Ok, with a little more time to mull it over:

Shop Decay- This is a horrid idea. As has been mentioned, some things sit in shops for a while. Putting decay in would make much of this non-viable. Things like clothing, armour, jewelry. For a lot of these, going to a respective tradesperson is needlessly awkward. This doesn't even touch on the 1000 credit price tag, and people paying that to have a place to store things. And not to play the "think of the children" card, but adding immediately having to learn what sort of tradesperson has to be tracked down for each little element of surivial isn't going to help an already steep start up curve.

Shop Capacity Cap- This is the Occam's razor solution. Simple with a controllable result. The problem is determining how much is "fair". Honestly, it is hard to say, because everyone's answer is probably "well, as much as I want to use. That is fair, anything over that might be too much". The best way might be to find, say, arbitrarily, the 10 worst offenders, see if they are gross outliers, and talk to them directly. It really depends on the distribution- if 80% of total item stock is in a dozen or so stock rooms? There's the problem. Find if there's a funky distribution gap between the average stock room and the monsters.

Elaborate Super Plan A- Generally, the more complex a solution is, the more likely that there's going to be problems, loopholes, and unforseen costs and consequences involved. I don't want to be a big nay-sayer here, and some of the ideas are creative, but I'm a big believer in the law of unintended consequences.

How would that work? A a jeweler puts charges on a cube-like thing, and charges the buyer per charge? Those charges can be placed in shops, and the buyer would buy the ring from that charge? Then if private designs could be done like that as well, as long as there aren't weird commodities, that would be great as well.

Xiel:

I still like the idea of making designs open to the public through shops to negate shopkeepers making dozens of a single item. -urge-

I like this. The only reason I stock multiple iterations of a ring is because when I have a jeweller, I'm gonna use him while I can.

Allow drinking from kegs, umpteen vials are suddenly unnecessary. Yay!

Vadi:

Allow drinking from kegs, umpteen vials are suddenly unnecessary. Yay!

Hmm. Pros, fewer vials. Cons: The only reason to get vial runes is to get the double sips, and you'd basically have to get the vial-rune if you got the Great Rune of Spatial Glassworks. So it's unlikely to happen, even if it's completely code-viable (it does keep track of sips at the moment, after all).

Falcon:

How would that work? A a jeweler puts charges on a cube-like thing, and charges the buyer per charge? Those charges can be placed in shops, and the buyer would buy the ring from that charge? Then if private designs could be done like that as well, as long as there aren't weird commodities, that would be great as well.

I have no idea what you just said in that second and third sentence. The cubes are enchanted by enchanters, not jewelers, so that shops will just hold a cube of say, mercy that people can just buy the enchantment from and onto the accessory of their choice instead of shopkeepers stocking hundreds of single enchanted rings. 1 cube with 236 mercy charges > 236 different rings with single mercy charges.

Make it so that designs can just be sold from shops, not actual items. If people have the commodities in their inventory, they can get the design made for the cost access to the design was set at. If they don't have the commodities in their inventory, they can just buy the commodities from the shop if it stocks it. This'll lift the onus of finding commodities from the shopkeeper to the purchaser and would rid the unnecessary clots of single-charged rings currently floating around.

Xiel:

Make it so that designs can just be sold from shops, not actual items. If people have the commodities in their inventory, they can get the design made for the cost access to the design was set at. If they don't have the commodities in their inventory, they can just buy the commodities from the shop if it stocks it. This'll lift the onus of finding commodities from the shopkeeper to the purchaser and would rid the unnecessary clots of single-charged rings currently floating around.

I wouldn't want to completely remove the possibility of selling physical items though. If a ring, for instance, took a very rare commodity (i.e. corpse of Cthugglugglug, or whatever the Avatar of Illith is called), you might want to sell those rings at a premium price yourself instead of letting the corpse go to waste. It's a rare situation, to be sure, but it should be possible.

I like the idea of recharging enchants from a cube. Do it.

It would save on having to stock a billion pieces of jewelry with enchants.

The only reason to get a vial rune is if you want a particularly fancy perm vial. The spatial one is alright, but the vial doubling one is pretty useless.

Some people store their vials and such too, this would be very tedious. maybe make it so a bin can hold X items and nothing in a bin (PUT ITEM IN BIN#) decays. I would buy a bin just to have a spot to put my stuff.

I think it depends on the cap you institute, you might be asking people to pay for something they bought the shop to do. Telling people we are making your shop 1/10th as effective may alienate the merchants.

I had other ideas to cut down on database size by the way!

1) Remove the "distinctive mark" line from basically any item that is not an arty. Who cares who made a vial?

2) Allow a period where cartels can sell back slots for like 3K this will remove those items from the database and remove the ability they will be made in the future.

3) Remove weight from most items as well maybe? The weight can be added to the end of the desc if it is needed, otherwise I do not see a specific use of this attribute.

4) My earlier idea of making stockrooms destroy the item and store the quantity, this is what would have its price set.. along the lines of... Design: 12345 Quantity: 10 Price: 100 DecayBase: 60. and just create copies of the item when bought

5) Limit 200 item TYPE to a bin to go with the above.

Hope those help but I know some of the ideas here will make people unhappy they ever got shops and its a pricey arty.

@anisu: You cant store trophies, heads, or masks in stockrooms they still decay.

Malarious:

Some people store their vials and such too, this would be very tedious. maybe make it so a bin can hold X items and nothing in a bin (PUT ITEM IN BIN#) decays. I would buy a bin just to have a spot to put my stuff.

I think it depends on the cap you institute, you might be asking people to pay for something they bought the shop to do. Telling people we are making your shop 1/10th as effective may alienate the merchants.

I had other ideas to cut down on database size by the way!

1) Remove the "distinctive mark" line from basically any item that is not an arty. Who cares who made a vial?

I'm not sure how much that'd save, to be honest. It's likely just a two-byte pointer to a character.

Malarious:

2) Allow a period where cartels can sell back slots for like 3K this will remove those items from the database and remove the ability they will be made in the future.

Doubt this would have any effect. What would happen to the items of that type that already exists? Unless they're all destroyed, it would have no effect whatsoever.

Malarious:

3) Remove weight from most items as well maybe? The weight can be added to the end of the desc if it is needed, otherwise I do not see a specific use of this attribute.

Again, not sure it'd actually help much. Two bytes would likely mean little.

Malarious:

4) My earlier idea of making stockrooms destroy the item and store the quantity, this is what would have its price set.. along the lines of... Design: 12345 Quantity: 10 Price: 100 DecayBase: 60. and just create copies of the item when bought

This was already rejected, I believe, since it would remove all specific things from that item, such as decay time etc.

Malarious:

5) Limit 200 item TYPE to a bin to go with the above.

I wouldn't be against limiting items per bin instead of as a total among all bins. It would also fit well in with the dingbat artifact that adds bins to manse shops.

Malarious:

Hope those help but I know some of the ideas here will make people unhappy they ever got shops and its a pricey arty.

@anisu: You cant store trophies, heads, or masks in stockrooms they still decay.

Not sure if the idea of adding decay got canned - but having saved up for almost 3 months for a shop in my manse: if you put a decay time, I am going to be pretty ticked off. I have a manse shop for, other than the obvious reasons of selling, so I can save many old items that have sentimental value to me.

I think the closest we are to decay times are decay times for things that aren't priced. Which means you could price it and put it in a bin only you have access to. No decay, and no one can buy it.

Marks and weight really aren't the culprit of bloat. If you're going to look at data types, strings are what could really cause bloat but we've pretty much been able to get around that. It's the number of replicas that we really want to focus on.

Regarding buying items from shops based on designs (by either the buyer or seller having the comms), I just don't think can or will happen the more I think about it. Sorry!

I've been out of the game for a while, but I did used to be big into shops. I haven't gotten back into them for a variety of reasons, though it's mostly because cooking isn't really necessary at this point for 90% of the pbase and/or anyone that uses wetfold/kirigami, but even so, I've always kind of wondered about the issue of too many people putting out too much to sell.

Here's some item clot reducing ideas:

1. How about allowing jewelry items to hold multiple enchantments? There's always 10 charges minimum dedicated to a given enchantment, but you can mix and match however you want. So a necklace could hold 20 waterwalk charges and 10 waterbreath charges. Optionally, allow enchants to be groupable on a given item in some orderly fashion that is more restricted so as to ease the coding process. Like a brooch could hold mercy/perfection/kingdom/beauty, crowns could hold a full set of either the elemental or cosmic enchantments all at once, etc. This would cut down tremendously on the number of rings in game, as well as encourage more variety in other charge carrying enchantment vessels.

2. Increase the amount of space a given artisan item takes up in a given room, instead of increasing the commodity costs the next time around.

3. That glamrock thing allows you to make "coutures", so why not allow players to build an "ensemble" object? If possible, the ensemble can then be a single item that you carry/store in a cabinet, and simply holds all the names and descs of everything you are wearing. People still see everything you wear, and can see the full desc with LOOK AT ON , it just gets reduced to one object in your inventory instead of many. Packs and wearable containers may need to be exceptions depending on how code handles them. You could also sell ensembles whole!

4. Create new cooking items with multiple uses, or upgrade existing ones to work in this fashion. Like you can have a bowl with three scoops of ice cream, and each time you "eat" it, it reduces the scoop number by one, etc. Adjust comm costs as deemed appropriate.

5. Before placing a flat limit on objects in stockrooms, maybe try a limit on objects -not- created by craftsman (ie, don't bear a person's mark or come from a cartel). This would cut out a lot of the random nonsense like people keeping thousands of ears, flowers, or other such things, and place a moderate restriction on general craftables. This, coupled with a few of the above might be pretty potent on their own.

One other new idea I quickly thought of:

Allow powerstones to be riftable if they have 100%. If they get used, even partially, then they lose their ability to be rifted and must be used up in a month or two before they decay.

Powerstones seem to end up all over the place because people gemcut for specific gems more often than not. A person that wants a throne of solid onyx is going to generate a lot of other stuff in the meantime, and I feel like this is one of the ways artisan being so restrictively expensive comes back to bite us in the rear. Powerstones are always useful, but there's so many in the game now that we can't really use them up fast enough. If the rifting idea can't pan out, I suggest making them a lot more rare. Like, cut the probability for a powerstone in half.

Fionn:

1. How about allowing jewelry items to hold multiple enchantments? There's always 10 charges minimum dedicated to a given enchantment, but you can mix and match however you want. So a necklace could hold 20 waterwalk charges and 10 waterbreath charges. Optionally, allow enchants to be groupable on a given item in some orderly fashion that is more restricted so as to ease the coding process. Like a brooch could hold mercy/perfection/kingdom/beauty, crowns could hold a full set of either the elemental or cosmic enchantments all at once, etc. This would cut down tremendously on the number of rings in game, as well as encourage more variety in other charge carrying enchantment vessels.

I suggested something like this as an artifact some time ago, actually. Forgot about it until now though. I think it'd be easier to just have one pool of charges for all enchantments though, both implementation-wise and player-wise. And, without knowing anything about how items are stored in the database, it'd probably not take up too much data either, only four bytes to keep track of which enchantments an item has. But all in all, love this idea and would definitely like to see it implemented.

Perhaps a new flag to mark certain objects as "decay in stockroom". Certain things like ears, arms, legs etc while cool do not need to be saved up - and I would be fine if those sort of things were made to decay even while in shops.

Make everything that doesn't come out of a trade skill decay.

I hit back on my browser and it posted what i had put..... Delete this post?