Discussion: Rarity on items

lbpiggy

Hello!
This was a discussion on Thor's stream, where he gave some good points on rarity not really serving a purpose especially on Gatherables.

I am paraphrasing here; Thor was discussing in this stream that way its currently implemented, only Common and Legendary resources actually matter, he was using wood as an example. Way he felt about it was that Legendary woodcutting axe was so much better than any other rarity below it, and relatively easy to obtain. therefore you should really only need legendaries or commons, where as other tiers kind of just bloat your inventory.

I think gatherables should only be one rarity per item. Any items you want to craft could have some other rare resource and then decides the rarity, or have it tied to quantity of items, or the recipe, or just plain old RNG. Though personally I am in the camp of no rarities, just have them on magical and other powerful items to denote their powerful status, and generally not multiple tiers of different rarities on the same item apart from some rare cases.

What do you think? Is rarity on gatherables an issue, or is it issue on all items? or not issue at all, but just needs tweaks?

Ludullu

Once we get crafting dials, I'd prefer if material rarity inluenced those in various ways. And while legendary mats might give you the best stat stick, lower rarities could give you more of a horizontal change to the item, which might fit your build better.

Imo this would drastically increase the usefulness of mat rarities w/o completely removing them as a concept.

Chicago

You could fix this by making an extremely high crafting cost in legendary items

Azherae

lbpiggy wrote: »

Hello!
This was a discussion on Thor's stream, where he gave some good points on rarity not really serving a purpose especially on Gatherables.

I am paraphrasing here; Thor was discussing in this stream that way its currently implemented, only Common and Legendary resources actually matter, he was using wood as an example. Way he felt about it was that Legendary woodcutting axe was so much better than any other rarity below it, and relatively easy to obtain. therefore you should really only need legendaries or commons, where as other tiers kind of just bloat your inventory.

I think gatherables should only be one rarity per item. Any items you want to craft could have some other rare resource and then decides the rarity, or have it tied to quantity of items, or the recipe, or just plain old RNG. Though personally I am in the camp of no rarities, just have them on magical and other powerful items to denote their powerful status, and generally not multiple tiers of different rarities on the same item apart from some rare cases.

What do you think? Is rarity on gatherables an issue, or is it issue on all items? or not issue at all, but just needs tweaks?

The related system has only begun the beginnings of a start of a hint of an idea of balance and design.

Rarity serves a purpose in that it's fun to experience it, and more importantly, it serves the secondary purpose of specifically making newer players or newer Artisans have their porgression and dopamine feedback loops without utterly destroying the economy.

Basically, MMOs have a really simple problem. Every player wants to feel good and able to progress very basic things without devoting hours, but they also want an economy to work.

So you have, say 100 people who need to be able to get started and feel like they're doing something, but you also don't want 'enough resources available all the time for those 100 people to constantly want to do it, or to get burnt out of doing it'.

Enter the 10%.

Some games do it by making the combat really engaging and having the droprate be 10%. Some do it by having multiple gatherables that can come from one type of gathering point, and 10% of those are 'really important' and the others are designed to fall into natural personal consumption sinks. Throne and Liberty has recently tried putting the 10% on the output side with no real explanation, but in combination with the rest of their systems, it seems to be having mostly good effects.

If the designers are sticking with the 'common practice' of 'letting players trade 10% of what they personally interact with', then we need that Rarity system to be almost exactly as it is. They could fix some other things to make the pyramid work, and they've already started some of that, so we should probably just wait for them to finish it, before 'deciding to just scrap an unfinished system because it isn't fulfilling the feelings it is supposed to'.

It's not doing its job because it's not complete enough to do its job properly, so I say let 'em cook.