Or rather, if the game assumes everybody has one?
Of course, that question is predicated on a lot of assumptions, such as "Why do people play the game?" and "What do the developers believe the players want?"
 |
| A college acquaintance had the LP and insisted I listen to it (among other LPs of his.) I'll admit I listened to part of it. |
Although it wasn't a Legendary item in and of itself, my first experience with an item that "everybody" seemed to want actually predated MMOs and video games by years: the +5 Holy Avenger from AD&D.
Among players of 1e AD&D, the +5 Holy Avenger was the ultimate weapon in the hands of a Paladin, at the time one of the hardest classes to roll for --and play-- in AD&D. Sticking to the straight and narrow of Lawful Good --in TSR's original Deities and Demigods sourcebook, Galahad was considered a 20th Level Paladin and Lancelot a former Paladin and now merely a 20th Level Fighter-- meant that you couldn't really participate in anything resembling a heist adventure. Or really, depending on how strict your DM was, anything that involved stealth. You were very much the stereotypical Knight riding up to the cave mouth to challenge the Red Dragon inside.
The Paladin's quest* for a Holy Avenger, either the sword itself or something earth shaking enough to warrant the sword as a reward, was one of the high points of an AD&D campaign. The adventure Fedifensor in Dragon Magazine #67 --reproduced here on Wizards' website in PDF form**-- was notable in that it was one of the first published adventures featuring a Holy Avenger (Fedifensor) as well as the first adventure featuring Gith (Githyanki in this case) as the baddies who stumbled upon the sword in the Astral Plane.
 |
| The first page of the Fedifensor scenario by Allen Rogers, from Dragon Magazine #67 Page 37. (November 1982) |
Still, despite the (supposed) rarity of a +5 Holy Avenger, it wasn't nearly as rare as the Artifact/Relic section in AD&D. Those were one-of-a-kind items that had boatloads of special powers but equally risky side-effects. The Hand and the Eye of Vecna --back in the day when Vecna was merely a powerful Lich who was supposedly dead-- were two artifacts whose first side effect upon grafting them to your body was to turn you immediately Neutral Evil. And the problems only got worse from there. Artifacts and Relics were nothing to be trifled with, even among mortals.*** By contrast, the Deck of Many Things was just a rare Miscellaneous Magic item, not a Relic of considerable power by itself that merited an entire D&D supplement.
Having the ultimate item in an RPG adventure has persisted through the years --what Witch or Wizard wouldn't want the Elder Wand, for example-- and so I suppose it's only natural to covet what is best. But if everybody has one, is it really something to covet versus just something to just acquire as part of the normal progression of things?
And what are game designers to do with game balance when accommodating an item of legendary power?
***
MMOs have a particular problem with this design, because the persistence of the game world and the constant addition of new content mean that what is currently game breaking may be no better than a basic quest reward a few years later. Or, worse, due to game design, that game breaking item might actually be worse than a basic quest reward.
 |
| Yes, I'm bringing out the old Nerfnow.com comic again for this post. |
This was a particular problem in Vanilla Classic WoW, where it turns out that some quest rewards or dungeon gear drops were better for your class and spec than the raid specific "Tier" gear. For example, while the Mage's Tier 0 or Tier 1 set might look pretty, a variety of crafted gear and dungeon drops were better for Mages overall. This had its drawbacks, as the three piece Bloodvine set had no Stamina bonuses which meant a Mage or Warlock wearing it was extra squishy in a fight****, but there was no denying the superiority of the damage potential for that set.
However, there were two items that it seemed everybody coveted: the legendary items Thunderfury and Atiesh.
 |
| This meme is so old hat that you can now get it on a t-shirt. Yes, really. From Redbubble. |
Thunderfury looked awesome, but Atiesh, not so much. It looked like a sulphur ball set atop a cane unless you looked closely.
 |
| I was not impressed. From Wowhead. |
Still, there was the general perception that since the work involved to get either item was involved --and in the case of Atiesh it came in the Naxxramas raid, which very few raid teams back in the day completed-- only a few people ever got either item. Even in Classic WoW, guilds usually designated a few select people to be those to work on either questline.
Between that scarcity and the potential for guild drama, both items were rarely found in WoW.
I'm not sure where things changed, but gradually the desire for an item of legendary rarity became normalized to the point where access to such legendary items became easier to obtain.
When I started playing WoW back in 2009, I became aware of legendary items as a "well, unless you raid and you're of the right class and status within a guild, you're not going to get one" sort of item. However, by the time I reached max level the "Fall of the Lich King" patch was released. Yes, everybody remembers the Icecrown Citadel raid, but I remember the decidedly unsexy Patch 3.3 name for two items: Shadowmourne and Quel'Delar.
That first item, Shadowmourne, is the two-handed legendary axe that people could obtain after completing quests in Icecrown Citadel. I can't speak of the scarcity of Shadowmourne, but one of the last things to do before completing the questline and obtaining Shadowmourne was to actually kill Arthas, the Lich King. Given that took a while for a lot of guilds, and I've mentioned numerous times how smashing your head against ICC for months on end ruined guilds (including mine), I can't imagine a lot of people obtained a Shadowmourne in original Wrath.
Quel'Delar, on the other hand, was more obtainable although still a bit of a rarity.
***
While not a legendary item per se, in order to obtain Quel'Delar you had to complete a questline once you obtained the ol' Battered Hilt, which was a rare drop in the Heroic ICC 5-person instances.
Although the Wowhead entry for the Battered Hilt mentions a 1-2% drop rate, due to a bug in Patch 3.3 the initial drop rate was a bit higher, and a ton of Battered Hilts dropped before Blizz fixed the bug. I wasn't high enough, gear wise, to get into the instances where the Hilt dropped before the fix, so I had to wait for said Hilt to drop at the "proper" drop rate.
And wait.
 |
| From Wowhead. |
And wait.
After several months of only seeing exactly one Battered Hilt drop (and losing that roll), I finally got tired of waiting and scraped together the 5000 gold necessary to buy one off the Auction House. It took me a month of steady dungeon running and selling ore to do so; I was going to buy Epic Flying then, but... To me, the questline was very epic, and since my Paladin Quintalan was a Blood Elf it fit perfectly into my race's lore.
 |
| Yes, I'm pulling out this old screencap from Eversong as proof. |
***
Judging by how the game has progressed since December 2009, it seems that while Quel'Delar wasn't a legendary item in the same vein as Shadowmourne, Quel'Delar was enough of a success that it seems that Blizzard decided to move more in the direction of using the sword as a model for how to handle legendary items in WoW.
And with that has come a sense of entitlement from some MMO players that I find both confusing and off-putting.
If a legendary item is supposed to be rare and difficult to obtain, why does it seem that a lot of players expect to obtain one over the course of an expansion?
 |
| From this Reddit r/wow thread. |
Perhaps this thread by itself doesn't cover the sense of entitlement per se, but...
 |
| From this thread on r/wow. |
I could keep going, but you get the idea.
***
Perhaps Blizzard is at fault for this sort of behavior, because a lot of their modus operandi in WoW's design is "Awesome players doing awesome things", and what isn't more awesome than having a legendary weapon?
Well, the funny thing is, if Blizzard designs its systems around teams having one or more legendary items, if you don't have one you suddenly feel like you're behind the curve.
 |
| From Reddit. (And SpongeBob Squarepants.) |
 |
| Yep. Another blast from the past. |
 |
| From Reddit. |
*Yes, Paladins would call them quests back then, denoting their outsized importance to the Paladin. Nowadays, people just call any task a "quest" of some sort, but back then a quest was very much in the realm of "rescue the maiden from the Evil Big Bad" sort of thing. No Kill Ten Rats here.
**I saved a copy locally on my PC just in case Wizards ever yanks the adventure, so I can upload it for future use.
***And yes, in the era of Elves living 4000 years, they were considered mortal.
****I was once in a Blackwing Lair Raid while wearing my Bloodvine set, and I kept dying during a specific set of trash pulls. A healer whispered an apology to me, saying that she'd keep throwing heals on me but I'd die before they landed. I told her I wasn't angry or anything because the Bloodvine set, while powerful for damage, meant I had absolutely no extra health to me at all. She was much relieved that I wasn't one of those asshole Mages who demanded that healers TRY HARDER for something out of their control.
#My inner Middle-schooler: "Micro-Blizzard... *snicker*"
EtA: Uploaded a larger version of the Nerfnow comic.
That album cover reminds me I saw the Kinks twice, although not for that tour. I'd completely forgotten. They used to tour each new album and play it pretty much in full in the first half of the show, then take a break and come back and do an hour of "the hits". Only band I ever saw do that as a normal routine rather than a special event. It had the benefit of keeping the audience largely acceptant while the band went through the new stuff but it was very obvious most had only come to hear the second half of the show.
ReplyDeleteOn the Legendary thing, it's impossible. As soon as you put any item in a game that allows for competive behavior OR requires teamwork, i.e. all MMOs, the best in slot items become mandatory for a significant number of players and developers have to balance content around the expectation that players will have those items. It locks everyone else out of that content, which then leads to stratified versions of that content, which leads to hierarchical behavior.
Either you accept the game is goinf to be inherently exclusionary and elitist or you take steps to nullify the effects of putting those powerful items in game in the first place. It's a circle that cannot be squared. Better not to put the extremely powerful items in the game in the firt place, in my opinion. I prefer games that have a lot of very good items, none of which anyone can easily agree on being "the best". It still leaves room for aspiration but doen't automatically exclude anyone who doesn't have the "right" item. Of course, MMO players hate genuine ambiguity and will always try to define "best" in some way or another, so it's a very difficult task for developers. Much easier just to put in a few OP items and let players fight among themselves over them.
I don't believe it's strictly an MMO player thing, but rather something in human nature. If there's a way to figure out "the best" in anything, people will migrate in that direction. Hence the proliferation of "manage by spreadsheet" Business degree graduates.
DeleteI personally would live with others having BiS everything and being able to wipe the floor with it than having an entire game tuned to said weapons. If you tailor the game toward the elite few, you eventually have a game that only contains the elite few and you have to milk them for as much money as you can. Much better to tune the game toward the vast majority of your players and let the elite few complain that things are too easy rather than depend upon the fickle nature of the elite few.
Game companies get in trouble when they try to tailor a game toward both sets of players, because I believe you're correct: the elitism will win out because Math is on their side.
Funny how humanity self-selects toward Feudalism or Oligarchy rather than equality.