Shattered Kingdoms

Easiest way is just to retire alts when you make new ones. I know I feel bad junking things that people took time to help me get enchant brew ect, but I do see how folks get upset. I do too. It goes the same when when folks hoard things that would kill their characters. Like me doing it with flaming ki straps when I am not a lighty and playing a centaur or someone doing it with sword of the damned. I do know that any code has limits and that Algorab has to do a lot of work to flesh out the truth. So thank you for your work Al and sorry to those that are slighted when I don't pass out loot to them. Hence why I will just stick to one character at a time. Or if enough people don't want me to play just make a poll and I will self ban. I got no problem with that.

As the OP said, this isn't really a 1-person problem, it's a game culture thing.

Just for the record, this is not Algorab's job. Also in case there are any misconceptions about how potions work, any of the good ones most likely will get automatically deleted when transferred between alts.

The issue with this type of activity probably cannot be corrected by staff actions or design implementations. For instance, there used to be a bug that people in the know abused for years to get Somnium's loot. Someone could logon with the set, junk it, then immediately logon with someone else, go to Teron, and get it again. Zero people reported this obvious exploit to the staff (and for all I know, some previous staff member could have created this intentionally - I can neither prove that nor rule that out based on how it worked and the information I have). But we ultimately found it and closed that loophole.

In addition to that, when I put the store room quest in, I also made it so that you actually have to beat (or get to) the bosses to use the features on their associated sets. Same with the shop's dragon scale set, and a few associated pieces elsewhere in the game (one of which, after years, still has not been found!). That prevented people from being able to roll a new character and immediately use the loot without doing any PvE. There are still a few shortcuts (intentional) to make this process easier, but they require at least some PvE and/or interaction. And yet, these types of issues still arise. If I restricted the suits to work only for the first person who wears them after the bosses are defeated, for instance, that would prevent the same set from getting shared around, but it would not prevent people from junking it to make it available for someone else who is organized and ready to go to the endgame zone in question right away. This means that decisions about whether any lines have been crossed will still ultimately come down to a Rules Manager making a call in situations where different players have different opinions on the issue.*

This same behavior was exhibited when the store room potions first went in. Why was it various people's instinct to bury the potions in the middle of nowhere, stash it in The Hideaway, logout from the other side of the hoop and leave the potions and the hoop there at that spot, or stick it all on tribunal guards? Many times people forget and leave something somewhere, but other times people do this intentionally. Anyway, now it's all timered because nobody feels like managing it 24/7. It's annoying. All of this kind of thing also wastes time. Yesterday I got roped into assisting on verifying whether various items were cleanly obtained instead of being able to work through the custom loot requests.

I would much rather implement more carrots and resort to fewer sticks with regard to reshaping game culture so that people do not feel incentivized to engage in this type of behavior, but it does require players to fundamentally want to be cool to all the other players, whether they're OOC friends or not. That is the impetus behind things like the Adventurer's Guild shortcuts. Those are tied to characters and not to any loot, so nobody can hoard your ability to use the shortcut to the Desert Spire or The Realm of the Clouds, for example. I think we have all, staff and players, made a lot of progress as a community in this department over the decades. Things are nowhere near as vindictive or mean-spirited as in the past. But obviously there is room for improvement, and there are things staff can implement and things players can do to continue to improve things. It's kind of a miracle this game is still up and running in 2021 to begin with. We may as well make it as good as we can.

*It is also fine by me as the game's area administrator if people who have taken the time to learn the more difficult and time-consuming elements of PvE, who repeatedly lead groups to those zones and often try to include a wide range of players when they go, more frequently end up with the best loot from those areas, provided everything is done on the level.

Most things that get flagged by code are dealt with automatically by the system which I prefer. To use the situation that precipitated this post as an example, a large number of items were removed automatically as the result of crash duping and previous handling, but because of the specifics of the situation it didn't clear all of them. It then requires direct involvement from staff to try and put together what happened from what information is available after the incident.



Depends on how that armor was on Jane for two months without being yanked. If you were logging sufficient hours, it's not really my concern how people decide to spend their free time as long as no rules are being broken. Plenty of people have a multitude of characters, and there is no rule against them having nice gear unless some other rule is being broken. It's the part where you're logging in just to maintain enough hours to hoard and hand the entire set to the third party that makes it a problem, not the idea that when you're actually done playing a character giving gear to other characters in your faction or orbit is somehow inherently bad.

Regardless, if you have a problem with how someone is behaving against the "spirit" of rules just report it via the form as already suggested, just be ready to explain it in a more clear and concise way than I'm generally capable of.

I would also like to state the obvious that what people do with their gear is their business (as long as they dont break the rules). Its their property and they can do however they choose to do with it even if someone else can better use it. Until its in your hands, there is no point in getting angry about what someone else has.

Also sometimes going down the rabbit isn't worth the effort.