>Of course the meta-issue that causes this problem in the first
>place is that Verant hasn't realized they need better money
>sinks, and some type of item sink. Stuff needs to wear out
>and be consumed, otherwise a year or two down the road, we're
>going to need a world reset.
>
>--
>John H. Kim
>kim@...
>
I'm not sure it'll take that long, by a large margin. The number
of plats and items in a world (take Povar, one of the original
servers) doesn't grow linearly, until bulk of the population settles
on one level. Lets throw some made up numbers out. If the
pop. mean levels out at 30, and the std deviation is, say 5 levels,
then 95% of the population will be 20-40. There is a LOT of
plat and magic items available to those levels. Now, Verant said
6 mo. of playing would take a player to 50. Given how wrong
they were, it seem likely to me that the pop. mean will level off at
a fairly high level well before the expansion, then just keep generating
plats and items, devaluing them until you simply won't see level
10's without full banded and nice toys.
I think this is especially true of servers that were up from the start,
as there were tremendous money exploits that people took
advantage of to become master smiths, tremendously devaluing
banded armor.
Also, that proliferation of high level, cheap loot will destroy any
usefulness that smithing and jewelcraft currently hold. Forget
adding features to these skills (smithing weapons, magic weapons
and armor) as there will simply be no place for them in the
player economy.
I really think that there not only needs to be item and money
sinks, but harder level limits on magic items. I'd also prefer to
see any magic weapon worth anything be useable by one
player only (like the no-drop what-zit 7/21 sword). Personally
I think they should have put an owner field on the weapons,
and the first person who kills something with it is the only
one able to equip it. This allows banking it, as well as having
a friend recover it from your corpse.
Seeing how easy it was for me to get my shaman to 6th
in a completely new zone, with no twinking, I think that
the next server that comes on-line, I'll start a new char
there. At least some of the over-abundance of powerful
item will be eliminated, as the worst exploits have been
removed (I hope)