Permanently Missable Content / MMORPG

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• City of Heroes has the anniversary badges. If the character wasn't around for the anniversaries, there's no possible way to get the badge.
  • There is also the "Efficiency Expert" badge in City of Villains. To get it you must successfully complete all but one of Pither's timed missions, if you fail more than one then you'll never get the badge. Not even if you have a friend get the missions and do them with him. None of the missions are available via the flashback system either.
    • If you fail any number of missions, you can still get the badge by abandoning the completed mission. When you abandon a mission (not to be confused with auto-completing it), it drops from your list of missions, and talking to the contact gives the mission you just abandoned for another try. But of course, you can't abandon a completed mission... unless you're a Rogue and go to any of the Paragon City zones, which will automatically abandon all your missions, no matter what state they're in.
• Dawn of the Dragons is chockful of items and characters that became permanently inaccessible after a certain time. Like Kingdom of Loathing, it is not a game for completionists:
  • Any player who participated in the beta testing phase received a "Tester's Tunic", an otherwise unobtainable chestpiece. The same goes for the other "t-shirt" chests, including the Dragon Raider's T-Shirt (from the Ultimate Loot Lair World Raid), the Echthros Tunic (from the March 2012 Echthros World Raid) and Bloody Alice's Corselet (from the Blood of the Bandit Queen Rare Spawn).
  • Most of the gear acquired from World Raids is intended to be available once only, and included entire sets of armor (Bloody Alice's Set, Grand Crusader's Set), generals (Thaddeus the Protector, Chieftain Githa), boosts that affected certain generals and weapons, and familiars that were awarded at the end of each raid.
  • The "Legion Boosts" acquired from certain World Raids, which were more valuable than other rewards because they gave a permanent (and scaling) bonus to the player's legion. These were only found in the Echidna and Library of Kazarach World Raids.
  • The social-media exclusive giveaways (the Gugent familiar on Facebook, and the Bethany the Sorceress general on Twitter) were limited-time giveaways that expired after a certain number of users "claimed" their items. Likewise, players who weren't present when the developers gifted an item ("The King's New Trousers") to everyone as an inside joke for those who noticed graphical glitches with pants can't obtain them otherwise.
  • When the Skirmish PVP mode was replaced by the Invasion mode in 2013, anyone who hadn't competed in the number of matches needed to get the requisite achievements was permanently out of luck.
• Destiny has this issue whenever a new expansion is released. Old weapons and armor got phased out for new ones, and not necessarily the same kind either. Fortunately Bungie brought all the old Year One armor forward for the factions while several select Year One weapons were reintegrated into Vanguard and Crucible rep packages, albeit with different possible loadouts.
• Speaking of Nexon (at least in North America), Dungeon Fighter Online has special titles that grant players with all kinds of nifty abilities and stat bonuses. The title of Trailblazer was given to players who participated in the closed beta and is no longer obtainable.
• There are quite a few titles and rare, event-only items in Elsword that were only available for a certain time. The items can potentially be purchased from other players if the players with them buy a seal in the cash shop (but expect to wind up spending a couple tens of millions of in-game currency), but the titles? No such luck, as you need specific items to even activate them. Even then, said titles will be removed at the end of their duration, making them lost forever even if you already had them!
• The Gold Magnate ship in EVE Online is an extreme case. Only one such ship was given out as an event prize. It was eventually destroyed in PvP combat, making it well and truly lost forever.
  • While the Gold Magnate is the only unique ship in EVE Online, there are a number of other ships produced in such limited numbers that they are close to being lost forever. The Silver Magnates, the Guardian-Vexors and the ultra-faction battleships are not in production and are therefore ultra-rare collectors items, several of which have fallen into the hands of a certain famous collector. Pirates in EVE leap at the chance to destroy anything unique.
• In Final Fantasy XI there are actually quite a few items you can only get once, and worse, they can't be sold or traded to other players, so you can save space on your character-that-can-do-anything. Most of these aren't exactly that good, but then you have examples like the Bibiki Seashell, a very decent tanking item... that once could be accidentally thrown, before a patch fixed it.
  • Final Fantasy XI's Game Masters will generally restore one item you accidentally lose. Needless to say, this ability is Too Awesome to Use for most people.
  • The Xbox 360 achievements are now unobtainable with the end of console support as of 2016.
• Final Fantasy XIV has several titles, mounts, gear, and other items that were obtainable during the game's very rough and troubling times in 1.0 to 1.23. When the game got rebooted for 2.0, anything not obtained beforehand was gone for good. This was also the case for post 2.0 and beyond for seasonal events where it was intended to make the seasonal items limited time only, but the devs slowly started to bring the old items back through the cash shop so players who missed out can buy the old items with real money. Since the items in question are only for vanity, there's no pay to win involved. For a while, the items and hairstyles obtained from the Lightning Returns event were going to stay gone for good (and the event returned three times to boot), but due to the massive outcry and demand that the items should be in the cash shop so everyone could get them, the developers eventually gave in.
  
  There are also many pieces of gear and certain items that are marked as unique, which means you can't hold more than one of that particular item. In most cases, a unique item is unique in the sense of "there is only one of its kind". If you discard that item, you'll never get it back. Like with Final Fantasy XI, a Game Master can restore one item you had lost, but you can this emergency service only once. Choose wisely.
  • The GARO collaboration is the only event where the items are no longer obtainable after the deadline and will not be available on the Online Store. The rewards were titles, mounts and equipment that have very high stats and unusually detailed textures. Thankfully, Endwalker's 6.1 patch brings them back, giving players another chance to get all its content.
• Granblue Fantasy:
  • You can only get one copy of a Seraphic Weapon. At first players could accidentally sell or feed it away, but it's been changed to be impossible to lose.
  • There is one Cross-Fate Episode exclusive to Comiket 2014. If you started playing after that, there is no way to view it.
  • The story events, new ones of which are run at the top of each month, are also this. While they rarely impact the main plot, the later ones from 2016 and 2017 especially do a lot to expand on and develop a number of the cast members. However, if you don't play the event while it's out, you'll miss out on getting the scenes from it (and its associated SR character and SSR) forever. The events do tend to get rerun, but it usually takes a year or more, and after the rerun they may not come back.
  • Averted with various old events as they are now permanently playable Side Stories accessible from the world map, allowing one to see the story, farm/buy weapons and get the event's characters.
• In the original Guild Wars, the beautiful tutorial area is irreversibly destroyed in an event called the Searing, turning it into a desolate wasteland. Thus, once your character goes through the searing, you can never return to the tutorial (which has become known as Pre-Searing, with many characters called "perma-pre" never leaving the tutorial). To acknowledge the efforts of dedicate perma-pres, getting to max level in Pre-Searing awards a special title; leaving the tutorial prevented that character ever earning the title.
  • Another fun thing from the tutorial was a special item that the little girl Gwen gave you. It didn't do anything. Even if you finished the game, there was no use for it, as Gwen was never found, and it was taking up space in your inventory. After some 3 real-life years, the 3rd expansion came out, and Gwen was there. Anyone who had saved the item could now use it for a bonus quest/item. For everyone else: Make a new character.
  • The titles "Survivor" and "Legendary Survivor", requiring you gain certain amounts of experience without dying, used to fall under this trope. A single death would permanently stop all progress on the title for the character, requiring an entirely new character be created and leveled. Eventually the counter was modified to simply reset to 0 on death and resume counting.
  • Then there're the lost riches of the duping scandal. In 2007, a bunch of players figured out how to manipulate a new mechanic in order to dupe items. Naturally, they started producing mass quantities of Armbraces of Truth (a high-end item that could be traded in to collector NPCs for rare items, which were commonly used as high-denomination currency). ArenaNet shut them down, but not before they were able to buy pretty much everything they wanted. The community is still trying to figure out how many ultrarare, limited-edition minipets were lost when the dupers' accounts were deleted. (The wave of bot-related account bannings in 2010 probably didn't help either, judging by the wails of some of the banned.)
• Guild Wars 2 created massive amounts of lost forever content with the first season of the Living Story. Every two to four weeks a new update would launch introducing new content regarding the storyline, while also removing parts of the previous content. Not playing for a month could easily result in a player missing multiple achievements, vanity pets, and in a few cases titles. Later seasons avoided this by permanently integrating the Living Story content into the game and making missed episodes available for purchase.
  • Similarly, rotating items in the Gem Store such as miniature pets may only be available for short times. Some do make return appearances for limited time sales.
• Kingdom of Loathing has many items and rewards that cannot be acquired anymore. It's not a game for completionist.
  • It's also notable that they give consolation prizes constantly to the most dedicated completists, if only because they frequently give away special items to extremely helpful players or members of the dev team as well. Two such members dismantled their Completist status by DESTROYING their unique items to find out what they became, as the prize for doing so to ultra-rares is an Ultimate Wad, an instant level up. They became useless powders instead. Furthermore, when a third player who currently had the pulverize ability was awarded a special unique reward item (for being the first to pulverize an ultra-rare), they lampshaded and averted this by making said item pulverize...right back into its original state. Yes, that's right, the urge to break things actually wins out over 100% Completion in this game a lot of the time, even with Completists, meaning numerous gift items shall never return, unless the admins wish it so. Also some trophies are awarded on a lark, such as the infamous 2006 pantsless trophy. If you had pants on at rollover on New Year's, you didn't get it. Furthermore, if you weren't watching the in-game chat at the time, you had no forewarning.
  • Items of the Month and holiday content can only be first created (through donation or special holiday shops respectively) during that month or holiday. Once it's over, no more will ever enter the game. They can still be obtained by trading, and many players get far more than they'd actually use just so they can make a profit selling it later. But especially for consumable or bind-on-use items, it's still theoretically possible for the entire supply to run out, and more than just "theoretically" possible for market forces to drive the price outside of your budget (depending on how long it's been and how useful the item is, among other things).
• Mabinogi has many of these associated with limited-time events. Not really important, since the vast majority of these items are purely cosmetic, none of them are Game Breakers or even particularly high-powered, and most of them don't last very long anyway.
  • Some of the main story quests have the option to skip them. Doing so loses a few good items or titles forever, or eliminates the ability to convert from Paladin to Dark Knight. It also makes some of the later story quests more difficult; though they're still available.
  • Special titles are available to players who "break the seal" on newly-released zones and dungeons by matching a particular set of conditions. Since each seal can only be broken once per server, they are unique, and unavailable to other players once the seal is broken. If the player character is deleted (by the player, or by the Game Masters for rules violations), the seal remains broken, and the title is lost forever.
• The Neopets Advent Calendar. Oh boy. If you miss out on a day's worth of free items, who knows what you can do...
  • You can buy them from another user's shop, most Advent Calender items are valueless until the next year because so many people have them.
  • A real example of this trope on that site is the fact that apparently there are a few very old retired items that no longer exist in the game at all because every copy was eaten/discarded/destroyed by a random event or left on an account that was frozen or deleted due to inactivity. The fact that there are items like this was proven in an editorial, but they refused to say which ones...
• Nexus Clash takes this trope and deliberately runs with it, since it's a game built around unique, non-repeating events to avoid ever becoming Perpetually Static. That said, each cycle of the Eternal Recurrence usually takes long enough to comfortably level your characters and thoroughly explore the world with time to spare, though it's possible to feel this trope if you joined a week before the current cycle ends.
• In RuneScape, certain emotes and items can only be unlocked during special events. Emotes and songs can be unlocked when the event occurs next year. The items, however, are gone for good.
  • Also, some items like the Half Jug of Wine, Santa Hats, or Party Hats can no longer be obtained, and unlike the above items, are tradeable. This has made them extremely valuable as only a few exist. If a player were to drop one and no one picks it up, then it would be lost forever and that item would grow even more rare.
  • How valuable, you ask? Party Hats (colorful paper crowns that were a holiday drop during Runescape's very first Christmas), go for so much that the game can't even keep track of them, as the highest value it can record is 2.147 billion gold. They cost significantly more than that.
• SD Gundam Capsule Fighter has this with special event units. Events like Rare Capsules, unit collecting and item spending tend to give out units that are either unavailable for upwards of another year or two or exclusive units (such as Gundam + B-Parts and Astray Red Frame Custom) that can only be obtained during that time and nowhere else. You miss them, you're in for a long wait.
• This trope ends up pissing off many Star Trek Online fans. At first, the only things that were essentially lost forever were a special sash based off of what Worf wore in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and a number of emotes that were at one time buyable. However, since 2014/2015, Cryptic has gone out of its way to add more to this, including weapons, DOFFs, BOFFs, and playable spaceships, which drives the player base insane because they have to have it all and they get pissy if one of their alts cannot get it or if they miss it because they decided to take a break.
  • Not just that, but many of the missable starships come with unique consoles or other ship equipment that is REQUIRED to complete event-themed equipment sets, keeping you from accessing a set's full power if you don't have that ship.
• In Tibia, If you happen to lose a quest specific item that doesn't respawn (pretty much every quest item actually). Your only way to complete said quest is by either buying the item from another player who hasn't done the quest, or create a brand new character just to do the quest again and transfer over the item. The devs have taken steps to avert this trope though, through the character of Black Bert, who will sell you (for a really high price) most of these items again if you happen to lose one.
  • The achievement The Call of the Wild requires you to do every mission available on Krailos, but one of these missions will lock you out from taking a few of the other ones and since you can do them in pretty much any order, its very easy to render the achievement impossible to get if you don't pay attention.
  • To Appease the Mighty quest involves you being made an ambassador to the Djinns in an attempt to make sure their war won't involve humanity. If you completed or even started the actual Djinn War quest first though, To Appease the Mighty won't be available anymore as Djinn War involves you stopping the war, meaning there will be no need for an treaty between them and humanity.
• World of Warcraft has a variation of this: Some specific quest rewards are items that you can only get this one way. Use it or sell it, and it's lost forever for that character. And some of these quests are only available to one faction... Of course, those limitations also make them Too Awesome to Use. And when you choose a reward for a non-repeatable quest the other possible rewards for that quest are lost forever for the character.
  • After the expansion came out, a certain world boss moved to a new location, got a level upgrade, and dropped new loot. Unfortunately, this caused all of his old loot to disappear, save for one item that could also rarely be found on more common enemies.
    • And the next expansion did it again, relocating and retuning an old dungeon... sans one Infinity Plus One Staff. Also, many mounts and titles are lost forever if you weren't playing the game during a specific timeframe. If you started playing afterwards, you're out of luck.
    • Players who acquired these items when available received the corresponding Feat of Strength achievement.
  • Another of WoW's many examples of this are the classic PvP ranks. Originally, players could gain (and lose) one of 14 ranks, ranging from Private/Scout to Grand Marshall/High Warlord, based on their PvP performance on a week to week basis. In addition to rewards which became available at each rank, players also received the associated title before their name. With the release of the Burning Crusade expansion, this ranking system was scrapped, and while the item rewards were made available through other means, the titles can no longer be gained by players. Those players who had earned a title before their removal are given the option to display it, and players who still have their title often wear it as a sign of veterancy and badge of honor.
    • These returned in Cataclysm as part of the rated BG feature, making it possible other lost items/additions can return at some point too.
  • In addition, the game's achievement system has a tendency to award titles/vanity pets/mounts/etc. with the completion of its harder and/or obnoxious requests. The most significant examples of this are the prestige mounts awarded for being within a certain upper percentile of the PvP arena rankings for a particular season, and/or by finishing all the "hard mode" meta-achievements for each content patch's PvE raid content — during that patch's duration. You see, the mount (and in some cases, title) rewards are removed when a new content patch rolls around, under the belief that the increasingly powerful gear provided by each would result in an immediate brute-forcing of those missions. This ensures that said rewards are badges of honor for PvE / PvP superstars.
  • Probably the most infamous example would be the unarmored epic ground mounts. Patch 1.4, released a few months after the game was released, replaced the original epic ground mounts with the new, armored models. For a player to have an unarmored model today, they have to have earned 1000 gold AND not have been exclusively been playing Undead characters (as the Undead epic mount was already armored and was not updated) before the patch replaced them, a very difficult feat. Pity, too, because Ivory Raptor is one of the coolest mounts in the game.
  • With the Cataclysm expansion, many NPCs and landmarks from the original game were wiped off the map by the expansion's Big Bad, along with their associated quests. In a variation of this trope, new quests dealing with the aftermath were added.
  • Many "Feats of Strength" are impossible to complete due to patches removing the content or rendering the challenge moot.
  • The extremely rare "Scarab Lord" title and the accompanying Black Qiraji mount are a double example of this. The title and mount could only be obtained by completing an extremely long chain of quests involving multiple raids and significant player cooperation. Once the first person completed the chain, other players had only ten hours to do so and gain the reward. After that the title and mount could never be earned again on that server. The rarity was compounded when the decision was made that new servers would not allow completion of the chain. The final nail in the coffin was the release of Cataclysm, where the entire quest chain was removed. A Feat of Strength achievement was added for players who had completed the quest chain long after the tangible rewards were rendered unattainable — the description even mocks players for this.
  • The game also had two quest chains that lasted the duration of their respective expansions that rewarded Legendary-quality gear — a cloak for Mists of Pandaria and a ring for Warlords of Draenor — that have both been completely removed. Not just the gear, the quest chains themselves. This poses a bit of a problem for later players, as for Pandaria one world boss is inaccessible without the cloak, and Warlords' chain explains why Cordana shows up as a villain in Legion.
  • Legion has the "Challenge" skins for the Artifact weapons that could only be obtained towards the very end of the expansion. Completely cosmetic, but proof that the player could pull off a difficult fight without help.
  • And then completely reversed with WoW Classic, which allowed new players to experience the pre-Cataclysm version of the game, as well as allowed senior players who're hit by the Nostalgia Filter to re-experience the world as it was before all the big permanent changes came.

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