I've been considering how we can use items and I've got a few ideas. I've no idea how easy they would be to impliment but maybe one or two might work?

Fishing Items - Be they from the underground Fishing Pool or the Fishing game we get a few items from these places. What if they could be used when players go back to fish again? Example: I recently played fishing and got a silver fishing lure from it. What if I could use it to increase my chances of getting a better/rarer fish? Or something rare or maybe even retired. I know this may involve putting more items into the mix but if I could 'exchange' it for food or even a greater chance of finding that treasure I've been hunting for months I'll gladly give you all the lures, fishing rods and other stuff I've found. As for the underground and the fish we get from fishing, would it be possible to use them as bait? Example: We have a fleash eater and use it when we go to the Fishing Hole. We pull up a zombie arm. The fishing hole attendant cries out. "Ah! So THAT'S where it went. My thanks to you for finding it. It's not much but have X sp or an Alchamy token." That's an item used and encouragement to use more.

Recycle Beast - Possibly one of the most difficult ones to sort out. The random nature of the items selected for the Beast each day means that very few of them are so cheap everyone can get some points. I've seen a few ideas all asking for it to be easier to get recycle points and I do have an idea that might help. Each item has an avarage user shop value. Why not, for a day or two, have the Recycle Beast accept ANY item that has a very low user shop value. Now, I know this would be complicated as it's not on the previews so maybe just change his selection process so he selects items under X sp to be recycled for a day or two. It's the random nature of the selection that makes things hard to get RP and causes people to horde. Once everything is balanced out go back to a random collection of items. However if this just isn't viable, maybe the Pawn Shop can help.

Pawn Shop - It's pretty full most of the time and finding things in it has often proven to be tricky. How about connecting it to the Recycle Beast? Example: I put five items into the Pawn Shop. If, after a certain number of days, no one has bought them, the shop keeper will exchange them for Recylce Points. Of course he'll take his cut from the deal so I will only get, say, 3 points in total. But I've got points, the Pawn shop is emptying out and it's another way of removing unwanted items.

Crystal Shop - I really think the holiday items should be able to be fragged all year round. I've got a few and I tend to horde them in my vault so that I can frag them when they can be fragged. If I could do it whenever I wouldn't seek to hold on to them. Also, to encourage fragging, it might be worth updating the Crystal shop more frequently. It might mean setting the prices of the items in the Crystal Shop higher but if I know I have the chance of picking up a new minion, book, battle item, etc every week or so I'm going to start fragging more to have the crystals ready. Maybe have a rare/retired item one Friday of the month? To encourage players to catch it.

Minions - I love hording these little guys but all the hording in the world can't seem to stop the sheer number of them sitting in the shops. What if they could be played with by our pets? Now I don't mean in the sense of a toy. Rather make them a stat booster. So let's say I set my pet to play with a minion. Not the one attached to them, but one I have been given or bought. Said minion is being socalised. After a few days I take the minion to Maybel. She then takes the minion for a therapy program she's running or someone who needs a well trained minion. My pet will then get a random stat point for their work. The minion has been 'used' and my pet is now a little stronger. Jim is still more efficent for serious battlers but for the casual player this might be rather fun. It may be easier to be able to attach the minion to the pet for this. But if that's the route to take it, allow pets to have more than one minion slot. These can be earned by the pet growing older or having a minion of their own who is already fulled trained. No more than three slots though or it might get out of hand.

Furniture/clothes - We have sooo much of this stuff sitting around and unless it's asked for in a quest you may not be able to remove it. So what if Mauve/Esmerelda/Charity and the Lakeside Resort ran their own quests? Furniture and the like would go to the Lakeside Resort and either Mauve or Esmerelda or Charity could ask for the clothes. Or make a new character working at the donation corner looking for clothes for those who need them. They could give out meals made by Charity or a piece of clothing only they can make. I know this would mean more items but if they only offered these rare items once every 3-5 quests that's still a fair number of clothes removed from circulation.

These two sound like very bad ideas, because they actually ENCOURAGE hoarding! If we retire more items, then people will feel like they have to hoard because there's no other way to get those items again.

If we throw more event/unavailable items at the Recycle Beast, then they will become more rare.

In both cases, prices will rise and give a greater reward for hoarders, and we are less likely to have a stable market for any of the items.

What would actually discourage hoarding is: -Increasing restock rates so people can more often just buy what they need. -Putting more event items into permanent special shops (like we do for New Year, Valentine's, Vesnali, Antique Shop, Quest Shop, etc.) but not retiring them as happened with items from the Steamworks Menagerie. Then people will only buy the specific things that they want/need and be less compelled to grab one of everything plus spares. -Tweaking the quest system to throw out fewer items, instead moving more towards currencies like we have with Wiz Tokens, Blue Building Points and Quest Points. -Fundamentally changing site events like Morostide Trick-or-Treating (which for me has been the source of item glut). Reintroducing more old ToT items, rather than pumping out lots of new ones. -Move towards new kind of rewards that aren't item-based... We already have HA skins, exclusive pet species/colours, titles, pet treasure slots, pet stats, etc. -Making galleries potentially unlimited in size, but only through upgrades (similar to how Neopets does it). Those who care about huge galleries will pay it and it will be a great sP sink, but most people will save the sP and take more care in curating their collections.

There are a number of things that can be done to reduce space. Shops should be used for selling and unlimited and Galleries should not be used for selling and only collecting. Make a place for people to collect subeta items like minions - books - food etc. That you can remove. We have already had to put up with collecting plushies and beanbags that we basically can't touch after putting in the collection. We would not have so much stuff if we had somewhere to put it.

it does sound like a lot of these suggestions will increase hoarding, not actually lower it.

giving something useless a use = it will be wanted more = its value will go up

right when it gains a use, people will buy it up off of the shop search. it doesn't necessarily mean people had a stock of 3000 in their vault. when demand increases, prices go up and supply goes down?

ways to reduce the actual hoarding going on is to not have a shop or event where you can autorefresh to gain items. snowballs, free beers, a lot of holiday items... they all have this in common. even if you can frag or recycle them, there's still a bunch on the site because they were so easily obtainable. if people had to put in an ounce of effort to gain these items, there would be fewer of them.

now if you suddenly give all of these items a use, people actually profit from the hoarding they did and the lesson they learned is to do what they did last time, except more so, so they profit more.

Some of us hoard things on this site because we can't help it. I do it here so I don't do it so much in real life. It's not always about making a profit. It's about finding some way to have control somewhere in your life.

I know that has nothing to do with this, but I keep seeing all this 'stop encouraging hoarders' 'hoarding is bad' and God help me, it hurts to read. stop worrying about how to stop hoarding and focus on making what we collect easier to store, organize, or display.

Make getting TC slots easier, for example. What about a pet upgrade shop? Similar to battle experience pts? But for things like TC upgrades - A special quest asking for items that don't have a use, in exchange for points we can collect to buy a TC slot. I can't afford 100k for 1 slot, but I'd be willing to do, say 25 quests (that would cost less) to save up for an upgrade

Also - Euclid. How about instead of zapping our items into dust, the zapper just deletes them? Either way we're gonna lose the item. Do we really need more stinky dust? Can we frag or recycle dust? (I haven't tried. It's one of the few things I actually delete through quickstock.)

I'm with the users proposing:

1. Convert the minion zoo into an area to store and collect them.

2. Add an achievement/tracking to toys like there is for food and books.

3. Give ALL site items some kind of use. Whether it's consumable, used in collections, wearable, consumed in a new way, whatever. Either that, or create a new use for items like furniture. There's been some improvements there, like making instruments wearable.

Except, as the new changes currently stand...we can't. Even with a GA, I will not have enough shop/gallery space to display all of the collections I currently have, and none are complete. One can be moved to TC's if I go crazy buying Magical Keepsake boxes (which I have, admittedly been lax on). With the current limits, which is all we have to go on for the time being, that is an issue. I'm not even touching the headache that selling is going to become because honestly, I have no desire to buy a GA with either sP or $$. And there is still the unanswered (as far as I've seen) issue of the fact that a good number of users, myself included, have paid sP for extra galleries for them to be rendered useless with this new system. It's not so much the change I think that is the issue, but this fly by the seat of our pants thing that has everyone so antsy. When you're dealing with large hoards worth a crap-ton of sP that people are emotionally attached to, having a concrete plan would go a long way to quelling some of those fears.

My TC's are tied to my pets...they have collections of items that make sense (if only in my mind) when considering their personality, so using them the way I use Galleries now doesn't work for me. It's a valid way to collect certainly, but not a one size answer for all.

That all said, I realize this is a suggestion thread, so here's mine: I implore staff to find some other way to preserve galleries that are not tied to shops. Some other system, some place that works like a shop but isn't a shop, isn't in the shop search, but is a safe place to put our treasures. I don't know anything about coding, or the inner workings of pet sites, so technical description is not my strong suit. I'd personally prefer the gallery system to be something different and seperate from shops, I'm just not sure in what way.

In case no one brought it up...

If you limit shop items then users are going to start massively pawning items and too many items in the pawn shop could then start to bring down the site. Yes there will be duplicates but there will be an increase of non duplicates too.

I'm just trying to say what some users are saying...that fixing this shop problem only allocates it to another place.

I really want to reiterate putting the galleries on a separate system. If there IS no "price change"(and people already can't buy items from a gallery so what's the point of allowing pricing them anyway?) or quick activities like that, then it seems it wouldn't be a huge problem to have a lot of items in them. This is based on what's been said in the news.

Alternatively, we could lump them in with collections. I know someone mentioned a collection that contains every item on the site(sounds like a huge job though), but that idea has drawbacks too. Some people want to have THEMED galleries, for which you would need more than one. Also, MOST people want to be able to add and remove items, which you can't if it's a collection.

I don't mind the changes to the shops as much, and personally, I have small galleries. This doesn't even apply to me. The more important thing is that a LARGE number of people collect huge amounts of items for their galleries specifically, and this change is going to essentially remove that aspect of play. To me it feels a little bit like if you decided to change wardrobes to where you combine all the tabs into just "head" "torso" and "legs" but keep the 2 item wear limit. Sure it's still there, but it's so limited that it's not nearly as fun.

I understand that, but why isn't the possibility of having a separate system for galleries being addressed. They don't have to be "shops" but they should have the ability to move items in and out, like Pet TCs. I checked your Pet TCs and they are wonderful, but what about people who have item specific galleries that are much larger than your pets treasures? I have very good friend who has spent years building a wonderful gallery. All of her pets already have pet specific treasures and she has close to 3000 items in her gallery. What is she supposed to do with that? And unfortunately a lot of us are skeptical about when or how high the limits will be raised. Keith told us last summer that galleries would remain unlimited and now he says, "RE: My post about galleries - it goes back to me being silly about limits." I understand the need to fix the site limit shops, but not the drastic beginning.

I do understand your limitations and applaud you for your bravery in taking us on. I know this has to be beyond hard for you. I'm just hoping that the powers that be will read this board and be a little more forthcoming.

No, I just can't. I love and adore my multiples in my gallery. What's the point of having cute items on site if I can't collect multiples of them? I don't want to just see one of something that I love and others don't either. It's not a win all around at all.

The only thing I'd like to see is this whole site taken down for a while and re-written. The coding needs to be changed so that we can keep our unlimited galleries! XS

's post above makes a ton of sense.

One of the biggest problems is site events that reward hoarding and encourage auto-refreshing. It would be great not to have any more holiday/event/plot components like that moving forward.

They could: decrease treasure chest slot prices - users will actually put treasure in treasure chests instead of storing in galleries to be put in at a later date when they need to do it for site spoltight or whatever.

I honestly don't see the point of multiples. Like really. Plus it just puts xXXXXXX under the item, so what's the point?

If there is a way to have them not stacked, which I may have seen somewhere, that could be removed, to discourage having 100s of the same item.

I understand wanting a big gallery where you can put pretty items you like so you can find them easily, show your friends etc. But one of each seems sufficient.

Unless you want to buy a ton cheap so you can then send them out to friends when they become expensive or whatnot. But you can always keep extra copies in your vault.

Minion zoo. That is all I want, seriously :(

But actual suggestions, I agree with a lot of what has already been said

• Make quests stop giving out so many items. Seriously, By the time I am done with all of my quests, I have about 140 items which is like half of the shop limit in just one day! Make them so they ask you for 1 item only and they give you a 'chance' of getting an item back, sP and quest points are reward enough.

• Get rid of vending altogether. I do actually like vending but it introduces a massive amount of items daily into the site that is not really needed?

• Charge for shop/gallery increases - Something like 10k per space. 50k for 5 spaces, 100k for 10 spaces etc. People can increase their gallery as and when they need to but it discourages the people who want to keep 500k of one item. Want to keep 500k free beers in your gallery? Sure, but it's going to cost you like 5B, Will make people think again...

*Retire things like recycle beast, crystal shop etc. It encourages hoarding no matter how you look at it

it's something to do with our money. Take that away and we have nothing to do with it. Even unstacked I'd have a ton of items, so what's the point of that, either? I love having multiples of the same thing. It's fun seeing how many you can acquire. Not to mention it would greatly limit what friends could give you. If they know you love certain things, they sometimes want to give those things to you. Limiting galleries will affect them, too.

and it's NOT galleries that are the issue here, but the shops XS

I don't think recycle beast and crystal shop encourage hoarding. Because overall the items are going to get deleted. Having more items asked though does help.

Also the problem is, if quests give out less items and you can't vend, you can't sell as much. So the GAs become less attractive as you don't need to autoprice as much.

Well I mean, people can still get you wears, TC items and well, any item you don't already have in your gallery. That's what wishlists are for.

I'm personally more worried about the shops, but most people seem to be complaining about galleries more.

the reason people are worried about galleries over shops is because multiples of gallery items are the things people love to collect on here. Giving things for alternate purposes will not quench the want for things for their galleries. Even if they're the same things. Having them all just shoved into a vault or on a "Do Not Give, Just For Looks" section of a WL means nothing for collectors. Having only a single unique item for all galleries is one of the lowest blows that could ever be done to players.

You can see some of the reactions to the same unappealing (I'd use stronger language, but it goes against the Guidelines) suggestion thread here: No Multiples in Galleries