I've never seen a topic on something like this so forgive me if I've overlooked it. What about adding a feature in the DBG store where you could purchase a key for 250 cash that would flag a no drop item heirloom after 2 expansions? The old no drop gear sitting in banks could then be used for alts. As of now they are only good for placement in guild halls right? I've never done housing in EQ but assume it's similar to EQ2. Just a thought. Seems like it would boost DBG store sales. Even make it a 1 time use heirloom , in other words you can flag it to put in shared bank once, but have to flag it everything you do it. I would love the ability to hand old raid gear to my alt.
codewise I don't see that as being feasible. Heirloom is an item flag so it has to be the same across all servers/players and is immutable. Items don't intrinsically know which expansion they are from either, so trying to make it change based on that would require a significant code change too. If items could change based on expansion, I'd wager a lot of spell scrolls would be No Trade (as they were when they were new) until they become researchable. On the topic of Heirloom, I always thought it would be interesting to see a server which used the FV flag but instead of making it tradable it made everything heirloom. Call it an Alt-friendly server.
I don't say "impossible" because our code team is brilliant. That said, it would take a refactor of how item data is stored... and THAT is not in any way a trivial thing, and might cost us way more than we would make on such a thing. It might not. And additional "Cost" to this is, as mentioned, the "expansion" of items for the first 20 or so expansions (including original in that 20, though it's not an expansion) is not data that is ON the item anywhere. (See the trouble we have getting items available/not available in era) Getting that data onto items is a monumental design task. We do have a data field for it (not visible to players) but, it's "Blank" for all items made before we added it (EoK I think?) and even then, it's not always used wisely (I abused the heck out of it for the TBL evolving items) Don't forget "Opportunity Cost" when you think of how expensive this is. That's the time we don't spend on something else that may also make money to make this. So we loose the opportunity of that money. It's a real thing in business, and people with real business degrees (Mine was CS, so I only had an entry in an economics text book to go on) could explain it better. Finally. We don't want to do this. We put heirloom on items that we want players to trade around their characters.
Thanks for taking time to explain it, stuff like that makes it easier to formulate reasonable requests, the more you know etc.
I think the easier answer here is to simply add a run once routine with each new expansion, that simply adds the heirloom tag to all No Trade items from the 4th expansion previous to the current one. Example... TOV would have added Heirloom to TBM items.
i would enjoy if Heirloom were transferable across toons (or able to bring to the /claim window)... i have a bunch on my OG toon on a live server.... that i would love to move to my TLP.. that i would pay for right now!
