it making him nigh-unbeatable to the vast majority of players. Maybe they'll improve things once normal Will is out and obtaining his drops is more viable? That seems like a rather awful way to go about things though, considering Lucid came out (and in GMS's case will have come out) a year and a half prior to Esfera's release. That's a lot of time to be making people grind that hard for that many rarely dropped items to get even a single piece of gear.
Another kink in the system I could imagine is the fact that the Arcane River already has dailies for each area already (or will have in Esfera's case, presumably) to collect arcane symbols which have a similarly abysmal drop rate, and are perhaps more important to the way the Arcane River functions than arcane gear. Maybe they couldn't come up with decently differentiated dailies for both symbols and droplets? Maybe, similar to the above, they have greater plans once all the River's areas have their symbol dailies? They're already streamlining dailies with the release of Esfera, requiring fewer to no dailies needing to actually be done depending on how far down the river you are, so maybe relief is coming? But again, a year and a half or more is a hell of a long time to wait.
I suspect the deepest reason for this manufactured problem is the most cynical one: Nexon needs its players to keep playing. That's how you keep free-to-play online games with cash transactions going. You need to keep a large player base active as long as possible to attract the whales. Without enough little-to-non paying customers players to be bigger than, whales can be prone to getting bored and moving on to the next game that can prey upon their fat bank accounts or compulsive gambling issues or what have you. And with so much competition in the market these days to lose those small players to if they run out of interesting free content (which can only be produced so quickly), what do you do? Stretch out how long it takes to finish that content. Heck, getting even one piece of arcane gear was a monumental time investment when the content was first released. Then what happened? Drop rate nerf. Suddenly that time investment skyrockets even higher, with no alternatives to an ever greater grind being presented (yet). I really do believe that at some point in the future, some better means of obtaining both types of droplets will be implemented. But by God I guarantee they're gonna take their sweet time putting it out there, probably just in time for the next set of gear to come out that will take a minimum 500 hour time investment to obtain a single piece. Maybe this strategy is working well for KMS, which as I understand it is doing rather well for itself with a large player base. But does this do any good for the health of GMS, which is...questionable in its current state? I guess it's hanging on by it's fingernails for now so we'll see.
In the end, I don't think the droplet drop problem necessarily needs improved spawn or drop rates to be solved (at least in the short term, these are definitely problems that need addressing at some point). What we need are daily sources of even a small amount of droplets. My proposal is simple: when you complete your dailies for any given Arcane River area, you get a droplet. Boom, done. That way, once you've cleared the Vanishing Journey, at the same time you get those last 3 symbols from dailies, you also get a droplet. Just 1 a day at first. Then once you unlock Chu Chu Island and can clear your daily Muto PQ runs, that's 2 a day, and so on up through Arcana for 4 a day (and 5 a day once Morass gets its dailies this summer in GMS). Maybe the type of droplet received is random between the usual one we currently grind for and the new Esfera one, or maybe Esfera could get its own daily for 3-5 of those droplets? I don't know, just spitballing. It would still a nice long grind like Nexon needs from us, but starting to get those droplets even before reaching Lachelein would be a nice carrot on a stick for players just reaching the Arcane River. Maybe seeing that they've already got a head start would entice more players not to give up on ever getting their arcane gear and keep grinding like good little customers. I doubt GMS will get anything like this anytime soon since even KMS doesn't have any droplet dailies yet either, but I believe something is coming from them...eventually. It'll probably just take another year at this rate.
Incidentally, I feel like a similar solution could be done for the difficulty of getting tyrant gloves from Kritias in less than a year, since GMS doesn't have access to that one boss you can get more anti-magic stones from. Finish a quest, get a stone. Simple as that. It would help, even considering KMS recently reduced the number of Kritias dailies you have to do per day. One third of the time to get a glove would still be far preferable that what we've got...but that's another topic that will never actually be addressed.
