Purpose of rare foods?

[Barnaby Gump]

I'm wondering if someone can explain the concept behind the rare foods and resources. As an example take the "Rare Main: Kitten Dreams" (2:00 DP reduction) or the non-rare "Main: Pan-Seared Red Snapper" (1:35 DP reduction) in comparison to "Main: Burgundy Chicken Pie" (1:35 DP reduction). The Kitten Dreams requires 6 Fresh Sword Fish and 4 Fresh Red Snapper, compared to the Pan-Seared Red Snappr which takes 8 Fresh Red Snapper, compared to Burgundy Chicken Pie which takes 8 raw chicken. I can get about 8 raw chicken in 1 swipe off of a dead chicken, whereas I might get 1 Fresh Red Snapper after harvesting 1000 mackerel. Other than as a challenge why would anyone ever want to make items using something that has a bonus rate of 0.1% chance of getting just 1 of?

[Oakleif]

I believe that the "rare" recipe designation indicates that they were created by a player as part of the competition.

[gopher65]

Yeah.... if it were me, I'd have made things that were made of rare bonus materials (like Red Snapper) have significantly greater DP reduction than normal foods. In the above example the rare food has only ~26% higher DP reduction than the non-rare food. Because these are rare bonus materials, the market could never be flooded with the product (since it is consumable). Given the time and dedication required to obtain the raw resources, either:

1) the DP reduction should be at least several times higher than the normal food,
2) the raw resources should be many times more abundant than they are.

This is similar to the old "risk vs reward" paradigm. If something is very risky, then it has to have a sufficiently great reward to overcome a player's natural tendency to take the path of least resistance (often mass-farming of weak monsters).

In the case of crafting you have "time vs reward" instead, but only if the player has a choice between two different items with similar function. If the player has a choice, then the reward of the more difficult item has to be sufficiently great to justify the additional time outputted, else the player will simply mass-manufacture the easiest items in the game that have approximately the same function. This is especially true of food, since the easy items have exactly the same function as the hardest items; it is only the amount of DP removed that changes.

In this case I don't think the time vs reward equation is anywhere near what it should be. It is so far off that it isn't even in the right galaxy.

[Lio]

no doubt we'll see a few tweaks coming fast n furious .. you can see they were putting the players recipes in and maybe not really thinking through the dp savings as much as may now be obviously necessary ..hopefully ..