Item recharging is an exploit of game mechanics

[Brinkman]

I am sure this thread will be controversial, however I think it needs to be brought up.

First off, one thing needs to be said: Recharging items using vendors is classic, there is no question about it. There should be no argument on this subject.

What i am concerned about is the assumption that VI never intended for this to be able to be done, and it was a thorn in their side from day one. From what I understand it was a coding issue that they could not resolve.

Most changes to recharging items did not happen untill around 2002, and most of these changes were made because the staff of forbidden rites was being used to recover raid wipes and saving hours of CR from failed raid attemps, Killing risk vs reward in the raid game. It was also being used by monks and Necro's to " battle rez" players to be able to kill raid targets that guilds should have failed on.

To fix this problem they removed the staff from Lady Vox's drop table and made the vendor buyback price ( on this staff and other items ) absolutely insane. They did this because they had not yet figured out how make vendors tell the difference between number of charges on otherwise identical items. On Oct. 9, 2003 they made it to where vendors could finally tell the difference between item charges making recharging items impossible.

Again, I agree this is classic. My concern is that this is probably an unintended exploit that is being heavily abused here. On P99 we strive to be as classic as possible, however, we remove many things that were left on live for quite some time for balance reasons.

We remove quests that give too much experience for example, Quests that gave too much coin, tradeskills that make you a profit selling back to vendors, fixed pathing exploits etc etc. All of these are classic, but were removed for balance reasons.

Why anyone thinks its alright for a pure melee class to be able to Root, Lifetap, Bind affinity, invis, rez, gate, port, enduring breath, levitate, dispell is beyond me. Many of these items are instant cast which is even more unbalanced. The classes who actually get these spells have to sit there for 3-10 seconds casting. On top of that, some of these items are not lore, meaning people can carry around a backpack full of them ( root and invis.)

These charged items were most likely put in the game for flavor and to give players a few casts of something they cant normally do for fun. They were meant to be used up and tossed for the most part. The charges were added to keep game balance, and being able to recharge them destroys that.

We have already made changes once to a charged item ( ivandyrs hoop.) Adversly affecting its drop rate ( which is quite unfair to people who just want to quest for the item ) Do we really want to allow people to abuse these items until we slowly realize its making parts of the game trivial and fix them one by one?

This entire situation is compounded by the fact that on live a small percentage of the population knew about vender recharging. On P99 it seems nearly everyone knows about it, making the problem much worse.

I know this post will be heavily scrutinized, trolled, flamed. But I felt this needed to be brought it. Its a Real problem.

Start of edited portion below:

There is no proof that can be gathered at this time that completely proves VI was against item recharging but wrap your mind around this:

In situations like this, one can only use common sense to make an assumption ( opinion ). They started to make changes to recharing items as early as 2001, slowly changing the buyback prices of many charged items, patch after patch as they became aware of balance problems. This is a fact, the staff of forbidden rites buyback was changed well before the Crypt masters conjering stone was. Both were in patch notes.

They finally found a way to fix it, and implimented it. Breaking item recharging in 2003.
The fact that you cannot find any information on the internet ( including wayback searches ) from before 2001 about recharging items is a testament to how hush, hush everyone was about it.

And again, using common sense, if they intended item recharging, why would they require a player to own TWO of the items, make them have to sell it to an "empty" vendor in a certain order and then buy them back. This is cmplicated by the fact that lore items would cause even more issues. Why wouldnt they just put in a " recharge npc" instead.

Its all circumstantial, but all of it put together makes a very strong and compelling ( opinion ).

Its common sense and Logic. Item recharing just does not make sense.

If it sounds like a bug, and acts like a bug, it prolly is.

And bugs are not intended.

People using bugs in game mechanics are using exploits.