Shattered Kingdoms

Jerinx container nerf idea plus Dulriks hoarding definition equals a bright new future. The latter takes care of the really heinous weapon/armor stuff, the former naturally takes care of consumables.

Once hoarders were identified, they could either be punished or dehoarded by the system using the systems suggested in this thread or any others, such as a combination of Finney's presence requirement and the formula I offered for calculating it. While I disagree with the PVP priorities in the posts of Jerinx and Finney, it's hard to deny the practical reality of their observations.

A hard item cap goes against every ideal espoused by the system. One thing about rules is that you sort of want to give people opportunities to identify themselves as disappointments, Inera, so that you can deal with them.

However, we could also define hoarding in a scaling matter. To be a hoarder, you would hold a significantly larger amount of certain kinds of equipment than other players. That can be calculated easily each month. See this formula for an example. Roughly 2/3 of characters will have scores between -1 and 1. 95% of characters will have scores between -2 and +2. That number can be used to flag characters for being problems.

Quality is not factored into your equation. No one cares if someone is hoarding all the Derk Thom's platinum suits.

My earlier formula for item loss factors in item scarcity in its probability of being lost, but that wouldn't be particularly appropriate in a character, rather than an item, measurement... It wasn't factored into Dulrik's, either, but you could add item quality in by only calculating average item level for items that are considered "hoard-worthy."

Perhaps only limited items would be calculated? That'd align with Dulrik's definition.

Item cap based on a value system like was proposed earlier. Each value has a limit set to it, you can hole 6 of one item to total the limit or 4 of one and 3 of a lesser to hit the same limit. Much like the system in place to limit the number of certain items.

That isn't even a complete sentence. What are you saying about it?

item cap = 60

items:
a=10
b=9
c=8
d=7

inventory <= 60

3a+3c=54 acceptable
7a = 70 not acceptable

Items are assigned a value and total value must not exceed item cap upon log out. If inventory exceeds cap upon log out, highest valued items are removed until inventory is less than or equal to cap.

I personally always saw hoarding as fitting into one of two camps:

A) People who hold onto items they cannot use.

B) People who hold onto items and do not engage with other players in any meaningful way, effectively taking the items out of the game.

I feel like these two behaviors are negative to the game, but that they should be dealt with in unique ways. For the first case, I feel like the dehoard requirements should be made more strict and check more often for items that are either cross-aura zap (That someone used a charm or something to put into a container), cross-aura scripted (faded holy light shield being hoarded by darkie sorcs for example), or are unable to be used by the person holding it. I believe that it should impossible, for example, for a priest to keep any wands in their inventory for over an IRL week. There are certainly legitimate reasons that people may hold onto such items (Recovering items from an enemy who killed an ally of yours, for example) but there should be a limit on how long items should be allowed to be kept out of the game. If you can't get in touch with the person that you're holding limited EQ for within a week it ought to be placed back into the game. Want to hold onto a set of heavy armor for a charm as a sorc? Buy some non-limited armor and enchant it up.

For the second group, which I've even been a part of just because of inactivity, I think that if there could be some metric to which "interactivity" could be measured it would be nice. Anyone can log in at 3 AM and sit in an inn without anyone else around. I would think that a combination of hours logged with other characters as well as in public places would be a better metric, although I'm not sure of what is honestly a good way to judge "presence" in the game from a coding perspective that doesn't have the same holes for abuse.

I'm not really a fan of tying hours only to inns, if only because it would put a bigger target on inns as a place to look for PK, and make any RP that happened in inns make people feel overall more apprehensive.

I also don't mind people having all the sickest loot in the game: Provided they can actually use it and aren't just storage characters.

Without getting too far into theory-crafting, I have the feeling that a metric of "presence" is already implemented in the game for a certain system. We could use a derivation of that system?

You have to watch penalizing people who have off hours or different time zones.

Oh yeah, totally. I'm talking about some pretty restrictive rules for dehoarding still, but I can think of a handful of deep-elf sorcs off the top of my head who would log on with quiet mode on, gather up loot, and then do nothing. They had dozens of high level items/weaponry/staves/scrolls/wands and didn't do anything at all with them. That sort of behavior needs to be curbed. SK is a multiplayer game, and if your only contribution is to take items out of the game, then you need to think of a better way to play.