My expertise is that, regardless that we use this time period “rarity” to check with the colour-coded class of a reward merchandise, this typically has nothing to do with the chance of buying it.

It might have as soon as been used extra actually, in a progenitor sport the place “higher” loot was doled out with diminishing possibilities (there are a number of that might match the invoice, I will not speculate on which one started or cemented the pattern). But as soon as it was engrained in participant expectations that “rarity” ≈ “goodness” of the merchandise, calling issues “widespread”/”unusual”/”uncommon” grew to become a helpful shorthand for “meh” “higher” “better-er”.

Players internalized that purple “epic” drops had been issues to get enthusiastic about, so sport designers eager to get gamers enthusiastic about an merchandise made it purple and referred to as it “epic”, and doubly so for gold/”legendary”, although there’s some variance within the actual sequence/labels between video games.

So I’d advise not taking the time period “rarity” actually to imply “low chance to accumulate”. It’s actually simply an alias for “high quality” or “grade”. We may exchange it with a star ranking from 1 to five stars like a resort ranking or movie assessment and the which means can be principally unchanged.

In video games with out probabilistic rewards, this rarity label is simply an arbitrary signifier designers connect to affect the perceived worth of the merchandise. Other video games have skilled gamers to take a seat up and concentrate when “uncommon” drops are on the road, so this simply leverages that expectation as a method to give gamers a way of stakes.

Often the project of those labels additionally correlates to details about the merchandise. For gear that has stats, there could be sure stat ranges or sure (numbers of) particular perks put aside for every rarity tier. Or for skins, it’d mirror the complexity of the pores and skin.

On an open world shooter sport I labored on, our “widespread” skins had been simply single-colour paint jobs / palette swaps, our “uncommon” skins had been tiling patterns (nonetheless simple to churn out for tons of weapons), whereas our “legendary” skins had been one-off artwork items with bits of lore connected. So you possibly can see this was a classification of high quality / manufacturing price / visible curiosity, not “rarity” (since there was precisely one copy of each pores and skin within the sport, and you possibly can ultimately unlock all of them).