Ragnarok Online. There were at one point quest givers that traded items for experience, directly, in a repeatable fashion. A set group of items for every 10 levels, all nice and simple. Except it wasn't.
The catch was, killing all those animals for their loot on the appropriate level would grant far more exp than the items did on the trade rate of the quest giver. (Like, to undertand the Book of Knowledge, you need to study all the knowledge in the world, a self defeating quest.) For example, killing one hundred rats for their fur jumped your level from 10 to 20, while the 100 furs would only advance 5 levels on the trade quest. The quest was specifically designed to empty all the high-level hoarder players inventories and making leveling alts easy, since people wanted to create more characters in other classes and have means to level them quickly.
I don't know if it was meant to combat bots, but it had the exact opposite effect, everybody found a way to run bots 24/7 and amass the largest amount of any random loot not nailed to the ground, sure to have a market for them (in a game where you can create a MERCHANT class). Almost the entire list of random loots in the whole game had a usage on these quests.
This is the kind of game that rewards hoarders, and when you go play Skyrim people ask themselves: "Why am I stealing everything in this house that is not nailed to the wall? Why am I stealing all his silverware? Why am I carrying 80 wheels of cheese?"
This game was one of the culprits of hoarding. Not to mention in Ragnarok Online you also have encumbrance by weight, and an arbitrary limit of 50 distinct objects on the inventory (later expanded, but still...).
On the other side of the coin, whatever bizarre object you needed, for whatever reason (Planet of Hats...) you were sure-fire to find someone selling those. Ragnarok Online took 20 Bear Asses and weaponized it with Screw The Rules Ihave Money.
Edited by Gonemad
General
Why bear asses? Can someone please change it to something less gross?
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See archived discussion. people have liked the title and found it crystal clear.
Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)
Harley Quinn hyenaholic
I removed the City Of Heroes example since it specifically said it avoided it. Sure, COH has fetch quests, but they're not really Bear Ass fetch quests.
Perhaps the IRL example/equivalent would be wolf and coyote pelts in western and northwestern US, when a few species were hunted to near extinction. The pelts were not used, but instead proof that a trapper had killed off the canis, seen as pests in the time.
About the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. example, the second second level bullet point seems rather irrelevant, since in most other games the Bear Asses are available outside of the related quests as well. Besides, it is different from the artifacts, which do have a gameplay function.
Edited by Durlendiamenfes
This article needs a cleanup BADLY. Most of the examples are complaining. I already had to rewrite the description because it was nothing but whining.
Changed "It is highly speculated in some circles that this is the MMORPG equivalent of filler" to "This is the MMORPG equivalent of filler." This ain't Wikipedia; you don't have to find a reliable secondary source before you can state the blindingly obvious.
Edited by Dausuul
I thought there was a Trope Namer here before. Wasn't it Yahtzee in a Zero Punctuation?
Edited by Malfunktionv2
change the name of this page please