De-Legro,
I have extensive experience with items from the noble side. I have a limited amount of experience from the advy side personally, but also have had advy characters explain to me quite a bit as well.
I have held an item for over a years time myself personally and got the item prestige up to +9, along with an extra state increase included in it. I know what I'm talking about and have experience in this area.
However, my statements are not that it isn't possible to operate under the current system. What I am saying is that the current system is not optimal. If Tom is seeking to find changes for the item system (with things such as creating armors), then I think one change should be that Unique Items don't degrade, OR they are easy to repair (but perhaps highly expensive). Maybe even phase out the adventurers some in this regard. I don't know. What I do know, is that under a new system, items could gain a greater status of importance, and if you remove the work (on the player side), but increase the value on the game side of the items (in actuallity, or simply by making them easier to keep) you will increase their usage and importance.
Have you had a new item with the new durability changes? Cause that is exactly what they aimed to do, and I believe are relatively recent. If items last longer, the work required is reduced yes? Once people are actually providing feedback on the change, then we can examine if the change fixed the problem, if further tweaks to durability are needed or if the system needs to be rethought. There is little point to changing the system as is until it is determined that the most recent changes haven't had the intended effect.
If you haven't played as a advy, are you really all that confident in saying they are hard to repair? I certainly can't say much because I haven't tried repairing under the new system. Under the old system I never found it that hard, but then I spent considerable time gathering, so when I needed to repair something I had damn good chances of having the items and I was part of a advy group, so if I didn't have the items someone close by probably did. The new sage code means I can't really comment now, cause I have little experience with how easy/hard it is to find sages.
