Path of Exile 2 players grew increasingly desperate while developer Grinding Gear Games was away for the holidays, even resorting to apocryphal rites in hopes of summoning patches to address their early access woes. But for YouTuber Slipperyjim8, the interregnum provided just enough time to descend into a 16-day spite-fueled mania of data collection and monster killing to prove whether or not PoE 2's item rarity stat does, in fact, produce more loot.
The Slipperyjim saga began on December 23, when Jim uploaded a video called "Does Rarity give you more currency drops?" The video was, itself, an offshoot of an earlier investigation of whether Waystone rarity affects loot amounts, spurred by a perception among PoE2 players that the item rarity stat—a stat that can appear on both items and map-generating Waystones to improve the drops from enemies—is overtuned. In the video, Jim explained that, while collecting loot data from 150 Waystone clears, he began having "doubts" about how the item rarity stat functions, particularly as it relates to currency items.
"Here's how I think it works: Rarity should make it so you don't get any more currency; the currency you do get has a higher chance of being more valuable," Jim said. "That's how I assumed it worked. But based on just feeling, I don't know. I'm starting to be doubtful of that."
Comparing the data he'd gathered while running Waystones at different rarity levels, his results seemed counterintuitive. As Jim crunched the numbers from 150 Waystone clears in real time, his data seemed to show that the item rarity stat was actually decreasing the amount of currency that dropped. "That's the complete opposite of how I assumed this worked," Jim said.
The numbers seemed to cause a small crisis of faith. Worse, Jim's commenters did the cruelest thing you can do to a spreadsheet-wielding man in a precarious state: They criticized his dataset. Jim, they noted, hadn't been considering Scrolls of Wisdom as a currency item—a classic blunder! I assume!
In doing so, they had initiated a grim transformation.
One week later, Jim uploaded a follow-up video called "I killed 500 rare monster and recorded every drop - send good vibes." The video began with Jim, wearing tinfoil over his scalp for reasons I did not and will not investigate, declaring that "there's nothing useful in this video." Its main thrust was to outline a harrowing journey that Jim had decided to embark upon: He'd killed 500 rare monsters in PoE 2 with no increases to his item rarity stat, recording the number of modifiers affecting the monster, each of which provides an increase to resulting loot, and the loot that they dropped.
And he was going to do the same for 500 more. And then 500 more—repeating at progressively higher item rarity stat levels to prove, definitively, what exactly the stat was doing. "There's no information in this video! Go away. There's nothing useful here," Jim said, hexing his viewers as he peeled the tinfoil from his head. "I put this out because I need positive vibes and lots of support so that I can go in and farm another 500 monsters."
The process would take another 10 days.
On January 8, Jim uploaded a video after 16 straight days of rare monster data collection, killing a total of 1800 rare monsters in the effort. Here's Jim's process, in his own words:
"What I did is I went into a map, found a rare monster, stopped, and I took a screenshot of his name with all his modifiers, because each modifier gives rare monsters additional rarity, and I want to know how much rarity do those modifiers give you, so I needed to kill a bunch of rare monsters with a bunch of modifiers without any rarity on myself, without any rarity on the maps, without any rarity on my atlas, and then do it again but rarity on me, not on the map and not on the atlas, then even more rarity on me, none on the map, none on the atlas, and then even more rarity on me but also rarity on the map and on the atlas."
To paraphrase, Jim developed an intricate process of snapshotting rare monsters and recording their ensuing loot drops, which he'd completed 500 times at escalating levels of item rarity stat—except he only killed 300 at the last one, because he'd, you know, been doing it for 16 days.
"16 days? 16 days of my life," Jim said. "And now the Sun is up!" He'd then inserted a short interlude, during which he ventured outside to take in the air, his task complete, a plate of chicken nuggets in hand. Tragically, by setting the plate down to deliberately touch grass, Jim gave a nearby bird an opportunity to run off with his food. Man is too often destroyed by his labor, even as the work is finished.
So, what did Jim's data indicate? What did each meticulously recorded item and associated rarity, each pile and respective quantity of gold, each orb, map, shard, and prism—and every resulting chart—tell us? Does item rarity give better loot?
I mean, yeah.
As Jim had originally theorized, the item rarity stat doesn't produce more loot. Instead, it gives the loot that does drop a higher chance of being a better item. As you equip items with more loot rarity affixes, monsters will drop fewer gold piles, but each gold pile will contain more gold within it and the gold piles that otherwise would have dropped are instead converted into rarer currency items. Likewise, monsters will drop progressively more magic and rare items as your rarity stat increases.
Jim's overall assessment: "This shit's fine." His read is that the sense of item rarity being a busted stat is a product of players obsessively comparing themselves to others.
"The whole reason that people are like, 'Oh my god, rarity is so broken, Breach is so broken!' is because they're looking over the fence and they're like, 'Damn, that guy looks like he's getting a lot of money,'" Jim said. "That's not how you're supposed to play this game. You're supposed to just do whatever's fun."
When PC RPGs were at their crunchiest and most hardcore in the 1990s, Farland Story set itself apart by… being cute?
Kingdom Come 2 and Avowed have revealed to me the grand unified theory of game design: A good game is when you can steal back the money you just spent at a shop, a bad game is when you can't
