It's called lively debate and discussion of theory...you don't have to participate, and you most certainly have no right to tell anyone to "leave it alone".

That is another problem suited for another discussion. The current discussion is about sinks. EDIT: Well, to be fair, it is about gear sharing, though I'm more interested in sinks. Oh noes, it seems we've hi-jacked this thead Heisen!

Discussing sinks without knowing about the whole economy as a context is rather difficult, I think. The construction of sinks also heavily relies on faucets, or how items enter the economy in the first place.

In the first months of Star Trek Online, this was a huge problem. The best end-game-gear could be acquired from NPC vendors for a certain currency, and it was rather cheap. Any Bind-on-Whatever mechanic is pointless when you can get as many items as you want without much effort.

On the other hand, if an item is so rare and difficult to get nobody will ever want to part with it, sinks possibly won't matter for that item whatsoever. In my first MMO, Ragnarok Online, there were weapons and armor called god items. Your guild had to hold several castles over long periods of time to collect the necessary ingredients to craft them, and some even required difficult quests after that. They were usually kept within the guild and traded from member to member, whoever could make the most use of it.

The item sink mechanic in Ragnarok Online was a failure chance for upgrades past a certain level. Nobody ever was foolish enough to upgrade a god item past the safety limit (I hope).

If STO had had an upgrade sink mechanic like RO at that time, the huge amount of available gear could have been countered. However, had there been Bind-on-Whatever mechanics in RO, most guilds wouldn't have bothered to create god items in the first place, because they had been too difficult to utilize in relation to the effort to make them.

What I meant to say is, there is probably no "best way" that fits every MMO.

I spent nearly 6 years playing CoX. I came in to the game just prior to the release of the faux-Romans. By that point, CoX had a matured recipe-crafting system for ability enhancements.

It took me a couple of years to really figure out how the system functioned, for a number of reasons: 1) the costs associated with buying the recipe sets (ie not having the cash as a new player to make uber-martial artist on day one), 2) no particular drive to make a min-max character, and 3) it just wasn't necessary for my play-style.

But once I'd accumulated enough cash to start playing with the base-building system and I had generated enough personal storage space for crafting materials, I started working on learning the ins and outs of tweaking characters builds via the crafting system.

The bind-to-character system CoX used for enhancements was a pain in the tuckus, to put it politely. If I made a mistake, I had to burn a horded respec to correct it. If I wanted to swap out one recipe set, I had to burn a respec. If I wanted to move an enhancement set from one character to another, I had to burn a respec.

Now, to be fair, my veteran status by the end provided a number of gifted respecs per character. The devs were fairly generous and provided a free respec per character with each major expansion, and you could earn 3 respecs for any one character via in-games quests. But before I reached that level of veteran's rewards, the recipe-enhancement system was work and not particularly fun work at that.

I'm hoping that Talaran's post indicates that bind-to- mechanics are either not used or at least significantly restricted. After playing Skyrim and having the freedom to swap/store/sell equipment as I please, anything less in ESO will feel artifical. Worse, bind-to- mechanics in ESO would severely restrict the devs's goal of allowing players to play wearing any armor/fight using any weapon.

Am I thrilled about a repair system? Not necessarily. But I'd prefer to a bind-to- mechanic.

This is an MMO, not a single player game, there are going to be restrictions on what is going to be able to be sold and bought and traded. Your respec thing does not work because the respec system is more similar to a point-buy abilify system than gear (of which CoX did not have as far as i am aware). Without the binding system, people will just buy all their gear and not bother doing anything, thus making them not have to work as hard to earn it.

That's a very good point. It's just as important to restrict the acquirability of items to prevent item inflation as it is to simply sink them. Though I can imagine it's a very fine line to walk, on one hand it will make items less accesible to lots of players but on the other hand it prevents item inflation. Though I personaly think god items should be hard to get and earned rather than simply traded for a quick buck. Making items hard to get and earned through teamwork will in turn prevent players from simply trading them away, because the hassle to get it is great enough for that guild/group of people to hold on to it rather than trade it to a random guy or alt. Or maybe I'm being a bit naive, I don't know.

But it's like you say, it depends on the game, no same solution works for every game.

Strange. The one of the issues in the other thread was there wouldn't be enough gear around.

If I have medium level super fantastic gear, and l level up and earn enough to get high level super fantastic gear, but I CAN'T SELL or give my medium stuff away, that is two sets of gear for my character. If I can sell it or give it to a guildmate or even the npc town guard, that is one set of gear I have for my character. The player who gets my gear wouldn't have to buy another set. So that would be overloading the server how? If I have to keep every weapon or piece of armor I use, *that* would overload the server with gear.