"Hoarding Items" isn't something that we want to encourage. Giving all users a chance to get items, and making it harder to just run down and buy up thousands of items from user shops to hoard.

This limit is staying, although the mechanics might change (number of items, number of seconds cooldown, etc) if we find that it is too restrictive for most gameplay. For example, it shouldn't effect anyone who is doing regular quests.

We are also looking at making changes to the recycle beast (different item requests for each user, or other changes) to make it less required to hoard items in order to upsell other users :)

Hoarding to release back into the system is still hoarding, and this is a change to discourage that to ensure that everyone has access to items in the user shops. Like I said in the discord, this was an entirely valid way to play the game, and I'm putting up some changes to restrict that style of gameplay. I sincerely don't want you to take it as me saying that you're cheating or abusing the system, just that as the userbase gets smaller and smaller (natural for a game 18 years old) the amount of people who can create a buffer against that style of gameplay is reduced as well.

I'm going to continue tweaking the numbers to ensure that folks doing quests and going about regular business (and even some degree of buying up items, this adds a timer and cooldown, doesn't completely stop you from doing it!) don't hit it or feel any kind of pressure to buy slower.

I also said this in the discord, but these are bandaid steps to the larger issue of where items come from and how they're removed from the site.

The recycle beast and fragging were bandaids we applied years (.. 10+ years, omfg 🧓) ago that don't make much sense anymore.

An ❗ ENTIRELY HYPOTHETICAL CHANGE ❗could be something like:

• Reduce the number of items that are given as prizes from quests
• Create unique pools for each of the vending machines, remove those items from restocking or quest prize pools (and potentially shift them to needing some kind of special currency you get from quests, or just more sP)
• Generate a recycle beast request per user (or per user group, like we split up for morostide), that gives more recycle beast points with a cap per day
• Remove fragging entirely and have those prizes come from elsewhere

❗ AGAIN, I HAVE NOT WRITTEN A SINGLE LINE OF CODE FOR THE ABOVE ❗ but that is just an example of large ways that we can tweak the site to make less items flying out of the ether only to be fragged later.

Yes, understandable, I was waiting for some data, please read more of my response below.

Hello, all! Thank you for the input! First up, for people who are worried that you are doing a bad thing by using the Fragmentizer or the Recycle Beast, please don't feel guilty about using it! It is a feature to be used while it is up. We are eventually looking at changes but will post with more information when anything is actually tweaked or action is taken, and we don't want to act hastily. We realize it's going to require thought and planning and don't expect people to let things sit in the meantime.

However, long-term we'll phasing out features that involve hoarding of items because it is a LOT of strain on the database. In the announcement about moving items from inventory to vault when people haven't logged in for six months, I mentioned that the current programming system counts how many items there are in all inventories and then sorts for your account when loading any page that looks at inventory limit. This is also the case for other processes that involve stacks of items, the database has to make hundreds of changes when you buy an item from the user shops and move it into your shop, or when you buy lots of things and frag the batch, and all those little changes for buying/reselling take up a lot of database resources for very experience value relevant to the overall game for most users. There is also the separate issue of people deliberately underpricing to start a pattern with the autopricer, who were setting a low price and then spree-buying the undercut things. The timer addresses both of these issues and is helping, Keith has specifically tracked improvements in database management that will come in handy with spooky season and beyond! However, he is going to tweak the settings on the timer a bit and we hope that can improve the user experience.

We realize people are often buying out cheap things because a quicksell price point changed the market, or because someone deliberately set a low cost to snap up people using a site feature. That first thing, buying cheap items, is not something we want to be punitive on for various reasons, from the practical to the philosophical. It is a symptom of a problem, that we have too many items in the economy, and we need to find other ways to tackle that. The latter issue, however, someone maliciously underpricing to buy up the results themselves, we do want to address! However, due to the way the shop coding is structured, we can't immediately track it down. If you think someone is deliberately underpricing their items to snap up the cheaper price points on shop search, please file a ticket. We can investigate (carefully and thoroughly), and act from there through several methods, so you aren't just getting someone frozen off of a suspicion.

But! Please don't just report people for buying cheap things unless you think it's related to them manually pricing low beforehand and taking advantage of that. There are several ways to find cheap items; sorting by userprice in inventory or vault or item directory, for instance, or checking the lowest listed price under the 'current' field in your user shop, and people do use those to find fragging fodder. As well, we don't want to punish people who take the time to manually clean a shop out of lower price points to stop other users from being undercut when they autoprice.

Thank you for reading, and for speaking up. We'd wanted to track how the current tools were working before saying more, and I hope this has given you all some insight as to why we do what we do and reassured people that we don't blame anyone for using the various legacy systems that encouraged hoarding while we work on alternatives. We just need to manage those system impacts, and the timer has helped with that. We look forward to being able to use the database resources for holiday fun instead!

Yes, those are some good ones! The idea of having some quest givers ask for more items is something I'm also going to bring forward.

I'm bringing this topic back up to Keith as well as mentioning the player feedback in this thread (no more currencies, for instance, please), and asking for more information on his answer. If, for instance, it's helping server load or database speed, I want to be able to share that with y'all.

We're still looking over the suggestions and working on which ones would be feasible.

One of the issues with retiring some items from shops but still keeping some doesn’t really work, they just inflate. This would be especially true with, say, books or food. Plushies might also become very expensive especially once people realize there aren't more going out. Clearing shops more often might also have this issue and making questing harder/more expensive. Amber has the historical data and I'm asking her now how, for instance, retiring some rarities more than others might work, but it's delicate.

What's really needed for root cause is a revamp of how rarity and quests work overall, and that is something that has been drafted! For those who were doing battle tagging, for instance, you might have noticed that the rarity system on it looked different than the one currently used. That is because there is some back-end implementation in place. HOWEVER, it would not be a simple undertaking to actually roll it out. It would be something requiring a lot of time, follow-up, and reporting, and tweaking programming as needed, along with users adapting to a completely new system, and is definitely not something we'd be deploying around a holiday and, like I said, not something we want to be hasty on. It would also require more coding in general and Keith's day job is particularly busy right now. It wouldn't be fair or practical to users to do something completely new without all hands on, and in the meantime patches to the system bring their own problems.

As I mentioned in my previous paragraph, we are still working on this! Alterations to quests are also being discussed as part of the root cause fix, but we want to keep the continuity between intuitive use plus fun and practicality in any change and that is hard. This is not something we're ignoring, or leaving be out of malice or apathy. Trying to manage site items and economy is just a very vast undertaking with lots of ripple effects; 'move fast and break things' may be a favorite saying of Mark Zuckerberg, but it's not a philosophy staff likes because we really do value your experience and people having fun. We just need to figure out the best way to do it.

This was implemented with thought; Keith looked at various factors to conclude it was needed, including how protracted buying sprees affected the database. It was also chosen because it could be changed more easily than, say, unretiring items or fixing a quest back if something did more harm than good.

An adjustment has just been pushed, in terms of time and items! Please let us know if that helps.