Ethercraft Item Types and Rarities Explained (and a quick update)
In this post I’d like to try to clarify our current item types and rarities and how they fit in within the design of the playable game itself. Although we didn’t have enough time to fit in much info about these in our initial release, the website has since been updated to reflect both item type and rarity, which should give our current set of items a bit more context.
Item Rarity
We have four rarities which are fairly straightforward:
- Common
- Uncommon
- Rare
- Legendary
Our intention is for there to be an intuitive distribution of items with these rarities. Common items will make up the bulk of the available items at any given time, and Legendary items will be extremely rare. At present, we have quite a few Legendary items as a proportion of the total offerings, and the reason for that is simply that the free and inexpensive Common items bring in less ETH than it costs to deploy them—it actually costs us ETH to sell the free and inexpensive items. As time goes on, the overwhelming majority of items added will be Common, Uncommon, and Rare, and Legendary items will be few and far between. The price distribution of our current items reflects this design:
Once things are in full swing, the bulk of the crafting and gameplay will involve Common items—things which people will be able to play with at a relatively low cost. By contrast, Legendary items will be exceedingly rare—almost unheard of.
Item Type
Item type, also known as category on the back end, essentially corresponds to the slot which the item occupies when equipped. Types include:
- helm
- chest
- legs
- boots
- hand (weapon, shield)
- amulet
- ring (x2 slots)
- charm: a special type that takes effect by simply being in your character’s inventory
- accessory (x5 slots) — these are for items that don’t go in any of the above slots and aren’t charms or consumables
- consumable — similar to a charm, but consumed when specific conditions are met; e.g. health potion when you lose health, Pep’s Token when you die, etc.
- crafting (tome/tool/resource/etc.)
As it stands, some of our really good items haven’t gotten very much love—probably because we neglected to tell people what they actually do (whoops)—and that’s a shame because they’re intended to be some of the best items in the game. For example, the Merchant’s Enchanted Token: This is a charm which stays in your character’s inventory (you can essentially “equip” it without using an equipment slot) and grants its bonus as long as your character is carrying it. Similarly, even though the Merchant’s Enchanted Potion and Merchant’s Enchanted Cologne are limited-use items (which we have found to be very controversial), they offer something extremely powerful that many other items don’t: you don’t sacrifice anything by using them. If you want the gold bonus from the Merchant’s Enchanted Doublet, for example, you potentially have to sacrifice some defense (which another armor might offer more of) in order to do so. By contrast, with consumable items and charms, you sacrifice only a modest amount of carrying capacity in exchange for their bonuses.
A similar principle holds true for things like the Merchant’s Enchanted Ring, for which there are two ring slots, and the Bangle and Cloak, which can be equipped in any of a total of five accessory slots (although you won’t be able to wear two cloaks—that would just be silly).
The bottom line: We expect clever power gamers to strategically stack these items at key junctures within the game itself, thus maximizing their loot with minimal risk. That is why these items are more expensive and will be far more rare than the cheaper helmet and body armor from the same set. (Note that the pricing distribution for accessories and consumables mirrors that of the pricing between the various rarities—it reflects the relative utility and ultimate in-game rarity of the item.)
We’ve updated the shop UI to reflect these types and rarities—something we should have done before launching!
Updates
Crafting Items
It’s almost bed time, so I’m going to give you the tl;dr: Right now we have relatively few crafting items, which is bad because crafting will be one of the first contract-related updates we’ll be rolling out. However, we don’t want to seem greedy by releasing a whole new set of items so early on and with so little warning.
So here’s our game plan: Within the next week or so, we’re going to be rolling rolling out a crafting set—tinctures and powders and troll eyeballs and things—but only after we’ve made some decent changes and improvements to other things first. This includes at the very least tweaks to the shop UI as well as some server and other back-end infrastructure upgrades. Moreover, these crafting items are probably going to be ‘enchanted’ but with super low prices so people can actually afford to buy in; the number one complaint with some of the enchanted gear is just that a lot of players either can’t afford them or aren’t willing to risk such large amounts on something that they think might not pan out (which is understandable).
Misc.
We’d like to thank
for his post on fixing the inventory UI for people with a lot of items. We are swamped and little things like this have simply gotten lost in the shuffle, so we really appreciate people reaching out and helping community members.Also—keep this on the DL, as it’s a definite WIP — we’re working on auction contracts and an associated front-end so you guys can trade more safely and easily and avoid dealing with things like EtherDelta and 0x.
Lastly, I’d like to note is that it’s really a shame that nobody is buying Corn, because while a megawhale has just cornered the Bread market, Corn is sitting at a mere 200 owners. I guess Corn Bread is going to be a very rare delicacy indeed.
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