There is a fairly big debate (and a few of them at that) going on in EQ2 about the new Heirloom tag that’s being tried out on the test server. You can read the 7 pages (and counting) of comments over on the official site here.
Basically this allows players to trade items tagged as heirloom between their accounts to their alts. A fine example of this (and the one in question) is the void shards that people can currently quest for. These items are no trade – and can be seen as completely useless if you’re a hard core raider. There’s no reason for you to collect void shards, the gear is of no use to you.
Allowing you to trade them between your own account, lets you have a purpose for those shards. You can trade them to alts and gear them up while your main does the instances.
I’m actually for this change (for now at least). I think giving people a purpose to do those instances is a good idea. I think that if people get any more bored with running them (lack of reason to go etc) then it could prove disastrous for those of us who NEED that gear upgrade.
Just my two thoughts for now. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it as it gets tested and changes. It’ll be interesting to see what else is given the heirloom tag.
(As a note – these items can be placed in your shared bank)
Honestly I do not mind the heirloom tag on things like void shards but not on instance armour. With TSO I find myself PUG’ing alot with people I do not know. If no one NEEDS it for the current toon they are on but for an alt, how does one know they even have an alt? Maybe they are just lewt grabbers. I think it will cause a lot of avoidable disagreements among PUG players. Among guildies is another story but we cannot make that stipulation. /claim items sure, currencies like shards sure, instance armour bad idea.
Domino also indicated it is being applied to some tradeskill items — I’m hoping it’s on anything that has to be commissioned, but most especially the AA mirror and the Pudding items!
It’s a good idea for things like the void shards, that are currency for other things. It’d also be a good idea for things like /claim rewards that are meant to be one per account too, so that if you do change mains you can keep using those items. The tag on instance loot would be ok as long as it wasn’t on fabled I suppose, but I’m not convinced that’s a good idea.
It may get as much attention in game as the new hate changes, I guess we’ll see.
Well you know I am actually quite excited about the idea of being able to share some more pretties between my girls. Once Nanytya has been through instance zones for the aa – it would be nice to be able to go back to running my beloved Killy. I would still be putting the time in, and one of my girls will still benefit.
I can see that this will be fine if you have a good regular group of friends that you play with. If I am tanking on my Pally and Arisha brings an alt, I would have no prob defering on lewt for him to give to Arisha because she is his main girl. But imagine a PUG where not only are you rolling against your companions but also effectively their alts. I could see that this could take from some of the impetus to group with people you dont know if too many items are flagged this way.
I think almost all NO-TRADE items should be HEIRLOOM. I’d want to be able to move any item I have between characters. NO-TRADE is supposed to prevent things form entering the economy, but instead it just ends up frustrating me because, with my luck, the good monk drops always happen when I’m playing my defiler, and the defiler drops I want appear when I’m on my monk. HEIRLOOM removes the frustration of the latter case (to an extent, need vs greed would most likely have to be reconsidered), while still preventing these items from entering the economy.
To the extent that the job system complicates need vs greed, the general rule when I played FFXI was that you only need if you need it for your currently equipped class. But if no one needed it for their current class, needing it for an alternate job always won out over greed. So it was a sort of NEED vs need (for an alt) vs greed system.
My ideal game wouldn’t need HEIRLOOM tags though; I prefer the job style system a la Final Fantasy XI that makes alts unnecessary. You’d just have one character, wouldn’t need to repeat content (especially inane access quests) for multiple characters, and no trade can really mean no trade.
Crafting classes should work like the job system, where you could be both an alchemist and a provisioner, etc. Why make people log off and back on just to use a different skill set?