History Main / LootDrama

* {{Borderlands}} and its sequel do not have seperate 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 ThatOneBoss to boot without the right gear.

** ''[[VideoGame/{{Diablo}} Diablo II]]'' in general is notorious for this. One patch offers runes and runewords; runes are special socketable items with a range of abilities, depending on the rune. Rune drops aren't determined by [[LuckStat 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 [[GameBreaker GameBreaking]]. Runes have supplanted the ''Stone of Jordan'' as the ingame with its own exchange and pricing system to boot. Rampant [[GoodBadBugs duping]] of runes has actually caused ''inflation''.
** For reference: There are 26 runes. The last 8 can have odds of dropping of one in tens, hundreds of thousands. To make a runeword, you'll need a specific combination, up to ''6'' of the "high" ones. And, sometimes, finding an item good enough to put these beasts in is going to be just as difficult.

* In TheGuild, 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 distract her, causing the guild leader to give the item to Tink. Clara gets upset, and sets up a secondary account to PK the guild leader's character 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.

** 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 [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard defeating it]] (Thanatos).

* ''DiabloII'' 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.

** ''DiabloII'' in general is notorious for this. One patch offers runes and runewords; runes are special socketable items with a range of abilities, depending on the rune. Rune drops aren't determined by [[LuckStat 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 [[GameBreaker GameBreaking]]. Runes have supplanted the ''Stone of Jordan'' as the ingame with its own exchange and pricing system to boot. Rampant [[GoodBadBugs duping]] of runes has actually caused ''inflation''.

* The Hockey Stick of Furious Angry Rage in ''KingdomOfLoathing'' could probably have been considered to cause LootDrama at one time, though other additions 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 (at the time meaning + 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 [[{{Nerf}} 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 [[GameBreaker 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 lead to some clans having them on a timeshare system.)

* MapleStory: Unless you're buying it off of other users [[AdamSmithHatesYourGuts (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.

* [[CosmeticAward The Isolator Badge]] in CityOfHeroes. 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 LostForever. 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.

* NerfNow parodies this trope (along with RandomlyDrops) in a strip imagining TeamFortress2 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 benefitial to her class to the Sniper instead.

* ''DiabloII'' has a 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.

** This caused Valve to remove hats and other items from people who farmed items by idling and/or using other exploits. 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.

* GaiaOnline has the Angelic Halo. It was one of the first Monthly Collectables released and it's virtually impossibly 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.

* ''RagnarokOnline'' is probably the king of this trope. 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 [[MassivelyMultiplayerOnlineRolePlayingGame MMORPGs]], right? Right?

* ''[[SimCity 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 [[SmallNameBigEgo egotism]] and [[StopHavingFunGuy 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 [[NintendoHard not made even the easy level of the game difficult as it is]], half of these problems wouldn't happen.

* ''{{Minecraft}}'': Diamonds, Lapiz Lazuli, and Lightstone Dust/Blocks. Notch is adding more stuff to the game which means the drama may only escalate over time.

** Let's take this moment to put some rough numbers to the trope. According to SquareEnix, as of 2009 the game hosted over 2 million characters in 20 [[ClassAndLevelSystem jobs]], of which 6 can use Ridill. According to [[http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Jobs/Job_Distribution_Statistics the game's wiki]] ([[TheWikiRule of course it has one]]), as of 2008 those six jobs were played by 30% of characters, resulting in 600,000 characters trying to get one. Meanwhile, Fafnir has been fightable since April 2003. Assuming it drops Ridill [[LiesToChildren precisely once a month]] and that all 16 current servers were available from launch, there are ''at most'' 1632 Ridills available to the game's player base. See the ConflictBall now?

** Ironically enough, changes to FFXI have made Ridill much more marginalized in its usefulness than times past. Before Warriors needed it to go from fairly good to amazingly powerful. Gameplay changes now just make acquiring a Ridill a different kind of powerful, and even then there are debates as to which way is better.

* ''TeamFortress2'' has this with the unlockable weapons and to a greater extent hats. With the RandomDrop system, people leave their computers on and wait until they get items.

Many {{MMORPG}}s have monsters that are infrequent spawns with [[RandomlyDrops 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.

** [[RandomlyDrops 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 fall somewhere in the neighborhood of ''40 million gold'' due to their rarity and have sparked many an angry rant.
* ''TeamFortress2'' has this with the unlockable weapons and to a greater extent hats. With the RandomlyDrops system, people leave their computers on and wait until they get items.

* In ''AceOnline'', the [[RandomlyDrops 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.

* Parodied in ''SluggyFreelance'' when a ''WorldOfWarcraft'' style [[MassivelyMultiplayerOnlineRolePlayingGame MMORPG]] has a special ability-boosting hat that a raid's boss only RandomlyDrops once every ten raids. When [[http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=080915 Torg gets the hat]] his first time playing the raid, other players who have done it 50 times without getting the hat are ''pissed''.

** The original [[LordOfTheRing One Ring]] movie prop which the four main characters greedily fight for, replaying the corruption of Smeagol.

* ''DiabloII'' has a 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. Then there's the ''Butterfly Ring'', which makes the Amazon ungodly powerful (it gave the Amazon + 15 to certain skills that were useful), which was even more rare than a ''Stone of Jordan''. Since the crackdown, perfect gems are used as the surrogate currency.