Board Thread:Administrator's Noticeboard/@comment-1250011-20131107193327/@comment-7697305-20140703204540

Catching up on some of the discussion... Exitwound 45 wrote: Kida155 wrote: Is the Category:Rare Items category really necessary? No, I don't think it's necessary. I never really looked at it until that day I noticed The Doctor's Pants were in there. But we're past that now. As a general note, I don't really like using "unnecessary" as a reason for removing/deleting/not implementing something. It just seems too vague, as if a part of the reasoning is missing.

Addressing this particular category: it doesn't seem unnecessary to me, as it seems like its purpose is to group together items which you kinda need to be blessed by the RNG (in one way or another) to get.

Anyway...

Oscuritaforze wrote:

Items should be considered for the Rare Items category by having a low drop rate, by having an ingredient with a low drop rate, or by being a drop from rare mobs (eg. Tim, Rune Wizard). Seems like a common suggestion for what that "low drop rate" should be is <5%? (Banners should be an exception, only considered rare by the appropriate category page being added to "Rare Items".) I agree with all that.

Why is the rarity parameter rendered as Quality in the infobox? Categorizing items based on their in-game rarity/quality seems problematic since this can be changed through reforging. Yeah, I'm not really sure why "rarity" translates to "quality" in the infoboxes. Thinking about how it could be changed (and taking your second point into account), how does everyone feel about changing the "rarity" parameter to accept both "rarity" and "quality", and then changing how that actually displays on pages from "Quality" to "Base Quality"?

Hunited wrote I think that craftable items should also be considered rare if at least one of their materials is also rare. This rarity should be completely dependant on drop chance or monster rarity. This way we can have a very well-defined idea of what rarity is. This I agree with.

This only leaves us with items found in chests. These should also be considered rare since they are only limitedly available. The only problem would be ores, bars and other naturally occurring items. What about Glowing Mushroom Seeds? Or Jungle Grass Seeds? I don't really think that items being available in a limited supply in a given world should factor into whether they are considered "rare" for the purposes of this category. Instead, I think this category should focus solely on how statistically difficult an item is to find. On the topic of chests, there are some chest items (like Magic Mirrors or Hermes Boots) which will almost always be found if you search the world enough simply due to how many chests are placed in the world and how many different types of chests can hold them. Then there is a small group of items which has a non-negligible chance of just not appearing in a world at all, like the Flamelash or Muramasa. I believe that only the latter group should be considered rare.

As Silver said, seeds have a drop chance from certain blocks of vegetation. I don't believe that any of them have <1% chance of dropping, so they would not be considered rare under the proposed system. I don't think ores or bars would be considered rare based on the same reasoning as I gave above for most chest items not being rare.