Monthly Rares Purge (Modification)

For each month we must play a certain amount of hours to keep rares, which I completely agree with.

However, what if we could apply a secondary condition? Some of us might play for many hours each month (50+), but certain obligations prevent us from logging on enough for lets say 1-2+ months out of the year.

This secondary condition would be that if a character doesn't meet the hours for that month, but their 3 month average (that month and the previous 2) meets or exceeds the minimum hours, then they won't lose anything.

Either this, or we could make it a meritorious incentive for those who would average well above the minimum, but just can't make it on enough once in a great while.

Sometimes life doesn't give us much of a choice, but this change would.

Since most of the time spent is near and around character creation/training, the time to allow for the hoarding of rares would be front loaded. This would allow a person to create, train, equip a character then sit on it for 3 months taking the items out of circulation.

I'll have to disagree with the OP on this idea. There is already a hoarding issue...again. Having like 12 characters in dudes roster and they power-log each chars hours in 3 days, then you won't see them until their 3-day power logging next month. It's already started happening this month.

There is already a bunch of stuff taken out of circulation because of this, having more rares out of circulation due to an hour-per-month-circumventing mechanic would only exacerbate the problem.

Exactly that. Characters hoarding items not even for themselves but creating characters of particular alignment to hold on to items that may be an issue when used against their main.

Xenyar nailed it on the head. And its not just end game rares, theres hoarding going on of low level rares. Its ridiculous.

I am of the opinion, that if you aren't going to make the minimum hours, you shouldn't have rares. I would support a purge that happened more often, not less often.

Recent changes have made it much easier to make rare hours than before. It used to require 20 hours played to keep rares, no matter the rares. That's been reduced at most 16 hours (scaling with rarity), with that reduced to 8 hours for "main character" on top of which there is blood time bonus hours for pk'ing killing the darkenbeast over and over (not hard). We have done a lot and the momentum seems to be we continuously make it easier to keep rares. Frankly, its trended that way because everyone's been complaining they dont have enough time to play. I think its a bit insulting to the players who want to be active in cabals and find nothing available, and would support rolling back or at the least just give all rare weapons the Sevokan treatment. instead of worrying your rares won't be ready or even attainable after you take two months off, you'll more then likely be able to just get a group, run any end-game area, grab whats available, and realize that you have a window of opportunity to make that weapon count before you're back running winter for another. It doesnt just stop hoarding.. it gives AR an end-game too.

Also disagree with making it easier to keep rares.

It does suck to log in with guild issue but having the rares go back into circulation for people who are playing and fighting is way better than having them sit on an inactive char.

While I'm not strictly against the winter idea, if I were to rep Ozaru he'd say he hates waiting around for a winter group that doesn't come together on his timeline. Part of the point of retaining stuff is to be able to jump in and fight immediately. A lot of notable cabal characters are lower hours because they just pop in at peak times looking for fights.

Grab bag of thoughts:

- Maybe the main character thing should just work the opposite way? 10 hours for your main (identified by most recent log in or log in count?), doubling for every character after that. Might have to group characters by ip or something because people don't forum account bind their mules? I dunno. Jerks could still work around it.

- maybe establish criteria other than raw hours? Take the bloodshed concept and extend it to profile actuality interacting in the game? Fighting players, fighting hard PVE, talking to other players, sending notes, getting a background approve, doing Consortium stuff (adding to mystique, booklets, approving backgrounds, publications, gossip, whatever). Just seems like raw hours is the smallest contribution to the game and the easiest to fake.

- Losing rares would hurt less if your replacement helped you jump back in better. Maybe higher level rares should replace with things that enable the end game systems? Give a big pile of ore or a voucher for gambling. Basically a better more tailored replacement than guild issue

Another random idea is to make a swap house where you can post an item and players can offer ro swap a similar item for yours. I could really see this helping when looking for a particular item other people are holding because it's the best yet could get not because it's what they actually want. Could open up the shuffle.

Then if a character fails to cross a certain threshold all their stuff (or just weapons?) goes into the swap house with no consent required. You don't come back naked but your stuff is significantly rejiggered.

Well, we probably should try to figure out something special for weapons, those are a very special circumstance. It does not necessarily make sense to treat the blood-filled voulge being kept in inventory the same way as everything else.

I'm not trying to annoy the IMP staff, since it's probably already being investigated, but we need to do something about the guy sitting in the warrior guildhall(and monk, paladin guildhall, etc...) for 16 hours/month, and instantly quits any time a threat logs on. He has all these rares across like 12 characters and avoids anybody that he thinks might be able to kill him and re-circulate those rares and unique. Rarely initiates interaction(unless he wants something enchanted) never wants to group, replies to your tells just enough to say he isn't ignoring you.
Any time I log on, I am almost guaranteed to see one of the minimalist, hoarding characters. It aggravates me.

This is hoarding problem of 2017 all over again.

Well I think youre kinda trying to publically shame/report a so-called "suspicious activity" instead of offering ideas that is addressing the actual problems. We identified there are two of. One is that rare weapons value is disproportionately high since they have higher ave (by far) than their non-rare counterpart. A red dragon helm and a crown of might is not a MASSIVE difference like that, and very few armor items are nuts when compared to the forged gear. Another, obviously more pressing problem, is that requiring players to play 16 hours with ways to lower it is proving very ineffective as a way to reclaim. I would say rather than ban/deny players for hoarding it's probably better to introduce baseline avg weapons that can be bought for medals/relics, like the witch carving stuff, and probably then you find a player attitude changes to like, well gee, if anyone can have some "bluesteel greatsword" kinda shit, that is ave 28 with no stats, but can be enchanted, why am I bother logging in 192 hours a month to maintain a vorpal advantage.. and then, looking at the issue of getting these items unloaded off players, an idea along that lines would be if we make it so that enchant weapon require a level 50 rare or unique weapon consumed to apply a level 50 enchant. If we do that, then also have the best ones returning to their mob after a week regardless of how much time logged in, it means best use it to enchant before it gets purged since compulsive hoarding is no longer in the cards, and it means rare-hunting for new weapons is a regular optional activity for everybody to try (if they arent satisfied with the basic stuff thats available and OK).

So, just ideas, but I think coming up with fresh ideas are better than blaming the games issues on the players, why do that when we can think of ways to make things more fun and get people fighting mobs for these weapons, if for no other reason than to enchant/trade it, intead of leave it there for the graveyard shift guys to get it out of pure boredom. I dont believe anyone is deliberately out trying to ruin other peoples fun but getting and holding onto rares is a way to feel achievement on this game.

It's not trying to publicly shame. It's trying to apply pressure publicly. I would create a couple fire giant warriors and park one at rank 25 and 42, but he'll log off before I can get a blade on him. Getting all these rares and uniques then logging off every time their is a threat is not fun for anybody. You want a plethora of rared out characters? Fight with them. At least add value to the pk scene.
There is several characters, not the guy I'm mentioning above, who have some super nice stuff and don't fight hardly at all. That's fine. That's part of the game. Most of those players don't have several characters like that. The bigger issue is one player has 8-12 characters all taking up a bunch of limited items, and avoiding pk threats by instantly logging out.

As far as ideas. I'm not sure. I'll have to chew on that a little while.

So heres a solution: Instead of time played saving rares, make it actual bloodshed. Lower the time to maybe 10 hours. 10 hours of actual bloodshed or you have to go get your rares again next month. For those faint of heart, Warlords generally honor duels to the stun which count.

Making non-rare weapons better would certainly offload the need to carry around max capacity of rare weapons, which is an absolute must on any character that uses weapons.

But at what point do we just make rares obsolete? If non-rare is as good as rare then why just not have rares? And I'm not asking this to be an ass, but genuinely. We all know how much gear disparity makes a difference in pk. Maybe eliminate gear disparity? lol But that seems silly.

We could also consider just redoing stats on existing rares. There are some rares that are always in because they're just kind of shit and no one cares. The fine mesh chainmail from dwarven encampment for example. Pretty hard to kill mob and all it nets you is some piece of garbage armor. Maybe make those kinds of pieces more worth having?

Also, how do you know there's somebody hoarding rares on multiple characters Xenyar? How does anyone know who's character is what player, let alone that all of these characters belong to the same person? Aren't you literally not supposed to know that kind of thing? I mean I'm not defending the hoarder or whatever, but I find it suspicious that anyone knows so confidently what characters belong to who.

I think rare items being strong is necessary for the game. If blue steal gets the same stats as titanium, nobody bothers getting rare, no pain to PK = no adrenaline when PKing.

I think one solution is to increase min log in time before allowing log out, bring back hitting guild guardian increases adrenaline if you are hiding inside. Make guild guardian weaker and easier to zerg them down etc.

Basically increases the threat when clocking hours. I know the flipside is real life emergency happens and you cant log off. But it's a trade off i suppose.

Speaking as a guy with two kids and a pretty reg mon-Fri days work schedule, the bloodshed enforced thing is a neat idea but would completely slaughter me. I might go several play sessions without a single fight and even then when I get a fight it doesn't always end in a death.

I do like the idea of looking at rares and re-evaluating garbage ones like hamsandwich said - why even have garbage rares? Beef them up or make non rare. I think the "magic" flag is nice and could maybe be utilized more (ie also hard to hoard since can't stuff in a bag).

Idk why people enjoy grabbing the best rares and never fight but they do. Frustrating for those of us that pk but I guess that's why we are talking about things.

On some level I agree with Kalist, I hate to bring up world of warcraft, but the way that they do it is that rare items are able to carry better scores compared to non-rares based on the item level. I feel like that's appropriate for a game like this. Skull ring in Mahn-Tor is +2 damage and is fairly low level (I think 25ish?), but there are better rings to be had at higher levels. I think the "garbage rares" should be obtainable and useful at lower levels, but then higher level stuff shouldn't ever be considered useless. More hidden flag stuff is great and a way to spread out the meta so we aren't just all stacking hit/dam.

Coming back to the fight continues argument, it was a great and innovative idea because it forces us as players to use multiple ways to fight, personally I would love to see a meta other than just stacking hit/dam.

So I guess my question is really what is the problem here because both the original post and the remarks since seem to be adequately addressed by gambling/forging/witch-carving, and the even easier specific cases of ranger bow crafting and whatever cabal powers/shops will trivially sell for you. Is it a problem if a guy is running around with 18 characters and they all have a full forged non-rare suit and samite gowns or something? Or is it weapons? or something else, specific? I know it is not all rares because the guy is definitely using forged gear on all his chars

It seems that the core issue is invin...err people hoarding rares because they like to collect them like Pokémon cards then are too scared to lose them. Remember we had Mummy and whomever hoarding every single rare in the game and there was a huge re release of over 60 rares/uniques? That is happening again but we don't have M1CO going full detective mode to sus out who they are.

There's like 20 slots? Forging only covers 5 slots.

I guess it's cool there's more options for equipment, Dav. But, is there a way to justify hoarding?

I think it's worth differentiating between players enjoying the game and players acting in bad faith in this conversation. Being blinged out is a core enjoyment factor for some even if they don't fight a ton. Running alts just to board for denial purposes is acting in bad faith.

I think there is room for adding to the gameplay loop like Dav was suggesting with some of his ideas. But I also think you want to target bad faith characters in a way that doesn't overly impact good faith characters.

In general, I'm against expansion of mechanics that lock characters into the game because they were really tough for small play time windows. But, I think you could probably target bad faith characters in that manner so that PKers can go after then.
Here's a random idea for how that might work.
Establish a "hunter" title for the top rating for the various PK bands. Dragon would be the hunter for the top band. When the hunter logs on, all in PK range of the hunter characters get a penalty based on the total aggregated level of rares they are holding.
> X, adrenaline applied
> Y, 2x adrenaline applied
> Z, 2x adrenaline applied and your location is public
Cabal, coterie, and > M bloodshed immune to the hunter penalties because they are clearly good faith characters.

A system like that would give the PKers free shots at the hoarders and give a reason good faith collectors to not be BIS rare/unique but rather use the gambling and forging systems to reduce their total rare level.

Just an idea! I'm sure there are other ways to go after bad faith characters. That idea just felt particularly AR bloody to me.

@Stiehl - 60 is lowball. It's more like a triple digit number. Roughly 12-15 rares over ten characters? I think that was the amount of chars that got denied back in 2017?

I have an idea. HARD CAP RARES per forum account. The initial number I was thinking was 50ish? That's enough to have 3 or 4 very, very well equipped characters, with forged to fill in the gaps. I probably have never hit 50ish rares on 3 active characters, like ever. Most of the players haven't either.
That doesn't deal with avoiding pk unless the matchup is in their advantage, only seeing these decked guys 3 days a month because power logging 16 hours in 3 days per character, and having minimal interaction. I don't know what will fix that, other than that player.

There seems to be an accusation of a single player having a bunch of storage characters and allegedly for denial purposes, with an evidence of their account having 150+ rare items. Other than the assumption of intent in there, that is all verifiable. Along with that is a remark that 50+ rares is a reasonable max for a single user which I can kind of agree with, but that is not perfect because players can make multiple accounts and also be in an OOC ring of enablers involved in getting the equipment for storage and benefit from getting any loot they wanted as they fed the beast.

I think its probably easiest for everyone if we do an in-game way to identify suspected "storage character" first, in that sense a command could be simply to just use this on them:

report <player name> storage

Then the imms can see the reports, check to confirm based on the evidence (if someone's account has over 150 rares I guess that would probably do it for most imms), we can go from there figuring out what next steps are, whether in-game warning, confiscating the gear, denying the character, to just getting banned from the game for repeat offenders. We have very well defined escalating punishments so that's easy.

--
HOWEVER, before we do anything, we do not currently have a rule disallowing storage characters, so I want to give all the players here a chance to give feedback of whether that is necessary and obviously a fair rule or what could be done differently to make it more acceptable first, as it would be a rule everybody has to live with.

I think Scrynor hit a really important thing to consider. It would be really shitty if this ends up hurting people who aren't really intending to do anything wrong.

Now off the top of me head, 150 rares seems like an absolutely insane number, like that's huge. So I guess sure yeah, if they have that many then do something about it, that's not gonna affect anyone except the target, I imagine.

But just because someone isn't the top pker doesn't mean they should be penalized. Sometimes quitting out isn't to "hoard," it's to avoid not having fun. Also, sometimes getting good gear on your character is just fun, not "hoarding."

What I am getting at is: I don't want to see this go too far and end up just penalizing anyone who isn't the best at the game. AR already has a pretty massive class disparity. There is clearly a "cool kids club" that no one else gets to be a part of already. All the "elite" and "emissary" people. If we add this in and start penalizing and denying players because they have rares but can't beat the top pkers in a fight, then all you're doing is widening the gap and making your club even more exclusive until there's no one left to play the game.

I guess what I'm saying is that just because you can't win fights and therefore end up quitting out of the game on occasion because it doesn't sound like fun getting your ass handed to you again by some Legion who silent pks you for the fourth time for no reason doesn't mean that you have any less right to play the game than anyone else. At least in my opinion, we all should be allowed to play the game.

Obviously is you're abusing the game systems and "cheating" then that's different, and you deserve to have consequences. I just want to make sure that the distinction between the two is clear and apparent and we try to avoid taking done any innocent bystanders.

Why can't i have 18 characters to try out the classes and in turn gain rares to play the game? So my 10th to 18th character cannot get rares so i can't play the classes to it's maximum effectiveness?

At the end of the day, this person is putting in 18 characters worth of time to keep the rares. What's your standard for hoarding? Quitting out when they see a PK flag? Many people quit out. Do we report and deny every single one of them because they quit out?

According to xenyar, If a player does not wish to fight a "disadvantage" matchup and quit out, is that penalizable as well? Not everyone is up for the challenge. Unless I'm caballed and bounded by cabal rules, I would rather roll up and advantage matchup to shit on that guy. I'm guilty of that for sure.

What's the point of having that many characters with all those rares that you power rank to 16 hours in 3 days, and never see them again until next month?

I know we all have different play styles, and there's plenty of ways to play the game. I'm cool with that. The rinse/repeat scenario of log 16 hours in 3 days, log out when threats arrive, get oathed and avoid legion for higher chance of not losing your rares, etc etc... guarantees 100-150 rares stay out of circulation permanently. Or until the guy feels like deleting...only to go reload again on a new clone.

What if I join this player and create 12 character, and play the exact same way this guy does. I as well will collect 100-150 rares, and never allow a chance to lose them. What would you think if 2 players accounted for 300 rares? What if another player joined in. Now you have 3 players collecting 450 rares. Then, something heavy handed would come down from the imps.. But because it's just 1 player, we're questioning if it's ok or not? Maybe I will do it just to prove a point. and I'll do it the exact way he does. I can say that in theroy, but if it c ame down to it, I couldn't do that to the community...And I'd be endlessly bored not trying to actively pk.

I'm certainly not trying to bash the player. They know the game, they know how to handle themselves in pk, and he does stay in character. There is value there.

We've all heard and likely use these phrases...Everything is OK in moderation. Too much of a good thing, is a bad thing, etc...

At what point is having soo many characters by one player with soo many rares, practically permanently out of circulation, a bad thing for the game?

There is clearly a "cool kids club" that no one else gets to be a part of already.

It's 2024 and we're playing a role playing enforced text based game, none of us are cool. /s

No, but seriously, I wasn't aware storage characters were that much of an issue.

Wasn't it merl and mummy? So I can see merl defending the hoarding.

So just to be clear here, there will be a formal definition of storage character as part of this. e.g. something like this:

A storage character is a player-controlled character primarily utilized for item accumulation, currency storage, or other asset preservation, with minimal or no engagement in core gameplay mechanics such as pk'ing, end-game community gear hunting, or social interactions.

So lets do a couple examples so that is easier to understand it.

Lets say a vet is messing around on a newbie, and notices there is a geared out warrior who is on a life support script to keep running from the guildhall to the butcher, i.e. just guild-sitting AFK. Since its observed purpose was simply to "earn" hours logged in to preserve rares., that would fit the above definition of a "storage character", and it could be reported as such, then the reviewing imm may rule to purge the character of all its rares and block it from holding further rares going forward.

On the other hand, if someone were to make an "experimental" character for testing (or I guess 18 of them), they might fit the first part but would not completely fit the definition because such a character would be an active participant in combat, duelling and fighting, etc. Other players would be unable to dispute the focus on learning and testing. That is an important distinction. However such a character could eventually stagnate into becoming a "storage character".

Yeah I'm not against something like that happening.

Sometimes opportunities to pk don't always happen though. I know depending on time zones and work/school/etc schedules it can be tough to log hours while there are other people around. So I'd have a hard time accusing someone of foul play if they were dinking around in the guildhall for a couple hours because there isn't anything else to do and they're waiting around for something to happen. If it becomes a theme and such though, then that's different. So we'd be putting a lot of trust in the Imms reviewing these reports that people will be making to make sure it isn't innocent idling and is actually something nefarious.



also, just to be clear, because Xenyar keeps bringing up the 150 rares number. I still think that's pretty excessive and maybe any account with that many rares warrants an investigation solely based off the fact they have that much shit.

It's insane to me that anyone would want 10 chars with rares on them. Like, wtf merlando?

I think ham makes a good point of making sure that whatever we do, we should make sure we are not widening the gap between newbs and vets. It's a very hard game and we shouldn't give vets any kind of advantage.

I love dav's idea of being able to help the imms flag suspected hoarders/alts. In a perfect world you'd have a imm sitting on 24/7 watching everything and identifying situations where chars are simply grabbing rares to prevent others from doing so and deny them but that's impossible. The imms are real people and you can't expect that from them.

As a person with little play time available it would make sense to have some kind of limit like only 2 chars can have rares. Or a rare limit per acct like Xenyar suggested (though then you'd have to try to police all that stuff).

As an alternative, I'll just say this - if you are simply grabbing rares to prevent others from getting them, kindly please go fuck yourself. That is absolute trolling and anti fun. It could maybe even be considered multi playing if you had a legion or something and made a good and requested shit so knights and other goods couldn't get it. If you are doing that, again, please kindly go fuck yourself. Maybe uninstall ZMUD and go try yahoo checkers.

I believe everyone is talking about my characters and I think it's time for me to weigh in on this topic after reading all the afore comments. First off, I would like to start by saying that all of the equipment I have now are obtained via legitimate means, whether its by the character itself or with a groupable party, or via the auction house put up by characters not belonging to me and said item was not obtained via grouping with one of my alternates. I am pretty sure by now the imms have already screened through my characters, all of them are tied to my forum account, I have got nothing to hide.

I am speaking out now with the risk of outing my characters, with the objective to clear some doubts that some of you may have and to hopefully steer the discussion towards something more constructive. So please kindly consider the below points from my perspective:
1) I have come to realise that building up characters and finally sustaining them in this manner had been a repeating gameplay pattern that I always end up in, across the 3 times I came back to play (this time included). Of course I committed mistakes and broke rules in the past, which was why I had been extra careful this time round. That said, I just wish to go on record to say that I initially did not want to come back to play since I stopped 3 years ago, but certain decisions were made and what's happened has happened.
2) So what differentiates me from the majority of players? Time. I dedicate more than half of my waking time in front of the computer and most of that time spent is on this game. Is this a healthy lifestyle? Definitely not. But it's a choice of mine and we are all entitled to our own choices in life. In fact, I regret coming back to this game because it has caused permanent damage to my otherwise sweet oled screen, but it's a story for another day. It's time sunk at this point.
3) How do I play my characters then? Generally, playing with 200+ms ping from a location far from the server, I always feel disadvantaged in the PK scene so I normally do not partake in high-stakes PK but what I enjoy most is in fact the buildup of my characters to min/max equipment and stats, test out the build against others in duels or lower-stakes fights.
I can start a character, solo level it to 50, forge all 5 pieces of armor, master all my skills, gather rares whenever they become available, duel some, pk some if the character rp allows for it and then in most cases end up stagnating with 1 million gold in bank, gambling done, and just clocking hours.
Why do I not actively PK, you ask? Firstly, the ping always feels like a disadvantage to me and I will not risk the hours i had put into farming my armor to fight a top pker and lose it all. Why should I give someone else the satisfaction of looting my hard earned equipment just because I am expected to conform to their PK-orientated playstyle? If a match up is to my disadvantage and I am not obligated by cabal or rp restrictions to take the fight, why should I? Everyone is subjected to the same gameplay rules and restrictions, and I firmly believe that we are all entitled to how we choose to play a character (as long as it's within the RP confines of the character).

Now that my motives are clarified, let's focus on the problem(s) this has caused. So I ask, what are you salty about? Is it because you can't bear the sight of seeing a character survive without dieing in this cutthroat game while holding onto the items that you may or may not want? Is it the rare items that you want but couldn't get because it has unfortunately been circulated to my characters after months of your character deletions while I never delete my characters? If yes, what rares are you actually after? As suggested by Davairus, solutions can be fashioned to address said rares and I am all for it as long as these rules fairly apply to everyone.

I am a player who had chosen to waste away hours of my life on this game. Am I 100% happy with how this always turns out? No. Do I enjoy the way I play this game? Unfortunately, I still do because there is certain satisfaction to be gained from building a character from rags to riches, fully trained, and simply knowing that the character is competitive and able to take on most fights should it happen. Are you going to penalise me for being an out-lier player who has the "luxury" to sink hours into this game?

ivindel, youve started your post denying wrongdoing with your statements of getting eq and playing many hours legitimately. We already all acknoweledged it isnt against the rules, and that the time spent in is fair and square. So that really just sounds like defensive statements. And then you go on to say everybody else is at fault because they deleted. That's a classic case of shifting blame, blaming the victims even. Then you end with letting us know your luxury of having many free hours to play and reminding us of having lots of well-equipped characters ready to fight, i.e. gloating about coming out on top. Basically this post is a flex that lashes out at everyone. This is the kind of baiting that I'd expect you already thought would get just about everybody reaching for their pitchforks and counting on Merlandox ready to launch into damage-control mode. However, I can only offer condolences for reaching the crisis stage of greed again.

Much like your excuse about 200 ms ping making PK much too unsafe (Szrevan was the *best* pk'er on that same ping), this is a stalling tactic and the smartest amongst us are able to see right through this defensive rhetoric and understand that the tactical avoidance of the actual issue is simply another compulsive measure to preserve the hoard. And by the way, yes I did look at the hoard, and some of the stuff just made me feel really sad and disappointed, like, 4x elven globe of light and 3x lantern of the green flame, which were requestable gears intended for players that fight elite evils like Xenyar to use. If you look in "help request", it says in there that hoarding it is abuse of request, also.

Rather than engage you on THAT any further, I'll suggest you to just go back and just re-read the first post of the thread. Just that one. Don't bother to read anything else in the entire thread. What's going to happen when he takes that unavoidable break and misses hours ivindel? I think what is going to happen is some greedy warrior gets his stuff and adds it to their repository. Do you agree or disagree that player's post honestly seemed like a reasonable request born out of worry? If yes, then you don't need to look any further to see the damaging impact on the community of a player striving to maintain and grow a large repository of rare items.

In closing, I'd like to remind you that you are not the only person who is capable of getting carried away by their greed. And by the way, that is perfectly fine to be a human being who simply spiralled. It happens. There's nothing to feel bad about, its a powerful spell ivindel, one that I won't feel bad about eventually pulling you out of either. I'd prefer to address things formally this time with some discussion and eventual a rule update that we all find mutually acceptable and then let things take their due course from there.. it'll be nothing personal as that rule will be for everybody, and therefore, fair. You dont have to participate in that conversation if you dont want to, but please do not derail the thread from debating solutions with more flamebait. The issue at hand is the already-proposed rule.

Davairus, I think you misunderstood me partially:
- Yes, I denying any wrongdoing because I did not break any rules.
- Yes, those were defensive statements because they are in response to some claims of wrongdoings on my part.
- No, I am not blaming anyone for deleting, I was just stating what actually happened over the past months. I started playing Nov 2023, from nothing. As I began to build my characters, people started deleting and rares started circulating to my characters and because I personally do not believe in deleting characters, those rares stayed with me over a period of 8 months and are still with me.
- No, I am not gloating that i had more time than others to play this game. I am stressing the time investment that I had put in and have to put in to maintain my characters, because I could have made better use of all that time to do something else but my OCD and perfectionist mindset is working against me, which is why i mentioned that i did not want to start on this game initially. Just as everyone else here, I have a family of 2 kids and I need to work for a living and have my own commitments to fulfill. So my time is not "free" and I don't like the fact that somehow the time that I had sunk into this game is deemed not as valuable as anyone else's. By devoting my time to maintain my characters, I have chosen to suffer the loss someplace else.

The 200ms ping is a real consideration on my end and has always been a sore spot for me for the longest time, whether I was playing warcraft 3 competitively or this game. Heck, I even have "travelling to the US just to play AR" in my bucket list, and I even considered taking a job posting in the US just to be able to experience playing AR with low ping. This may not be the only reason to me avoiding PK but it is definitely a contributing factor. You may view this as nonsense but I can assure you it is not.

I would welcome fully that rares circulate back to the mobs regardless of hours played, because that will free up so much time for me. Or whichever other measures that you would like to implement. When no one else needs to worry about clocking hours to keep rares, I think everyone will be happier for it, including the player behind the original post.

Honestly, I am sick of clocking hours just to keep rares, just like everyone else. Or if there are better alternatives to those rare weapons, I wouldn't even be holding on to them. Armor wise, I am not even using any of the popular end game sets. 30% of armor on my characters are either gambled or non-rares(for the set requirement), almost all 5 pieces are forged on every character, so that leaves the lights, abouts, and maybe a gauntlets or boots that are rares but even then I would use relic bought replacements if the set does not require a rare engrave.

I am baring my soul here, not gloating on the community. When I happen to be the weird guy within this small community to have spent an excessive amount of time (at my own expense) on this game, it becomes a problem because the majority of players cannot keep up. But it hardly seems fair to be faulted this way from my perspective, don't you think?

Listen to me ivindel. I have all respect for you and I promise I like having you around and find you to be a pretty wonderful person to know with decent pk talent, but you and I both know you have been no angel in the past about this stuff here either, this is not the first time we were here, in fact I unfortunately remember you ended up lowbie pk'ing somebody with winter stuff. And nobody brought your name up specifically here over it, they don't even remember who it was from the time you originally did it. Nobody called you out at all. Also, I can think of at least 3 other independent players who I had to unload for doing the same thing..... Most likely you have in fact been on the other side of this yourself and just not realized it, as have other players during times you werent even playing here. so I'm not even in the least sure how you can possibly have a feeling anybody is being unfair to you.

how about lets just stick to figure out what will be the right phrasing of rule that forbids the undesirable behavior we found here with minimally invasive impact on anything else players might be enjoying doing. I think thats the right way forward. If a rule is for everybody, then it is fair. Besides which as you just said yourself, you dont even enjoy getting all these hours.

Iv's post makes me double back to the swap house idea.

It's his one sentence "what own do you want so bad?"

It is frustrating if you are hoping for a particular item and are looking for it for months and it never shows up and you never know who has it. Maybe we just need a way to be able to send a note to an item and it goes to whoever has it. Just a way to actually ask a character of they are willing to sell or trade?

Sorry because this is only tangentially related, but because people have mentioned forged gear a few times:

Doesn't forged gear still remove a rare item from circulation if it was made with a rare gem? I know there are some non-rare gems that people use but they aren't particularly easy to come by. So if someone forges with the bloody ioun or whatever, the ioun is tied to the forged gear and therefore still removed from circulation. So forged gear isn't exactly a perfect relief to the rare hoarding thing.

Unless I'm mistaken.

Hi hamsandwich, 90% of my forged gear uses level 50 non-rare gems. Not easy to come by but obtainable nonetheless alone with sufficient time and effort, and I can tell you that the success rate of getting a properly forged armor piece is not dampened in any way despite using a non-rare gem. Therefore, if you do choose to go the forged gear route because you can't find a rare piece for that slot, you can always forge it with a level 50 non-rare gem. And since we are on the topic regarding armor, I will share my thoughts on the various slot options (from a melee class perspective):

<used as light> **no good non-rare options
<worn on finger> gambled is generally always a better option than rare unless compared against BIS pieces
<worn on finger> gambled is generally always a better option than rare unless compared against BIS pieces
<worn around neck> gambled is generally always a better option than rare because BIS gives only +3
<worn around neck> gambled is generally always a better option than rare because BIS gives only +3
<worn on head> forged gear is better than most rare options
<worn on ear> useless slot mostly unless for set requirements
<worn on torso> forged gear is better than most rare options
<worn on arms> forged gear is better than most rare options
<worn on hands> gauntlets of conquest from Noliperus is a good option for 2hit/1dam if no good rares are about
<worn on legs> forged gear is better than most rare options
<worn on feet> boots of conquest from Noliperus is a good option for 1hit/2dam if no good rares are about
<worn about body> **no good non-rare options
<worn about waist> forged gear is better than most rare options
<worn around wrist> gambled is generally always a better option than rare because BIS gives only +3
<worn around wrist> gambled is generally always a better option than rare because BIS gives only +3
<wielded> **non-rare weapon choices are generally not comparable to rare options since they can't hit the average 25 sweet spot
<floating nearby> most non-rare stones suffice unless you need the additional stat which only rare floating can provide

Therefore, for a melee class, if you are gunning for hit/dam, technically you can still be competitive against the top geared with mostly gambled + forged, aside from the light, around body and weapons which will require rare pieces.
Also, there is the added advantage of the forged armor piece to be non-rare since you used a non-rare gem to forge it, which helps to alleviate some of the grief if you do not have sufficient hours within the month to keep the rare pieces on your body. Do take note though, that if you choose to engrave that forged piece, it becomes unique and will then require hours to upkeep.

In actuality, there are gambled items that can be as good as or better than the best in slot rare if you have the coin, which you stated you do. Nonrare 50 gem is easy, there are 4 plus options for that. You can get better gambled boots and gloves than conquest fyi. If you take weapons out of the equation you could nonrare every slot and be competitive, it just takes investment.

Need some light armor forging options for the rogues of the realm imo. High level leather working perhaps?

Stiehl26:
"Wasn't it merl and mummy? So I can see merl defending the hoarding"

Yeah yeah it is me. I love hoarding. Come PK me if you can find me! I have around 12 characters

I've avoided posting in here for quite a while, but the idea that you can't get avg 25 weapons without having rares is nonsense. Accessible by all, maybe not, but I can name two reasons why stronger weapons are sometimes available.

One of them I won't get into (though those who aware of it no doubt know that what I say is true), but the other involves class-specific items. The most practical example is the bound weapon of a dark-knight (two kills will turn a two-handed weapon into a 24 average item, and no doubt it gets better from there). The healer staff I seem to recall is at least 25 average (but who plays them anyway?). The ranger bow is also a very strong weapon, especially the woodcrafted version half-elves get. I'm guessing that shadows who forge a sai or pair of claws can get a really nice weapon with a large enough ingot (though they can't reclaim their ninjutsu if they want to keep it).

As for the other arguments Ivindel made about slots - you clearly haven't gambled for lights or attempted to try for something BESIDES hitroll/damroll. You can get +4 str/-1 hitroll lights in the right place, which allows you to carry a lot more dragonwing equipment. Good-aligned characters can gamble surcoats at the shop in Liberty, and those can be as good as a rare item if not better. The kudzu tarps or whatever the about the body item that Faerie Fransiz sells for neutrals is also a reason I call bullshit on you saying there's "no good non-rare options" for that slot. Mindflayer robes from Enthema are also sometimes acceptable for evils.

Furthermore, what's the point in keeping rares loaded on every single character you own if you're not going to fight with them? I've heard of characters who log off as soon as a *potential* threat shows up even when there was no real danger involved. The fact that one character had apparently been online for some time when one person in PK range was online, and instantly logged off when another person in PK range showed up (or so I gather from what circumstantial evidence I have - and I wasn't involved there) suggests that character is a self-preserving coward if nothing else. It's one thing to avoid people stronger than yourself, and another to instantly log off when certain people show up. I'm with Xenyar on this - if you're gonna bottom-feed, you don't need 12 characters to do it with.

It's fine to do niche PKing (at least until the Immortals tell you otherwise), but again... There's no need to equip a bunch of characters when you're not even doing anything positive for the game or community. I have remained silent until now, but I feel compelled to point out some of the lies I'm seeing.

Please don't take the bait from whoever is trying to derail the thread to avoid implementing any solutions. As I had said, you are welcome give feedback on if this is a reasonable definition of "storage characters" before we ban them:

A storage character is a player-controlled character primarily utilized for item accumulation, currency storage, or other asset preservation, with minimal or no engagement in core gameplay mechanics such as pk'ing, end-game community gear hunting, or social interactions.

To put it into perspective, when I first started AR in 1999, the level 50's of the time were complaining that a Knight was holding the taint of shadar logoth deliberately to deny it from evils, and that continued for many years, to the point that Odoacer finally made it so the opposite alignment's gear just zaps you on pickup. So it should already be clear that rare storage is established as deplorable activity. Its just time to codify it instead of keep making one-off slays and sometimes huge purges for so-called "outliers"

@Dav,
I would be happy to see that even stricter. There is absolutely no reason for any one person to have more than 2-3 characters with decent rares max, and if they have that many, they better be putting them to proper use. My 2c.

Since I've been one of the voices raising concern I'll chime in again:

Sounds good Dav. That is a thorough and reasonable definition.

Right sorry about that Dav.

As a baseline that definition seems pretty solid what you gave - but having a limit to the number of characters makes sense too. It's one thing to experiment with classes and another to keep characters active just for their items when you've not yet decided to focus on that character.

The whole multi argument can also come into play. As a hypothetical example, what happens if Player 1 controls characters A and B, and Player 2 controls player C, and looting is involved in the following manner:

C kills and loots B, but then A kills and loots C, and A managed to loot items which had originally been in B's possession. Already the multi rule is broken UNLESS A makes a specific point to either not loot items previously belonging to B, or A destroys any items B once possessed during the course of the looting process. I have sometimes had such issues with only two active characters in the past - are we saying that it's okay to let people play FOUR characters with rares at this point? Three is already a slight stretch but it's doable. As the number of characters played increases, there's a higher chance of the multi rule being broken either deliberately or by accident.

I think most of the community is guilty of killing someone, looting/sacrificing items and picking them up on an alt. Whats important there is the motive behind it. Is the alt legitimate or is it storage? I'm one hundred percent behind Dav's idea and definition. I'd still like to see bloodlust contributing to rare protection. Maybe something more reasonable like 5 hours.

I think that sounds great Dav.

@Dav:
To clarify this definition, does it mean that if there is any character that does not engage in any of these 3 activities, it is considered to have broken the rule, even if it is not storing rares?
Does it also mean that any character needs to engage in only one of these 3 activities to have fulfilled the requirement of not being flagged as a storage character?

- pk'ing (what if I do not wish to pk or being a character that is neutral normally does not have a tendency to pk? How do you quantify that a character has sufficiently engaged in pk?)

- end-game community gear hunting (if the character itself is already geared or do not wish to engage in aiding an evil character who requested help to obtain an item? what if no such opportunity presents itself?)

- social interactions (can you expand on the examples of "approved" social interactions that can meet this requirement?)

ivindel lets start by saying I recognise that singapore is 12 hours ahead of US eastern, meaning 10pm for you is 10am for most US players and already nobody is logged in by then. I also know PT is 16 hours difference so thats even worse. And any other imm will also recognize that makes things difficult. However, there definitely are other players in your timezone where this can apply as well.

Now to clarify the definition, as you asked.

1) if it is not storing rares then no it doesnt break the rule of course. i can clarify it means for limited items only.
2) 1 activity is sufficient to avoid the judgment
3) pk'ing --- we'll probably be most interested in addressing pks that are being *avoided* via quitting, since that is already illegal in the rules anyway. I don't think that means a whole lot else for right now
4) gear hunting --- most vets want to go bossing to get the blood timer up/relics. i dont see why that should be an issue for you.
5) social interactions - that could be anything meaningful - attendance in the herald events, bothering to observe duels, answering newbie chat questions, etc. Again, remember is driven by player report. if the hours are being just AFK scripted, theyll notice and probably report it.

Davairus, thanks for clarifying. I do have some follow-up comments if you don't mind:

3) pk'ing --- we'll probably be most interested in addressing pks that are being *avoided* via quitting, since that is already illegal in the rules anyway. I don't think that means a whole lot else for right now
-> I know that this topic is a sore spot for people on both sides of the fence (people who quit out because they do not want to engage in PK for whatever reasons versus others who are annoyed at people quitting out on them). It is clear to me that if I quit out, hence not engaging in PK, I will of course not fulfill this "pk'ing" requirement. However to clarify, you are saying that it is actually illegal to quit out to avoid PK (sorry, I wasn't certain that it's a rule)?
-> If yes, how long should a player stay logged on (when a PK comes on) to qualify as having stayed on long enough that it is not avoiding PK?
-> Or does it already count as engaging in PK if we skirmish once and then I run to Narnia and quit out?
-> Does such a rule work well and deemed as acceptable for the general community?
-> This rule means that I can technically report someone for quitting out on me?
-> Or does the "no quit-out" rule apply only to characters that are holding limited items?

5) social interactions - that could be anything meaningful - attendance in the herald events, bothering to observe duels, answering newbie chat questions, etc. Again, remember is driven by player report. if the hours are being just AFK scripted, theyll notice and probably report it.
-> Honestly, I am not sure how well this aspect will work for me. 80% of the time, most of us are just minding our own business furthering our own agendas, and I have developed a deep distrust (by default, because my mindset is deeply ingrained in AR from the past that everyone is an enemy unless proven otherwise) for any evil characters that come to ask me for help with anything. I am all for guiding newbies, but I don't give two shits about veterans in-game (sorry for being blunt about it this way). I'd admit that it's a bloody toxic mindset but it's something that had been beaten into me since the first times I played AR as a teenager (example, someone asking me to help with ranking and then backstabbing me when I am low from tanking the mobs). Sure, such negative behaviour can be policed by the staff to a certain extent (one can argue that it's not wrong to backstab someone as an evil character) but I would rather not even expose myself to such a risk to begin with because the damage would have been done.

I am seeking clarifications like these because this rule(s) affects me intimately, and will most definitely influence how I play this game when the changes kick in, so I kindly ask for your patience.

to be honest that is something I think other players need to think about as well but, with pk'ing , the rule in HELP RULES says ICA = ICC as in actions must lead to consequences. so you can be a co-op neutral player all day but if the legions realize you helped geared up the knight, or levelled up the knights, etc, those guys may decide you are not neutral and mark you as an enemy

My 2 cents, Dav is right that the report system is better than all the other good ideas in this thread. Iv, I understand your desire for hard and fast rules but the reason Dav is right is because this game has a ton of gray area in it. The last thing anybody wants is to make rules with player hostile, unintended negative consequences. I get that this impacts your playstyle in particular but it's better than a hard character count limit, right?

We need to be careful that hard and fast rules don't create enforced bottom feeding. Nobody wants a massive spike in PKing weak players or assaulting characters that are just trying to train because there are suddenly 20 toons trying to meet the non-a-storage-character criteria. There is an element of qualitative judgement to this and the Immortals are the ones to make the call.

I feel like all of Dav's definition rules come back to the same thing: Be a part of the world. If a character is many months old with hundreds of hours and nobody knows who they run with, or what they do, then it's a storage character. If a character is a year old and has never appeared in a log, not an event, not a PK, not a warlord duel, not a game of poker, then it's not really an active character.

On the ducking fights thing, I think everybody agrees it is fine to duck fights. But you have to occassionally let people have a go at you even if you just run, right? Look at Burroughs. He's a well known character right now, is absiolutely loaded, is known to never fight on even terms. But nobody complains about him as a hoarder because he's around and he lives dangerously. Everybody knows what he's about and if people focus on him they know they'll get their shot to kill him.


Dav, on the rules, I think two things are missing:
1) There should be some sort of hours / character life req called out before you the storage character thing is in play. Nobody wants to worry about being reported while they are in their training / gearing phase and I'm sure IMMs don't want to deal with a report flood.
2) There should be a clear expectation called out on the consequences and how they escalate. Warning, strip, ban, whatever. Personally, I would lean soft to start. I don't know what all IMMs track behind the scenes, but we all know rares are not created equal. Avg dam, proc abilities, piece of a set, whatever. I think the first warning should be something like, "hey, you've been reported for storage. These 3 items are constantly located. Use em, sell em, or ditch them or this escalates." I think that kind of "gray zone judgement" for the items involved would make this softer for the accused rather than just stripping them down fully.

As negative as it might be to add these additional contributions...

I don't feel that giving a definitive answer to what's right and wrong is ever going to work. For one thing, those who simply care about not getting in trouble for breaking rules rather than understanding the spirit behind even putting them in place aren't going to change significantly once they know what's not acceptable. They are just going to make note of the cases (what is unacceptable and/or any exceptions to breaking the rules) and then continue doing what they are doing.

Furthermore, there is no way to apply cookie cutter or black-and-white implementation of some of the rules in place. Someone who logs off three times when the same opponent shows up has developed a pattern sure, but it is also of significance how often the two characters meet. If these instances all took place within a week (or even a day or less between interactions), I'd say there is a strong case against the player who keeps logging off. If on the other hand a month passes between interactions and they are not logging off when everyone else generally considered of comparable strength shows up, it's perhaps more acceptable.

Also, regarding quitting out to avoid PKing... It's not that it's completely unacceptable to my understanding so much as establishing a pattern, particularly where cabal characters are concerned.

A thought: what if the character falls within the top 10 or top 15 of the PK ratings board? Would that also satisfy the PK condition? 36 characters are now currently above the red line, top 10 would be top 28th percentile or top 15 would be top 40th percentile.

The PK ratings board currently tracks the "active" (at least those that had logged on in a particular month) characters and their ratings with respect to everyone else. It would make sense to me since it feels like a good measure against the rest of the playerbase whether a good proportion of the community is actively PKing or only the top few predators are hunting. If a good portion of the playerbase does not even partake actively in PK, then it would also suggest to some extent that it is harder to find someone to fight or the general sentiments are "I do not play this game to PK".

I wonder how many different items that trigger "Aha! Somebody is hoarding." when they are not in. There can't be many.

Probably titanium and a few weapons.

If you have any in mind, list them, maybe some relief will be granted with new alternatives.

Way too easy to achieve Ivindel. You can probably get top 10 with 2 kills. Also you can do a ton of fighting and have an engaging char who never has a kill.

I feel like this process is going to have a little wiggle room either way. It's obvious to the players which characters are fighting (either from stream/logs/in game discussions) even if they aren't landing kills.

My biggest advice to you would be to roll an evil, don't tell anyone you are playing it, and play it with the intention of fighting a ton and getting back into it even if you lose. You'll be surprised how fast you'll be able to equip if looted. Your PK abilities will improve. Soaking deaths on the same char is a surprisingly liberating experience.

Friendly reminder, we are discussing this rule due to something very much NOT a hypothetical. the scenario is 10+ characters all chock-filled full of mid-to-high level desirable rares which we all know already has been hoarded for months on end. in addition there are a bunch of auxillary characters (hi Merlandox, although I doubt its you, stud pk'er that you are) who I think have developed similar storage habits after they got sloppy seconds while helping to farm all this stuff.

ivindel, I know its a cliche to say it, just as you said it, but the damage has been done here applies both ways. Please remember, what we're looking for here are solutions that mitigate the way your playstyle (not you, the playstyle specifically) impacts everybody else.. if that playstyle is rooted in a distrusting perspective that's understandable but we still want to mitigate this playstyle.

At the moment, still very happy to take feedback that tweaks the "storage character" definition a bit, but I'm not looking to give it a firm number of alts, number of items, or add an elaborate list of conditionals. The guys who are getting impacted by this are going to be very obvious due to there being a high concentration of the game's rares in their hands. That's in spite of the game having already things to break monopolies: thieves, Keeper's cabal, monthly purges, the black market for gear contracting, and so on. If it isn't an obvious open-and-shut case, its highly unlikely the imms will want to take it up. We usually just wait for slam dunks so that we don't miss.

Here's the new def:

A storage character is defined as a player-controlled character primarily utilized for accumulation and retention of limited items, with minimal or no engagement in any other core gameplay mechanics such as pk'ing, questing, or social interactions.

Solmundi has a point about it being unclear what items are bothering people. Should there be a way to report what you feel has been absent forever? Is that useful for the immortals adjucating this?

It isn't just BIS items and weapons. Players can choose to care about whatever. Just one personal example, I've been trying to do a max out healing procs shtick just for fun forever and it feels like I haven't seen the crown of the minotaur king in over a year. It's a weird state that I can run Order for the nimbus multiple times but that crown is unobtainable.

(Or maybe I just need to learn what this black market is...)

OP Here.

After reading some of the feedback on this, my apologies for making such a terrible suggestion. Sometimes gaining perspective from others, can remedy a lack of insight to these things.

From my perspective, I only have one main character at a time and my other characters don't usually have any rares. Once in a while I may have a second character with some limited items, but more often than not, this is not the case. As for those who do horde rares, I agree that this is already a problem to be considered - My bad here

If there was a way to allow this for just one character per player, then it would seem practical? Problem is people can have multiple accounts, so there's no way it could be enforced. I'm not sure if you can only have one caballed character per person? If so, maybe that would be the way to go.

Under normal circumstances, I agree that its easy to meet the minimum hours. However, some people might have to travel for work and/or to take care of elderly family members. If we can't accommodate, then I understand. Not everything is doable.

Nothing ventured; nothing gained

It was any specific items, Scrynor/Solmundi. It was a pattern of several things I started noticing on a slew of characters that brought the hoard to my attention.

Unfortunately this is a classic hoarding disability. As the player stated...he has an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the need to acquire things and not let go of them, even if he doesn't enjoy doing it(he stated he doesn't enjoy logging all these hours to keep the hoard). There's a whole TV show on AMC called Hoarders...my old lady likes watching it, which means I end up watching it.
OCD and hoarding doesn't make anybody a bad person. We all have issues we deal with. But, just like on the tv show, the hoarding affects others around them. In this case, it's AR, and it affects the community. Also, unfortunately, we have a playstyle that on occasion rears it's ugly head and now new rules have to be implemented. That sucks. Self policing could have been the fix. But that's not reality, people must have rules to stay in line. A rule made because of the few, effects everybody. Isn't that how it normally goes?

I see. Obviously seeing one character or a roster of characters that are all rared up only logging in to pad the hour limits is frowned upon. It'll be dealt with.

On a different topic, If someone wants to compile a list of items that seem to be never in, in a different thread, go for it or send a bug report. Curious as to what the top 5% of items would be.

Which player/s are you referring to about the OCD hoarding Xenyar? If you're talking about me, that's a pretty wild accusation, considering I'm about 99% sure that I'm amongst the least of concern in this area lol

To reiterate, I just thought it was unfortunate that if someone (hypothetically) averaged 50 hours over the last three months, but during one of those months they could barely log in (maybe they travel and won't have access to internet or a personally owned computer), they lose their stuff. Some of us stick with one character most of the time and are not doing any of the aforementioned weird stuff.

If someone were to tell me the solution is to care less about losing stuff, I wouldn't disagree. I'm just trying to help improve the game, but unfortunately was a bit ignorant regarding this topic.

PS I just saw the saw the reply where Dav mentioned how easy it is now to keep stuff as a main character. I still thought it was 20 hours. I'll probably still struggle not to get purged from time to time, but the fact that this has already been addressed makes me feel foolish for posting this as a suggestion. My fault for not keeping up with the changes, I'll try to do a better job with this in the future.

Is there a way to claim a character as your main, or is that done automatically?

Don't worry turningpoint, nobody is upset with you at all or implying you are the one with multiple chars with rares - there is a different person.

This was a much needed discussion- thanks for bringing it up.

I think your main char is just whoever has the most hours on your account.

You can use the lore skill to see if an item is safe from purge. If you love it and it has a "nice sheen" it is safe. If it shows "a bit of rust" it will be purged if you don't get more hours by the end of the month.

Two random ideas that are more to the OP.

I think it would be really nice to be able to designate main character instead of max hours. I've lost rares on my main because I didn't realize the new guy I was training had surpassed my main in hours and it was kinda annoying...

A vacation clause might not be terrible? Maybe you could crowd source it? Just like cabals and cotories don't typically have storage characters because they police themselves what if you could just report an absence to immortals with a couple of active players who could vouch for you?

We would have to take the main character thing up with Olyn. I am not sure how it even works. If it is player-chosen I think it would have to be permanent until delete.

Kalist, thanks for the explanation. What is obvious to elites, may not be obvious to all. Also, your AR tutorials/videos are indeed festive and shockingly good.

Scrynor, the part about new characters typically logging more hours seems accurate; player-chosen mains seem logical. As far as traveling or being absent goes, some things that should favor one might be 1) Its their main character 2) They're in a cabal 3) They've achieved a degree of character longevity 4) They're active PK/RP. Accommodating every request without meeting at least some of these criteria would seem dumb to me. What do you guys think?


Dav, I agree that player-chosen mains should be permanent. The only exception should be that if your initial main is un caballed and then later you have a character who is in a cabal, then logically the caballed character should become the new main by default. Right?

I like the idea of designating your main. My reasoning is that in the current system, if you have a single char, you only need 8 hours to avoid purge. If you have a second character, you now need 16 on both (assuming uniques); it quadruples the required hours.

I must say - it's very nerve-grating to come across people who seem to be making active attempts at avoidance and I've located several items which have been absent for a long time on a character. Recently, I noticed somebody with two unique weapons and two rare weapons just from using locate object TWICE, and the unique weapons have been missing for a long time. The rare weapons are also in high demand when they're in. Dealing with people like this makes me sick. It's like playing Super Smash Brothers in Training Mode with the opponent set to evasive only you have a human opponent.

Worse yet, the way the character avoided fights opened itself up for abusing features currently in the game.

With regards to this definition:

"A storage character is defined as a player-controlled character primarily utilized for accumulation and retention of limited items, with minimal or no engagement in any other core gameplay mechanics such as pk'ing, questing, or social interactions."

I would add to that definition the following line:

Note that abuse of the request feature to create storage characters is forbidden and will also be punished under this rule.

While it's probably self-evident that the request feature could result in storage characters, I feel laying it out explicitly is a good idea if we make the rule.

Yes it's frustrating, widow. You can't expect an alcoholic to quit drinking because you tell him to. Just like you can't expect somebody with a hoarding disorder to stop collecting things.

For characters that hold rares and don't want purged, I suggest hour scaling something like this.
1 char - get your 8 hours like it currently is.(is that right? Only 8 hours?)
2 chars - 16 hours for both
3 chars - 18 hours for both
I guarantee everybody, except for one, maaaybe 2?, actually play 4 characters or more and try to juggle hours to keep rares.
From here is scales up more drastically.
4 characters - 25 hours each
5 characters - 35 hours each
6 characters - 45 hours each
Continue in 10 hour increments from there...


Imagine if dude would put his AR time into only 2 or 3 characters, and really developed them...Man, you could make some very memorable and impactful characters...that's something you can create and be proud of. That sounds so much more fun than clutching all those rares in fear of losing them, while trying your best to live in a safety bubble.

Isn't the entire point of this exercise to increase circulation of rares? You're just putting a requirement that hoarders will minimally meet to continue to keep rares out of circulation. It won't necessarily increase interaction because when threatened the same people quitting out will continue to do so. Not sure what the issue with basing it off of bloodshed is. Probably just people wanting to hoard disagreeing with it. Here's an idea off an idea; make fighting bosses that give relics add to bloodshed. Say.... 15 minutes of bloodshed per 100 relics. Would force people to do something other than just sit afk. Provides an out for people who would rather not fight.

Bosses that give relics already give bloodshed. Bloodshed minutes = 10% relics gained from killing bosses. E.g. Schwartzer awards 300 relics and 30 minutes of bloodshed, Darkenbeast awards 100 relics and 10 minutes of bloodshed.

Am I the only one who plays one character at the time? How do you guys have time for more than one? No wonder I can't find shit. Ever

And no one ever wants to group to get shit cause they already got it or they're waiting on their buddy. Sole reason I made Ravinah to weed this bullshit out myself

See? Its perfect, make people do stuff to keep their stuff.

So right now I think we have very clearly identified our problem "excessive rare hoarding" and the means by which it is done "storage characters" ... I am however not convinced yet that dealing with the storage chars is going to make all the hoarding just magically go away, as there is a conglomerate of different players involved in this and they could simply divvy it all up and then we have the same problem as before.

I want to make sure we get the solution to the problem right here, that means we would need something that address both the storage char method and the alternatives.


I was thinking maybe if we do a rares leaderboard so that these characters would stick out like a sore thumb in a top 20, and the leaderboard will even show what rares you have since you are so prolifically well geared. That way hoarding a lot of gear on one character would get you on the radar of every player who wants what you have. A player who prefers a low profile or prefers avoidance of any negative attention will simply avoid getting on the board, so that helps relieve that hoarding a bit. it also gives them a good guideline of what to shoot for i.e. dont be so rared out as to appear in the top 20. Now by the way, when I say top 20 here, I mean, it can look at the strength of each item and give it a score just like the Keeper cabal used to. So it'll be the top 20 best geared guys, not just cheesed with 20 swiftbirds or something.

Then, we can also explore maybe updating the item bounty system (job posting for all thieves and shadows?) where a player will be asked to clean out rares from the guy you mark for a reward. so then the question is just how long the mark can keep a low enough profile to avoid all the hunters. and we can even give the game some sort of email notification (might be too OOC? technologically this is very easy) to subscribed thieves so they can follow when their mark is available and online. whether the player would be able to evade the hunter all month and still get enough hours would be potentially very exciting, and I don't really feel I can take any offense personally to something that helps a player identify there is a fun reason to login instead of just logging in as a chore to hoard rares. we have some absolute beasts who play graveyard shift AR, guys like rothak, merlandox, m1c0, even ramod might dip in or something. the constraint here would be you can only buy the bounty if theyre on the rare leaderboard, and its fair because if you really want rares , even if you arent a massive hoarder, you may still get a visit from the thieves. It just sucks if you are a guy with ten characters on the board.

I like it. Contracts would give thieves an excellent IC reason to do what they do. And you guys know how much I despise thieves.

Contracts is a cool idea.

I actually would vote to just have locate object go full out of game and be part of the codex and work on offline characters. It always felt razor thin as a spell ne. Borderline inmmersion breaking. It's just a necessary mechanic to know if it's worth running certain content.
There are tons of locate alts just there for that purpose even if you are not shipped to. And for those who obey the rule getting requests to locate for people is just a nuisance.
Locating a proxy way to tell if thieves and shadows are hiding always felt not right to me.

I just don't see why it doesn't go full codex. Hand wave it as the latest mystics innovation. I don't really think people seeing your load out is a huge deal. It's easy enough to get a look at people and dig it out of your log.

And knowing who has what could help not just identify power hoarders but also help with above board item keeping. It would let you know who to send a note to looking for a swap. They might not be clutching that item you want they might just have it cause it's what they've got.

More succinct version, public knowledge of where items are and thief contracting is cool. Just do it the simple way though. Make all item locations public in the codex. "Held by whoever".

Establishing a public "top 20 most loaded" characters list will increase hoarding not decrease it imo thieves be damned. See list. Reach top of list. It's human nature (and especially gamer nature).

Locate object serves other purposes such as checking consumables and also finding people based on tents/other sneaky checks. I think being able to check full loadouts outside of game is just another was to powergame and wouldn't add anything to the game. Maybe giving that to mystics/consortium would increase interaction and make them even more important as information brokers. Thieves taking on a contract for say... ring of accuracy would need to get information from them to be able to fulfill it.

Bottom line very cool ideas, but still wouldn't stop someone from just semi-afk sitting guildhall or a safe place in a separate tab while they're working to establish minimum amount of time to keep rares every month. You could give thieves/shadows a way to bribe/bypass guild guardians and an ability to "treasure hunt" i.e. golden road to whatever item they want.

I don't know if it's just a knee jerk response or if I'm alone in this feeling, but I personally do NOT like the idea of giving OOC info to people who are not logged in. Some email to every thief character telling them when someone logs in? That seems directly contradictory to everything. Whats to stop someone from just rolling a thief so they can get OOC knowledge to always know who's on and then just log in to their other character or whatever?

I'm hesitant to give people in game info when they aren't in game...

The top 20 rared to hell list sounds neat though. May pair up with the top rating, may not. Those who aren't on both will stand out I guess. I will say though that 20 sounds like way too big a number. Is it not? Would it need to be 20? Seems like that would just become a list of the top 20 most active characters. I wouldn't be against cropping the list.

As I once already proposed; the best would be to have the decay/reset timers on individual items according to their rarity/uniqueness, i.e. common rares would survive a month, semi-common rares 3 weeks, low limit rares 2 weeks and uniques 1 week.

That would actually incentivize people to play when they have a lot of rares/uniques to fully take advantage and utilize what they have before they decay.

AR has come to the point where almost all PKers are all always fully decked in rares and uniques and the ones in red dragon rarely stand a chance due to eq disparity.

I'd really strongly recommend revisiting such eq-based wow-like character strength measurement simply by making it less probable/possible to be fully decked out unless you actually are actively playing and re-gaining what's decayining etc.

This would also create much more competition in pve and pk, as more people would be seeking the same item when it decays and competing for it.

The decay should also be randomized, sometimes a day earlier, sometimes a day or two later etc. so people would not be able to camp the timers.

This would create the effect of actually having unique named things and strong rares a privilege not for granted and whilst you'd get them you'd be much more motivated to log in and play with them. Instead of having decked out chars on your account sitting there just being logged to collect hours.

I've been reading this and trying to stay on the sidelines but since this is starting to merge with the recent change of "named" items, I thought I would chime in. I have very little interest in playing a seasonal game with a very short season timer. Personally when these things happen unless I am very immersed in the game, it will very quickly turn into a chore. Do I want to log in and reg-gain all that stuff I worked really hard to get every month, or would I rather play something else? I am pretty sure I would do it a month or two but after that I would feel like I am getting full looted every month, which sucks. Then you have to race to get to your things that you worked really hard to get and avoid conflict on the way, because you could be missing key things, like saves.

I have been the hoarder, when I play this game, I generally play it non stop, all my free time. Its not hard to acquire 150-300 hours in a month, if you spread that across a few characters they are all going to get equipped. The other hoarders have already said the same thing.

1 week for uniques is ludacris by the way, lol. That made me laugh. Getting those full sets is actually very difficult to get, its not just go kill the boss, To finish the Xanthak set you have to kill him twice, which means you have to wait for him to reset via storm and then kill him again and he is very difficult to solo.

Is hoarding even an issue anymore? It seems like all this stuff is already covered under current guidelines, You can't quit out to avoid IC consequences so that deals with people quitting out on PK, are we even dealing with a current problem? I have never, even during Ivendels hoard show even have problems getting rares and uniques. The fact that you can't get some stuff some times is what makes them RARE and UNIQUE, they are not abundant. Not everyone gets them. That is what makes them valuable.


TL/DR; AR becoming seasonal makes me not want to play the game

seems like people have gotten entitled to full set of rares/uniques instead of understanding that they are supposed to be rare and unique items.

So since the question "is hoarding an issue" came up, let me share some rough stats. I have been working on monitoring for the moment to get the full picture as its pretty hard to make an informed decision without it, but soon I will know what is going on in much more detail.

The players manage to check out 1000 rares between them and the average per player (with rares) is 8. That count excludes anybody who does not have rares, whether that is by choice or not knowing where they are, I do not know. But the overall player average is absolutely 8. I did not break that down into "accounts" yet, I would prefer it I think. if we take that mean, and consider anything 3x standard deviations above the mean as a sign of some unnatural process such as multi, cheating (for monitoring purposes), then since the mean is only 8 that would be honestly pretty low. As an approximation for variance, since these are small numbers and represent members of a population we can use the square root of the mean for this (poisson distribution), which would be square root of 8, i.e. around 2.82, which means the "high end" of rares is actually 17 rares. Now when I looked at the characters which had the most rares, it proved to be the case that the top 20 were all 17+ rares. We have a bit of positive skew there, and I would want to (a) see if I can break it down by accounts further, and/or (B) factor in rarity instead of just "rare" raw count, but it is already obvious that one geared-out alt is kind of an issue, and also this average is not a high average, it demonstrates most characters are NOT hoarding.


For the excessive hoarding situation we are in, that player has approx 170 rare items across like 12 characters, and (I also want more granularity on this) a large amount of the best uniques and rares. Out of the top 20 rare-stacked characters, he shows up over and over, I think it was min 5 times. If/when we do a rares leaderboard, you guys will see visually how ridiculous it looks. It looks silly at best, at worst it offends sensibilities.

I do not regret adding mythical status to anything yet. That is for sure. I don't want to expand it to items that are equal or shittier than crafted items, that's obviously pointless, but if you ever want a realistic chance at having the best weapon available, its wise to force it to be circulated, similar how to we circulate the runed blade already, sevokan already, because these weapons also create the STRONGEST incentive there is to binge hours to keep these best in the game items. Its not a regular "seasonal" rotation either, the countdown begins from when the item is acquired, and its set over a month ahead, so lots of time to dick around with it.

To answer the question ""is hoarding an issue" ", its the right question to ask. The answer is yes to "excessive hoarding" is an issue. That player has 10 characters stacked with the best rares he could get his greasy mitts on, and the other players in the top 20 (i.e. the ones he is neck and neck with) are fighting over the remaining scraps available. He is cock-blocking the viability of certain classes and races in some cases, e.g. having managed to make the frostbrand swords maxed out, which makes life easier for fire giants. Its clearly disruptive. Another thing I can add here. As the Warlord Imm, I see the new Warlords hitting 50 with something in the above-average range of, lets say, 11 rare items, and I observe that they are having difficulty to find gear to compete without first having to grind the forge for 20 hours and then smuggler, nothings available. Unable? No. But having 180 rares and 65 rare weapons out of circulation, it matters. That's 20% of all rares anyone has, and (to be determined) a proportion of the best ones. And frankly, even if you take the impact of PVP out of it, it reduces the fun of the game to not be able to do any eq hunting because there's no point. You are going to have to craft your gear. So then you say, okay, but its a roleplaying game isnt it. It is. And this guy doesnt do that either. Which means the value these excessing hoarding characters is adding to this game is essentially reductive. I think most players here would be happier if they were purged and the dude was allowed 2 characters with rares or something, because, if you take those 180 rares and share them across the entire pool of everybody that's actually active, the overall avg rares per player would not be much different, but that could support two entire cabals of players.

I'd like to improve things a bit. There are surely lots of good ideas to do this, like bounty sytem, leaderboard. It could also be just a second character requires 50 hours to keep rares, or the even lazier just make the rare counts 10x so it is unlimited. The more important question is, how do we make the game more fun? Because this, logging in loads of dull hours to pass the time to keep eq, or the alternative of punishments/rules, its not something most people wanna experience or do. Its a turn-off, and cause people not want to play AR because they know they need hours for rares and simply can't be arsed to sit online for that. I am hopeful we can think of better. Lets try to do something positive for the game here.

So I finished my study of rares by account. We'll not get into who has what, we'll just say, the top 10 are all over 30+ rares each, and several are decently over. One guy is an outlier, but he does not outnumber all other accounts put together, he does outnumber the next 3. I also looked through what rares are the most highly stressed and placed a few new "anti neutral" and "orderly" on things, and I removed that little trick of quitting out with a rare in your mouth or using it to drop cursed weapons. I doubled the number of guardian cloaks as quite obviously golden guardian is unuseable at this point. the next phase in this will be to understand how this breaks down by actual item levels and see if there's any obvious opportunitues to reduce rarity. I notice for example the kung fu shoes are flying , but I need to dig a bit deeper into it. One thing to credit ivi with, he does use the crafting alternatives, so I'll see if there's something we can do to help witht hat. i think a craftable sword will help a LOT from what I saw so far.

i liked when you were like "oh shit look at that guys sword and rings" when you met someone with a couple of uniques/rares instead of titanium tenor being pretty much a default PK set.

I gotta agree with Ronk. Everyone here acting like there's not enough rares in circulation, I gotta say it's the complete opposite. There's way too many rares these days, the game is over-saturated with rares. Just having like 2-3 rares would be seen as impressive, and now the average player is rolling around with 8? That's a lot.

Just ranking up, training, and exploring I've been stumbling into rares without even looking for them, and I've already gotten a pretty decent collection of rares on my character already. And I'm seeing rares that nobody even wants. Ave 21 damage weapons used to be considered pretty good weapons, now they sit completely unused because it seems nobody will use a weapon with less than ave 25 damage at rank 50.

Makes me wonder what people really want. Should we just remove rares from the game completely, and make every item common, regardless of powerlevel, so that every player can fulfill their fantasy of being decked out in the most powerful gear in the game? Reading posts in this threads I almost feel like that's what people are wanting.

Also, with people walking around with so many rares I feel like it's also really effected game balance. I guess I don't have the actual stats to back this up, but I feel like the combat-oriented classes like warriors and berserkers, who benefit the most from wearing the strongest equipment seem to be dominating the game these days. Meanwhile the classes that aren't as equipment reliant, like the mages, who used to be really powerful have fallen to the point of being insignificant. When every warrior out there is decked out in rares and casually slinging out *** damage with every auto-attack, there's just no way an invoker can compete.

I think people need to calm down about the rares. This makes me feel like an old man shouting at the kids to get off his lawn, but I don't think the newer players realize just how easy they have it with rares these days.

Valid points. You won't see those top bruiser classes actively fighting at 50 until they do secure their best pieces. When's the last time someone was being hyper aggressive with red dragon up there? As a previous Warlord, I certainly got sick of hearing "im not well enough equipped to fight," even though they would have 6-10 rares. It feels like there's a meta out there for AR and it starts with having Tenor/Wraith and a unique weapon. I don't think the rare problem is with those highest end pieces. Let those that have to maximize every little thing suffer. The problem is the mid level stuff like wrist pieces from tower of magic or the stuff from mahn-tor, something as innocuous as a brooch of life or a guardians cloak being unavailable is a huge problem.

divsky> a reason 21 avg rare weapons aren't used as frequently is because you can simply buy weapons as good, if not better, if you have enough relics most of the time. Unless the weapon has other desired characteristics (e.g. frostbrand sword ice attack for use when fighting fire giants or invokers), there's really no point to getting a rare weapon that strength or lower in most cases.

I actually debated putting something along the lines of, "why even have rares at all?" In one of my previous comments, typed it out and everything. But ended up deleting it.

We have a pretty consistent theme of comments on most logs that are posted: "get better gear"

That's how you win or lose, by having the best gear. Obviously this game is pretty complex and there's more to it. But when most of us have played the game for many years and have dialed in what to do, it kind of ends up burning down to who has the better stats and the better gear.

The reason no one has tried to pk competitively in red dragon with a jagged sword is because they wouldn't have any hope in hell. The enemy could probably not even use sanc and still win.

Power creep is a tough thing to deal with. Because it's fun to have better and better gear. That's exciting for everyone. But it means the old gear becomes obsolete.


But back to the topic at hand

I have never actually once seen in game the forged war sword. So I don't find it surprising that there's some serious hoarding going on.

I am grateful of your perspective Dav, "let's try to do something positive for the game here."
Which I think entails having everyone continue to share their opinions.

As already mentioned, I empathize with the idea that maybe there are too many rares.
I also am conflicted because having the rares reset frequently incentivizes people to play and gives them a goal. The most boring times on AR are when you have nothing of substance to accomplish.
But on the flip side, I feel like tayyah's comments really resonate with me. As someone who has had a character lose items to a monthly purge before, I am intimately familiar with the feeling of logging on and seeing guild issue and just logging out again because it sounds like a chore and a hassle to get gear again. it feels like "getting full looted every month" even though you didn't die.

All of that, just to say that I don't really have any substantial suggestions or answers.

Seeing how I blew the whistle on this hoarding thing, I'll throw this out there.
I'm with tayyah, I generally don't have an issue gaining the equipment I want or something equivalent. I wasn't upset I couldn't get my hands on specific. Sure it'd be nice to have a ********, *******, or whatever other nice weapons are permanently out of circulation... But I don't NEED them. There's other great alternatives that you can effectively PK with. ..

I blew the whistle on the hoarding issue out of principle. I just don't think it's good for the game(you/me, the community) for one player to have 20% of the limited equipment and never let is back into circulation. I can have BIS, and will put it all on the line to whoever wants to fight me. If I die and get full looted, so be it, all those items ARE REPLACEABLE ...and I'll be back at 40 hit/40 dam in a few hours anyways.

(i edited weapons names - I shouldn't have mentioned specifics).

Okay I'll take a shot at a wacky idea that may (or may not) make the game more fun and ties into a lot of these comments. Also, caveat, this idea would be a lot of work for the devs and really shake things up.

Maybe it's time for a big shakeup on how things work? The meta has gotten more dialed in because the player base shrunk. Now that it is possible to be near BIS in every slot because you can get 30 rares that has become the barrier to entry to elite play.

So if raw rare count is at the heart of the problem, both for the elite meta stagnating and the hoarder issue, maybe we should attack that premise?

BIS is easy to assess because the cost of using each item is the same. 1 slot. Currently you can hold # slots + 4 rares. But we all know not all rares are created equal. So what if we make them not cost equal? We assign a "magic value" to each rare. And change the rare limit from # slots + 4 to a "magic capacity" limit. A cap on how much magic value you can hold.

This would open up a whole new trade space for devs to play with. You could make really strong inefficient rares. You could make truly bombastic rares that eat up a huge amount of your magic capacity. You could play with crazy abilities or high proc rates because the old limit of "That's too good I can't do that" can now be balanced by being able to make it more expensive to have and use. It makes your character load out more like a build rather than an imperfect set while you strive for BIS someday.

Sure, the best most efficient rares will still end up the best. But you could see an easier path to a character being competitive with red dragon and his whole capacity using the ludicrous weapon or something. There would be more varied viable answers to what's competitive. And a hoarders job would be a lot harder if the shiniest thing to hoard takes up a whole character.

Some rares are just there to help teach you about the game having them. We have a "rarity" stat, which means we can have a "common rare" that there is an abundance of if we want to. They don't have to all be scarce. The top gear should be much more scarce, obviously, but it shouldnt be scarce just because one guy has ten characters filled with all the best weapons. Anyway, I think we should probably just focus on the level 50 shit here, and make sure we provide some baseline weapons because otherwise any dude who rolls a warrior is going to feel they need to claim six rare weapons.

Here's my suggestion on how to fix things and put more rares into circulation: Make mages stronger.

Like I pointed out in my last post, fighter-type classes get the most benefit from strong equipment. And it's not just rares here are the problem, other people have pointed out that equipment has been power-creeped hard in the past few years. Between forging, grambling and rares it's become extremely easy to get a fighter up to 60+ damroll and it's hard to stand up to that kind of damage output.

Plus, fighters and rogues got big updates in the past few years with the combat and weapon style changes. Mages and clerics though have just been kind of left out in the dust. I think this breakdown of character classes kind of supports the idea that fighters are dominating the game right now: https://abandonedrealms.com/players/ Warriors and Berserkers are the most played classes right now by a pretty decent margin. I think PK stats would back this up even more, but I'm not sure.

But traditionally mages and clerics have been the classes that don't depend on equipment nearly as much. Equipment has gotten a lot stronger of the past few years, so that's buffed all the classes that scale with equipment, but left mages in the dust. They just can't stand up to the uber-geared out big bruisers anymore.

So what if we just gave mages the tools they need to take on the decked out fighters? This would give us classes that don't need the strong equipment to win fights again. And if a warrior completely decked out in rares and uniques got killed by a half-naked necromancer, well, that's one way of putting those rares and uniques back in circulation.

I kind of miss the days when mages were truly feared. And a scary mage wasn't scary just because they were overpowered or geared out. They were scary because they took real skill to play well. We need another necromancer to dominate the PK scene and send all the stone giants running and hiding again.

I dunno may be wrong because I haven't played much in a pretty long time, but I just don't see that anymore.

Why would you think mages are weak? With the removal of flee murder, invokers are super strong now in my opinion. I would not even rate psi and illusionist as being weak currently. Healers maybe, shamans def not wweak either. So maybe you can specify more on what mages/clerics do u think are weak?

Ashlyn, how do you propose being hyper aggressive in red dragon set against DK, vamp, shaman, necro. 5 rounds and you'll be shitting bricks getting pinned down with all the nasty mal spell. With the exception of larot who dies 20 times a week, is this the kind of characters u want to see daily?

I don't understand why there is a need to starve neutral chaotic characters even further by slapping on "anti_neutral" flags on items like bone bracelets, and putting an "orderly" flag on some weapons. Isn't this just funneling neutral characters into narrower choices and making those choices more scarce?

In the first place, no good aligned even bothers to use the elven globes, they had been sitting there for the longest time because there are better choices around like the green lantern or the BIS "angelus". Why use the globe if the green lantern is available? There is an abundance of slightly lesser choices like the "light of dawn" and "light of simplicity" for goods, but neutrals can only use either "orb of precision" or "rod of neutrality" with no lesser choices. The elven globe was a good middle ground and I use it despite the -10 health because I needed the +2 dex from the light slot. I am not intentionally hoarding the globe, I am using it because there are no better choices around, but your "balance" changes just seems targeted. I can even be contented with a blood candle if I didn't need a rare in that slot.

The choices for neutrals are already so damn limited, but heck, I can't be bothered anymore, screw neutrals.

ivindel if you could please review the tweak that was made to "help request", you will then understand why elven globes are anti-neutral. I want to be able to make people found abusing request into neutrals, as a means to close their access to those kind of items. I am sure you realize the usefulness of DEX for gambling rare alternatives and I want to make sure that lightwalkers have acess to it. I don't care if they're too dumb to realize its there to use. The point is, its put there for them to request, but if it turns out to just get maxed out by neutrals whoring the dex then they obviously cannot request it.

Where I definitely did target warriors (this is kind of a stretch for you to think is about you, but makes more sense than elven globes) was when I made the icy blue daggers invis. I don't feel a big fan of warriors having badass offhand daggers that go through fire giant shamans with dual parry, and invis is an inconvenience at best. Anything else, no, not targetted, in fact I doubled the availablity of guardian cloaks which you didnt bring up at all.

Completed rarity/power analysis tonight, avg'd across chars per account, results show a lot less of a problem than saying "170 rares" sound like. ivindel does not really deserve this bad rap. A lot of characters with a lot of rares yes, but his characters power is not coming largely from there. You can definitely take him at his word that he has been replacing with forged gear. He is not in the 10 most rared out by account. Many of rares held by him are not even maxed out (as he said with elven globe). The most purely rared out guys are sitting on the top rated killers list, and they've as much of the "awesome" gear as he does for the most part. A bunch of rares are certainly available too. I saw some green-tinged dragonscale armor which only 5 people are using, but it can actually be out up to 1000 times, even though its 3 hitroll 1 dex armplate?

As far as "storage character" goes, blackwidow made a suggestion that agrees what the data I scraped suggests, which is that it pretty much applies strongly to the requested items. I think we could add storage character behavior into "help request" and make it clear characters with such behavior will be changed to neutral alignment, kicking them out of the pool. Its not really important who ends up reporting these. Its important that they are removed from the good alignment as a matter of RP.

As tayyah said, some of this quitting shits already in the rules. if we just need to prosecute it, then that's what we should do. gather the evidence and deny the char as a matter of RP.

This said, weapons do look a problem. it is easy for anybody to get carried away with rolling 1 or 2 alts and take up 18 weapons. one guy went abit far here but there are other people at three characters contributing significantly to that problem too. my opinion - its just been a very costly design mistake to have so many "cost 2" or "unique" awesome weapons in a thirsty/cut-throat playing field where weapons are much more significant than other items. Perhaps we will disagree on the solution, but I am of the opinion that a lot of this issue goes away if we make a way to "imbue" the winter metalsmith's starfoil/astral weapons with temporary elements. I think it makes sense what Ashlyn suggested, that is for rare weapons above a certain power level to require bloodshed (i.e. real pk time) instead of just spamming hours.

Good point Meriando, you could swap out some of that sweet red dragon for the decent and always available non rare save gear. Plenty of combinations of rings, bracelets, and armor not even including the gambled stuff. Definitely don't need rares for mal or mental saves. Even if major globe is king. Good luck getting it though.

Dav, having characters in the top 5 or whatever with a bunch of rares, means they are using them in PK and putting them on the line...allowing other players the chance of taking those items from them. A lot of us also let our alts go inactive and let those rares purge back into circulation. I do that all the time. I should remove and sac them, that way they are available sooner to the other players.

Hoarding rares, living in a safety bubble to hold onto those rares, and taking those items out of circulation permanently is the biggest rare problem.

I would like to add it's not terribly difficult to get to the top 5...you can get there with bottom feeding and pking pple at training scarecrows on your way to 50.

Ashlyn You kidding me bro. Major globe is only +8 save vs spell. You call that a king eq? None of my characters even consider using it and it's a unique. In fact i think it should be a minimum 12 save vs spell for a unique.

Usually you will be hard pressed to get saves against a single branch. Take mal for example, against a necro you'll need approx 132 save vs mal. How is your non rare and major globe going to help you achieve this?

When I log into a character, one of the first things I check is the Major globe. 16 ac for an around the body, plus 8 to all saves? Yeah that's pretty sweet.

You can throw + 56 Save vs all and +80 hp with 5 forged pieces and 2 avg 25 witch daggers. All non rare, no gambling, nothing on your accessories but hit dam. Save swaps have never been in a better spot in the history of the game. Break gear and abilities have gotten some buffs lately for a reason. It's tough sledding trying to land stuff on the big boys out there.

I wasn't trying to suggest or imply that requested items were actually an issue with hoarding by the way (though I have seen such issues). Instead, I was suggesting that we extend the rule for request abuse to cover hoarding specifically. The method Dav chose sounds good, though we have yet to see if it will be effective.

Ok. If there are mixed opinions of major globe then the equipment has achieved success. Some like it and some dont. Awesome.

Merlandox> where are you getting the 132 save vs mal against a necromancer, bro? I'm pretty sure that's overkill. 132 - 15 (max break) - 6 (curse) = 111, which is well above the point where additional points stop mattering (anything above 95 after any modifications isn't going to matter).

Plus, against a necro you want to wear mental saves too since sleep is a mental spell.

[edit: wasn't aware about the ossuary, thanks for pointing that out.]

I keep forgetting that you have to be completely maxed out to play the game. My mistake. Most classes and cabals have skills to increase saves on top of plenty of non rare save pieces that give -8 to -10, gamble pieces get up to almost double that. There's also the crafting route which is solid. Major globe is in my opinion one of the top 10 pieces out there. Not sure when it got cast protective shield(thats how long its been out of circulation from my perspective) but that seems overkill. -80 is a good spot for saves considering how squishy necros are. You can get that just from gambled neck, ring, and wrist. You can get -60+ from nongambled nonrares for those same slots. If you really need the reassurance of -100+ then add a few forged pieces or tantalum/blue steel. The main spells you're looking to dodge is sleep and dispel. If any one mal lands, you're prepared for that and instantly out when it hits anyway. I saw some interest in buffing mages. Illusionist doesn't need it at all due to how ridiculous dreamstruck/feeblemind(which no amount of saves is going to save you from dreamstruck) is, but you could just lower the cap by 5 saves to 90 and watch everyone rolling martial lose their minds.

@Ashlyn

Gambled saves are the highest tier and you need time to farm it. My point is non rare alternatives like wyvern etc etc are at -8 or -10. To get 132 save vs mal for a 8 save eq, you need 92/8. An average of 11 to 12 pieces (excluding innate save skill). That's an entire body of saves.

And to answer blackwidow, a level 60 ossuary bite does - 22 or 25 save vs mal. And i tested it at level 50, even with 122 save vs mal, the bite hits with ease. So adding it with break rings, u need approx 132 save vs mal.

Can you fight with 90 save vs mal? If you wish to fight blinded plague weaken poison then sure.... if you think your warr can beat a necro spelled up, be my guest.

So that's the reason why you dont see people going crazy with red dragon eq. It's not viable. The last guy doing that was larot and i dont think there was any positive impact to the game.

Are we just theory crafting here? How did this discussion get on saves? There are like, 3 active Illusionists and one active necro at 50. 3 of those are in the Consortium and the only dangerous one is Fawneria who has 1 logged hour this month. If these casters were actually that scary people would be playing them.

Did no one see the latest log of Aethon winning the duel against a stone giant warrior warlord by not evening fleeing to use energy scrolls to heal or use any of the stronger AOE spells? Invokers shit on warriors now and you want more buffs to mages and nerf warriors more?

I was just pointing out to ashlyn why people dont go ham in red dragon gear. Saves is one of the reason.

So one mage beat someone as an outlier and that means mages are s tier?

So, ultimately I've found that this looks really over-blown. There are so many rare weapons that nobodys even using, and its really not bad weapons.

Just looking at high ave swords, I see mourneblade, huge iron sword, blood-soaked blade (of which there are seven, ave 24 two hander), rune carved rapier (10 of those, one-handed, also ave 24), other exotic blades shit like eviscerator, demon carving blade. Its a lot. Which means I don't see much point to do anything here. there is this mace, its called a "heartwood mace", there are 5 nobody is using. What about polearms? Well, theres 6x withering scythe nobody uses, and its pimp ave 25 . There's a ton of great rare flails to get right now, same goes for axes, spears, exotics, bows. all but one of the rare whips is available right now. how bout a vainglory? nobodys using that either. take one of the 7 available.

detailed flails example provided below. the degree is a subjective measure of how powerful that item is, the rarity is how many are available to use, and the count is how many characters are actually using it.

(6, 'degree', 0.0, 'rarity', 10, 'count', 0, 'a consumed flail', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 26.0, 'rarity', 20, 'count', 0, 'a warded flail', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 39.0, 'rarity', 30, 'count', 0, 'a cranium smasher', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 52.0, 'rarity', 12, 'count', 0, 'a flail of dark iron', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 52.0, 'rarity', 28, 'count', 0, 'a flaming flail of fury', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 52.0, 'rarity', 5, 'count', 0, 'the silver flail of Lenrathil', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 61.0, 'rarity', 6, 'count', 0, 'a flail of interlocked fingers', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 65.0, 'rarity', 5, 'count', 0, "a demon's tongue", '[]')
(6, 'degree', 78.0, 'rarity', 10, 'count', 1, 'a dull metallic blue flail',)
(6, 'degree', 87.0, 'rarity', 1, 'count', 1, 'the extendable appendage of King Rockwort',)
(6, 'degree', 87.0, 'rarity', 3, 'count', 2, 'the barbed tentacles of the Karakken',")
(6, 'degree', 87.0, 'rarity', 4, 'count', 0, "an Outlaw's blade splitter", '[]')
(6, 'degree', 91.0, 'rarity', 1, 'count', 1, "'Elundaris', the Flail of Lifestealing",<---------- this is the only flail ivindel is using
(6, 'degree', 91.0, 'rarity', 6, 'count', 2, "a bishop's holy water sprinkler", ',)
(6, 'degree', 104.0, 'rarity', 2, 'count', 1, 'a crimson tentacle',")
(6, 'degree', 104.0, 'rarity', 6, 'count', 0, 'a flail of intense molten fire', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 117.0, 'rarity', 4, 'count', 0, 'a Flail of Gasteride', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 126.0, 'rarity', 1, 'count', 0, 'the Flail of Eternity', '[]')
(6, 'degree', 204.0, 'rarity', 1, 'count', 1, "'Chautard-ta', the Meteor Hammer", )

Thats easily over 100 rare flails for the taking.


We all have the same ability to witch-carve ave some 25 physical weapons, so even if the game's rares were all out, that's not stopping anybody having ave 25's. I'm seeing monks, and cabal powers both offering ways to make some headway there too, so I'm genuinely not sure what all the fuss is about, it already seems like the game is lugging a pile of unnecessary trash that is not getting any use whatsover. Having the best high ave uniques become mythical like sevokan means the game is going to pry those back at some point now, which includes Elundaris of course. so unless there's something niche I missed, I'm not seeing a real problem.

I actually am agreeing with ivindel early on in the thread --- is there some specific item that was really bothering you guys? or item slot? Like, what exactly should we really be going after here that isnt already covered. I do like that we have created something to add to "help request" to help free up gear for Knights if it ever comes to that.

Hah, I can actually answer your question about the blades and I am confident that most others would agree with me:
- Mourneblade -> 2handed (unique) -> no one uses 2 handed because it sucks
- huge iron sword -> 2handed (unique) -> ever since it got changed to 2 handed (from oversized) no one uses it anymore
- blood-soaked blade -> oversized -> decent ave 24 slashing blade for giant-sized warriors and I was using this before you accepted my suggestion to change forged war sword to oversized (from 2handed) since forged war sword lets me hit that sweet spot of ave 25 and I don't even need to enchant it further than 4/4 which it comes with
- runed carved rapier -> 1handed -> decent ave 24 blade but too bad it's stabbing, not slashing, we all prefer slashing weapons, and it's hard to get this rapier since you need to fight all the way into redhorne to kill that jotun battlemage, not worth the effort
- eviscerator -> exotic 1handed blade (unique) -> somehow no one likes an exotic even if it is blade type, maybe because there is this (mis)conception that exotics don't parry well, and this eviscerator is no_enchant, invis and weigh 1 lb which sucks because you can't dual wield anything in the offhand with this.
- demon carving blade -> exotic 1handed segment (unique) -> even though it is called a "blade" but it is a segmented weapon (doesn't parry well), has bad stats (-2 con) but it does slice well

The gap here for blade is to have a more commonly available 1handed ave 24/25 slashing sword that non-giants can use, especially for neutrals. Goods have heron blades or battlemaster's blade, evils have at least access to battlemaster's blade. Neutrals have none. There is the unique BIS silver bladed katana but that is not commonly available.

Similarly, the reason why no one uses the heartwood mace or polearms is because they are all 2handed (I am not sure if you remembered the conversation we had before on this topic of 2handed). Also somehow, we all just love swords, maybe segmented weapons are the hidden OP that no one bothers to explore enough. Vainglory locks the weapon in hand and can only be removed with the weapon_freeing potion/spell, and the -5 wisdom is not desirable so most people do not consider it, but I think it does fit the spot well for certain classes that want to deal with undeads.

I remember getting an Outlaw's blade splitter", '[]') and nerve swimmer as two ez to get big dps rare weapons when i hit level 40 on any char that could use em.

'Elundaris', the Flail of Lifestealing",<---------- this is the only flail ivindel is using. <<<<and never to be used by anybody else.

Permanently keeping gear/weapons out of circulation by hoarding it on 15 CHARACTERS is the issue. What's available isn't really the topic.

I think the info Dav pulled brings up some interesting questions. Why aren't people using these weapons? My understanding is that flails/whips are terrible for parry but great at overcoming parry. Surely some of the awesome players would have determined they were viable if they were viable, or maybe everyone is so stuck on playing the meta that they aren't willing an able to try? I don't think my opinion is any good here, just asking the questions.

Solid change on request. Makes sense from a gameplay and rp perspective.

Xenyar, I honestly think you are just salty about the fact that you can't get me to fight you, and not about the gear. I am pretty sure that even if I am sitting on full forged + gambled + bought/witchcarved weapons, you will still get triggered because I choose not to play the game YOUR way. If I know that I can't win you, why would I be an idiot to throw myself against you who is obviously better than me in PK, and die for your enjoyment? I don't know why you would have this warped idea that everyone must be PKing with the equipment they have to enjoy the game? FFS, what do you enjoy most about diablo? Isn't it the sweet loot and your character looking pretty and seeing those damage numbers fly?

With all the data Davairus shared, you are still harping on only about me hoarding when the evidence points towards others who are hoarding the limited items worse than me. Yeah, maybe I am mistaken that you are taking a personal shot at me, since I "revealed" myself to become the target board in the first place. For the record, I voiced out on my own accord to open up the floor on this topic (since I had a history for hoarding), so that the rest of the community have the chance to also share their thoughts on what exactly is bothering them. With full disclosure, it was easier to blow this issue wide open for constructive discussions.

Sure, go get that Elundaris that you seem so fixated on when it returns to circulation, or whatever other rares you want. I am 100% supportive of these mythicals returning to the mobs. On the other hand, if I choose not to fight and there are no in-game/in-char obligations that forces me to do so, the choice lies with me. I'll be blunt, I do not play this game for anyone else's entertainment apart from my own.

thats unfairly villainizing ivindel. his characters have half the rares (at most) of any character in range, and he plays neutrals so he shouldnt be trash pk'ing everybody. also, just look again at the above examples and you can see there is plenty rare available. this isnt a big problem. It also isnt even illegal to hoard on neuts/evils. mythical change has already mitigated the top weapons and everything else is in circulation or has proveably ample alternatives many of which nobody is even using. someone else earlier posted there are way too many rares and I feel thats much closer to the truth than the highly exaggerated claim ivindel is hoarding everything. he should take away from this thread that he is burdened heavily with the amount of time this takes up and that the amount of available rares is making it so that it isnt giving him any extra advantage, or realistically possible to get there

Ivindel, I have seen somebody literally log off when they see a *hint* that they might have to fight as one of my characters came online when they were otherwise online for quite some time and other people in PK range were online. So it's not just Xenyar who's noticing characters not fighting them.

The issue, and I agree with Xenyar on this, is the sheer scope of the hoarding. For those who say Tenor is a necessity, it is absolutely not and while many people aim for it, I don't. (I feel it's not worth the effort since you become a PK magnet once you acquire the set or even the majority of the pieces).

With that said, there are some items which are never in or rarely in since Dav asked for examples. Some examples from the about the body slot:

Fine rain poncho;
Unmoving black cloak;
Marisa's gown of white samite (I consider it ridiculous to see most of the male characters who have it openly wearing it, or, as I saw years ago, referring to it as "a good item");

The spiked light-steel gauntlets from Aarngrim are rarely available for long and tend to be snapped up quickly if a pair suddenly becomes available.

Most of the lights with stats above +1/+1 hit/dam, +2 hitroll or +2 damroll (aside from the flame of the underworld and light of dawn) seem to get taken quickly (Angelus, orb of precision, lantern of the green flame, etc.)

It's difficult to find *any* level 50 rare gemstone for forging followed by engraving should you want to engrave forged armour into certain sets.

Also, the spiked mithril trident (which is one of the most effective weapons for most people when it comes to fighting drow) is often maxed out. The Centurion's polearm doesn't seem to make its way around very often either so the most easily obtained anti-drow weapons are generally not available. Worse yet, the silver-bladed katana from the sensei in the Barren Wilderness is generally not around.

I also spotted somebody with Durindel, the skythorn thunderblade, a frostbrand sword, AND a heron-marked blade the other day. Like, seriously? Why would anyone carry four rare swords unless they're hoarding?

As an aside, the immutable ioun was made non rare to enable consistent forging. It's readily available. To be fair there's certain people I don't enjoy fighting either, normally because they refuse to fight except on their terms and to their advantage(which is fine). Better to frustrate those guys by drawing them out and not playing their game.

Some of those weapons that are available are just kind of difficult to obtain. It isn't always easy to get a group together to go grab some avg 24 weapon, especially when there are other weapons just as good or better that you can solo in less than 5 minutes (forged war sword for example, again that I've never actually even seen before)

But you're right, there are tons of weapons. I don't often have a hard time getting weapons. Maybe not always the absolute god tier weapons, but serviceable weapons are abundant, I don't disagree at all.

To comment on segments, I think the reason they see less love is because the con of bad parry is just a bit too brutal. Especially because they are outright countered by shaft weapons, of which there is a fuck ton (5 weapons count as shaft, compared to only 2 blades). So you're just unlikely to often have a situation where you don't just look silly using a flail against a mace and getting curb stomped. They are particularly helpful when you're a fire giant or something and you know your enemy is gonna be using frostbrand and icicles, then you come in with that big flail. But otherwise they kind of ending up being too niche and easily countered.

I think I have to agree with Dav though, as I kind of felt from the beginning, I am not sure there is a huge lack of rares. Are there times when I cannot find the very specific rare I am looking for (major globe for example)? Oh absolutely all the time. But is there often something else I can get instead that is only marginally "worse"? Yes. Once I get into the upper levels, especially to 50, it is very rare that my character doesn't have a full kit of rares. Hence why I thought the average of 8 was low. Typically I have full rares, except for a forged or gambled piece or two. And typically I try to get more of those as time goes on, they just take ages to farm is all.

I think the strength of rare items is that they can do more than forged and gambled gear. Forged gear is pretty undeniable the best for getting one specific thing. 4 hitroll with no penalty and it has good AC? HOly shit. BUt rares can give you hitroll AND something else. Gambled gear again can give you lots of one thing, but it often has shitty or absent AC. Rares can give you hit and dam and AC. And so I think we've come to want the best of both worlds and therefore all of us are looking for the same few pieces. We all want BIS.

I think the info Dav pulled brings up some interesting questions. Why aren't people using these weapons? My understanding is that flails/whips are terrible for parry but great at overcoming parry.

I think it's the meta, which I've said before greatly favors fighters over spellcasters right now.
Going against a mage who's only defense is parry, you want something that overcomes parry so you can quickly burn them down. Parrying their attacks is less important because they don't do much autoattack damage.
Against a fighter though, it's much more important that you're able to parry their attacks, so you need a more defensive weapon.

I've been going through the graveyard and looking at PK stats. I'm seeing tons of fighter classes that have just been dominating the game, very few mages. Maybe this deserves its own thread but I'm still kind of convinced the power-creep of equipment/over-abundance of rares is greatly favoring fighters and leaving less equipment oriented classes behind.

Ashlyn, yes there are other gems but you can't ENGRAVE such forged items INTO SETS. It's not just the ioun, there's also the ruby teardrop from Redhorne and (if you're evil and don't mind potentially losing gear if/when a Knight purifies you) the witching stone in Grimforge.

My comment about rare gemstones was the general lack of availability overall, which makes it difficult to engrave into sets (which on the other hand increases competition and isn't a bad thing).

And I was specifically talking about engraving into sets (yes I'm aware there are other options for gems) in this case. Unless I am mistaken, you *NEED* a rare gem to forge an item that can be engraved. Note that I specifically said engraving in my previous post.

As for why people don't use flails/whips? There are very specific instances where I use a flail:

1. Double-gripping as a warrior (can't do that with any other segmented weapon);

2. Giant shamans do better with flails than whips due to the str vs dex component (though most of the time, a mace is better than both of these);

3. On rare occasions a flail is useful for a healer or DK;

The fact that flails are usually blunt attacks makes them less effective against giants and minotaurs unless you have a specialty weapon.

Whips are best as an offhand weapon - if you don't have dual parry or are focusing more on offense, a whip can be used instead of a dagger. But as a primary weapon, only an illusionist really has a reason to use one (and that's because it's one of the few weapons they *can* use).

Ivindel, I'm gonna create a character that I let get beat until I'm at the bottom of the PK charts. Then I'll go to a train at a scarecrow and wait for you to come attack me. That will GUARANTEE I get a fight out of you and all.

Also, nobody hoards on 18 characters that they try and keep forever, and lives in a safety bubble, avoiding most pk, and not engaging in the game or rp in any meaningful way... That's only you and only you. This whole conversation is primarily about you. Most everybody else that creates alts and gather rares, ends up letting them get purged. Nobody clings to 20% of the rares. Just you.
Just. You.

my original numbers were looking at player rares and not all rares. so for instance theres like 180 rare flails total, ivindel had 1 and everyone else had 5

I think we've been ignoring the elephant in the room and I've not even been addressing this directly - another problem I have with some of the hoarding I see is that I see no active attempts at engaging my characters with a number of people guilty of hoarding unless there is some obvious benefit they might gain from that interaction.

Put another way, I feel such characters add no value to the game and I could even compare them with parasites. Most places I know either discourage or actively make rules against deliberately scummy and toxic behavior.

Some people have mentioned before the ideas of tying bloodshed from PKing or boss fighting to item requirements for keeping, which might have some uses - though I feel that newcomers or returning players might not realize such an implementation occurred unless they were playing close attention.

We all know that having more players is nice, and keeping them, if they're having a positive impact on the game or community, is important for retention if not growth itself. But, with that said, tying the requirements to keep items in other ways than simply logging 16 hours (less if you PK/fight bosses) a month might be impactful and helpful. Maybe adding background entries (I would say once every three months or something this option becomes eligible) can increase your prestige and bloodshed if they're approved. Maybe gaining currency from another player could contribute. I'm just throwing out some other ideas while I'm thinking about them.

So ivindel holds one elundaris and it becomes a crime. Come again how long did kryton hold the blood filled voulge?

This logging off bullshit needs to stop. Everyone logs off on other PK characters. It's so normal you're going to have to deny 10 characters every day to enforce it. I wouldn't go challenge the top PK in red dragon gear. I'll get myself prepared and when I'm ready I'll fight him. That's how it is.

another problem I have with some of the hoarding I see is that I see no active attempts at engaging my characters with a number of people guilty of hoarding

Nobody is required to engage your characters and PK with them. That's actually a kind of narcissistic way of looking at the game. It doesn't revolve around you.

Put another way, I feel such characters add no value to the game and I could even compare them with parasites.

Other players don't exist to add value to the game for you either. Let people play the game they want to.

If you're really mad that you can't PK someone, the only advice I can give you is git gud. If you desperately want to kill someone and you're unable to track them down, that's a skill issue. Even guilds aren't safe, at level 50 a guild guardian is just a minor annoyance. I can tell you that against some of the best PKers in AR history, people weren't able to hide.

You're just mad that other people aren't laying themselves at your feet to be killed so you can get their rares for yourself? Grow up.

Isn't this just a redux of this with the same actors -

https://abandonedrealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11290&start=160&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=hoarding

Well, no. Some players in this thread are asserting there isn't an issue. Others are pretty vocally frustrated about it, and there are obviously battle lines drawn. Last time it was pretty obviously a massive problem.

The thing is, I would be fine with people not engaging with *my* characters but if they avoid *everyone* that's a definition of zero value. I don't care about PKing them for their rares either so much as the fact that they are literally dead weight and not contributing anything positive to the community or game. I literally don't care about whether I can PK them or not, I just care about them not doing anything of value and leeching from the game. Hence the term parasite.

It's one thing to be a Consortium member and pick up items along the way (Foggledonk has had one particular unique weapon for quite some time), and another to just pick up items and doing nothing but attempting to hold onto them at the expense of others.

Perhaps we should at least consider the carrot instead of the stick here?

Collection is a valid enjoyment vector for games. It seems like the game might be lacking rare sinks other than PK and hours purge. Maybe there just needs to be a more compelling reason to hand in your rares for the collector archetype of player.

Since we're hyper focused on Iv here, let's just ask him.

Iv, can you think of anything that would scratch the itch? Maybe rares for exotic lair stuff so your character has the most blinged out lair? Or a lair trophy case you can fill with a replica of everything you've handed in so you can collect them all and have a record of it?

Maybe there is nothing here. But it seems worth asking.

I've also heard an imprint / illusory idea before from somebody. Can't remember the details but I'm sure the person will pop up if it gets discussed.

It was something along the lines of "if you hold a rare for > 3 months you get an illusory copy of it that is rotdeath and the rare returns to the wild"

Scrynor, Mervindel said in their previous posts about this in the link I shared, that it was more of a game for him to log in and dodge people to keep the rares than playing the game. If AR was a game of keep away, then sure, but it's an rp/pk game.

Now, if you wanted to go the route of collecting, which is a thing people may like to do, maybe make "collectible" items of varying rarity and allow people to keep or trade them as they see fit. A complete set may give a custom title or tattoo or whatever. People could collect to their hearts content, there would be meaning for that collection and players could flex their niche skill, and items wouldn't be taken out of circulation.

Mervindel. Hah!

Alright. I'll join in on the rare hoarding collection then. Nice seeing Stiehl cry more on the forums. 10 hoarding char sounds like fun. Even better that i have found the perfect class to hoard rares with. This will be such a blast.

@ Merlandox

Sure, I had plenty of nice things on Kryton, and kept a lot of them a very long time....but, I fought EVERYBODY... I'm no voidwitch when it comes to RP, but I did engage in RP with any I interacted with. I didn't dodge people. Everybody had the chance to remove those items from me, and some did. Savanti full looted me. the Justice 2v1 full looted me. Losing equipment is part of the game for me. It doesn't bother me one bit to regain equipment(it use to anger me, but I matured out of that a long time ago). I thoroughly enjoy building sets, even after I get full looted. It's like a blank canvas for me. I like to hit certain goals with hit/dam, ac, health, etc.. But I always interact with the players and give them a fair shot at taking them from me.

If you find one of ivindels auto-pilot characters in game and send a tell, he'll respond cause he probably has triggers or whatever to interrupt and alert him. But, if you go stand next to him and use "the "say" command , he'll never respond or have any clue. I've followed his characters while they script, never to be acknowledged or responded to. This doesn't happen every time, but it certainly has happened/is happening.

Another thing is, most people don't full loot anymore. It seems everybody grabs a piece or two and moves on, or auctions off what they took so they player can get it back.

Kalist is right about it being liberating once you reach that level of not caring if you lose your equipment. It's so easy to gain back a solid set to go fight again. That's what's great about this game. I can lose it all and be ready to go again in short order.

AR has a cycle that's mostly worked for a long time. We create a main, we play our main. we create our alts, we get tired of that race/class and want to try something else. We let the alts purge, recirculating rares in the game. We get tired of our main and delete, letting rares circulate in the game. Create another main, play alts until tired of them, recirculate more rares. Rinse repeat. I'd be willing to wager a large sum that most everybody fits into this cycle. Then, there's Ivindel... takes a dump on the cycle, and clings to limited items like he'll never see them again. Now becasue of him new rules get put in place. Mythical weapons. I'm going to hate that. Unless you get to keep those weapons indefinitely based on pk bloodshed.

It seems like the imprint / illusory idea is really compatible with the mythical concept of people do end up hating mythical. It would let a highly successful character like a Kryton keep an illusory rotdeath version of his BIS weapons while also letting others get the real version of the same weapon to take him on on even footing.

One of the best things that has happened to me in this game was Pip making me choose between legion and other cabals when I made Dogran. Since then, I have only once had more than 1 50 at a time, and my other 50 has zero rares on it. It has been good for me to focus on one character, not worry about extra hours to keep stuff etc.

Whatever happened to gangbanging the guy with the best rares/uniques to liberate them because you couldn't beat him 1 on 1? Considering the amount of try-hard combined with the sadistic enjoyment people find in racking up kills, you'd think that would still be a thing.

Xenyar already stated how that wasn't possible based upon Invidox insta logging off if anyone logs on in their pk range.

No, that was in response to Scrynor wanting free copies of Kryton's weapons.

I have some further plans here, but just so theres no confusion, this does not look like the top priority it did so I am leaving ir for the next patch to help ensure we dont just knee jerk. I will update a couple rares that are big offenders now but more to come later on.

Lol Ashlyn, I do not want free copies of Kryton's weapons. I was saying that would allow Kryton to *keep* his mythical weapons instead of re-claim them ever month. Stop assigning agendas to people during brainstorming.

Was I mistaken?

"It would let a highly successful character like a Kryton keep an illusory rotdeath version of his BIS weapons while also letting others get the real version of the same weapon to take him on on even footing."

You're specifically petitioning to allow two copies of a unique weapon. What exactly is the point of having it return on a timer if he just gets to keep it? The only point I can surmise is to allow others to get a copy of that weapon. And what happens to them when the timer hits again, do they get to keep a copy too and the next person can go get it? The only way they'd lose the weapon in your scenario is to be taken down. Which was the whole point of my response.

Yes, you were mistaken. You completely ignored the "if people do end up hating mythical" and that I was responding to Kryton saying that all this thread did was result in a new mechanic (mythical) that he will hate.

Kryton put forward that a change was bad for active players. I mentioned how a previous idea (that isn't even mine) might combine with the change to mitigate that. Interactions like that is what makes these threads a brainstorming session.

Then you reply quasi-aggro with an assumption that I'm just out for personal gain. Like you do.

I know other people's hoarding creates a frustrating experience / hot topic but lets be respectful of each other in the forums, don't need more shit to be annoyed about.

Fair enough. Respectfully, I disagree with that idea(dupe weapons) for the reasons stated above.

The easiest way to solve this is transparency.

Which characters hold what rares and what account do they belong to. I for one play 1 character at a time. It may last a week, a month or 3 months but I will play the same character every single day. It is beyond frustrating that basic rares are never in. When I play at least 2 hours a day and never seen anyone with the rares I am looking for. I want to compete against the other people who play regularly.

If someone has their alt to hoard items that would be used against their main that should be a rules violation. If someone logs in 8 hours a month with their main during the friday night surge, wtf do you need rares for. I took a hiatus from the forum because I was banned and I just let it be after being unbanned. But I won't play this game until this equipment issue is solved. If you have 15 characters at lvl 50 and they all have 1 rare you are the problem. Because you certainly aren't playing them every day.

Can you imagine, coming to some game forums and you see a buncha vets are potty mouthing each other and other deplorables talking about how they are done playing? And imagine the developer responding to behavior like that and changing the game? I wouldn't play that game. Basically what I'm telling you is the cost of fixing it is not worth the benefit after that. So youre gonna be the reason nothing further gets done.

Before this page, issues that had been brought up are :-
* a guy having most of the rares (debunked)
* a guy having most the best rares (debunked)
* a guy having most of the weapons (debunked)
* a guy having most the best weapons (validated and addressed w/ mythic)
* storage character (took ages to even define, addressed via some shit made anti-neutral and update to "help request")
* specific slots of items with issues (i added a handful of new rares to relieve pressure on a few items that are popular but maxed)
* rares leaderboard was offered and basically not a well-liked idea
* some other action items pushed to patch because this all seems very knee-jerk

I said earlier, its obvious that there are a ton of rares available, but if you have specific items or item slots that are causing troubles, post them. I have addressed the one's that were posted, and I have done so thoughtfully and carefully such as to ensure that these items would not be easily added to anyone's repository. that offer stands. But there are other more important issues to address in AR than some guy butthurt that his titanic talisman got sacced. Like, noticing some AFK scripting is fine, report it and they get slain. Noticing and reporting a patern of "quitting out" is fine, report it and they get slain. However, stop stalking and outing each other's characters based on looking for their behavioral ticks. Stop going totally fucking OOC with caballed characters. And stop outing your own active character so obviously in fuckin' OOC logboard posts. That's an actual much bigger problem that I really cant help you much with. Have some pride in the game you spend time in. It doesn't suck, and try as they might one person can't do enough to make it suck.

The reason why nothing gets done here is because the expectation is just time. Play your character for a year and eventually you should be able to get the items you want. What you are endorsing is the long game and honestly thats why this game is empty most of the time except during peak surge hours and the beginning of every month when rares return.


So titanium tenors isn't in go forge equipment. Ok I go forge equipment. No decent rings, neckpieces, wrist pieces are available go get relics and spend gold. Ok 2k relics later quarter mill on jewlery and you end up up with less than optimal pieces. Oh no decent weapons available, well get the second tier shit and lets make due. I have a decent set feel good about what I have, but I know im weak on spell protection.

Oh now a vamp logs in or an illusionist logs in. Oh hey they bought a minus 12 mal/mental break ring invested less than 30k gold in that 2 pieces of armor and they can kill you with ease. As I am juggling the gambled items, shit weapons, decent forged armor pieces that took me about 10 hours of my real life to get. While it takes you 2 seconds to buy two rings and less than 4 minutes to kill me. Oh and then they decided to sacrifice critical equipment you need that you spent real time getting.

1 person invests a shit ton of time in their character and is still not competitive another spends less then 10 minutes and wins easy. So the solution is to what quit out or just wait for rares to come back.

A character that I have right now.

Of the 18 slots for equipment.

The basic slots you would wear magic protection Rings, neck, about waist.


SVS aff 79
SVS Mal 89
SVS ment 72

hit dam 29/32

So now if I swap out core armor for more savs my hit dam will probably be in the low 20s. And maybe I can boost my saves 20 more points. So aff 99 mal 109 ment 92 LOL 1 break ring im still fucked.

So that 1 guy who has a main character that isn't a vamp or a illusionist who wants to weaken the field knows this and weeds out potential threats with that trash character to save their main from getting killed. But sure I'll try and wait till the end of the month and hopefully better shit comes back so I can have fun and try to be competitive with my character.

ozaru I made some decisions based on spending these past three days to a week looking at data. Everything posted this thread is anecdotal. I have charts and graphs.

For instance, lights was brought up as a problem slot. I dont get it. there are enough rares to cover alts. orb of precision, lantern of green flame, rod of neutrality, blackened rose, elven globe, that alone comes out to be something like 28 rare lights. there is an additional 5 or so lights that are a step better than those too, and DOZENS that are a slight step down that nobody even uses. It seems like nearly everybody has a 3 hit or 3 dam light. What would be an appropriate number of lights with that much power and the amount of people playing would be 5-6, not 30. We have 30 because we have lots of identical gear with rarity set the same instead of adjusted for there being similar items. We are swimming in rare lights. There's a rod of neutrality on Szorbin right now with like 5 days left in the month. its a 3 dam light not even maxed out. why doesnt ividenl have that? if hes hoarding so hard. Things like this are clear evidence against these claims, and they recur across slots.

Lights aren't a problem slot. Finding suitable replacements for sets that give amazing bonuses are a problem. Tenors gives great ac, hit/dam, mental saves, increase con. Of course every class wants it.

Find suitable replacements for endgame weapons are a problem. Honestly if you made the forged armor a set I don't think anyone would complain. I have zero problem investing my time in this game if it is worth it. I have said this for years, why is my ability to play this game hampered by someone who logs in 4 times a month.

If you implemented the same thing for light armor where you sew it together and it gave a set bonus no one would complain.

If rares aren't in I should be able to make my own armor, make my own weapons and they should just as good if not better than the rare sets. If I gamble items I shouldn't be penalized by spending 1/4 million gold and 2k relics and not getting what I need.

Nothing is more deflating in this game than clearing blood faction, steel faction going back to the smuggler and getting jack shit. E You finally get the perfect group together you clear it before your wife gets pissed because you've been playing for 3 hours straight. Each group member got 1 rare YAY and minimal improvement from treant thews.

BTW right now the game truly favors spell casters. You can forge HP equipment and it seems earthen gambles just fall out so easily. You can buy a break ring with minimal investment.

------------------------------------------ \
/ |
| Hitroll: 44 Armor Vs Pierce: 288 Saving Throws |
| Off-H: 43 Vs Bash: 236 Afflictive: 49 |
| Damroll: 56 Vs Slash: 280 Maledictive: 40 |
| Off-H: 55 Vs Magic: 143 Mental: 55 |
\==========================================================-/
You are affected by the following:
Spell: enlarge : modifies hitroll by 3 for 15 hours
: modifies strength by 2 for 15 hours
: modifies constitution by 2 for 15 hours
: modifies size by 1 for 15 hours
Spell: flesh armor : modifies armor class by 20 for 24 hours
Spell: armor : modifies armor class by 20 for 23 hours
Skill: devote : lasts for 16 hours
Skill: warcry : modifies save vs afflictive by 7 for 7 hours
: modifies hitroll by 6 for 7 hours
Power:: vigilance : lasts for 12 hours
Set : Titanium Tenor : modifies damroll by 5 permanently
: modifies constitution by 5 permanently
: modifies save vs mental by 15 permanently
: modifies armor class by 40 permanently

That was my score with gulgru in my fight against afales.

|
| Armor Vs Pierce: 274 Saving Throws |
| Hitroll: 32 Vs Bash: 305 Afflictive: 40 |
| Damroll: 36 Vs Slash: 288 Maledictive: 44 |
| Vs Magic: 204 Mental: 40 |
\==========================================================-/
You are affected by the following:
Set : Treant Thews : modifies armor class by 21 permanently
: modifies health by 30 permanently
: modifies hitroll by 4 permanently
: modifies damroll by 4 permanently
: modifies strength by 4 permanently
: modifies constitution by 4 permanently




You are using:
<used as light> (Glowing) an elven globe of light
<worn on finger> a ring of the hierophant
<worn on finger> a ring of the hierophant
<worn around neck> (Humming) a collar fitted with cruel spikes
<worn around neck> (Humming) a cloak made of skin
<worn on head> Nothing.
<worn on ear> (Glowing) (Humming) a diamond earring
<worn on torso> overlapping plates of black armor
<worn on arms> superior thewed golden vambraces of perfection
<worn on hands> a pair of dark ironoak gauntlets
<worn on legs> (Humming) some black-tinged dragonscale legplates
<worn on feet> a pair of living ironwood boots
<worn as shield> (Glowing) a gem-studded golden buckler
<worn about body> a beautiful gown of white samite
<worn about waist> Nothing.
<worn around wrist> a living ironwood wrist guard
<worn around wrist> a living ironwood wrist guard
<wielded> (Glowing) an icy blue dagger
<stored in quiver> (Glowing) shafts of pure green light (20)
<floating nearby> a deep red stone
<behind shield> a set of wooden javelins (9)

This was my score with Filo add 4 hitroll for waist and I think 4 damroll for head piece. Pretty fucking big difference when end game armor is about vs not.

For God's Sake, Ozaru... Don't show the names of cabal powers when you copy-paste stuff from your previously logged output.

The data from Gulgru is invalid for reasons I'm not gonna bother mentioning.

Some theory crafting here, but I think the hit/dam numbers actually comes up pretty close. Every little point adds up.

Filo has total 32+36=68 points without head and waist
Headgear diff -> 10 points
Waist diff => 4 points
Non-enchanted icy blue dagger vs elundaris (4hit/7dam) -> 11 points

So assuming Filo is in the same cabal as Gulgru, Filo should be able to reach 93 points versus Gulgru's tenor setup of 100 points. This remaining gap of 7 points most likely can be closed by having 1 point more each from the light, 2 rings, 1 collar, floating, and from a mixture of other places. Overall, the base hit/dam between a duergar and halfling are actually quite similar in total points.

The gap is also largely attributed to treant thews having a significant dex sink (+dex armor needed) and being forced to wear boots, gauntlets, 2 wrists with only 2 points each. This is alleviated a little due to tenor only giving +5 dam while thews gives +4/+4 (overall 3 points more for thews). Just from a set comparison/analysis point of view, I don't really see tenor being that far ahead of thews, but I do hate that neutrals (especially chaotics) can only choose between tenor or thews. My take is that neutral chaotics are generally weaker in the hit/dam department if they are to compete against goods/evils or non-chaotic neutrals. This is also why I won't play neutral chaotics anymore.

Help vigilance, oh no the help file is blank. Justice helm has been outed by imms already. You can easily take out the justice helm stat from gulgru and replace it with a plus 4 forged piece. Really not much of a difference. But sadly you are missing the point. Let me spell it out for you.


Gulgru maximized every slot in the game because those items were available and as a davairus follower buying the neck pieces was easy.

With Filo those rares were not available and this was the best i could get. So even as a warlord with filo i max out fighting kryton with a frostbrand in main hand icy in offhand maybe im 38/43. thats still easily a 10 point difference. Ivendel I appreciate the effort with math, but remember thats what I had available. I tried gambling didn't get what I needed, I still needed to balance stats so thats what I am stuck with.

You are also taking this in a fighter vs fighter scenario vs just eq overall. Look at the sav throws in the 40's I would absolutely get destroyed by any mage/hybrid class.

My whole post has been about being competitive. Its one thing to lose to someone on equal footing, its another thing to lose to someone because you put the effort in but can't be competitive because of the restrictions of the game and how the players abuse it.

How about a Juggernaut feature where in a stun duel you can pay medals to wear the load out of one of the ranking PKers for that fight only?

Might be a fun handicapping system to let players take fights before they are geared and feel the difference between their setup and BIS.

Obviously, this reveals the top PKers load out. But is that really a problem? We know what people use.

(Just brainstorming things that might make the game more fun and get more fights happening)

You're also missing the point about why the data is invalid, Ozaru. The enlarge buff is no longer available for personal use unless you have an illusionist ally - and those affects did not show the addition of haste so it's not a valid data point.

Frenzy also adds hit/dam stats but at the cost of defense so if we wanted to theory craft the best hit/dam this is far from what you could achieve.

Also, Filo's affects did *not* include warcry whereas Gulgru's did so ivindel's analysis is slightly off.

I suppose the point I was trying to make is that, without the tenor set, I can still get good hit/dam with other sets (just not with treant thews), and those sets will still allow me to swap out slots to effectively get close to 110 saves in one particular branch, while maintaining somewhere around 70 points in hit/dam.

Ozzy, make a character and park him at rank 42. There's several decked characters sitting there. There's a guy with no pks and a full suit of tenor, I believe, in that range. Try to kill them before they quit out and you'll have all the equipment and weapons you can handle.

Now that you mention it there are a few people at 42 that have exactly 16 hours played for the month.....

If there was a main character tag, then increasing hour requirements for secondary, tertiary, etc characters to retain rares, may help reduce the hoarding issue.

Also, reading through the original Invin hoarding (multi-ing) issue that took nearly every significant rare out of circulation, it seemed that the initial reaction was he wasn't doing it. Defended several times. Then, after a seemingly expansive investigation by multiple imms, the determination was made that he was guilty.

I am NOT saying you didn't do your due diligence dav, but is it possible there is a deeper issue here?

Are there players maintaining multiple characters at rank 42 to hold items?

Ozaru, I'm not sure what kind of gambled equipment you are aiming for. Like a full 2 wrist, 2 neck and 2 rings of each piece giving 15 mal saves and 8 mental saves? Bro, if you can get 6 of those in 2k relics, please go buy powerball instead.

I never had any issues gambling for the wrist neck and rings. Law of large numbers, if you gamble enough you'll get it. I think the issue is you're aiming for the 0.1% chance gambled items and so it doesn't work like that. My character had like 4 storage bracelets of 4 dam -1hit wrists before i deleted. 4 dam -1 hit -1dex is so common. If you are mixing with rares it's easy to form a good set that is very similar to end game stats. And bro, i definitely gamble more than you. Ask dav to pull up my stat and I'll def smoke everyone in gambling for shit. I'm not kidding, so i can safely say i know the best stats for every slot that you can get gambling.

If you're grumbling about that 6 hit/dam making a difference in your fight, a good rng round will negate that difference. It's a matter of whether you can capitalize on the advantage when you have the rng on your side.

I gamble a lot because i want to min max but honestly, it wont change my fight much so I'm not complaining. Grinding for gear is also an endgame thing. If dav makes it obtainable at the snap of a finger, people complain there's no end game content. Make it difficult ppl complain it's too difficult to obtain end game gear. Guys come on.


Also why are you guys so hung up on the titanium tenor set? I managed to get higher hit/dam with other sets. I tested it, so what's the big deal?

I'm not hung up on tenor or any item. There's no item in this game that I NEED. On a fighter I'll be at least 40/40 in short order, with solid weapons. Honestly, relic weapons are plenty good. If I'm not competitive with 40/40 and those weapons, it's a me issue, not equipment issue. Yes, going pure hit/dam I can get better numbers without tenor. And you have more versatility with wearing saves equipment since you don't have to worry about keeping a set active. In general, that's why I prefer not to have sets.

What's nice about Tenor is it gives you 40ac, 15 mental, and 5 con...in addition to 5 damroll. That 5 con is sweet for being able to balance out the -con from wearing saves vs spells eq. That's a big mental and ac buff, too.

I'm a huge min/maxer, Merl. I love tweaking sets...THEN PUT IT ALL ON THE LINE FIGHTING EVERYBODY I CAN. Saying I have it means nothing. Showing what I can do with it....that's what counts. Win, lose or draw.

I don't wish to grind through literally every slot, but there is lots of equipment in the game. Its been pointed out that titanium tenor is not optimal, so I didn't bother pursuing any further relief for it. if you look at shape of the wraith set, you dont actually *need* its spider climbing slippers anymore. Instead, you can kill Crimmon, get the "wraith essence" and engrave a rare with that. Its also been possible to engrave forged gear for a while. We could add more essences, as needed. It is easy enough to not even need a reboot. Then as far as other set alternatives goes, there is the recently upgraded red fox, known now as "Vulpine Guile" which actually does a little mini-dodge, on any class. The stats are fine on the items and the AC is good, with no penalties. It doesnt have any heavy armor items, and it has lots of pieces so there's lots of room for engraving, no reason it shouldnt be viable at level 50.

ye gl with Crimmon slippers when Ozaru is on his drow ninja period. He has like 5 of them on his account

This thread is getting off topic and frankly out of hand.

So..

I am not sure what you do but.. I do know why I love this game. I think we all enjoy having cool and unique armor, and either having a good PK'i g record (mainly done for adrenaline and the element of risk), or having the encounters and interactions on the RP side of things...or both. And while I am not a fan of named weapons or unique weapons/armor fizzling out after 30 days, perhaps Dav's responses are best.

As time continues on, people debate, critique, socialize, and even throw shade, but there is usually a response from the IMP's that leaves everyone in some way shape or form happy. Now if we can learn yo be a little bit more constructive in all our advances, the game, not one person or the other, will benefit from it. Because we are all here for this game right?

And while I am not a fan of uniques disappearing, perhaps some can, with good reason. For example, if you die wielding the ruby-hilted dagger it kills you instead and crumbles. Leaving it unavailable until the next rare reboot. Adding different ways of things returning to the mob on rare reboot would be cool and interesting, but I don't think every item should return because we all work to gain those items and proudly enjoy them

Perhaps more weapons/armor would be best gained from class quests at 50 to gain a randomized special item for completing. Or armor, etc. like the windstone, firestone, and earthstones. Ritual spells required by 2-3 clerics/and or mages that require materials from winter bosses ir something abstract like the wisp portals (except extremely low chance to get, not rabbit population). I don't think nerding all the weapons is tasteful to a lot of us, but with our egos aside i think we got some pretty good ideas rolling

Also, you could just render them different colors

Is Ronk micro or ranix I can never remember

I mean like I'm not sure what to do, not what you do..for clarification.

Crafted armor/weapons should never be as good as the hardest to get items in the game, but maybe there are close seconds, or that one ultra rare way of crafting the sword of omens lol.

Also I agree people should put the armor and weapons to battle, put it to use, but some people don't play that way. On an evil you kill them. On a lighwalker thats kind of annoying when you're the only active Knight and your superiors have half of the best requestable armor. These are just examples. Ractor pretty much told me he was going to kill Pteroh if a certain item was gained, and I knew that, I wanted to get the item even more after that
The holy gangbang of doom only works with people playing, and you can't control how long or when someone plays. But I get on my thief and camp their guildhall. Or I can find a way with my invested character to make a bargain they cannot refuse

I was never catching Burroughs, and I knew that, so I started putting bugs in peoples ears
I made due with other items and did pretty decent. TLDR don't nerf all named weapons, expand rituals, have investments in your characters, and stop complaining so things will change in your favor. Have a bird's eye view

So, for mythical weapons. Its a good move for requested weapons, as there is no other way for good aligns to unload them from good aligns. If we want to tweak it so that getting a PK with evil weapons refreshes the timer, I mean sure, why not. I'm for that. Its just that in the other thread we landed on that being on a mourneblade-only thing, for starters.

Curious, who uses mourneblade?

Merlandox, *I* used Mourneblade for a while as Militha. I was giving Kryton a run for his money with it until he won a fight and took it away from me. If you can manage to kill ten people with it, you will now have a VERY strong weapon. I was actually dealing so much damage that concentrated attacks alone weren't enough for Kryton to gain an advantage against me.

Militha is correct. I was getting beat down. I was able to get the centurion's polearm and that's what made the difference in that victory. That was when silver vuln was around, not this pansy material weakness.

Mournblade is a great DK weapon, and generally a good counter to polearms.
I remember I had that blade way back in the day when I played Gorgite(fire warrior). Olyn vs Gorgite were epic, fun battles. Mournblade against the effigy. Battle of the giants. Ah, the good ole days....

You need to be level 50 to wear level 50 rares

That is an absolutely horrid suggestion ozaru, if that is what you were trying to do, BUT it gave me an idea. with level 50 gear we might actually benefit from a tiered system.

We could add a requirement of "prime hours" for the big ticket spiky steel items, earned by playing AR either at level 50 or in the gauntlet during surges/events. That also could go on a bi-weekly cadence so we've got a bit quicker turnover on that gear.

The pro's of such a system are:
- encourages participation during surges even more
- the best gear could be in the realm more frequently (since bi-weekly), and during the most populated times
- the quit mechanic is not as easily exploited since once you have been chased out of prime hours you can no longer gain meaningful minutes, i.e. essentially its forfeiting it to the eq purge
- easily met for a person with 1 character
- depending on # of hours needed, could be made impossible to have 10 "alt" characters and make attendance due to limitations on number of surges available, especially with cabal char 30 min logout wait
- entirely optional -> don't like it? just dont use winter stuff. go craft some dumb shit with about a a dex point worth of difference.

That plus rewarding bloodshed at the end of the month with some reputation w/ davairus (1 minute = 10 rep) I think I'd be content we did something for a bit. Not sure what is a good amount of hours so that would have to come from you guys unless I can figure out a way to just see what the players who play regularly are doing.

Davairus (the character not the moniker (probably)) is evil though and doesn't benefit good/neutral really as far as I know (if I'm wrong tell me and I'll delete). Could you incorporate something that would benefit good/neutrals as well?

I think tiered system makes sense. If the single person hoarding everything isn't empirically supported then forcing good items into circulation by pk by your system seems like a good alternative.

It reduces smuggler gambling prices I think Vertas. And yeah, there are other characters, its not singular.

I think the bloodshed reputation at end of month should go to whatever deity it is the person follows. You already have head stomping/crushing giving rep for you, let's give all the other deities/alumni some additional ways to earn rep.

how about earn stryth rep plus sovereigns (and that is the justice currency) then you can spend the sovereigns for armor enchantments