Guild Wars 2

electricwater.1572:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s an easter egg; it needn’t be easily farmed.

I guess the only ‘easter-eggish’ thing about it is that one line that says it belonged to Rurik. For the rest it offers no further lore.
Compare the method of acquiring it with the way you get ascended rings from other maps. Costs way more effort for the same reward.

An in-game easter egg is anything that is hidden from accidental discovery, requiring clever reading of clues and/or some trial & hour. Once solved, it might be repeated more easily. It has nothing to do with lore.

Easter eggs are meant as local color, not as something meant to have a bigger payout than anything else in the game.

It only costs more than the same reward because people over-hyped the value of the strange rock based on speculation and scarcity of the item. Similarly, long before Sam became part of a collection, it easily cost 3-20 times as much as other items with identical stats simply because people loved the cute icon.

tl;dr it’s an easter egg; it needn’t be easily farmed.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

An in-game easter egg is anything that is hidden from accidental discovery, requiring clever reading of clues and/or some trial & hour. Once solved, it might be repeated more easily. It has nothing to do with lore.

Yes, ‘This rock is humming with magic’ screams throw me in a specific spot out of the way from any normal travel. Even by your standards this little easter egg fails at being something unique.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Easter eggs are meant as local color, not as something meant to have a bigger payout than anything else in the game.

They are also not meant to be a waste of time or worse, a detriment to your gameplay.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It only costs more than the same reward because people over-hyped the value of the strange rock based on speculation and scarcity of the item. Similarly, long before Sam became part of a collection, it easily cost 3-20 times as much as other items with identical stats simply because people loved the cute icon.

Let’s keep away from the whole ‘scarcity’ argument, that’s one of the main blunders which caused all of this.

Sam as you mentioned had an appeal for its unique looking icon back in the day. It had an internal scarcity associated with a bugged Ogre Wars, but more than that it was a sought-after Berserker Stats Exotic Accessory of which you must know of the old Zerker days.

However, this ring is far different. The RNG in getting it is worse, and it costs you for trying to get it. Once you have the rock, you have no indications at all on what to do with it. ‘Humming with Magic’ is so unbelievably vague that all manner of possible theories came forth. Dozens if not hundreds of player hours were poured into the rock at release by only the select few folks who had the rock.

But there was nothing, and so the speculation came up with an unfinished product that would come about eventually from Current Events, since practically any other items like this one would lead into collections, special interactions, etc.

This was only resolved when Lindsey had mentioned that everything had come out about the rock with the release, our first REAL clue about the solution. She even followed up with keeping it in your inventory, and that’s a pretty nasty flaw for a secret scavenger hunt when you have to give hints out like that months later.

And ultimately, like you mentioned with Sam, the ring was the final reward which shared same stats as other rings of its caliber. But do you see the fatal difference between Sam and this Ring? Sam is actually something you can work towards, figure out on your own, doesn’t cost you anything per chance at RNG.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

tl;dr it’s an easter egg; it needn’t be easily farmed.

Do you know what’s a cool easter egg?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gwen's_Grave

Hero Point tied to a nod at GW1.

Or, maybe something closer like:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Althea's_Ashes

Another nod, Accessory that is SHARED in cost with other accessories of its kind!

So please explain to me why this particular easter egg is destructive again?

No one forced any of you to blow the hype out of the water for the Rock.

Datamining and player perception took what was an odd item from farming EB while it was current content and projected it to absurdity, despite nothing from Anet mentioning it in the slightest.

It’s completely absurd to assume that it was any kind of ring precursor, or anything of the sort, being that Anet have not ever introduced a non-core legendary in that manner, marketing or implementation-wise.

The fault lies not with Anet. The players set the TP price, hyped it up thinking it was more important than it was, and was upset when their headcannon didn’t match reality.

They turned something that had a rare drop from an otherwise material sink (skrit stashes>crafting mats), and ran with it.

Danikat.8537:

I think it’s quite sweet that he kept the ring all that time, considering Althea died in the Searing and that was almost 3 years earlier. Although I suppose after the Shiverpeaks he wasn’t in a position to decide which items he would keep with him.

That’s not actually the case. Althea only disappeared shortly after the game catches up with the main character, a couple years after the Searing happened.

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Duke's_Daughter

i never heard of this til today lol If i get one from the map cool but not gonna seek it out don’t really care about it that much specially after skimming through some of the posts here lol.

The first thing I thought when I read of an guildie looting one of these was “Might be an ordinary item with no greater value”. Several people from my friendlist spend days farming these rocks while I saw it as a waste of time/gold without knowing what this actually is. Glad to see I was right =)
A little easter egg that was totally overhyped by the players.

Yes, the journey was arduous. It started with reaching for my wallet and ended with buying gems.

The horror.