WTF: Higher rarity tier should always have lower supply for a given item slot

[Thunderfish]

This was raised in discussion among the wearables task force and thought it made sense to introduce it for wider discussion.

Currently we see a few cases where within an item slot, a high rarity has a greater total supply of items than a lower rarity tier. Examples:
Uncommon body > common body
Mythical Pet > Legendary Pet
Uncommon Pet > Common Pet
Mythical Face > Legendary Face

Proposal: To go into effect after the upcoming wearable raffle.
For a given item slot S, and two rarity tiers H and L where H is higher rarity than L:
No wearable raffles/auctions should introduce a scenario where H has a larger supply than L.
In cases where H already has a larger supply than L, each raffle/auction should close the gap between H’s and L’s supply until the imbalance is resolved.

Note: This proposal does not create any restrictions on cross-slot supplies. It says nothing about the total supply of body items vs face items.

Example (Eyes):
Currently there are 260 Mythical and 200 Legendary eyes in circulation
In the next raffle/auction, a new mythical wearable cannot be introduced in isolation as this would further the imbalance in supply. However, introducing 1 mythical and 1 legendary eye would be allowed as this improves the imbalance from 60 to 10 (310 myth, 300 leg).

Let’s say Pixelcraft decides to simply fix the imbalance and add one legendary eye with no mythical eye. This leaves us with 260 Mythical and 300 legendary eyes in circulation. The following raffle/auction cannot introduce a new mythical eye in isolation as this would create an imbalance that does not currently exist. That is, the supply of legendary must remain higher than the supply of mythical. They could, instead, introduce one of each or forego introducing a mythical eye again.

Reasons to Support:

• Wearables become a bit more predictable.
• Rare items should be rare. Powerful items should be more rare than not-so-powerful items.

Reasons to Dissent:

• High rarity tiers already benefit from having more powerful stats. It’s okay for some lower rarity items to benefit from a limited supply.
• Limits design space for PixelCraft
• Potentially restricts one-off items that may create imbalance

After some discussion, I can reply with an updated list of pros/cons as suggested by you, the community!

Would you support a proposal like this in its current form?

• Yea sure thing, fren
• Gonna be a no from me, fren

[Thunderfish]

With 11 votes for and 1 vote against, unless there’s further feedback or comments I’m going to turn this into a SigProp in the next day or two.

[kenymccornick]

By all means, go ahead @Thunderfish . While I understand the logic behind this, I just don’t think it’s necessary to look at the overall supply of a rarity tier unless its really bad. An item is mythical because the supply of that specific item is lower (and therefore a bit more “unique”) and its stats higher than a legendary.

Looking at the overall supply of course makes it all more coherent, but even if the total supply of mythical items was the same as legendary, that would not change the fact that one specific mythical item has the limited supply and stat boost of a mythical item and has more collector value in itself than a legendary.

Of course, if its tier is also more limited is a plus, I get that, but I just thought it may make things more complicated for devs and not really that big of a deal IMO. No need to convince me though, I’m not against the idea as I said, I was more like ‘nah, it’s no big deal for now’ and rather reduce the number of non-essential proposals to speed up development in other areas.

[notorious_BTC]

I think a better metric to go by is number of sets

There have been a couple of issues where the supply of mythicals is more than legendary, as with the pet.
What we should be moving towards, in my opinion, is more sets for commons, uncommons, & rares than legendary, myth, and GL
We shouldn’t be having three GL & myth each pets when we have only one common pet. In theory, those numbers should be flipped.