I think we should redo the system entirely.
Make them not degrade whatsoever, so that people actually want them.
Make them an order of magnitude more rare and difficult to get, so they actually serve as a status symbol. There should be like, 50-100 items max on a continent, maybe less. Give them bonuses beyond mere prestige by giving them all skill bonuses, and give them a wide variability in quality (so that the rarest items are things Kingdoms would go to war over).
I think the real allure of items is having a lot of history attached to them, a story, a wiki article, etc. High turnover shouldn't be something we're aiming for at all... When I got my first unique items on my advy I was pretty excited and wrote articles about how they were found, but when I found out they were basically just junk you used to get your reccs I was pretty bummed out and cancelled the character.
Obviously, to prevent item inflation, we would need some way to remove them (infrequently) from the system. Allowing people to send their items home as a family artifact for some sort of familial boost (+fame? +prestige to all characters, both current and new? I dunno.)
Alternatively, just have a set amount of items total, and allow them to be lost in battle and (re)found by advies.
The recommendations system would obviously need to be reworked if this were to go through.
