[MUD-Dev] Unique items vs. item references

[lynx at lynx.purrsia.com]

On Fri, 9 Aug 2002, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> And having just finished Diablo II a month ago, I will comment
> that they're really, really, really, really boring.  The first
> time you get something "rare," that's much better than the other
> stuff you've got, ok fine.  The second time, well, hmm.  After
> that, it's just a random pile of gobbledygook statistics, it's
> never really all that much better than what you've got
> anyways. ...

I'll argue that the rare qualities did matter, especially as you
moved up to higher difficulties.  Unique items did overshadow many
of the rare items, but rare items with high properties could and did
beat uniques, especially those with coveted properties like
'magic-find'.  The crafting formulas also saw some use as, for
instance, amazons would craft specific gloves in order to try to
create gloves that had both knockback and plus to skills.  Elemental
resistance could be very useful as well.

Sure, you had to sort a lot of rare items and crafted items to get
the ones you really wanted, but that created a hierarchy: common
rare item for low-level types, increasingly specific and
higher-valued rare items for the higher-level types, etc.

If you made rare items targeted to just the stats that people
wanted, you would eliminate much of the scarcity that makes them
valuable.

This may be an issue for crafting systems, also: if it's possible to
reach some kind of zenith in crafting items for players to use, will
people focus solely on the best and ignore the rest?  How can it be
encouraged for people to buy and use crafted items from less-skilled
crafters besides forcing such crafters to immensely discount their
equipment so they can get lower-level characters to buy from them so
they can afford to increase their skills?

Scarcity has to enter the equation somewhere, and not just by
limiting the number of crafters that can reach the highest levels
because once they do, they can mass-produce their wares.  Maybe the
finest items require the scarcest materials to create.  Maybe it
takes an exponentially longer amount of time to create them.  Or
perhaps there is still a random factor involved that allows items
created by less skilled crafters to, if they are very lucky, become
competitive with those by more skilled crafters.

Or, maybe there should be no 'best', only many different choices.

-- Conrad


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