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The year is 2030. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon. You’ve just finished mining 30 obsidian ore playing Crypto Crush Saga, a match-3 mobile game.
You open up The Elder Chains Online and feel a rush of excitement. Your buddy from school has spent the last 2 years becoming a Master Blacksmith, and he has agreed to turn 10 obsidian ore into an Obsidian Battlestaff, a HUGE upgrade over the Mithril Mace you’ve been wielding for the last weeks.
It’ll take him an hour or so. In the meantime, you hop into Clash of Guilds, and use the remaining obsidian to upgrade your town hall to the next level. That should keep your village safe for now.
You wish you could fast forward time to tonight. Your Guild has plans to go for a deep run into the wilderness in Old School Rune Chains, and your prospects of a successful run (and great loot) have never been better.
All members have been spending the past 2 weeks grinding for better weapons, and you’ve agreed (through a vote) to use the Guild treasury to buy everyone a new full set of Red Dragonhide Armor.
Tonight’s objective is to kill the level 128 Frost Giant hiding in the Cave of Sorrow. He has a 5% chance of dropping an Immaculate Orb of Brilliance, of which there are currently only 4 in existence.
The Orb can be used as a power source in an upcoming space exploration game, and should give your guild a great advantage in reaching distant galaxies first. A 5% drop rate is low, but you’re feeling optimistic.
In the distance, you hear a faint ‘BloCkChAIn doEsNT bRiNg AnYtHiNg nEW tO gAmES’. You shrug, and join your friends in the Discord voice channel.
Life is good.
#blockchaingaming
You’ll be shocked to learn that this guy is now in the AI space.
small thing that my brain latched into
this is a misunderstanding of how video games work on the level of the scene from ready player one where nobody has thought to try driving backwards in the race to find the secret
it’s like a game mechanic from sword art online that the author thought he was really cooking with but anyone who’s ever played an MMO knows definitely wouldn’t work like that
the only way this works is if the boss has only spawned about 20 or so times since being introduced, and even launch era FFXI NMs weren’t that stingy
If you actually tried to do this mechanic in real life every time the boss spawned the area they spawned in would be an absolute clusterfuck as everybody tried to get a hit in so they could get in on the drop lottery. it would not be fun.
Not to mention his friend spending two years ranking up a fake profession like bruh do something else
runescape cape grinders be like
I think BDO is the closest thing to “what if a hack LN writer designed a game” and even that’s not that absurd, but it absolutely did have the unplayable nonsense pileups around worldbosses as everyone competed to get into DPS brackets with better loot chances while just randomly dying to unrendered attacks. It’s really a shame, because in terms of the specific combat gameplay it is hands down the best MMO I’ve ever seen, it’s just the entire rest of the design is the actual worst it could possibly be without shoehorning gacha purchases into the core progression. It is genuinely like they set out to make the sort of MMO a bad anime would design, with incredible action gameplay but nothing to use it on but mindless trash mobs, the dullest and worst executed bosses ever, and ludicrously imbalanced PVP that favors P2W progression.
I liked BDO for a while but i REALLY do not like “upgrade this weapon 20 times oh and the last few will basically never succeed and probably destroy it or whatever” gameplay mechanics. It’s just gacha shit but for swords and stuff.
Yeah, it sucks so much. It is/was a weirdly common mechanic for MMOs coming out of Korea and Japan before gacha bullshit took over everything and started spreading too, and it’s just such a fundamentally awful design. Like BDO could have been the actual best MMO ever if it just didn’t have all the P2W gambling progression bullshit and if it had real PvE content that isn’t just “run in a circle one shotting trash mobs that you massively overlevel the instant they spawn, while trailed by a herd of RNG P2W cash shop pets to loot the drops and regularly calling up a P2W summonable NPC vendor to clear your inventory, and also only like 10 people can grind in this entire area at once in the entire game because there are only 10 instances and an overleveled character can monopolize the entire set of spawns.”
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Surely a winning strategy to make an item in your game that no one will ever get to use. Time well spent for everyone involved, both player and dev. No one will get tired of it.
yeah but it gives you crypto and if you don’t have crypto you don’t get to eat
Still would make more sense to sell the item then to have it randomly drop at a super low chance…
Oh wait! That is how these games actually work!
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Isn’t that because items are essentially infinitely varied because of random modifiers though? So having that 100% best item is next to impossible but having an 80-90% item is very possible. That is how I remember looter games like that working.
Plus, there is no scenario in which PoE would be like “Well, that was the 4th drop of this item, remove it from the loot table”. So no, it is not the same.
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You are right the thing says currently only 4 in existence, implying that more can drop, but also implying that this boss has only been fought like 100 times since the drop rate is 5%
I also looked up the mirror thing and one guy said he had 22 drop over the course of killing 9.400.000 mobs. So yes, rare, but not to the point where the people who REALLY play those games will never see one.
To be charitable I guess in his supposed future everybody would be grinding 30 different crypto games and wouldn’t have time to grind 1 specific game for 1 drop. Still pretty dumb