Can we have a skill in discernment that warns you when any vial in your inventory hits the 5 month left period?

Someone keeps bringing up an idea for the even better "decaylist" that lists all items in your inventory below a certain decay rate (and the months they have left.)

That'd be a good idea. I wrote a system to display potionlist in a nicer format (number of sips left in category) and tied into that a warning for any vial that is under a certain number of months.

Or at least, everything that decays at the same time gives you one single message rather than fifteen. (Had that happen before)

I have an idea! Let's make an ability that lists all your vials, including the months left and even what's in them and how much! We'll call it VialList!

It'd be nice, however, if this skill was much lower down in the skillset. Pipe/vial/magiclist shouldn't really be something that a new (poor) player has to give up guild skills to obtain.

I like these ideas.

One more thing that I've been wanting forever, so much so I might make my own topic for it, is for "potionlist" to accept arguments.

I want to be able to do "potionlist mending", and get a list of only vials that are holding mending.

Another of the good ideas I've had to implement myself via scripting.

This is true. It's one of those necessary things that could save new players a lot of hassle, and probably help retain them. Generally, things that are purely utilitarian in function shouldn't be so difficult to get here. Reducing the frustration/hassle of activities in game helps keep players.

I think the justification is that you don't need the skills to play the game, which is true. I have, in the past, designed systems that did almost the same thing as potionlist by running an INFO INV command, pulling out all the vials, PROBING them and extracting what's in them from the text. This did, however, lack the information of how many sips were in the vial, so I had to manually track that. Then again, from a mechanics standpoint, if everyone were doing this on a regular basis it may have a detramental effect on game bandwidth. Figure the INFO INV, plus 80 or so PROBEs, every time I wanted to check my status.

However, my personal feelings on this is that inventory management shouldn't be something you have to invest in. It's part of the game mechanic, and should be included for every player regardless of how much money they have to invest in credits. You can work around it. But, new characters are not going to invest that kind of time into writing a system for a game they don't know if they're going to stick with. Also, not everyone is willing to (or able to) invest that kind of effort into inventory management systems period.

Agreed, I've always thought it was ridiculous that pipelist/potionlist/etc were something you had to learn with lessons. It should just be something you can do, as much as checking your score or your stat is.

It just seems like something to fluff the discernment skill.

I've never actually felt like I needed potionlist at all. I've only ever used it for decay once or twice and for finding out which elixirs I have a few more times than that.

I've always just figured that it's the utilitarian abilities like these that drive many people to buy credits (in the game or out) just to make their game playing a little easier and more fun.

What we really need, though, is more abilities in several of the general use skills, and that in turn might push some of these abilities down the list and make them easier to reach.

That's always been my assumption as well, a vehicle to promote credit sales. That said, I still think they should simply be a part of the game mechanic (or, very low in the discernment skill).

People have already invested lessons to get up to PotionList (or even some like myself up to MagicList). Changing the skill to lower in discernment would make those lessons be a waste to some.

That being said, I'm always using PL and ML (and sometimes ClothesList) to check decay times, potion/enchantment amounts.

Actually moving skills down would mean you gain more skills for the same investment. That means you got more bang for your buck, not that you wasted them.

Oh how I love this argument. It's the great stagnater of IRE, standing in the way of all people and things which seek to balance or make right with the world.

This argument works in real life actually. See: Social Security