World of Warcraft: are rarer items more valuable?

Item value used to be a simple thing really: either an item was rare therefore expensive, or it wasn’t. But as armor becomes usable across classes, accessories provide numerous but focused abilities and weapons transform into mainstay weapons, a blur begins to develop around the concept of “value.”

Are rare items valuable? Well, that depends on who you ask. There are people who could find a certain item not even worth the effort, while others sweat profusely over their keyboards, waiting for a chance to grab it. Value has become a mix of intimacy, practicality and preference, with infinite combinations.

While ol’ blue Blizzard has been at work patching up item socketing and addressing issues with item value, they’ve decided that it’s about time that value was adjusted in line with something other than it’s color.

Purple just isn’t always better than blue, since people also believe that under an item’s actual value is the element of risk involved. Perhaps it’s just the PlayStation Generation warming up for the MMO age, but with laziness and instant gratification aside, players do have a point. An item’s worth also includes the amount of investment you’d blow for attempting to grab a certain drop, including the risky possibility that you might not succeed in getting it at all.

So while Blizzard is promising to patch up this issue with shifting item value and abilities across the board, you may not want to build up expectations for them in the next major patch. After all, Blizzard rep Vaneras did say they were going to fix item values “over time in upcoming patches.”

Item value used to be a simple thing really: either an item was rare therefore expensive, or it wasn’t. But as armor becomes usable across classes, accessories provide numerous but focused abilities and weapons transform into mainstay weapons, a blur begins to develop around the concept of “value.”

Are rare items valuable? Well, that depends on who you ask. There are people who could find a certain item not even worth the effort, while others sweat profusely over their keyboards, waiting for a chance to grab it. Value has become a mix of intimacy, practicality and preference, with infinite combinations.

While ol’ blue Blizzard has been at work patching up item socketing and addressing issues with item value, they’ve decided that it’s about time that value was adjusted in line with something other than it’s color.

Purple just isn’t always better than blue, since people also believe that under an item’s actual value is the element of risk involved. Perhaps it’s just the PlayStation Generation warming up for the MMO age, but with laziness and instant gratification aside, players do have a point. An item’s worth also includes the amount of investment you’d blow for attempting to grab a certain drop, including the risky possibility that you might not succeed in getting it at all.

So while Blizzard is promising to patch up this issue with shifting item value and abilities across the board, you may not want to build up expectations for them in the next major patch. After all, Blizzard rep Vaneras did say they were going to fix item values “over time in upcoming patches.”