Even after a spawn rate hotfix The Maw’s Blazing Ingots daily quest item can still only be looted by one player, and makes me deeply unhappy

In case you didn’t know — and I say this because I didn’t — there’s been a change to the Blazing Ingot daily quest in the Maw that makes an already tedious experience painful to the point of futility. That change is simple enough — previously, while doing Acquisition: Blazing Ingots, the ingots in question were clickable by all players in the area. If you were running around at the same time as a bunch of other players and the ingots spawned, you could all click on them and get an ingot, meaning that being in the Maw with a bunch of other players wasn’t a nightmare of frustration, swearing, weeping, and raging at the universe for having come to exist in a form that allowed a nightmare like ingots that despawn as soon as one player clicks on them. Starting in patch 9.0.5, only one person can click a pile of ingots before it despawns, making the quest an endless race to get to ingots before anyone else.

I don’t know if the change that now causes ingots to despawn is a bug or a deliberate change.  If it’s a bug, it’s proof that we do not live in an orderly universe where predictable things happen. If it’s deliberate, I feel like I must have personally done something truly heinous in a past life to cause this change to be made, because this transforms a mundane daily quest that we complete in a predictable manner into a Sisyphean ordeal that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy, Greg.

Yes, Greg, even you don’t deserve this.

I cannot fathom why anyone would look at this quest, or indeed any quest that requires you to gather something in the world — I’m told Animacones needed for the World Quest in Ardenweald were changed the same way — and decide that only one player should be able to loot the drop necessary to complete the quest. It doesn’t do anything except make players unhappy to see other players in an area. Players who have trouble seeing the quest items — which in both cases match the color palette of the areas they’re found — are just plain out of luck if there are other players in the area. Is that the experience we want players in a massively multiplayer game to have, to feel the pit of their stomachs drop out at the sight of another player?

No, I can’t believe it is.

Hopefully these are bugs, because if this is working as intended, I cannot feel like doing these quests is worth my time. I can get angry and frustrated reading the news — I don’t need to play a video game for that.

Update: There has been a hotfix applied to both Animacones and Blazing Ingots that increase the drop rate of these items. It doesn’t roll back the change to the ability for multiple players to loot the same item, but it does increase the respawn rate so that the items should be easier to get. I don’t personally think it will be enough, and I’m frankly confused — I take it to mean that these changes were deliberate ones and that the problem wasn’t that they altered the drops, but simply that their respawn rate wasn’t good enough.

Only time will tell if these changes will address the issue at hand, but at least it should be easier than it was before the hotfix, and that’s worth noting.

Originally posted March 16, 2021. Updated March 17, 2021.