Pretty purple epic loot does nothing for me.
This is part of why: Obsidian Hatchling
Note two key nuggets of information:
One, the Rarity is “Very rare”, kindly noted in pretty purple text.
Two, the cost and supply: “50 (unlimited supply)”
To be completely fair, it is possible that something with unlimited supply could be very rare, if not many people are actually buying it. That said, since gold is also itself unlimited (OK, throttled by time and per-character carrying capacity, but practically unlimited), there isn’t much of a limit to how many of these critters can be in the world. I must admit, I’d love to see an Obsidian Hatchling swarm crash a server somewhere. Yes, you can only have one per player active at a time, but the mental image of these little guys Zerging through a capital city just makes me chuckle.
Calling them “Very rare” is a bit disingenuous, and is likely more of an arbitrary selling point, rather than any reflection of accurate valuation or representation. Perhaps it could be cynically noted that savvy customers already know this, but I can’t help but feel that something has been lost in the callous marketing.
“Rarity” in WoW is a better measure of the time investment than actual rarity.
It’s ultimately not a big deal, and I’m certainly nitpicking the nomenclature (something I’m no stranger to, considering my stringent objection to “black holes” in the most recent Star Trek movie), but it’s one measure of how sales and presentation are rather… flexible… in their interpretation of reality. (It’s also why you need to do your homework when shopping or listening to those who are selling, and why Big Brotherish information peddlers are less than informative.) The game goes out of its way to make everyone feel Super, which ultimately, undermines the point of being Super. (Cue Syndrome evil laugh.)
True rarity just wouldn’t sit well with the current crop of MMO designs, for better or worse. That’s not “bad design”, just unappealing for some, and underwhelming for those looking for a little more meaning in their entertainment. (Not everyone, to be sure.) It falls into the same taboo realm as basing advancement on player skill, and really would be a niche design tenet.
To be fair, I’m not terribly concerned with true rarity, either. If I’ve achieved something in the game, it’s a goal I’ve set for *myself*, and I don’t particularly care if it’s something that has been done before by someone else. I don’t care for the pride and preening aspects of these things, either. As a wise man once said:
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. … It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.” (Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1952, pp. 109-10.) *Cited here: “Beware of Pride”*
At any rate, this is why I have a hard time getting worked up about gear in modern MMOs, or about “Achievements” that anyone with enough time (and OCD) can do. It’s all about time and perception, and I have neither the time nor the delusion that these “epic rares” are all that epic (in anything but the grind to get them) or all that rare, and with the “Im speshul, yur not” and “true uniqueness” aspects removed, all these things are is indicators of how much time I’ve spent. I choose to spend my time elsewhere. (Yes, some things are vaguely skill based, inasmuch as they require raiding skill or social (asocial?) skills to manipulate a guild to do your bidding, but by and large, time is the biggest factor by far.)
By extension, it’s also why I can’t get worked up about playing these MMO things all that much in the first place, at least not long-term. It’s fun to see your numbers go up and watch merely mortal mobs melt under your maleficent ministrations, but when it comes to feeling special as part of the game world, well… we’re all just heroes in our own minds. Some of us play that role better than others (maybe because we have to to enjoy ourselves in a world of clones), but in the end, what do we have to show for it?
Are you really a rarity, a sparkling snowflake in a world of me-too caped heroes? (Sadly, my Death Knight is no longer the only Sendoku.)
Somehow, I can’t make myself any more interested in being a level 80 Druid (or whatever) any more than I want to be an 80 year old Cube Jockey dual specced into Paperwork and Maintenance. The journey itself has its share of great moments, certainly, but the destination is rather underwhelming, including the epics you have to show for it. Perhaps a whirlwind spin through the Cataclysm will be fun, but like any good vacation spot, it’s not somewhere I’d really want to call home, or build a self image around.
tl;dr version, I’m still an Explorer, not an Achiever. This applies to gear and loot as well as Achievements.
This rarity issue – purple is the norm – started with TBC already. Suddenly it was not having ONE epic purple item that was special, special in a negative way was having ONE item that was not yet purple.
Power creep says hello. WOTLK tried to stop it with giving little to no better gear prior to max level than you could get through the “badges” in TBC at level 70 already. But then Naxx came along, some more extras, and we are back to everything being epic again.
Pride and e-peen are indeed motivating factors. Right now all this has become a function of time. One of my friends and notorious MMO slacker has 4/5 max tier gear on his Paladin created in this summer. 😛 Another one has maxed his gear to the max and only bothers with patch content updates for two reasons: 1.) working on achievement progress 2.) if there is one-two better pieces of gear available for him.
I think you are much more forgiving than me when it comes to achievement systems. I see them as a burden, as putting me on rails to do this or that rather than letting ME think up of something I could do in this virtual world. Plus you also get “rewarded” for doing all the many odd things they come up to be achievements. Even if I say “screw achievements, just play” I saw the worst of this system in GW. People are constantly drunk and switched of post-processing to bypass the annoying blur effect of the screen when you are drunk, which they are constantly. There is an achievement for being drunk, so people drink afk with macros and drink while they are playing. The same people can hardly be swayed to do anything else but something that is missing them for this or that title.
I remember how I said this when they introduced titles/achievements to GW with Factions: “cool, I get a title for completing all prophecies missions with bonus” or “nice, the explorer title shows me how much of the map I really explored” (which I did before the title for that was implemented).
Then they added more and more titles, factions, grinds for titles and factions and well… this was much more stressful than enjoyable for me. Some titles were even required, like high lightbringer rank, if you wanted to join parties for the Domain of Anguish.
Achievements are nothing else than cheap, recycled content and making fun of the player by making him do ridiculous things for “rewards”. Just another additional layer to stretch content, to make players play on and stay subscribed
The worst thing is we applaud them for this, and more and more games copied this silly system. Even the small indie “puzzle” game Osmos http://store.steampowered.com/app/29200/ has achievements. I got one for completing the introduction and several more for completing levels. Even games that have no subscription system copy this crap, it is like the pox!
A game designed with achievements as driving force in mind would probably drive me nuts. A game adding achievements for everything possible is like grabbing for the last straw. Just read the WOTLK raid/dungeon achievements and you are right, this rewards OCD behaviour very well.
A few years ago “death to grind” was the mantra, now we found something worse to replace it, apparently. 😛
I might just be a wee bit more forgiving in general, but actually, I share many of your sentiments about achievements. I don’t really like them… but then, that’s not quite what I was getting at with this particular article. I’m not sure that I need to tackle them, though; you’ve got it covered pretty well. 🙂
I just remembered… if there is something RARE in WoW, it is the non-repeatable “feats of strength”.
Like getting the Amani War-Bear, Hand of A’dal (OK, almost everyone has this title – but you cannot get it anymore), and so on.
Hmm, I don’t mind Achievement that are given for things you’ll be doing anyway. If a system gives me some title or minor perk when I’ve killed my 1000th goblin in a game where goblins are a prominent segment of the bad guys, then I’m fine with.
I probably won’t ‘chase’ that achievement unless I’m in a particular frame of mind. In LOTRO I’ve parked my character in an area where Trolls are during a week where I know I’m going to have a lot of stress and not much gaming time, then I’d log in for 15-20 minutes a day just to kill a few Trolls in order to get a Deed (LOTRO version of Achievement) done. By the end of the week I’d gotten it and it was one small fun accomplishment to check off my list.
What I don’t like are the ‘quirky’ Achievements. I’m not familiar with Guild Wars but it sounds like the drinking one there is an example of what I mean. In Warhammer there was an Achievement for fighting in a scenario ‘naked’ and it was really frustrating to be in a team where half the players refused to wear armor because they wanted that Achievement, and because of this our side got slaughtered.
I can’t really comment on the rare issue because, as a solo kind of guy, I never really have access to that anyway, so I don’t bother paying attention to it. 🙂
Hmm, chain commenting, must be a rainy Saturday.
In the case of the broodling..is that one of the little pets that you get as a drop one of out ever 8 bazillion kills of its older brothers?
If so, that seems to me like a legit ‘simulation’ of rarity. Obviously with a virtual item there can be no true rarity, but aren’t diamonds valuable because it takes so much time and effort to obtain one ‘from the wild’?
And since they are rare, and pretty, they become a status symbol. Presumably the broodling is ‘pretty’ in its own way, and it is ‘simulation rare’ so… that just seems to work to me.
Pete, the Obsidian Broodling is one I very specifically picked for this. It’s not one of the “rare” drops that would indeed qualify for a sort of simulated rarity (even though such “jackpot drops” are still just a measure of time and probability; spend enough time and you’re likely to get one). It’s just a fun little dino that you can purchase from a vendor who has unlimited amounts of them. It’s likely only “Very Rare” because we’re told it is.
Oh, and yeah, I’m a confirmed soloist as well, marching to the beat of my own bagpiper. When I look at these things that typically only the elite or raiders might have, it’s a game design analysis (albeit filtered through my own motivation to play, oft times).
Ah, I was mistaking him for that l’il dude you can get from the Wetlands.
But speaking of ‘real’ rarity… that’d be an interesting game system, I think. I don’t see it working except in a ‘sandbox’ kind of game with some sort of ecosystem built in where somehow things get recycled into the system?
But then…that seems like a lot of effort to make a very, very small percentage of your players happy. Y’know, if there was only 1 unicorn in the game, and eventually it would die and another would spawn and whomever found a virgin to tame it first could ride it for a while… that’s just a lot of code for something that .0001% of your players would ever access.
So, this brings up a few questions:
1. Is rarity in a game useful? Is it meaningful to have things that only certain people can get? I think the main reason why WoW has gravitated toward “easy epics” is because it keeps people interested longer than striving for something they will probably never have (epics from raiding in vanilla WoW).
2. What’s a good enforcement of rarity? Requiring some level of skill or ability excludes people. Requiring a large group shuns some people. Making something a “rare drop” frustrates some people. (I love WoW’s pets, but there was no way I was going to grind low-level monsters for days or weeks on end to get some of the “rare” ones.) What’s a good way to make sure that not everyone has an item without being overly exclusionary?
Some things to ponder.
Pete, some of the really “quirky” achievements from GW for you. Killing X,Y,Z mobs does not even come close to that… 😉
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Legendary_Defender_Of_Ascalon
+
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Drunkard
The 10,000 minutes required for completing this title track takes about 6 days, 22 hours, and 40 minutes to achieve.
Real time. I guess I was not drunk this long in my life combined.
Rare = time taken is a very common thing in MMOs these days. It’s not so much what you can do but how much time you have to devote to doing it.
On the bright side, now that I’m getting older (bah) and wiser (hah!), I don’t care about that stuff anyway. If people want to spend hours and hours for an extra 1/16″ of e-peen, that’s their prerogative. And it’s mine to not be impressed. 😉
@Brian — I’m not sure you can have true, exclusive rarity except for things like pre-order offers and whatnot, that people seem to accept with less grumbling.
Which is the basic conundrum: if everyone has access to something, how do you really make it rare? And if not everyone has access to it, how is that fair?
And ahh yes, $(*&@#&^%# whelplings. I killed as many of those whelps in the wetlands (and in the.. badlands? somewhere with whelps) as I could stand, which admittedly in my case isn’t that many, and then decided I didn’t want one of those things if it came at the cost of my sanity.
Brian, thanks for extending the chain of thought. That’s really what I *should* have done here, but I wrote this over a week in small bits, so lost my way somewhat.
Ultimately, I do think that true rarity has a place in MMO design, but that yes, it would be a niche aspect that very few players would get to experience (like Pete’s Unicorn), and can’t therefore be the main dev priority. Also, it’s very mass-market unfriendly, and subscription-unfriendly, so these MMO things that need a critical mass of subbers to make their investment back literally can’t afford to use it.
It’s like a strong spice; great in some recipes for some palates, but not in cheeseburgers.
I had a funny Guild Wars experience related to ‘rarity’ a couple of weeks ago.
I was running around with a friend of mine (playing much longer than me, couple of years), and we were smiting the evil and smooshing the weevil… or something. Generally squishing things!
At the end of it, he goes, ‘Hay nugget! What’s that staff you have, it’s neat!’
…
Well… it was a ‘common’ item you could get by collecting a couple of random body parts and giving it to a collector. Which is how I got mine. Easy peasy, and works good, since GW has a gear cap built into it.
I just found it really funny, since people pay a huge amount for rare and (admittedly some very pretty!) skins so they can wave them around and look leet. And my wussy little collector’s staff is so little-used that it may be rarer than all those expensive skins. XD
Rarity in GW is really only tied to how hard it is to obtain certain supposedly rare skins and how desirable the players judge them to be. This is an entirely player-driven concept of rarity. There are gold, purple and turquoise color texts for items as only means of the game to tell someone that this is a rare item. In case of the green items, they lost in value after inscriptions were introduced and people could get/customize exactly the looks plus the stats they wanted.
Rarity can even trump looks or make ugly things look desirable in GW. Just for example:
There is a crafter for perfect 15^50 Dwarven Axes by now. A perfect golden Dwarven Axe would have sold for gazillions before. But now it is no longer rare, and for looks… I have not seen anyone wielding the quite nice, but just by far too tiny dwarven axe.
One could also argue that if tyrian Crystal Swords would not be so rare that people would not talk about the ugly things at all.
Yah! You’re right! Which is why I thought it was an interesting tie-in to the discussion.
The whole what does ‘rarity’ mean anymore, anyway, thingie.
Luckily for me, I just pick weapons that are convenient, or are easy to get *and* I like the skins for.
😦 But on the downside, as a newcomer, it’s near impossible for me to get a price range on certain items… so they end up on my Hero AIs instead.
…the froggy sceptre is so cute though. Ribbit!
nugget, that is a fun inversion of the standard. 🙂
GW just does so many things differently (and *right*) that I wish them great success, and that others would look to their example more often.
Awww, Ysh, you don’t want your own Whelpling that you could kick around? I’d think it could be mildly cathartic on occasion… but maybe I’m just weird. 🙂 Giving WoW characters a /kickpet emote might get PETA down on Blizzard. Can’t have that.
Oh, and Pete? An ecosystem complete with item decay that could promote some sense of true rarity as well as preserving turnover would be very interesting to me, and could fit nicely within the other design notions that we’ve batted around here, making the world more dynamic and interesting. It certainly wouldn’t work for everyone, but I think that if the game were set up so that such churn were expected, it would be an easier aspect to sell than just plunking it into an existing system like WoW’s non-rare rarity. You could also goose the system by having several different rare items and critters; maybe there are a handful of “mythical mounts” like that Unicorn, such that someone with a real hankering for a pimped out ride could get *something*.
Of course, there will be the OCD players to whom “only THE Unicorn will do”, but if the churn rate is high enough, it might work. Especially if you give them some sort of Achievement and automatic screenshot or something to commemorate the occasion. Eventually, everyone might have had a ride on the Unicorn, but There Can Be Only One who has it at any given moment in time. Whether or not that’s better in the long run is up for grabs, but it could be an interesting experiment.
There were certain “rare” horse mounts that could also fight in Ultima Online, aptly called “Nightmares”. They came in three color flavors, greyish black, somewhat different greyish black and the so-called TRUE BLACK.
Guess for which color people were camping spawnpoints for hours, slaughtering Nightmares with incredibly good stats because they were not true black ones.
If true black nightmares were actually prettier than the not totally black ones is up to debate, as they were so totally black that one could not see details of the horse that the other colors showed. Basically, they were like walking black horse-shaped holes in the landscape which was looking kinda weird.
70% of the population were riding the “rare” true black nightmares. 🙂
I absolutely love this write up Tesh. It really looks at how MMOs are designed now versus how they were previously.
One of the features that attracted “achievement” type players to EQ1 was the fact that raid gear in the current tier was rare. Heck, forget raid gear. Gear in general was rare!
Who didn’t play classic EQ1, see someone go by in a rubicite breastplate or FBSS and go, “Wow! I hope I get that some day” and that was hope. You might not get one. That was insane rarity.
Obviously that is now niche and I can’t say I disagree. Only a part of me misses camping things for 24 hours straight. When I got it though I did feel like I had achieved something. It had “value.”
I feel that in our games now the value is gone completely. Achievements and gear seem trivia. Things you just get by doing whatever it is you normally do.
The only frontier left for me is defeating raids that are hard. Just the win so to speak. I’d love for someone to come up with a middle ground. Make me feel more invested in an MMO again.
Moar ponderings!
Maybe I’m just perverse, but sometimes it seems that turning something into an ‘achievement’ with a label, may also have the unintentional side-effect of magically turning it into a grind. It’s all about perspective.
For instance, right now in Guild Wars, there’s no title track that I know of associated with collecting all the ranger pets in the world in your little zoo-for-one Zaishen Menagerie. Nor is there any titular/achievement reward for levelling one of each specimen to the max level and putting it in said menagerie.
It’s something I’ve started doing because I *want* to. And I don’t want to use haxx methods like Junundu pet levelling either, cause I find it more fun to have my pet (or my heroe’s pets really, poor things, I force them to bring the pet) running around behind me.
But if they were to tack an achievement/title to what I’m doing now… I’d personally just feel sad. 😦
Because I get the feeling that what to some people is a joy, (surely I’m not the only mad nugget doing this!) would be automagically turned into a grind.
Humans are strange!
Well I think you have to look at what you are really asking.
Does a purple item mean that it is “rare” or “awesome”….there is a big distinction between the two. The purple Items that you get for your character to wear are not rare at all, they just have better stats than the blue items and generally speaking, the color gives the player a direction to progress in.
The term Epics, especially as it is in wow, has become a kind of moniker used to just express items needed for the turn of endgame, not really by any means saying epic=rare. As far as gear goes, what is rare is the highest of the endgame drops and that changes patch to patch, expansion to expansion.
So where you have raid drops which would be rare=skill of team, WoW makes many other rare relationships.
You have the TCG items which are rare=luck/money. You have farmable pets that have no limit which is rare=time/effort/luck. You have grinding rep rewards for rare=time. achievements for rare=any of the above depending on the achivement. Feats of strength is rare=you cannot obtain it anymore.
As for the really rare camping things for 24 hours solid and stuff…there is still that. Many of you have the time lost protodrake?
WoW puts enough things into the game to allow everyone to do their own thing…which is nice. The fact though is MMORPGS…hell video games in general have begun to take the normal person’s schedule in to light. Instead of forcing you to spend ridiculous amounts of time to achieve things, they have made it easier. It used to be that everything was a grind. All instances required you to plan your day around them. It has changed, for some- the better, for others- the worse…it is all on where you fell the importance lies. Then there are just the others; some people want to flaunt items that others cannot get- it is not wrong to want to do so, however as somebody somewhere, smarter than I once said- if you are not happy without it, you will never be happy with it.
nugget,
I also filled the Zaishen Menagerie with all pets in all possible evolutions. I already had a lot of pets trained on various heroes and alt chars, but some were missing. I used pvp faction that I had leftover to unlock and train them.
I absoutely understand you, tack an achievement title onto this and *everyone* will do it, even if they do not enjoy it at all and do never use pets.
Hm, we are deviating from rarity… 🙂
That’s what we do here, we run tangents. 🙂