Un-attune & Re-attune items and gear

I wouldn't mind a gear unattune... as long as it ended up Heirloom rather than tradeable.
There would have to be some limits imposed for sure.

Some suggestions....we can either do...
* A limit how many times you can do it / item

or...

* Have a system like we do with AA respec, ie it gets more and more expensive. THen it reset. And you can only do it 3 times / month.

or...

* THe traveling society that comes to the cities 1 time / month has new skills and will sell a potion 1 potion / toon and only 1 time / per account / month.

Onodi@Guk wrote:

Well... first off, if any crafted gear could be unattuned it would hurt trade... not only that, but it would be unfair to outfitters versus scholars. Outfitters have to worry their goods will be resold, but scholars don't have to worry about it because nobody is asking for their expert scroll back once they upgrade it.

Other than that, if we're talking about heirloom drops in dungeons... You start just giving away old gear to new players and suddenly there's no more reason to play at all any more. You just take the whole purpose of having an alt away in the first place. I mean, if we're not playing to earn our rewards then what are we playing for? If you use it on one character it is USED. You can't just make it unused again so you can give it to someone else. Once something becomes used it depreciates in value, but instead of the depreciation you ask for a magic wand that restores the item to completely new and unused and restores its value to full.
Now I would endorse a way to turn in old gear for some kind of currency that would let you buy gear of lesser quality. For example, I wouldn't have a problem with selling T3 shard shard armor on player A in order to aquire T2 shard armor on player B, but just a magic get out of jail free card on gear doesn't belong in game.

It shouldnt work on crafted items ofc. and you shouldnt be able to sell it to other players.
There are loads of good gear out there that can be used again, and that is impossible to get because ppl just dont do the zones anymore

interesting argument (TheSpin) of it hurting the crafting market... not really sure how substantial that would be though i think that in gerneral the weapons/armor crarting market hasn't been the same since RoK anyway and that Vellious willl directly address that with their crafted required interaction to make the better gear of the expansion. money will be made via tips and people activly looking for work over letting a set of mastercrafted armor sit on the broker for potentially weeks before someone picks up a piece. As for dungeon crawling... people still do it to help others, marks for fabled items, colelction items, master drops there are plenty of reasons. Most of the time people greed on loot for alts anway so its a 6 to 1 chance of even getting an upgrade for them. I can't really see de-attuning hurting the heroitc content gouping.
another post (Kain-UK) i read if you de-attune something then it auotmatically becomes heirloom... great idea altough most pieces are heirloom these days... just prevents resale (what little selling there is of decent gear on the broker these days... outside of a few lore Fabled pieces from t9 instances and raids).
hasn't talked me out of it though its still a great idea... although i like the idea of doing away with attuned pretty much cross the board since we have heirloom now (i feel the attune system is antiquated... was appropriate for year 1 eq2 but we've changed) i figure we have better chance of SOE addopting it if we offer up SC purchasbale potions so they get a new revenue source (which we know they have a focus on). it will most likley come down to the money...

It is still a terrible idea. Being able to trade gear ad infinum is exactly why the ATTUNE mechanic was made in the first place: to put a stop to it.

it is not required to pass the items over and over again, but if SOE decides to change the stats of items completely like after the stat consolidation with SF it would have been nice to find the gear unattuned on logon. wearing all of a sudden healer gear which was before perfectly suited for brawlers kinda sucks.

Verrie77 wrote:

IMO, Verrie77 highlights points that completely trump all the naysayers' reasoning.

Bosconi wrote:

No, First off, why bother with the time to create the feature if it's only useable 1-3 times a month? Plus more importantly, how many features start out being really limited and slowly the limitations fade off. We started with research assistants one per account, now it's every character. We started with a handful of items on the marketplace, and now we have EQ2X. Let's just stop this 'slippery slope' before it becomes yet another avalanche.

mark my words ... they will make a SC potion (500-1000) which does this just to milk the regular servers

Crismorn wrote:

Except that it's not.
Believe it or not, but there was a time before we had shared banks and heirloom items. When a special item dropped off a mob, if it wasn't no-trade already, then it was either attunable - and thus could be sold on the market - or becomes no-trade once you equip it. If you decide "Hey, I really like this item. I want to give it to an alt so he can use it too", then you're out of luck because the item is now no trade, and thus you cannot twink your toon with it.

I NEVER said that Attuning was used to prevent *ALL FORMS OF TWINKING*. I said it was implimented to mainly prevent twinking.
Just because things have changed since then doesn't make it any less true. If you want to buy all your gear for your alt for when they get to the point that they can use it, then that's fine, but you couldn't hand down what you used to use just because you don't want to see it disposed of.
You know, the worst part is that if this thread was brought up back in 2004-2005, I would have no problem finding an article or developer post to reconfirm this.

Cusashorn wrote:

Dont be silly, everyone knows this game is nothing like it was 5-6 years ago and dam near every rule that was in place then no longer stands now.
There are alot of vaild conserns for both sides of the fence. As long as if they take all these concerns into consideration there is no reason they cant come up with a middle ground. If enough people ask for it and are willing to pay, it will happen. The last 3 years is proof of that.

Paill@Nagafen wrote:

Nah it doesn't really bust it. When you get the gear you have to think "do 'I' want to wear it or do I want to give it to another toon on my account?" To be honest I think the whole heirloom thing was more to simply make it easier for people rather than having to /camp <insert character name> if u were alt looting.
I do remember the good old days of EQ though when this wasn't an issue. There I am running through (I think) the Common Lands when up runs a lvl 50 monk. He says "hey I am quitting the game here" and gives me all the gear he was wearing, old gear that was in his bags etc. I can totally understand why attuneing came in because with NO effort on my part I suddenly had some of the best gear for that level.

Gisallo wrote:

Thats not what Cusashorn said. He never said one thing about "you have to think "do 'I' want to wear it or do I want to give it to another toon on my account?"
WTF are you smoking?
He said this
Cusashorn wrote:

which is 100% wrong, because heirloom allows you to do Exactly that........
So again...
Paill@Nagafen wrote:

There have been previous threads asking for various tradeskilled items which would allow the un-attuning process to occur. For instance, sages would make a scroll that would allow you to unscribe a spell, weaponsmiths and armorers would take the gear and weapons and remove the "customization" to your character making them useful to someone else that could have them customized, etc.
This could have been a good plat sink in the game if the primary components to make these removal types recipes were vendor sold only. That would give it a plat sink and allow sales by crafters to offset any reuse of an item.
But now that it has been asked for to be a SC item I am sure we will see it there instead, which will have no actual benefit to the in-game economy what-so-ever.
Maybe they will give us a way to exchange plat for SC, that might be interesting.

I remember when I bought parts of my gear for the Armorquest when I was lvl 20-25 mainly because it was to hard to go down alone in Crypt of Betrayl. None talked about that being wrong, it was perfectly normal.

Artemiz@The Bazaar wrote:

You make a very good point.
What if they did both?
What if it required a SC item and a Crafter item to unattune an item?
Maybe that would be a bit much? but it could help everyone to some degree.
I think the main things though is if they did this, if would have to make the item Heirloom if it wasnt already to prevent broker abuse.

It is a pain in the you-know-what to search these forums, let me tell you. The search engine constantly breaks. And so far I haven't been able to find old dev posts explaining the need for attuned gear.
However looking at very, very old posts it basically comes down to this:

• For a supply and demand based economy to work in a virtual world --- and let's face it, camping mobs for loot is part of supply and demand --- there has to be finite supply (items are essentially removed or limited from the supply via transmutation, attunement, item destruction, rare drop rate, to name a few).
  
• With unattuneable gear, the supply side of the equation can be virtually limitless, as the same items can be passed down from one player to another ad infinum, making it pointless to add new items to the supply. This is what we saw in EQ1 for many years (they've moved to an attune system), and what we saw with EQ2 at launch.
  • Given enough time, items prices will eventually bottom out to whatever NPCs will buy the items at. You see this now with a vast majority of common items like Advanced recipe books, because the demand for such items is far lower than the supply.
  • Granted, you don't see this evenly applied across the board, as there is always a demand for transmutables at all levels of play. The price for these items is dictated by both what the NPC will pay for them as well as their value once transmuted.
• With attuneable gear, it ensures a method of limiting item supply. Once an item is "consumed" (Attuned), it is removed f rom the supply. Thus, as more items are consumed, new items are necessary to replace

Also if I remember, the reason that instance loot is largely no-trade (Heirloom) in the first place is because the supply side of the equation cannot be controlled as easily as it can be for contested zones. At any given time you might have one, or perhaps two "The Hole" zones at one time, but you could have as many as 50 "Demitrik's Bastion" instances concurrently running. Thus the limiting factor for instance loot is how often any one character can run the instance (controlled via lockout timers), as well as the chance that any one item can drop (you only get one chance per instance to get a specific item to drop). Ditto for raid instances (it's very rare for any one person to be able to run a raid instance more than once per lockout timer cycle).

Cusashorn wrote:

Everything you said is still wrong

Xalmat wrote:

Honestly, the singlest largest thing, IMO, that causes MMO's to begin their decline is an economy out of balance. It happens to every one of them it seems.
They fail to employ a single person to monitor the sinks (things which take currency out of the game) and faucets (things which bring currency into the game) on a full time basis to ensure a balance. There are a lot of variables to consider in the construction and maintenance of a world economy and honestly, I have yet to see any gaming company do it well... yet.
RoK started the major decline of the in-game economy for EQ2 with the introduction of big plat drops and less and less sinks. TSO increased the faucets and again, decreased the sinks and SF is only continuing the model. Going on 3 years now we have had players stockpiling plat with less and less to spend it on EXCEPT the broker where price inflation has skyrocketed steadily. At level 70, masters could be found in decent amount with reasonable pricing. My conj pet masters were ungodly rare and I paid 75p for my mage pet, most masters were purchased for 2-10p at that time. In T8 masters steadily rose to the 50-100p average range and have stayed there since (the researchers brought the price down a bit but selling masters for 100-200p still is pretty easy). This is out of control inflation due to improper monitoring and gear is really the least of the worries.
Being able to unattune gear and reuse it (with a plat sink for this removal process) is not nearly as detrimental as dropping 6-30p in every instance zone where a decently geared group can run 6-10 of these in a night thus introducing 36-300p into the economy, per group. How many groups are being run on each server, each night? Get an empty weekend and you can introduce a thousand plat into the economy per group very easily. This does not account for trash drops which are also another faucet nor for chest drops which can result in broker sales and thus shuffle around more currency rather than remove it from the game.
This game needs some serious loving to its economic structure. There are a lot of little things that can add up to big sinks in the scheme of things and the faucets should be tuned down. My 2 coppers anyway.