rare skin alert

Ok I'm gettin tired of asking my guildies which skins are rare since I've been out of it for awhile and missed a few updates, so this is a fix to that. Also helps the newbies.

When a rare weapon drops, like a platinum staff for example, there should be something alerting you to the fact that it is indeed a rare skin and therefore worth more than the average bone staff.

My suggestion is just to add a small subscript that says rare to the weapon description if the skin happens to be rare. This would assist in price evaluation for those of us who are trading challenged.

Ideas? Comments? Suggestions?

/notsigned

Rare = gold.

I'm not a fan of skins. Let's say a max req7 spiked axe drops. Its only worth idk about 50k max? It could have zealous and +30 with a 15% in stance I wouldnt really care. See greens golds purples blues doesn't matter if it's max and useful I will use it.

The rarity of a skin is largely determined by how many of them are on the market at any given time, with a few exceptions (items that are known to have an extremely low drop rate, such as Dwarven Axes and Crystalline Swords). Given this fact, your idea would require a "bot" so to speak, that would constantly scan all sales in the game to pick out the rare skins from the common skins (except for the few exceptions). While it would be nice to automatically know if a skin is rare or not (for those other than the extreme players who make a habit of staying up to date on these things, of course), it would require a lot of effort on the part of the development teams, and it's unlikely that they'd devote that sort of time and resources to something of this nature.

Would I like to see something like this in game? Definitely.
Do I think it's probable that I will ever see it in game? Not one bit.

Rarity is defined by players.

It is a combination of mods, skin, availability, trends and novelty.

Some skins aren't that rare, for example chaos axes or bows. But getting a combination of a good mod and low req, combined with flashy skin makes them somewhat desirable.

There is only a handful of truly rare items, and those either don't drop in PvE, or the chances of finding one is negligible. The others are simply trendy items.

But what was hot during first month of Factions is merchant fodder right now.

Then, there are items which are simply good and convenient. Some greens have this property, and sell for high prices, despite being nothing special as such.

All of this changes even more with inclusion of inscriptions. Not to even mention, that desirability of certain items depends on a single point of difference (req. 7 vs. req 8 for example).

Last: An item is worth exactly what it's identified price says. 5-400 gold. Everything else, is merely a question of supply, demand and bank account.

See price check forum stickies for a list of rare skin items. Use ctrl + F to search the list.

QFT

The game doesn't determine the rarity of a skin, us players do.

the game determiens the rarity.
WE determine the value.

/notsigned because its unecissary.

Well, I am really glad that you said that this feature would help both you and newbies in separate figures of speech, but why? It seems as if most players can calculate how rare an item is by how often they see it drop. In order to see what items are dropping simply look at the screen where messages that are sent from player to player are displayed. Then you will notice that in green letters it will say which items are dropped. Then if you see that a longsword is dropped 13 times, a chaos axe drops 2 times, a shadow shield drops 14 times and a insightful staff drops 16 times you can kind of assume that a Chaos Axe is a rare item. If you think maybe you have false data you can do another trial by farming the area again! Who ever said mathematics (Math) was not involved in video games? amazing huh?

...what he said.

/somegreyareabetweensignedandunsigned

yeah, what is rare?
to a lot of people, a fds is rare and desirable. another lot of people laugh at those people who think a fds is rare.
/half sign

beauty is the eye of the beholder.

Wrong... some skins are pre-set to have different drop rates by anet, this is easily proved by skins like crystalline.

Just because a skin is expensive doesn't make it rare, but a truely rare skin IS truely rare...

Meh, reading the entire post....

"There is only a handful of truly rare items, and those either don't drop in PvE, or the chances of finding one is negligible. The others are simply trendy items. "

The insane prices were reached mostly for the weird items that were imbalanced, like HoD prenerf or 15% unconditional.

Everything else balanced itself out sooner or later, with, obviously, exception of Crystaline or sephis axes perhaps. Other items are simply subject to supply and demand. While there's a few rare items, the demand for them is insufficient (due to high prices) to warrant the time needed to obtain them.

There's a sweet spot between availability and trade viability. If an item is too hard to obtain (1 in 10000) its price will be so high that it will be slow to sell, and it wouldn't cover the time needed to obtain it.

So these items fall under "lucky bastard" category, since they cannot be actively farmed, but when someone does get them, they get a nice lump of sum. But none of these are part of regular economy. I stopped following these long time ago, but I think some of these (maxed at least) can now only drop from HA chests, especially after removal of Shiverpeaks chest.

But as said before, these items are excluded from usual trade and farming channels and follow their own price rules.

Umm... math is only involved if you want it to be. Farming is only involved if you want to farm. Don't assume everyone has the time (or wants to waste time) to farm. Some people think of a game as a game you know, not a big math exercise.

The rarity of the skin, while dependent on pre-set drop rate, is also influenced by the presence of players in the particular area where it drops. If it's common but almost nobody adventurers there, then it becomes rare in the market. It's a combination of game settings and the players that determine rarity. Best solution is to check the forums.

guess i dont have to type anything after this...