ArenaNet:Guild Wars 2 suggestions/Rare items

Making rare items "rare" (Discussion)
In Guild Wars, "unique" items usually lose any "unique-ness" after some time of being introduced due to the virtual unlimited availability of them to the game. In this regard, Guild Wars 2 could introduce the concept of rare items by making them effectively "rare". A good point of comparison for this are GW1 minipets, where "rare" minipets such as the Panda are available, and also "unique" minipets such as The Frog exist. One way of implementing this concept in-game could be:
 * Limiting the availability of rare items to a certain number (uniques to 1), and making the limit game-wide.
 * Putting a limit to the number of uses or the amount of time these rare or unique items could be used, in order to avoid rare items being monopolized. This could also allow the creation of "balance breaking" items, since they would not be available long enough to be abused.
 * Other alternative to the previous one could be introducing "events" that could remove such items from the owner randomly.
 * Putting a limit to the time these items could be possessed each time by a single user, in order to avoid rare items being "lost" due to inactive accounts.
 * Once a rare or unique item has it's time or useability limit expired, it would become available again to be attained. This in order to ensure that new players and old players all have a chance of getting their hands on them.
 * Ensuring that no rare or unique item shares it's effect with other items in-game. This would finnaly ensure that unique or rare items cannot be functionally fully replaced by an easily accesable alternative.


 * Why this is a good idea
 * Would reward users by giving them access to rare items that are actually "rare", instead of just being "not common in skin" as in GW1.
 * Would enable the introduction to the game of unique items that are actually "unique".
 * Would ensure that everyone has a chance of attaining such rare or unique items.


 * Why it may not work out
 * Since the limit would be game-wide, the detection and removal of expired items could be a high-resource consuming task, server-wise.
 * Guildwars is about skills and the use of skills: distinctly more powerful items would be unfair to people who might not get them. Using the above example, there are only fifty panda minipets in the entire game: most people are never going to own one.
 * Would be a waste of programming time to program something that only 1 in a million players will actually be able to use. If each player should be able to get one unique item, that means a huge amount of programming as well as server and computer space, which just is not worth it.
 * Unique items r unique because of their names, let's keep it that way ^^ making them really unique is just too much! it's like making the last boss of the game "unique" so only 1 party can fight him! what's the point of it???