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Originally Posted by SirBruce
Here's the design point -- if you don't really WANT or EXPECT players to pick up all broken items and run back to sell them in town with multiple trips, WHY have broken items at all? You can tweak the early quests to give newbies more cash. In the end, it's really just aesthics, the coolness of having the battlefield littered with all those broken bows and such. I'm not convinced that's really all that useful, but it's trivial enough to simply make it so broken items don't intercept mouseclicks and can't be picked up.
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Greetings:
From a design perspective, we made a decision early on that we wanted monsters that use equipment to drop the equipment they're actually using so that players can take it for themselves. This led to the problem of having tons of white (normal) equipment lying around after every battle, and a lot of it was the same, and people were gathering everything up to take it back to town and sell it. So, we invented the gray (broken, worn, rusted) category, dropped its sell value, and made it not show up on the default show items view. The message to players was intended to be "hey, you can pick this stuff up if you want, but it's not going to do you much good".
If we had made those items non-interactive, it would have broken the prior design rule of being able to pick up and use the equipment of monsters you defeated. And believe you me, when you see a monster using really cool equipment and you go over and kill them and get it for yourself, that's a really neat thing. Just last night, I was playing and I saw this skeleton dude using what looked like an icicle, and I immediately went over and killed him, so I could get the unique frost-axe from him.
In the big picture of things, I'd rather have players learn to disregard the gray items than forego the pleasure of spotting something cool, killing the guy using it, then using that equipment to kill his buddies with.
Ultimately, we can't really stop players from making decisions that make the game less fun; we can't stop you, for example, from standing in one place for hours, or from setting your brightness on your monitor so low you can't see anything, or from running naked into a boss fight. On the development side, we try to encourage players (with incentives) to do things that will be fun and to discourage them from doing things that won't, but really, it's all up to the player to decide how they want to play.
It's cool that people disagree on some of the design decisions. You're never going to make a game that everyone agrees on as the best possible design. We made our choices, and we know that some people will like them and some people won't. That's great. If everyone wanted the exact same thing, life would be less interesting.
Best,
Michael.