The concept of DPK can actually be good and rewarding if they are done correctly.
First thing which the game designers need to understand that in order to maintain scarcity of an item, locking it behind a high dpk isn’t the only way to go about doing it.
Generally all players want to see progression that comes along with the effort and time they used
The above holds true for all aspects of the game, be it character development or item acquisition. Just lengthening the time needed to farm one such item (high dpk) makes players feel unease when they see no progression at all especially when the item didn’t drop after sometime in farming. This is made worse when they found out that their effort may be taken away from them when some other lucky player got the dpk item first.
There are actually a couple of solutions to this problem. I do find them to be good ways to alleviate the item farming (at least imo), let players have a sense of progression yet still maintain the scarcity of the item being farmed.
Solution 1
This is more for materials for recipes. Increase the amount of materials needed to make the item but reduce the amount of dpk needed to get an item to below 100. For example, if a sword needs 80x of mat A to make with 700dpk each. Convert it to needing 800x of Mat A with 70dpk each.
Ultimately it is still the same amount of time and effort needed to make the sword, but due to it being low dpk with high numbers, players feel progress more since they get to see their material gain increases.
Granted it will also make item acquisition easier due to market forces, but the materials needed to make the item can be adjusted to factor in material sales.
Solution 2
This pertains to both materials, items and HG cubes. It is to create a “middleman” for players to trade in lesser mats/cubes for the cube they want.
An example will be a HG npc middleman who takes in lesser cubes for a cube of higher quality. the HG will drop white equipment cubes every 70-100 dpk. 10 of these white equipment cubes can be traded via the npc for a blue equipment cube. And subsequently 10 blue equipment cubes can trade for 1 purple equipment cube.
As they are all cubes, the player, at any point of time can just open them to get the equipment they want, which corresponds to the cube level and quality. Cubes also prevent buying and selling through market or player trade until they are converted to items.
This functions like some sort of “personal dpk” and allows the players themselves control their progression, while keeping the scarcity of the high end items intact.
The same can be done for materials for high end recipes too, but with the alchemists’ magnum opus as the “middleman”. This has already been done with old R7 materials such as brown stoulet helms <> dawn crystal shards but I’m kind of surprised they aren’t even implemented for R8 content.
The above 2 solutions can work in tandem with the current dpk system, in which the current dpk will provide the sudden “stroke of luck drop” while the 2 solutions become the backbone for item farming and acquisition. This helps make item farming a much more enjoyable experience than it is now, imo.
