Hi fantheons! :P
So I simply can't keep my excitement down for this game and have been pondering about various aspects of mmos. I played EQ2, WoW, Rift, Swtor, ESO, Wildstar and a few others and since EQ2, "RARE" items/gear/ material etc has not truly felt rare for me. I do think this game seems to be going in a direction of making "Rare" feel special again.
Below are just some ideas or approaches I feel would help but I understand it might not be universal to every player's liking and I respect that.
1) Mounts: Mounts do not have to be overly stacked with glowing eyes, huge bodies, and tons of armor to make it "rare". If every player can easily obatain said mount it quickly devalues the rarity. Once you see every player on your server running around with that mount, you lose that value.
First, the developers would have to decide how quickly they intend for the easiest obtainable mount to be available. If the initial cost for the slowest mount is pretty high, it instantly creates a spectrum in which some players are willing to spend currency for it as others may choose to continue by foot. So let's say the cheapest mount is 10gold (let's pretend 10 gold is a large portion for given level) and is a basic horse. The next step is where the spectrum can be widened further.
Option A) Make in depth story lines, quests to go into X dungeons or zones, harvest, craft, and spend currency to upgrade mount slowly and by a small percentage. The sequence of doing these things can NOT be simple and should take a long time. It should cost currency and require the player to invest time, currency and material into. This will again leave players with the option to keep the basic horse to adventure to upgrade. To take this further, depending on which direction (zones, dungeons) the player chooses to pursue upgrades shapes the mount aesthetically (not statistically to prevent a "best" upgrade path).
Option B) More expensive Mounts: And when I say expensive I mean mounts that won't be purchaseable with a few months of release minimum. For this mount graphically, it doesn't need a huge reskinning but simply a headpice armor or small body armor. Does it look different than a basic horse? sure. But it is still a horse and leaves room for further unique mounts from dungeons or zones.
Option C) Rare drops etc: If implemented, rare spawns shouldn't be easy to find and farm. Ideally, it should be something that happens naturally and randomly. Once 100 players farm a rare drop from a static npc, it is no longer rare but incredibly common.
This leaves room for other mounts to have small additions added to them for more cost whether it is currency or adventure / world exploration etc.
2) Harvested materials for crafting: Recently, mmos provide such ample amount of "rare" resources from gathering nodes that it really doesn't feel rare but instead an alternate resource. Harvesting rare stone or plants etc should be something that takes hours on end and effort on the player. If rare material is too easily obtainable, it floods the trade market and devalues the material as well as provides an ample amount of material to craft "rare" goods which are no longer rare.
Using WoW and garrisons as an example, players can farm everything without even leaving their garrison. Markets are flooded with dirt cheap material. Because of that, rare crafted goods are also flooding the marker at dirt cheap prices. If players had to put in effort and TIME to find rare materials, it would lead to higher prices (probably persuading more players to go harvest themselves which gets people into the world) and directly results in rare crafted goods being much more costly and probably less asscessible.
Overall, I think this philosophy on "rarity" could shape gear, housing items, zone and world items, titles etc. To be completely honest, I have found recent mmos to be incredibly simple and boring especially when I see a majority of the players running around with the same titles, mounts, gear etc. One of my favorite memories from eq2 was when I came back after a short break and saw a player with an incredibly cool mount and gear and he was the only one I ever saw with it.