Follow TV Tropes

This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Loot Drama

Go To

"Say you all managed to work together and kill a boss. Now you get to split two or three prizes between the 25 of you. This means that you now get to add jealousy, greed and entitlement to a group dynamic built entirely around impatience, disrespect and retarded."

Many MMORPGs have monsters that are infrequent spawns with rare items. In fact, the rarity of items is where much of the replay value comes into play. If all one had to do was just go to a shop NPC to buy every item, people would quit once they got bored of said items.

But sometimes, an item is so rare, so irreplaceable, and so iconic that it causes otherwise rational people to do horrible things. Indeed, with the uncertainty of getting it and the high competition both within and without a guild, many people resort to downright Machiavellian tactics. People will backstab, undermine, and do nasty things to try to secure it for themselves. People will abuse game mechanics, leading to excessive use of cheat programs. People will try to Player Kill those that pose a threat to them getting it. Indeed, very few guilds can have this item in their treasure pool without all hell breaking loose. Expect Ninja Looting, loot sniping, and a ton of arguments about who deserved it.

There are a couple criteria for an item to fall under this trope. First, it has to be extremely rare. At best, maybe two can drop per month total for an entire server. It has to be something that is the best for a particular class/playstyle, going well above and beyond other options. If you can't define a player based on whether or not they have it, it most likely doesn't count. It has to be something that drops from a world spawn, leading to heavy competition from other groups. And finally, it has to cause a ton of drama. Typically, the negative actions that players partake in to get this item will overrule any positive benefit the item gives. While the other rules can be stretched, this is required.

Sometimes, this is intended as part of the game experience (where it is often referred to as loot tension); suffice it to say, this is generally considered bad game design.

Compare Artifact of Doom and McGuffin, fictional plot devices that share many similar properties. See also Apple of Discord, when the Loot Drama plagues a previously cohesive guild or relatively peaceful player base. Contrast Enough to Go Around which averts this.


Examples:

  • In Ace Online, the really good rare drops are greatly sought after. Several bosses, particularly the ones who drop the parts of the unique Boss Armors, are always being chased by players of both nations within minutes, and sometimes even within seconds, of their spawning. Whole long-and-nasty bouts of warring often break out over the control of maps with these bosses.
    • Other than that, the demand for more mundane rares, such as the Seraphim Bible and Gemetria Scripture (which are used to make Legendary weapons and armor), which drop from most Gold Mobs, is there too, but at least they drop more often and are thus more accessible to casual players.
    • There are also hard-to-obtain minerals and alloys, like the much-sought-after Aimaam Edcanium and Shine Titanium, which sell for tens of thousands of SPI.
    • Somehow, someway, Episode 3 Part 2 decides to give this trope a giant middle finger with an unhealthy dose of Bribing Your Way to Victory. The boss armors mentioned now have are available in the form of replica armors, available from the cash shop slot machine (each token relatively "cheap", and with 1-in-20 chances, it's much higher than boss drops). A big difference is that while the replica armors are inferior to the real armors, they are upgradeable (whereas the finished boss armors are not; unfinished boss armors are seldom useful except for Episode 3 ones), allowing massive doses of Elite Tweak. Putting the real and customized replica Episode 2 armors side-by-side, chances are the pimped up replica armor will have better stats than the rare, real armor, which makes the real armors nothing more than less-than-useful collector's item.
      • It is however worth mentioning that only Episode 2 boss armors get replicas. Episode 3 Vattallus armors don't (it is debatable which will be better, the pimped Episode 2 replicas or finished Episode 3 rares).
  • Borderlands and Borderlands 2 do not have separate drops for its online mode. When Legendaries drop, especially very rare and powerful Legendaries, expect fireworks among a group. For example the Infinity Pistol is a reasonably good pistol statistically; decent damage with a fast fire rate but it also NEVER NEEDS AMMO. It has an estimated 0.07% drop rate from its boss although the boss can be called at any time. This boss is also That One Boss to boot without the right gear.
  • The Isolator Badge in City of Heroes. To obtain this badge, you had to defeat 100 Contaminated Thugs that were only found in the tutorial zone. If you bypassed the tutorial, or you got bored fighting that type of thug (and it is really boring), this badge was no longer obtainable. The developers eventually responded to complaints by adding... the Infected Thug enemies, who act and look exactly the same as Contaminated but don't count towards the badge. After more complaints, they finally added a spawn point. For ONE Thug. Every two hours. In a high-level PvP zone. And since villains can't get this badge and thus had nothing to lose, it was easy for Griefers to just kill the Thug (it's still level 1!). And then stomp the non-PvP ready hero who was just here for the badge. After more complaints, this was finally rectified with the Flashback system, where you get to replay the tutorial mission and regain the badge.
  • While not nearly as rare as some of the other items on this page, the Cloudsong from Dark Age of Camelot caused a player to have an absolute meltdown when another player picked it up. That meltdown, featured on this YTMND, became a popular internet fad for quite some time.
  • Diablo II had an extreme problem with Loot Drama because every item, bar none, dropped straight on the ground; if your group didn't have strict looting discipline (hint: it didn't), they subsequently went to whoever was fastest at snatching them up.
    • One rare item, the Stone of Jordan, which gives + 1 to every skill. This was actually used as currency in the online aspect of the game for rare goods. Before any crackdown on selling in-game items for real money, an eBay auction was selling about 50 of these for $300. Since the crackdown, perfect gems are used as the surrogate currency.
    • Diablo II in general is notorious for this. The expansion added runes and runewords; runes are special socketable items with a range of abilities, depending on the rune. Rune drops aren't determined by magic find so the probability of finding any (much less the one you want) is very low. Runewords are specific combinations of runes in a specific item which when created, imbue the item with increased stats, ranging from useful to Game Breaking. Runes have supplanted the Stone of Jordan as the ingame with its own exchange and pricing system to boot. Rampant duping of runes has actually caused inflation.
    • For reference: There are 33 runes, and the top 8 are extremely rare, having drop chances of one in tens or hundreds of thousands. To make a runeword, you'll need a specific combination, up to 5 of the "high" ones. And, sometimes, finding an item good enough to put these beasts in is going to be just as difficult.
    • Diablo III has a different system: loot drops are exclusive to each player, and you can't even see what other players get unless they drop it, which makes the loot visible to everyone. This doesn't completely eliminate Loot Drama, but it does mean that if you do get some coveted item, the rest of the party won't know about it unless you rub it in their faces.
  • Slightly averted in Dragon Nest, to get legendary equipment you need to enter weekly hardcore 8 man nests. but legendary equipment bind on pick up and have no way to be traded. note , L grade accessories on the other hand don't need to be upgraded and are tradeable.
    • You have a higher drop rate from bosses when you have more people in your party, so some guilds agree to give the somewhat rare items (like mountsnote ) to the party/guild leader for him to sell and the people in the party share the profit.
  • The Korean server of Elsword had a very interesting version of this. When the Dragon Knight avatar set came out, it was considered worthless since Avatars are mainly used for aesthetic value and not straight up power. Almost nobody got it even though it was a limited edition avatar set. The producers, in turn, decided to split the avatar in two versions: Darkside (The Original, Red one) and Abaddon (The Recolored, Blue one). The demand for the set increased, but not by much, until the producers said, one day before the release of the Abaddon version, that they'd make a new version of the hair part of the set as well, without a helmet. Suddenly, the demand for both versions of the set (Abaddon especially) skyrocketed. The helmetless abaddon version's price went beyond the in-game cap for market prices, forcing players to sell it by trade. By 1.2 Billion ED, no less. It got so ridiculous that the producers had to make both versions available again in the cash shop for triple the original time to stabilize the price. Crack is still cheaper, though.
    • This actually led to people exploiting an in-game bug that allowed you to transform a one-day-only version of the Darkside Set into a permanent version of the Abaddon set. Complete with the helmetless hair. People who abused this bug were banned for a month, or three years if they did anything with the set besides wearing it. And that's because of a screwup on the developer's part.
    • Something similar happened with the Archangel Set before Christmas of 2012. Since it was the very first avatar set to be released and was so damn old (And every avatar set is limited edition "never to return to the game-shop") it was pretty rare to see anyone with it. If you had it, chances said you weren't gonna sell it. Which caused any and all parts of the set to be ridiculously rare on the market and sell for double to triple the price of any other set at the time. Thankfully for anybody wanting the set, all Avatar Sets came back to the market on Christmas of 2012, putting the price back to "possible" status, instead of, "Jesus Christ who'd pay 600 Million for Wings?!"
  • In EVE Online, it's not so much that the owning of a rare ship causes drama, it's the desire of everyone else to want to blow it up and get credit on the kill mail. Because Eve is a single server, rare ships destroyed in combat are lost. A few different kinds of ships fit this trope:
    • Titans are the largest and (with their Wave-Motion Gun weapons) debatably most powerful ships in the game, with a resource and time requirement that can only be put up by the largest alliances. And the largest alliances are always fighting each other. Blowing up titans in fleet battles is almost routine now, but oh the drama when someone in an alliance turns traitor and steals one. Or the time when Goonswarm found and killed a "baby titan" that was almost finished with construction (they take a month to build).
    • Limited edition rare ships include unique faction ships such as the Raven State Issue, or Tempest Tribal Issue, which were handed out as rewards for player tournaments. They are now nearly priceless, as some have been destroyed, and the owners rarely entertain buy offers. Due to their value, these ships are never actually undocked or used, being owned by collectors of unique items, despite the Megathron Federate Issue and Raven State Issue being the most powerful battleships in the game. And in the realm of indescribably valuable is the Apocalypse Imperial Issue. There used to be four. Now there is one. In the entire universe. No more will be made. It's been fought over, killed for, and stolen many times. And the current owner refuses to even host showings of it. Frigate class examples include the Gold Magnate (exactly one was given out as an event prize. It has since been destroyed in PvP combat and is now unavailable) and the Silver Magnate (given out at the same time as the Gold. Although originally more numerous, many have also been destroyed, so there are only 3 or 4 estimated to still exist).
    • On a different note, Capital ships (dreadnoughts and carriers) as well as supercapitals are not allowed into high security space and are unable to be built there or flown in. Originally, when capitals were first introduced, they were allowed to be built in all security levels for a brief time. During this time, several carriers and at least one dreadnought were built, with some remaining. There are several carriers around in various systems, but only one dreadnought remaining (it's called the Veldnaught and spends all its time mining Veldspar). The drama came when a GM, ignorant of the Grandfather Clause, moved the ships into low-sec, and a flamewar ensued over whether they should be moved back or their "special" status discarded — the owner of the Veldnaught is something of an Eve celebrity). They were moved back under the condition that they could never be used for combat.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy XI: The game's evolution has rendered many of the drama-causing items either obsolete or more easily attainable. Most of the best items are not one-off treasure pool drops any more.
      • Ridill is a level 70 sword usable by six jobs that has a frequently occurring chance of additional attacks in a given attack round. It used to be borderline game-breaking, but since a player's effective level past 99 is now tied to equipment, it's unusable against end-game content. It is dropped by Fafnir, a "notorious monster" that was formerly on a 21-to-24-hour spawn timer except every 4-10 days, when something else spawns in his place (both are now spawned with items). The drop rate on Ridill is hard to quantify with a percentage, but exceptionally low; The "average" estimate is about 5%. And it was the source of a vast majority of the drama in the game. There are also several other items that actually have lower proliferation rates, but due to their specialized and not-so-glorious benefits, don't really cause as much drama.
        • A fitting coincidence is that in the original Fafnir myth, one of his items (Andvaranauts as opposed to Ridill) pretty much corrupted people into being greedy assholes. How apt.
        • Some servers had this compounded even further by groups dedicated exclusively to hunting Fafnir specifically to sell the drops. While exceptionally rare, it's somehow even more insulting than the cookie-cutter cheater linkshell because at least they ostensibly care about their own advancement instead of exploiting the game for money.
      • Worse than Ridill, but less infamous, was the Defending Ring. It's one of the most powerful items in the game, reducing all damage the wearer takes by 10%. A notorious monster named Behemoth used to only spawn once every 21-24 hours (like Fafnir, Behemoth is now spawned with an item). King Behemoth would randomly spawn instead of Behemoth starting 4 spawns after King Behemoth's last death (so he takes 4 days until as long as he feels like to spawn). King Behemoth drops the Defending Ring, but only an estimated 7% of the time. Assuming a flawless 4 days for each King Behemoth, it's about two months before this ring would statistically drop. Demand was so high that players winning it from the yearly staff-run in-game lottery (having chosen it over, among other things, more money than most players would ever need) are almost universally derided.
        • Assuming 60 days and the perfect one kill every 4 days, if the same person kills King Behemoth every time, they have a 2/3 chance for that ring to have dropped at least once. So, two months, and there's still a 1/3 shot of never getting it at all.
      • A modern example is Tartarus Platemail. It is easily the best tank body armor in the game and has a distinctive appearance with glowing red laser wings. It drops from Plouton, a boss that requires first getting three key items from very difficult timed instances (luckily, everybody gets one and only one person is required to use their items at a time). After that, one has to spawn a different boss first that will flee if a single person dies during the battle, consuming the key items in the process (which Plouton does as well). However, everybody present gets a Plouton spawn. After all that, Plouton has at best a 1% chance of dropping Tartarus Platemail. Even with the more generous than usual distribution of spawn items, this still results in massive drama when it finally drops.
    • Final Fantasy XIV has all gear based loot regulated to treasure chests in dungeons. Rather than having the first person to open the chest getting the loot, everyone in the party has to roll a dice based on whether they "need" it or want it for "greed" (usually to sell it on the market). The only way one can "Need" on an item, is if it's either a crafting ingredient, a item that's traded to NPC for Equipment, or a minion (in which everyone can "need" roll on it), or be currently playing as the class that can equip the item in the case of gear. Players that roll need get higher priority over players who rolled for greed. The drama over who gets what loot still applies, considering that most loot are random and most of said loot can't be given away to other players.
      • For a short time, the developers tested the idea of having gear obtained from alliance raids only obtainable by abolishing the "need" option and having everyone roll for gear through "greed" instead. The dev's reasoning behind the change was to allow people to have a more fair shot in obtaining gear, especially for those who weren't comfortable playing their main jobs in alliance raids due to pressure that comes from raiding with 23 other players. The change caused players that actually needed gear to strengthen their class having a very slim chance of actually getting the gear they needed due to everyone else now all rolling for it against them. Players loudly complained about the changes to the point where the developers reverted the changes in less than a week.
      • In Eureka, there are several Notorious Monsters that occasionally drop valuable items. Unlike most rare drops these are determined separately for each player, so someone else getting one doesn't affect your chances. As a result the general rule for NMs is to wait several minutes for everyone to arrive, cutting down on most Loot Drama. There is one exception: King Arthro and his Blitzring would routinely have player groups engage the instant it spawned, preventing others from getting a chance at it. This progressed to the point where everyone now gathers around his spawn point at the proper time as a matter of course.
  • In Fortnite's Battle Royale mode, landing someplace populated in a standard match means you have to quickly find some good weapons or you'll be one of the first 10 or so players to die. In 50v50 and other big team modes, you still have to quickly find good weapons, but for a different reason: loot is not localized (much like in regular matches) and if you take too long skydiving to a particular location, you'll find that your teammates have taken all the good stuff already, so while they can go to the frontlines with those awesome high-rarity rocket launchers and scoped assault rifles, you'll be struggling to contribute for your team with a basic low-accuracy assault rifle that was sitting out there in the open because none of your teammates wanted it. And there's the occasional player who, instead of trying to find their own loot, will simply follow you as you open chests and discover weapons just to take what you found first. There is always the solution of "just land somewhere unpopulated," but good loot is harder to come by the further you are from any major location, as named locations generally have a higher concentration of loot chests.
  • Gaia Online has the Angelic Halo. It was one of the first Monthly Collectables released and it's virtually impossible to get one. The admins and artists know this and love to screw with the users about it. Several cheap alternatives have been released because of the item's rarity.
    • Chance Item prizes, usually the 'cute animal mascot' types, fall into this more often than not; the most notorious of them are Lucky the Cat and Jet the Kitten Star, both of which are among the most expensive items in the game due to their rarity and have sparked many an angry rant.
  • Averted in Guild Wars 2, since all loot tables are personal. Ninja Looting is absolutely impossible: if you don't get the stuff you want, the only one to blame is the RNG.
  • The Hockey Stick of Furious Angry Rage in Kingdom of Loathing could probably have been considered to cause Loot Drama at one time, though other additions (mainly other, similarly powerful, more accessible sources of extra monster level) have since made the hockey stick's benefit more marginal. When equipped, the hockey stick would cause any monster the player was fighting to become stronger by 30 levels (which effectively means + 30 to the monster's attack and defense), with the benefit of + 6 XP per battle. The + 30 did not add to the monster's HP (though that was fixed later), and its other stats are nearly moot if you can KO it in one hit. Also, up to 3 hockey sticks could be equipped to take up all 3 accessory slots, and their effects would stack to a whopping + 18 XP per battle. (The toughest monsters in the game back then had a base XP value of 36.) In short, they were extremely useful, and nothing else in the game at the time came close in effectiveness. Meanwhile, hockey sticks are also an Ultra-Rare. The Ultra-Rare mechanic itself is unknown, but it is suspected that only a certain number of Ultra-Rares (around 2-4) can drop across the entire game per day. Add that to the fact that the hockey stick only drops in a zone that players usually have no reason to bother visiting and can only be visited by ascended players who are a Mysticality sign in their current ascension, and the end result was pretty predictable. (Thankfully, it's easily traded, which led to some clans having them on a timeshare system.)
    • This was also slightly lessened due to the fact that Kingdom of Loathing is kind of a special case due to its interface - if you were to get one, nobody else would see that fact unless you wanted them to. Far more like drama-causing loot now are the boss drops from Hobopolis, which have fairly good chances of dropping, but which only one single player per clan gets a chance of snagging per run. Most notably is Hodgman's Imaginary Hamster, which drops 100% of the time from the superboss and doesn't automatically go to the player who killed him... if you beat the Dungeon in 1100 turns or less, a feat requiring literally almost perfect turn management and a character specifically designed to take down a Nigh-Invulnerable superboss in a single hit. And did we mention that each "raid" of Hobopolis has a meat cost of one million meat?
      • Smart clans cooperate for hamster runs. With the new slime dungeon, smart clans also cooperate for slime prizes that can only be gotten by speed runs. There are also high-level players who (cough) rent themselves out as boss killers, and even entire clans that will let you walk in and take their loot... for a price. Notably, most of the best Hobopolis items (and many slime items) are non-tradable, so you have to make at least a token venture into the clan's dungeon to get the item.
    • Oddly enough, the Hockey Stick, Crazy Bastard Sword, et all of the Ultra Rare drops have subsequently been replaced by gear obtainable in-game, from special one-time-only quests, or Items of the Month (the Brimstone Bludgeon far, far outweighs the CBS for Musc boost, and the Haiku Katana gives near-equivalent bonuses all-around and has way better abilities — both are one-handed weapons, too, while the LBS is 2, making them even better in comparison). IOTM's & FOTM's in particular are known for this, one being the V-Mask, which is generally considered a ridiculously high-powered item; others are the aforementioned Haiku Katana, Pilgrim Shield, any Tome, Libram, or Spellbook, and especially the familiars — Bandersnatch, He-Boulder, Llama Lama, Comma Chameleon, and Sandworm being some of the best.
      • And with the introduction of the Juju mask, Vivala masks sank significantly in price. Hooray for power creep.
      • Note that Items and Familiars of the Month can only enter the game if someone "donates" money to the server fund. (They're tradeable, so it doesn't necessarily have to be the same person, but the price seems to hover around four million meat per ten US dollar donation.)
      • As of June 2012, they're now up to 10 million meat.
  • MapleStory: Unless you're buying it off of other users (for millions and millions of Mesos), chances are you'll be spending a good deal of time hunting monsters so you can FINALLY equip something over level 35.
    • And not just something. Most armor for every possible class can only be taken from monsters.
      • This has mostly been rectified by a major update which greatly increased drop rates and a major update which added the ability to craft your own equipment easily.
  • In Monster Hunter, monster carves and gatherable items are localized; each player gets the full limit of items per gathering site or monster. This does lead to the occasional odd sight of, for example, a fellow player whacking their pickaxe at thin air because you already mined from that particular rock, but it's a small oversight compared to players fighting over who gets what.
  • Phantasy Star:
    • Phantasy Star Online had some drops which were so incredibly rare, seeing even one drop ever was considered a major accomplishment. Some of the worst offenders had loot drops that had a less than 1-in-100000 chance to drop off an enemy that only spawned less than half-a-dozen times in a single dungeon. Not helping matters were that many of these items were the most powerful weapons in the game. Needless to say, the appearance of these rares could cause major strife in a party.
    • Phantasy Star Online 2 attempts to avert this by making item drops are on a player-to-player basis: the item a player sees are only visible to (and obtainable by) them, so players won't have to argue and fight over loot. However, this can still pop up, since the game broadcasts to other players in an instance when one player finds a rare drop.
  • Unusual in that this isn't an online game, certain Pokémon may sometimes be this rare due to the difficulty in getting them. Especially Pokémon that are given out at Nintendo events. This goes doubly for Pokémon that are only available through these events like Mew and Celebi. This also applies to Pokémon that have special moves they wouldn't normally learn (such as Ralts with Wish) or shiny Pokémon (which are only encountered once in a blue moon).
    • This has gone down a bit as far as shiny Pokémon are concerned, as most can now be obtained through chaining, a method which allows you to get shinies more reliably. Granted, it's still hard to get one, but they're much more common now.
    • This is also why there's very little stigma to using a GameShark to access the inaccessible, especially among those who have little to no chance of gaining one officially.
  • Ragnarok Online. Almost every monster/boss/etc. in the game has a chance to drop a card, which can be compounded into compatible equipment types to give special benefits to their users. Some cards are vital in the creation of some classes, while others can be flat-out gamebreaking. The bottom line, however, is that the base drop rate for most cards is 1/10000. Ten-flipping-thousand. But hey, at least combat is quicker in RO than other MMORPGs, right? Right?
    • Add to that the fact that all the minibosses and boss characters had spawn times of between 1 hour for the weaker ones to 24 hours for the big MVPs (the game's equivalent of bosses), some spawned randomly from a pool (Rekenber Biolabs) and some required an entire guild to run a quest just to get one to spawn, nevermind try defeating it (Thanatos).
    • To add to the drama, all drops were lootable by ANYONE after a fixed amount of time, if the original player who killed it couldn't pick it up in time. This has resulted in some serious drama where a passing bot or passing player could loot a valuable card in the mess of loot when the exclusive loot rights timed out. And said owner of bot or player would then try to sell it back to the original owner.
    • Adding to the drama was the problem with looting monsters. More commonly seen on Porings in the starting fields for new players, but every once in a while an odd creature would have this ability as well. As the denomination implies, hey can loot from the ground quicker than players can see them dropping, especially if they're non-aggressive. The problem? Once they've done that, the claim that the player had on the stolen loot is automatically gone, and any other player that kill it right after will have claim over it. For that reason there are players dedicated to sweep entire maps after these monsters, for the sole reason to get rare drops that the thieving monster swept from other players.
    • And yet the biggest source of drama from Ragnarok Online were the Guild Castle's Treasures. Those were awarded for the Tower Defense-esque mode of PvP between two guilds, though only if the invaded castle was conquered. There's two problems though:
      • One, only the Guildmaster could enter the rooms where said treasures were, thus having full rights to it alone.
      • Two, depending on which castle was conquered, there was a very solid chance that a few of the prizes was a Purposefully Overpowered gear, to the point that many would call them "Developer's Items".note  The drama concerning how those items were throwing the balance out of the window and were exclusive to one player out of thirty involved in the event to access them was so huge, that, depending of your region or even if you're playing on one of the many private servers available, they were downright removed from the game to silence the raging mobs!
  • In Roblox, while many Limited items can cause drama enough if they're highly valued, the most notorious example that isn't an Limited but timed-exclusive has to be the Headless Head, which is only available by purchasing the Headless Horseman costume on Halloween, which is worth about 31,000 Robux (Equivalent to $387.50). Because of these, many people have to resort to extreme measures to obtaining the item, whether it be using debit cards from their parents without permission, stealing money, etc. The problem grew only worse when UGC was announced, in which certain creators require it to "complete" their design, such as making it so that not even reducing head size can fix not meshing with it well.
  • In RuneScape, the Lootshare and Coinshare systems are made to mitigate this. Lootshare distributes the dropped items to all players fairly evenly, and Coinshare converts most valuable drops into gold and distribute it exactly equally, but with a 5% gold deduction. If you don't have either on, the loot will go to the one who dealt the most damage. Since some untradeable or unique drops such as charms will be lost if either systems are active, there is still potential for Loot Drama.
  • Sim City 4 Deluxe manages to turn high-end commercial development and some rewards into this in the general game. Many modding communities have built mods, buildings, and other various programs to help make getting skyscrapers and rare rewards easier to achieve. Of course, being as chock full of egotism and snobbery that occurs in the modding community, the general person won't be able to get access to such things without wading through ego wars. Of course, had Maxis not made even the easy level of the game difficult as it is, half of these problems wouldn't happen.
  • Generally averted in Star Wars: Galaxies, due to the rarest and most sought-after items — such as the Mandalorian Armor or the Jetpack — requiring significant amounts of coordination amongst group members (and for those members to have other loot already on their person in order to craft the item in question). However, there were a few uber-rares that could still cause this strife.
  • Team Fortress 2 has this with the unlockable weapons and to a greater extent hats. With the Random Drop system, people leave their computers on and wait until they get items.
    • This caused Valve to remove hats and other items from people who farmed items by idling with external programs. Valve rewarded players who didn't do this by giving them a halo hat as proof. However, this caused even more drama where people made fun of people who got the halos or even banned people from their severs outright from having it, likely being the reason said item was later given to everyone else as well.
    • The best example of this yet in the game is the Golden Wrench. There are only 100 of them in the whole game. That's right, 100 total for a million+ players. To get one you had to be either super-lucky or knew the mechanics of how to obtain it during a three-day period. As for the drama-causing part... Well, here is a blog post from an important person in the various Golden Wrench charities explaining what the rage was all about.
      • It's gotten to a point where even those who obtained the wrench legitimately will not use it and will set their player profiles to private so no one can find out and hound them in public for being so-called cheaters. One of the players who got a wrench has even changed their account name to "The Wrench Is Cursed."
      • One player even got the Golden Wrench as part of the charity auction, making this Golden Wrench 101!
      • Even better, out of 101 of them, only 21 Golden Wrenches have been intentionally destroyed while only 1 has been destroyed by Valve. Some destroyed their Wrench for charity; others destroyed their Wrench purely for their enjoyment of watching thousands of people rage at them for simply destroying an incredibly valuable item and one owner had their account Valve Anti-Cheat banned from the game, resulting in their Golden Wrench being destroyed.
      • Also, for those who don't know, destroying a wrench will alert every server, at the same time, to the destruction. Anybody who plays the game at the time of destruction will instantly be aware of this removal. Normally only the server the player is on will get a message about a player's inventory.
  • World of Warcraft has several items of that kind, which have their own rarity category, called Legendary. Without exception, these weapons require weeks of raiding efforts to be created, and just deciding who in the guild should get the item can be cause for much drama. Some epic drops in normal dungeons also fall into this category, such as an extremely rare mount (which only looks unique and doesn't offer any improvements over normal epic mounts, mind you).
    • At least this type of items in World of Warcraft all come in instanced dungeons, so the drama is at least limited to those who participated in the raid. One can only imagine the howling terror of a legendary item on a world spawn in that game.
    • Prior to a fix that gave all hunter pets of a given type the same attack speed, a rare spawn called "Broken Tooth" was particularly desired as a hunter pet for its 1-second attack speed, the fastest of any trainable creature. This creature, which roamed randomly throughout a remote region of the game, had an eight-hour respawn timer and more often than not was killed by non-hunters who didn't recognize its significance.
      • Uber rare pets have returned, with the Spirit Beasts (a glorified cat with swirly spots and evil glowing eyes — oh, and it casts Moonfire as a normal attack). Again, spawns once a day in a random position in a rather large area of the game and is rare as all getout. Oh, and he's invisible.
    • The last Legendary item released before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was Thoridal, the Stars' Fury, a Legendary bow. There's only one class that deals damage primarily through ranged weapons: The Hunter. However, the bow curiously lacked a class limitation to them. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before one was looted to a Rogue — who'd use it as little more than a minor stat boost — over two Hunters that could have used it. The fallout from the drama that caused broke out of even the server it happened on, with the entire World of Warcraft community now knowing of it. That is the power of Loot Drama.
    • There's also now a rare (Possibly the rarest creature in WoW) that drops itself as an in-game flying mount. The appropriately-named Time-Lost Proto-Drake has multiple paths it can patrol along, but nobody's followed it for very long because it's now well-known enough that most servers have a few people in its most commonly-seen areas at all times. In addition, the loot is bind on pickup. The monster itself is quite weak, any character at the level cap could solo it with their eyes closed, so its a case of blind luck or dogged persistence.
      • Speaking of mounts, there are also several very rare mounts that drop from instanced bosses. Due to their exceeding rarity, sometimes dropping less than once in every hundred runs, it was not uncommon to see groups, raids, and even guilds fracture if greed got the better of somebody. Game Masters have been called in to punish those who steal these mounts, and they do so.
      • Back in vanilla, multiple guilds fell apart due to infighting over who would get the incredibly rare drop of Baron Rivendare's Charger. Using it in public was also a known cause of the owner getting hounded and harassed by less lucky players. Yes, you could feel loot drama from players who didn't even play with you. In addition, it should be noted that the Deathcharger is merely a slight recolor of the Forsaken epic mount, meaning that virtually any member of the Horde could get an almost identical one simply by getting exalted with the Undercity.
    • Now it's the pets that are causing drama. After adding pet battling in Mists of Pandaria, players are combing Azeroth for rare pets to Gotta Catch Them All, so naturally the rarest ones are highly prized and cause frustration and resentment from people who can't get one. Pets that drop off bosses are at least tradeable, so anyone who misses one can usually buy one from the auction house; the ones caught in the wild are not, and anyone who wants them has to catch it themselves.
      • First it was the Minifernal and the Scourged Whelpling, pets that showed up in one area, and had a long respawn timer. This was exacerbated by the newly implemented Cross Realm Zones (or CRZ) which took players from low-pop realms and jammed them onto the same server, meaning players weren't just competing with other players on their realm, but several other realms for those rare pets.
      • The next rare is the Unborn Val'kyr, who spawns all over Northrend, in very specific places, making her hard to search for by jumping point to point, and other players are likely camping the spots. Worse, the Val'kyr has an ability called Haunt that takes her out of battle for 4 rounds where it cannot be caught, and if it's the last pet in the fight, Haunt is a self inflicted KO, so you can't catch her at all.
      • Starting with the Midsummer festival is the Qiraji Guardling, the last pet needed for the Kalimdor and World Safari achievements for many collectors. Found in one area, on a long respawn timer, and is only available during the summer, so everyone collecting pets is rushing to catch one, and the Scarab Gate is often crowded with players looking for one.
    • Raid-focused guilds often have a strange inversion of the trope: the proliferation of "Dragon Kill Point" or DKP systems have caused grief over people not wanting items. DKP are an unofficial sub-economy whose simplest forms consist of "Participate in raids, earn DKP, trade in DKP for the 'right' to roll on specific bits of gear." The grief comes from particularly stringent guilds who use convoluted methods of calculating DKP that often means "You're one of these three pre-approved builds or you'll never be good enough to get anything", make no allowances for any reason, and then insist that all rolls require DKP spending, even if it's a case of "Nobody wants/everyone already has that piece of crap, just greed roll or give to the Enchanter to disenchant and be done with it." This leads to major quarrels about "wasted loot" or an excessive amount of time spent determining simple drops. Such systems rarely last long, thankfully, except for guilds whose entire mindset is proving how hardcore a player they are.
      • Other guilds have broken because one player who could have used the loot was "ineligible" to roll on it because they lacked the DKP. Usually the guilds that used such a system for more than a few months forbade this, but other guilds weren't nearly as rude enough to toss loot away that someone could use.

Non-Video Game Examples:

  • The Big Bang Theory provides two examples:
    • The "Sword of Azeroth" rare drop in their World of Warcraft game, which one of the players steals only so he can sell on eBay. Which is immediately bought by another member of the group.
    • The original One Ring movie prop which the four main characters greedily fight for, replaying the corruption of Sméagol.
  • In Green Lantern, this is the inevitable result of there being more than one Orange Lantern. Since the orange light represents greed, the Orange Lanterns will fight anyone or anything to get more treasures... including each other, if they decide their fellow Orange Lanterns have got something they want. In the present day, Larfleeze is the only Orange Lantern left after he killed all the others to get their loot. When they're later revived, they work together to get back at him, only to immediately turn on each other and fight over loot the second they win.
  • In The Guild, a web series about people who play an MMORPG together, the group finds a rare item. Both Tink and Clara want it, and are engaged in bartering for it, when Clara's children unplug her modem, allowing Tink to win the item (Vork's thinking is that Clara obviously didn't want it, or she would have said so). Clara gets upset, and sets up a secondary account to PK the guild leader's character over and over out of revenge in secret. When it's eventually revealed that she was the one who kept killing him, it caused a temporary rift among the guildmembers.
  • In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World: White keys. These rare and well-guarded objects allow access to and coherent conversation with the Pyar gods. They are highly sought after by the Power Groups, who will do just about anything to get one. When they find out that the four will be returning with one and naively carrying it through the city of Tevri'ed.... except a healthy dose of luck and craft lets the four bypass most of the traps set for them, which pisses off a lot of people.
  • Nerf NOW!! parodies this trope (along with Randomly Drops) in a strip imagining Team Fortress 2 to be an MMORPG: the rest of the team have to hold back a visibly angry Heavy Weapons Gal when the server randomly allocates an item beneficial to her class to the Sniper instead.
    • The BLU Engie-tan deliberately invokes this trope in the Rainy Day arc. Acting as Gamemaster for a tabletop RPG, after her ultra-powerful end boss (and in-game avatar) was trounced by a lucky critical hit from the RED team, she got her revenge by revealing that the loot they were after was a fancy, gem-encrusted hat... but there was only one of them. The party quickly turns on itself in a self-destructive bloodbath over who gets the loot.
  • Parodied in The Order of the Stick when Haley, a greedy thief, divides up some loot. She claimed she didn't want any treasure, "just these five rocks," which made everyone else, especially team leader Roy think that the rocks were special and they needed them. So they said that to punish Haley for trying to hoard the rocks, everyone but her would get one and she'd get an extra share of treasure. The rocks were just that, plain rocks.
  • Parodied in Sluggy Freelance when a World of Warcraft style MMORPG has a special ability-boosting hat that a raid's boss only drops once every ten raids. When Torg gets the hat his first time playing the raid, other players who have done it 50 times without getting the hat are pissed.
  • Occurs in a Sunstone/Blood Stain crossover comic. The main cast takes down a boss on the Moonstone Gate server for the first time. Vlad claims the Arcane Dragon of Magic for its magic resistance, while Ally is outraged that he took it (and is now bound to his character), as it has much more potent bonuses for her Dark Mage build. She challenges Vlad to PvP to vent.
  • Invoked in Survivor. When a player wins an individual reward challenge, they're usually told to choose some other players that they'd like to share the prize with, thereby potentially alienating the ones who weren't picked. This is done on purpose by production because conflict plays well to the cameras and keeps things from getting boring.
  • In Sword Art Online, there were several instances of Player Killing over rare drops and one episode revolved around a crooked guild trying to extort a rare item from a lower-level player. Another arc revolves around the murder of a guildmaster who decided to sell a powerful ring rather than give it to anyone in her guild. In that case, it turns out to be mostly irrelevant, since her husband killed her because he was afraid of the game changing her, although the fact that the ring ended up in the inventory he shared with her after the murder, rather than on the ground near her corpse, is the last piece of evidence that confirms his guilt.
  • Ur-Example: In The Trojan War, Ajax and Odysseus argue about which of them deserves to receive the dead Achilles' arms and armor more, as Ajax brought back the body while Odysseus kept the Trojans off him (note that looting someone's armor and preventing the enemy from doing the same is very Serious Business). Athena influences a group of Trojans to declare Odysseus as having done them the most harm, leading the Greek kings to award the spoils to Odysseus. Ajax stalks off and ends up slaughtering a flock of sheep, believing them to be the Greeks who just despoiled him, but realizes his mistake when he comes back to boast of his feat. Unable to stand the humiliation, he kills himself (and is still pissed off at Odysseus when he visits the Underworld years later).

Alternative Title(s): The Ridill

Top