Hello all
As the title says "how rare is too rare" of course im talking about mounts, pets any collectable really.
WoW is pretty famous for its 0.01% mounts that few people ever see and i have always thought this is a bad thing and i will explain why.
1. We dont have the time like we used to, this isnt news but most kids arent playing MMOs (source: i work with kids) 99% of MMOs players are adults with jobs, kids, hobbies and other MMOs we are also playing, most people just arent farming like they used to.
2. People who give up farmig do 1 of 2 things, 1. quit the game. 2. stop farming. No one wins if either ones happens especially if its a mount that drops from a raid boss that willl become outdated one day and no one willing to farm it.
3. Its not fun, plain and simple its not fun to farm something thousands of times.
I personally think no mount, pet or collectable should be rarer than 1% especially if obtaining it is a challenge.
"How do you create prestige and rare items if everything is 1%"
Easy you make the content difficult.
The only gatekeeping for rare items should be skill, not attendance and obscene drop rates.
Would love to hear some opions on this.
P.S I soloed Zul Gurub for years to get the Swift Zulian Tiger, so im not lazy, but id never do this again as a grown man.
Rarity is important and not everyone should have all items. But rarity must be managed in a way that isn't abusive of player time and isn't a grind that detracts from the game. These items should never feel like they are required to participate in content.
To keep items highly sought after without encouraging all the toxic behavior and burn-out that comes with making something super rare, we could have two versions of these items. The less rare version and a more rare version that has only slightly better stats but is also visually much better. The super rare item will still stand out and turn heads, but players won't feel required to get the flashier version, allowing them to play, not farm.
I somewhat disagree with the OP
The whole "we don't have the time that we used to" is nonsense. There will always be people in different stages of their life with more or less time. ..though I do joke that by the time Pantheon releases everyone who was an adult when EQ released will be retired and have a ton of free time :)
If anything, technology has streamlined our lives and given us more time. Faster startup/load times/connections. Faster more efficient communication. The ease and efficiency with which information is spread allows for more free time than we had before. (the flip side is that maybe players have less patience now because of that technology? hard to say)
But also, I enjoy long camps. Farming one thing for days or weeks or months sounds amazing. An incentive to do so would be wonderful. To often there is not enough content.
Give me that long grind or camp so that I'm doing something active and I'll happily spend as long as it takes to get that item and I'll enjoy having something to camp.
It's the LFG part that isn't fun. Once we are there and camping something it's fun. Who cares how long it takes if it's fun?...you should want it to be longer.
I thought the super duper rare stuff was supposed to keep me from farming them? If you have to squash a million giant bugs in a few months to get the .01% bug mandible monk fist weapon to finally drop, I assumed it was because only 1 person on the server supposed to be blessed by it's presense after a few weeks of many players squashing bugs. I'm okay with spending a few hours a day to get a 2% bug's eye agate necklace to drop for anyone in the party until I get a chance at it. I wont spend a week there unless something was more inportant, like Exp or a class required ability book. Then it's time to move on.
As with so many things - entirely accurate generalizations based on current MMOs (which almost universally rely heavily on microtransactions) do not necessarily apply to new games that rely entirely or mostly on subscriptions. Which Pantheon may, or may not, be.
Extremely rare items are often - perhaps usually - a teaser to get people to head for the accursed in-game store. Of course they can also be simply an encouragement for people to grind - all MMOs have time sinks.
When I saw the topic name I didn't think mounts or drops I thought harvested materials - as in Vanguard's somewhat flawed system of normal, rare and ultrarare items available from harvestable nodes, bodies and the like. Somewhat flawed IMO because the so-called ultrarares weren't all that rare. I would love Pantheon to have a similar system where we have a neverending incentive to harvest even common looking boring nodes because there is always that tiny chance of a jackpot.
The OP fails to understand one fact about percentage based chances: Nothing prevents you from beating the odds the very first time, or the 2nd time or the Nth time. Take that 0.01% chance and spread it across the hundreds, if not thousands, of people across all the servers and rare isn't actually that rare. It might be rare for the individual, but not the population as a whole.
I knew people who never managed to get their EQ1 Vex Thal keys yet I managed to get all 10 shards for it in less than a single real time day. That's the fun of percentage based chances.
I really don't care too much for it. I remember Final. Fantasy 11 had a sword call Ridill that allow a player to hit 2x-3x time instead of the usual 1 time. It was the most sought after weapon in the game and the dragon only spawn 1 time per month at the time of it's death.
So if you didn't know what time it died you'll never know what time it will spawn next month and you'll be wasting your time waiting at the spawn location. Now some people did manage to get it but they were in hardcore elite guild but for peasant like me and other we had to wait years before Final fantasy 11 decided to release some weapon with said stats which you could buy on the auction house or drop from boss fights.
By that time the game was in its quality of life phase, population down, few server and merge, no new expansion, game is 10+ years old. Sad part is I still don't have Ridill, even when they have similar and better weapon on the auction house or drop from boss.
Now that's how you keep an epic weapon Epic! If Pantheon makes it impossible to get said item, I'm all for it! I enjoy seeing others with impossible to get sought after item, that what makes the world real to me!
Drops with a 0,02% drop chance is terrible game design, IMHO. If you want, that something is rare thern make it hard to get. Running thousands times the same game content, because the drop chance is so low is tedious and boring and lazy game design.
Cheers
Larirawiel said:Drops with a 0,02% drop chance is terrible game design, IMHO. If you want, that something is rare thern make it hard to get. Running thousands times the same game content, because the drop chance is so low is tedious and boring and lazy game design.
Cheers
I get why stupidly low drop rates are used, because players are far more creative when it comes to defeating even the most challenging content than developers are capable of actually creating challenging content. With thousands of player across all the servers effectively working together (by posting what they learn on any number of wikis) we'll learn how to beat anything a developer creates in very little time. The only time content actually stops players is when developers have unwittingly coded it so it actually doesn't work or deliberately coded it so it cannot be beaten.
Low drop rates are created to prevent a too-rapid influx of items into the world. But is that really a bad thing if the items are NoDrop? I don't think so. So long as the drops are not unbalanced, overpowered, etc who gives a toss if you kill X mob (and I think we're talking raid targets mostly here) it is guaranteed to drop that item? You can't trade it, can't sell it and it isn't OP.
What could be done instead of low drop rates is to just make the spawn time stupidly long, but that is just trading one low percentage chance for another. A 0.01% drop chance for a named that always spawn or a 100% drop rate for a named that has a 0.01% chance to spawn. Pick your poison, basically because you're going to get one or the othere in Pantheon. Guaranteed.
The casual Meta player. If everyone was a casual meta player, the person with the .01 rare item taking 4 years to obtain said item would be acceptable- a panacea- to the casual meta player. The casual meta player not seeing the .01 rare item until they have been playing foir 4 years will also be assuaged.
However, the casual meta player seeing within a few months (due to the RNG gods) someone with a .01 rare item will... never be rich beyond the dreams of avarice and allow the covetousness of the item eat away at their soul like a neverending cancer and anyone that has read any morality tale or fariy tale will know that the final obtaining of said item will provide merely a pale abd strangely empty satisfaction.
How-ev-er
I think which items are rare is a valid concern. Class epics? every class wants their epic, what class is not worthy to earn their epic? unless there are secrets designed in the game to allow a class to excell in another skill that superceeds the epic. On the other hand, items that are not good for my class, I like seeing, but I am not stressed if I dont have it. like, oh so that is the rare warrior item that summons a pet? how neat- I could honestly not care. BUt, that is a caster ring that allows a invulnerability spell? why have the gods favored YOU and not me, surely I am more worthy. But I recognize this folly. I dont let it consume me.
As someone who had farmed Invincible in ICC25 weekly on 3 toons, for over 4 years, to have it drop once. I can relate to OP.
That said... I liken the .01% to an age old Homebrew D&D rule. The Death Threat roll. This was something that came around (as far as I know) in 3rd Edition D&D. The normal rule was if you rolled a natural 20 on your attack roll, you get to roll that d20 again to confirm the crit, this was called a Critical Threat (you had to beat the AC of the target to confirm the crit). But if that second die resulted in another natural 20. The homebrew rule was that you now go into a "Death Threat". This was a way to 1 shot kill, whatever the target was. And in order for that to happen, you'd have to roll a third and fatally final natural 20. If somehow the dice gods have blessed you with 3 natural 20s in a row, you'd slay whatever adversary stood before you. In my case, I was DMing. And a low level Fighter with a non-magical weapon rolled 3 20s in a row, and killed a Dragon NPC that was supposed to give them quests. It was 1 in 8000 chance, or .0125%. Who was I to rob him of that joy?
That's right, the probability of a Death Threat roll to succeed is 1:8000. How many times have I seen that happen in my 2 decades of D&D? I could count on one hand. Then again, to throw my whole post into the garbage bin I could also say this. Statistics 101 - Past results never effect future probability.
Would it be better to have ever increasing drop chances? If so, based on what? Time? Attempts? Participation? Would there be a cap? Could you eventually be guaranteed a drop? All of those could have some merit. And I'm curious to see where this all goes. The only question we need to ask ourselves as we painfully grind our way over and over to that said item is this; "Is the juice worth the squeeze?"
BTW, .0125% chance to win means 99.9875% chance to lose. Slightly different perspective if you think of it that way. Sunken-Cost Fallacy? Also, if you knew you had a chance to win a lottery jackpot, but instead of it costing you 5 minutes and $2 to participate. It costs you hours of your time potentially daily if not weekly. Time probably better spent elsewhere like learning a skill IRL or earning money, ect. Would you still do it, knowing you have a 99.99% chance to lose/fail?
I'm all over the place with this post. Haha I just like the philosophy to it all.
This is just my opinion, but honestly, anything that has a static drop source shouldn't have a less than 2% drop chance. I think that a 2% drop chance is still rare for most items when rolled against the rest of the loot table. With that being said, I am ok with world drops having a lower drop chance.
I don't necessarily think that everyone should be able to do/obtain everything easily. I think that players should have the opportunity to, but the ability to do so should require a decent time investment.
I also don't agree with the argument that people have less time these days. I think we all have to make an active choice about where and how we spend our time. It is true that as we age we have more obligations and personal responsibility, but people in the 19990s were also dealing with these same obligations/responsibilities. If anything the growth of the internet and advancements in society have improved our time management skills and led to us having more time.
"This is just my opinion, but honestly, anything that has a static drop source shouldn't have a less than 2% drop chance."
Shouldn't this depend in large part on what is providing the drop?
If the drop is coming from a raid boss that can be killed once a week 2% may seem like a really low chance to get something especially if one item drops for the entire raid to roll on.
If the drop comes from a low level animal that can be killed in 5 seconds maybe 2% is way too high.
There is no inherent rule or law that drop rates must remain at a set % indefinately. Though, It is important that specific items do remain fairly rare. As content or level caps change, so too will the desire to obtain certain drops. Thereby, creating shifting needs for different items. The game itself will further require players to diversify their gear to specific challenges that arise at level. This too diminishes the 'need' or 'desire' for one rare piece of gear. Suppose that item is rendered virtually useless by specific content a player is engaged in? The idea that something so rare will somehow significantly change gameplay (make it more fun?, make you more strategic?, make you better?) seems to not be so big a deal when you consider that the vast majority of players are still playing the content with their non-ultra rare items and doing just fine with what they have. I do hope to see a fairly broad range of rarity both in terms of visual impact and technical stats with gear.
Also, I've known people to log in to immediately get a drop of a highly rare item when they're very casual players. And others, hard-core types, play for weeks on end and never see the drop they've been working toward. In this regard, I hope dependency isn't just vetted on drop rarity but also on work put in as well as accumen of gameplay. Yeah.
4
dorotea said:"This is just my opinion, but honestly, anything that has a static drop source shouldn't have a less than 2% drop chance."
Shouldn't this depend in large part on what is providing the drop?
If the drop is coming from a raid boss that can be killed once a week 2% may seem like a really low chance to get something especially if one item drops for the entire raid to roll on.
If the drop comes from a low level animal that can be killed in 5 seconds maybe 2% is way too high.
Grimseethe said:Hello all
As the title says "how rare is too rare" of course im talking about mounts, pets any collectable really.
WoW is pretty famous for its 0.01% mounts that few people ever see and i have always thought this is a bad thing and i will explain why.
1. We dont have the time like we used to, this isnt news but most kids arent playing MMOs (source: i work with kids) 99% of MMOs players are adults with jobs, kids, hobbies and other MMOs we are also playing, most people just arent farming like they used to.
2. People who give up farmig do 1 of 2 things, 1. quit the game. 2. stop farming. No one wins if either ones happens especially if its a mount that drops from a raid boss that willl become outdated one day and no one willing to farm it.
3. Its not fun, plain and simple its not fun to farm something thousands of times.
I personally think no mount, pet or collectable should be rarer than 1% especially if obtaining it is a challenge.
"How do you create prestige and rare items if everything is 1%"
Easy you make the content difficult.
The only gatekeeping for rare items should be skill, not attendance and obscene drop rates.
Would love to hear some opions on this.
P.S I soloed Zul Gurub for years to get the Swift Zulian Tiger, so im not lazy, but id never do this again as a grown man.
I still have nightmares about watching my brother play LII where there were literally hundreds of players taking on a gargantuan boss for one single drop and the closest guy to the drop with the quickest fingers gets the item. I believe they had a 0.01% system for drops as well, and I knew that if I ever played a game like that I would /never/ get a legendary item. So 1% would be a solution in Pantheon, and also make many of them (higher quantity), so you don't skip work and school just to farm for a single item.
As long as there are other, not-quite-so-special items (even versions of the *same* item) that drop more often than the 0.1% item, then it's a good thing.
Getting a rare drop is exciting. The knowledge that you have a chance is exciting.
If people have the tenacity and endurance to repeat an encounter ad nauseum in order to get that drop: Good for them. I believe endurance/persistence is a quality that should be rewarded in MMORPGs. Obviously not exclusively, but why shouldn't it be laudable and rewarded?
But to know you'll probably get *nothing* unless extremely lucky, is not so much fun. To throw a (less juicy) bone to the majority of players makes sense and is fair.
As for the whole skill-effort aspect of the issue:
I understand the whole "I don't have the time I used to" argument. I agree that it makes sense for most content to be approachable in chunks. I agree that it's very important for the challenge level of content to be greatly defined by the level of ability needed. I don't agree, though, that content should require much less time than it tended to in 'the old days', overall. I also think that the best content should require many attempts to even beat it. No matter your skill level, there should be an element of 'learning' what needs to be done (and failures until you do).
As far as I'm concerned, the best 'challenges' in an MMORPG (and in life, even) involve 'effort' not just 'ability'. That effort/endurance/tenacity is a significant part of 'skill', not just raw ability level. Killing one level 5 Orc doesn't mean you may as well go up to level 6 because you've proved you can beat level 5 difficulty. XP is called 'experience points' for a reason. They represent your experiences not your raw level of capability.
To reinterate: Yes, of course capability is the major part of the challenge/skill concept, but effort definitely is, and should be, a significant part too.
OmegaBeam said:I still have nightmares about watching my brother play LII where there were literally hundreds of players taking on a gargantuan boss for one single drop and the closest guy to the drop with the quickest fingers gets the item. I believe they had a 0.01% system for drops as well, and I knew that if I ever played a game like that I would /never/ get a legendary item. So 1% would be a solution in Pantheon, and also make many of them (higher quantity), so you don't skip work and school just to farm.
Don't get me wrong, I love very rare items and the fact that you have to put in the extra work to retrieve them, but a thousand players fighting for a single drop is not fun, IMHO.
Hehe well you've added another aspect which *definitely* is undesirable, whether or not items are rare drops.
Having players squabbling over loot be part of the rarity concept is a terrible idea bound to result in at least negative feelings and probably bad toxicity in the community.
Also, as long as not having a particular rare item doesn't stop you even participating in any part of the game, then people just need to learn to control their avarice and jealousy hehe.
Who cares if someone else has the rare Sword of the Golden Dragon as long as your not-so-rare Sword of the Red Dragon lets you take on the same content with similar chance of success?
I suppose the key also there is not to have rare items be wildy too much better.
This topic has been promoted for my CM content, please continue the discussion and have fun! :)
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As others have suggested, the mob in question matters. Ultra-low drop rates on slow-to-kill mobs means the item may not even exist, from the perspective of an individual player. I don't particularly care if everyone and her sister can get a particular drop. I care if I can.
So... if someting is supposed to be difficult to get, make it difficult. If you're thinking of a 1% drop rate, instead, I'd rather have to kill 100 of the mobs in question and collect a drop from each of them. That way the path is predictable. Success based on a combination of a sucky RNG and a huge time sink isn't my idea of fun. Just tell me up front, "go kill 100 of these guys and come back to the quest mob".
This is also how I feel about pretty much all contested content. The least fun thing in original EQ was the 2-year queue for epic drops. 3-day (or worse 1-week) spawns. If a particular mob is required for a class-defining skill, then I hate having my success depend upon a bunch of other people having to wait.
Having to wait an hour? No biggie. Having to wait a week fo the next person? Having a queue that's months or years long? Definitely not fun.
I think part of it is people just want thier PC to look good with respectable stats, and not run of the mill. So as long as there are items that don't have us all looking like we shop at garage sales for our equipment, then the majority of the players will be OK with not having ultra-rare items.
Early game when everyone looks like they stole a burlap sack from the local shop to create armor is depressing. :P
Grinding for faction stores, skills, or to obtain multiples of an item is an industry standard that can not generally be avoided.
It's an MMO and time sinks are what keeps you playing the game.
But grinding the same mob or endlessly raiding for a random chance of a required drop is horrible.
Rarity is fine as long as the item can come from anything in the world, including crafting.
It would also be nice if the stats scaled with your level.
In WoW, I obtained the pattern and all of the materials needed to build a Molten Core Rifle. It took months and all of my money.
Then The Burning Core released and the very first green drop was a better weapon. All that raiding was wasted.
That was when I quit playing that polished turd. Before that day I was fine grinding furby faction to get a purple cat.