Why do reward items in Battle Passes have rarity levels?

Question

Many free-to-play video games feature a Trophy Path mechanic, also known as Battle Pass/Premium Pass. It offers an alternate progression path to players beyond the core game in the form of rewards, as well as acting both as a player retention mechanism and a monetisation strategy.

TP rewards can be quite diverse: in-game items, skins, soft currency, emblems... and they are rewarded to players in a sequential fashion: the more they play, the more trophies they get, the more rewards they earn. There's no such concept as "probability" of earning something at a given progression level: TP items are either owned or not.

Moreover, a given Trophy Path is the same for everyone playing during a certain season, meaning that some players will unlock and get the same items. Potentially, all players would earn those very same rewards, given enough time.

If so, why do granted items have a "rarity"? Is it about a future projection of players' ownership for a given item? Or, more simply, is it just a reinterpretation of the original idea of rarity, here used only as reinforcement of the aspirational value of the item?

Answer 1

My experience is that, even though we use this term "rarity" to refer to the colour-coded category of a reward item, this often has nothing to do with the probability of acquiring it.

It may have once been used more literally, in a progenitor game where "better" loot was doled out with diminishing probabilities (there are several that could fit the bill, I won't speculate on which one began or cemented the trend). But once it was engrained in player expectations that "rarity" ≈ "goodness" of the item, calling things "common"/"uncommon"/"rare" became a useful shorthand for "meh" "better" "better-er".

Players internalized that purple "epic" drops were things to get excited about, so game designers wanting to get players excited about an item made it purple and called it "epic", and doubly so for gold/"legendary", though there's some variance in the exact sequence/labels between games.

So I'd advise not taking the term "rarity" literally to mean "low probability to acquire". It's really just an alias for "quality" or "grade". We could replace it with a star rating from 1 to 5 stars like a hotel rating or film review and the meaning would be basically unchanged.

In games without probabilistic rewards, this rarity label is just an arbitrary signifier designers attach to influence the perceived value of the item. Other games have trained players to sit up and pay attention when "rare" drops are on the line, so this just leverages that expectation as a way to give players a sense of stakes.

Often the assignment of these labels also correlates to information about the item. For gear that has stats, there might be certain stat ranges or certain (numbers of) special perks set aside for each rarity tier. Or for skins, it might reflect the complexity of the skin.

On an open world shooter game I worked on, our "common" skins were just single-colour paint jobs / palette swaps, our "rare" skins were tiling patterns (still straightforward to churn out for tons of weapons), while our "legendary" skins were one-off art pieces with bits of lore attached. So you can see this was a classification of quality / production cost / visual interest, not "rarity" (since there was exactly one copy of every skin in the game, and you could eventually unlock them all).