Shattered Kingdoms

Honestly -

As the details are worked out to improve the knowledge the average player has to find this loot in the first place and the mechanics to fight...

I think the hoarding problem is just a symptom of the lopdittle the game seems to be in, and not the root cause.

Why do the same people seem to get the same gear? Because they are the ones who know 1) where to find it, 2) how to get it, 3) how to fight to keep it.
Get more people knowing the game, and they can better self govern. Focus there first.

Improving the # of players, and improving the transparency of the game will go a long way toward balancing out this aspect of it.
There will actually be more players able to compete.

As an aside - If there's really an issue of people just hiding in their bat-cave and this is a cabal-hoarding problem - don't count time toward thief safety if in the headquarters.
That shouldn't be too hard a thing to tweak.

I'm not wanting to see a lot of effort wasted on a minority of characters, when other things could be done to aid the majority of players to get to a level they can just compete for the items.

Would it be possible to code only allowing one of a particular item to be carried by a player at a time? If that were possible, you could allow more of a powerful scroll or potion to exist without worrying about someone carrying 5 of them at once.

Here is a separate thought I had: what if you could only junk items you can actually pick up?

That wouldn't solve all the problems, but it is a rather elegant method to help with anti-hoarding some of the consumables...
Although it probably should not apply to ammo.

When staves got their charges nerfed, people just held onto more staves. I think even in this thread people justify carrying 4 sanctuary staves because they each have so few charges.


It's an interesting idea.

Is this really what you're going for as far as the design re: potions, scrolls, etc? I'm one of the current "worst offenders" as far as making a point of running around buying up powerful scrolls and potions for me and my allies to use, but I can't really see how it's reasonable to limit people to one of each of those items. If you do decide to go this route, consider a higher limit than one. Brewing and scribing can be annoying enough as is, especially with a low player count.

If some more things were more available or easier to find there'd be less point hoarding.
I don't really mind if some staves have only 1-2 charges of say water breathing, for example.

People wouldn't feel it so 'necessary' to hoard things, when there are things they can at least obtain, use, earn some cash, spend some cash, and repeat.

Brewing and scribing are another 'how would this work' situation. If you normally get all your (limited) flasks from the same place, should you only be able to keep one of those, regardless of spell imbued in it? Or only keep one of each type of spell imbued? It gets more complicated with scrolls. Is a 'sleep, finger of death, petrification' scroll the same as a 'finger of death, sleep, petrification' scroll? (The complexity of keeping track of this on logout is starting to scale up rapidly.)

I've made no decisions about any of this, but I'm curious for more feedback on the possibility.

I really don't think consumables like vials and scrolls should be subject to this sort of thing. Items that can only be made by staff like wands, or staves? Maybe, but not player-crafted consumables.

Scrolls fall into this category, I know of a handful of store bought scrolls that are hoarded because they are very useful.

If the item was wholly crafted, then I would agree. But the base scroll/flask is often a limited item in itself. The high level ones are capable of holding the strongest spells. So these are something that are capable of being 'hoarded' with the argument that it will 'reduce the potential power of my enemies'. (An argument which I don't particularly like, but appears to be ingrained.)