Shattered Kingdoms

In fact, Derk Thom's platinum suits are limited items. Most items above Journeyman status are not unlimited.

Regardless of their perceived quality, worn limited items would be counted toward the hoarding rule. The question is, why would you bother to hoard a load of Derk's platinum gear in the first place? Hopefully this proposed rule would cause people to only keep the items that truly matter to them, and leave all the other items available to people for which it would be more useful.

For items that are not shields or weapons, which can be held, they would need to fall under the same as consumables, for which I don't have a proposed rule yet. Not sure I want to be as draconian as jerinx about containers.

I will also add that consumables seem to be the items more in need of regulation anyway. There is tons of wearable gear available in the game, just sitting around on the NPCs that spawn them. I did an informal survey this week and saw mithril and adamantite and even energy gear for probably every equipment slot. That's not to say all of it was premium, but a lot of it had quality innate enchantments and some were even scripted items with some boffo effects. Frankly, I don't think even the veterans know about half of the good stuff in the game anymore. The explorers need to step it up.

Let's assume container capacity is handled in a dexterity sense: scaled with quality, they can hold X items relative to their size rather than their weight. Would that not be an improvement?

Dulrik, since you've got the numbers...

What's the mean number of consumable items held by characters in terms of percent of capacity, and what is the variance of that measurement? My hypothesis is that Jerinx' suggestion may not even result in a noticeable impact for the majority of players.

On one note, unless that mithril/adamantite/energy comes with innate willpower or fortitude, then it actually is worse than most armor even of lower grade material. There's a lot of eq that was made undesirable by the changes making it impossible to enchant stacking will/fort/reflex on armor.

On the other hand, I think that if you're looking to make the game more desirable for existing players, then you shouldn't hard-code a limitation on how much prep time is useful. It's definitely frustrating for players to feel that their characters are totally outclassed by the "vets" because the "vets" can spend 20 hours prepping for a single PK whereas they can only spend 15 minutes to an hour tops. However, making all prep time past an hour useless is just going to deter people from playing, not encourage them to. Just make it so that if you spend 20 hours prepping, you're only going to be maybe 20% stronger than the guy who spent 1 hour, or whatever, while the guy who spend 1 hour will be twice as strong as the person who doesn't prep at all.

However, if you want to talk about limiting consumables or non-worn limited EQ, then you ought to take into account that casters will definitely get hit harder by this than other classes. There's no equivalent to magical devices like staves, scrolls and wands that casters effectively need to have access to if they want to make their character as strong as possible. As well, a great deal of magical devices are only useful in certain scenarios, and are useful for a variety of purposes, both utilitarian, defensive prep before PK, and offensive use during PK. Limiting a caster to 6 magical devices would be a severe nerf to all the casting classes and leave non casters unharmed.

I'm more a fan of being more harsh on people hoarding an abundance of items, OR holding onto items that they cannot codedly use.

The kind of people who will be deterred from playing if prep time gets diminishing returns are, I dare say, the kind of people who need a little nudge to take a break every now and then anyway. Nothing bad would come of it.

I like the main/alt idea.
More items allowed on the main.

I wanna bring up an idea of hours to items ratio.
Don't make the hours a static number. Make it a flexible number.
The more hours, the more legendary items allowed.
Also, if the item is frequently used, it's "hoursNeeded" variable is less. (Or decrements)

I imagine each item recording "daysOwned."
This number increases and the longer you have it, the more hours logged required.
This number should have a max.

Different variables should influence the hoursLogged to NumOfLegebdaryEq. I think a flexible system would help make sure the dedicated players are rewarded and storage characters punished.

How would room-affect spells factor into spending time at inns? Can I just sit under a cabal ability for the required hours?

Time spent in the void isn't logged, right? Maybe shorten the timer so people can't AFK. Create logs of players going into the void.

Containers should be dehoarded. If you're losing all your other stuff, you should also lose that nice container.

There are plenty of people for whom a great deal of their play hours are not during peak hours or are during times when there aren't enough of their IC allies around to go on any long trips or have any RP sessions. If you remove ALL of the benefit that any sort of prep time in that timeframe would gain them or their allies (In the form of enchanting armor or brewing potions for their IC friends) then they'll probably just get bored and log off. However, if there's still something for them to do, albeit certainly boring, then leaving it as an option makes it more likely that while they're in the middle of enchanting, gathering, brewing, scribing, etc. that someone else will log on.

This came up on account of the "ways to excite/retain existing players" poll. It would be a shame if one of the changes accomplished was to remove all benefit from doing anything besides afking unless your friends were already logged on.

I strongly disagree that restricting the number of items that can be held will in any way solve the hoarding/item transfer dilemma. Serious hoarders have multiple characters and, without some fix that helps identify and shut them down, will easily level up more and duck any item value limit. I think a better practical solution is something like the "X hours in an inn" requirement. Since that so obviously benefits those of us who are good at PKing people I think that some oversight code for the game to identify/flag item transfers is probably better, but I'm entirely clueless as to how difficult that is to pull off.

My problem with this approach is it ONLY helps the pkers and nobody else really benefits. It basically forces everyone into one easy to find location to gate and gank. This is why I don't agree with this approach in the least.