Do you really think rare items are rare anymore?

If that's they way you look at low drop chance items then there are no such items in AQ3D at all. Not everyone knows that such items are even obtainable because most of them are not mentioned in-game in any way and only way to find out about most of them is from sources outside the game or ask players who own them. The fact that it's not obvious that they exist makes them rare and not just the low drop chance.

 

Been thinking about this too. Rng is a crazy thing and I'm seeing so many people get done with all the "rares" real quick, basically like a hobby collection. The cloud felt like a proper new rare, but now seems pretty common too.

 

How do you know that these people got all these "rares" really quickly? I suppose you can ask them, but you are assuming that they got them fast and that isn't always the case. Does everyone have a lighting cloud pet? No? I though so. Not so common now is it?

 

Rares in this game could have been something unique, but of course the AE team knew what they were gonna do even before the kickstarter. All that crap about AQ3D being the original adventure quest but just in 3D was where it started. During the tech demo and alpha stages, you could truly grind for items that no normal or average casual gamer would be able to get. They went and brought all those or most of those items back. I'm almost glad I'm getting too old to be gaming too regularly now. Truly sad what this game could have been and what the team decided to instead do, especially with rares.

 

I got lightning cloud after 9 days

 

For the majority of items, they're not really that special. The more people want them, the less special it becomes (particularly if that item is permanently in-game). In other words, the rares of today become the commons of tomorrow. I find it more rare to see players wearing certain craftable gear, especially gear that doesn't look all that great, than these so-called 'rare items'.

 

Isn't that kind of the point though? Can't have all items be special because they wouldn't actually be special then. It's up to players to decide what items are special and what qualities make them special. The first post is talking about low drop rate items and that can be seen as a quality that makes an item special. Sure, they become more common as time goes on, but they won't become common enough to make that low drop rate irrelevant.

 

I think the problem here is rarity. In all of AE's games that word has meant something scarce that you had to be around at a certain point in the game's history to be able to obtain. After that time, unless the staff are feeling insanely generous and give it to a hand picked few for helping with something big, that item is then gone forever. AE tried breaking that pattern with aq3d and so far this game has nothing to offer. It's literally a 3D dress up game. It was supposed to be the mmo of their original game, it's even in the kickstarter. This game is more like aqw, except that game had actual rares you could collect and what's more, the enhancements were a joke, but at least there was some form of stats.

That's why I feel their shift towards this low drop % has done nothing but give players the time to think about how boring the game that their playing is. Cause there is literally nothing else. At least if you're doing a war for rare cosmetics the players interact or work together to some degree, adding that entertainment value. The problem your point doesn't take into account is nobody is sticking around playing a 3D dress up game long enough for those low % items to matter. Why? It's pointless as far as entertainment goes, there's far more entertaining games that offer the same. I remember for a while people bragged that they got soulborne axe as a drop, then it just stopped. The population of this game won't grow to the size that's needed for it to really matter or stand out. Hence, the axe was a lot more special when it was an alpha stage item that very few actually had.

Literally all they have to do is give items unique stats and have a war like once a month where you can obtain unique items from a boss like his armour or his axe, give it unique stats and voila, once it goes rare people will get excited, you'd actually be able to build a character that is dex oriented and do fun stuff like solo bosses or with other specialist players who maybe favour a large hp stat of like 5k. That's what their original game and aqw's had, that factor to it. This game has literally taken away genuine rare hunting and relied strictly on cosmetics, how long will it last? Barely anywhere on the internet anyone discusses this game. It's not growing, they just market a lot, but how long can you keep it up?

 

AE hasn't handled item rarities that well and there are times when it just becomes a blur and you can't see any difference between them. Making items which actually end up becoming rare when it comes to them being discontinued isn't something that happens that rarely in AQ3D and when it does, it will either turn out well or just flop completely because there is this new item that's basically a recolor of a discontinued item.

There really isn't much that can keep players occupied after they have reached max level and farmed best equipment, you will either farm for cosmetics, gold or duel other players with not much to so for it. Side actives are important and it's what AE should consider if they want to keep players playing and not leave right after finishing that new release that they put out. All that work they put to those releases which actually aren't just filler kinda feels that it gets flushed down the drain when players don't have anything else to do besides farming for cosmetics after being done with those proper content releases.

 

Not really almost everyone has some but the one i dont see often is the doomripper

 

Doom Ripper's pretty common, but I don't often see people using it unless they're matching a set. The thing about "rare" items, or hard-to-obtain items, is that people tend to farm them a lot to the point that regular items get overshadowed. I don't call them rare, because they're actually quite common compared to the "common" items that appear rare; for instance, I see more players wielding Soulborne Axe than players wielding an obscure, generic weapon like Vampiric Dagger.

And really, the reason why "rare" items aren't really rare is because there are so many weapons in the game, and of that large pool of weapons, people tend to show off the ones that stand out the most, because of their prized difficulty (of obtaining), because of special value (maybe it's from a Kickstarter or something else), or because of their stats. And usually the players that wield generic items are new players, but they're often just farming gear that match their level/stats and incrementally working towards progression; I guess you could also say that any level 30 gear (current level) is generic as well, but a lot of players don't see it that way because any gear with stats that match the current max level holds more value.

 

The only things I class as rare now as you still don’t see many is frogzard an midas but agree they don’t release enough rare items before people have obtained them either.

I got all rares very quickly as well in about 7-8months of account creation but didn’t know about rares until i met @Xctroy an became besties.

 

Not everyone equips their "rare" items, and it's hard to know how common many of those items are. Probably would be nice to have some sort of item stats tracker in the game that can show the number of people that own any item, so people will try to farm for the thing lowest on the list and equalize the rarity of items and make them more common, but I doubt AE would implement such a feature for two reasons: 1) They don't want "rare" items to appear common, because they want to keep players playing. 2) It'll eat up a lot of data trying to track stats.

 

I wouldnt mind having more truly rare items in the game. They need to be relatively hard to get, at least not a garunteed drop nor purchasable item. And they need to be obtainable for only a certain amount of time. They were doing this for the concerts, they can and should do it else where in game.

 

Except you'll never have truly rare items, except for maybe limited time items. When you have limited time items, the number of players that own those items are fixed permanently; and in that sense, limited time items would truly be rare. But generally, AE doesn't want to add content that'll only be accessible to a few players.

Rare, in the sense of low % drop rate, is really a misnomer, especially when you're plotting a distribution of every single item in the game and analyzing what percentage of them are being currently equipped by players. You'd often have a higher percentage in the analysis for low % drop items than the common items, mainly because there's more desirability for low % drop items and because common items are too abundant that it's rarer for people to equip any specific common item.

And "harder to get" in the sense where there's a threshold where there's undesirability for players to obtain the item would really be a waste of resources, and would have the problem that limited time items have. For instance, with a highly improbable odd of 1/1,000,000,000 for an item drop, maybe one player will only get that item in the entire lifetime of the game, and that would just be unreasonable.

I think maintaining a threshold where an item is not ridiculously hard to obtain should be satisfied, because the importance of desirability weighs more than the importance of improbability. Players generally want to feel rewarded for their accomplishments, not tormented by a reward that they'll likely never achieve, especially within their desired time frame.