We’ve all been there. You are a Paladin enthusiast. It’s your favorite class. You just finished maxing a Paladin on your last character slot. You’ve got a generic tops set. You’ve been farming Pentaracts for weeks trying to get an oreo to complete your Paladin’s set. You see a Hermit God on your quest window while hunting Pentaracts. You arrive on the scene of the Hermit God event terrain and begin the fight alongside 84 other people who all teleported to you leaving the godlands empty so that nobody can teleport back after the Hermit dies. After several seconds of plowing through the Hermit God you see it… The elusive white bag containing the Helm of the Juggernaut. You’re ecstatic. You’re shocked. You’re… well… disappointed. It wasn’t that oreo you wanted. You don’t have another character slot to max a Warrior so that you can actually use the Jugg. You work full time at a pizza place in real life. You earn just enough to get by and pay rent. Realm gold is out of the question. Your Jugg must face the same fate as many other UT items, that is, rotting in your vault until your current character dies or until you get birthday money from your parents in a half a year when your birthday swings around.

Unfortunately, this happens all too often. I, personally, have never gotten an event white, but for the longest time I had two midnight stars sitting in my vault rotting away because I really disliked Ninja (until about a month ago when I tried to play the class again). As I said, we have all been there. We all have our classes that we like and those that we dislike. We all have tons of UTs sitting in our vault that will more than likely never be used because they’re for classes that we just really do not like to play. We’ve been hoping for years for another UT weekend so we can finally have our precious storage space back in our vault. It’s probably never going to come. I mean, don’t get me wrong. UT weekends were great back in the day but at this point there’s just so many items in the game that a UT weekend would probably be a bit of a train wreck and DECA’s servers would probably all collapse due to a broken aortic valve because there’s so many trades taking place.

So that gets me wondering… Why not just unsoulbound all items? You may think, “that’s crazy talk!” and I most certainly agree with you. I mean, take a look at all of the negative impacts that full on unsoulbounding all items would cause:

Real world traders would be able to have a constant source of income (a source of income that takes away from DECA’s own income)

The ST mystery boxes would be even more pointless than they already are as any of these ST items would be traded to dupers and then be duped to oblivion and there would be no reason to ever roll these mystery boxes

These two issues are directly caused by real world trading. However, there is one more issue that seems to be inevitable no matter how we go about unsoulbounding items and that is the following:

Players wouldn’t have to try in order to succeed in this game. They could sit in the trade server all day attempting to trade for items they need. They would never have to risk their characters.

Unfortunately, I do not see any sort of solution to this. That would really be the only consequence (that I can think of… there may be more, feel free to respond with other issues you might see) and honestly, being able to trade is meant to be part of the game so I do not really see too terrible of an issue with people trading to win.

All of these points leave me to the question, “How may we unsoulbound equipment in a way that would prevent real world traders from benefiting directly?” And I actually have a solution. One that would honestly feel like nothing has even changed in the game. One that would be fairly easy to program and establish as a feature in the game. One that only the players that put the most time into the game would be able to achieve.

Allow UT equipment, ST equipment, LH tops, etc. to be traded at the cost of a large sum of fame from both parties (both the seller and the buyer).

Now, you may be thinking at this point, “if you have to charge the seller fame as well then nobody is going to sell UTs.” This was the first thing I thought of when I first heard this, however, I feel as if this implementation would create a market where the rarer equipment (such as event whites or Lost Halls equipment) have an absolutely massive cost, let’s say 40 life for a Jugg, because of the fame cost that must come from both parties. If the seller and buyer both have to contribute 5000 fame in order to trade a Jugg, you would expect Jugg to sell for a very expensive cost like 40 life since the seller also has to deal with losing 5000 fame.

Another point I would like to tackle about it “not being worth trading” is that as the game currently stands, many players have plenty of extra fame sitting on their account as they have maxed or almost maxed pets and nothing to do with their fame. This fame could be used to sell the UTs that they have sitting in their vault currently.

Now, in regards to the RWT issue, this method of trading would force real world traders to fame farm an absurd amount if they actually plan to successfully dupe and sell items like Helm of the Juggernaut. At a cost of 5000 fame or more it honestly would not be worth it for real world traders to farm for. Not to mention, they would also have to find someone willing to buy it at the same time. What this whole fame cost does towards RWT is that it makes it so real world traders are unable to mass sell items. They can only sell them to other players one at a time as they continuously farm fame. By having the fame cost it sort of limits the amount of a certain item that may enter the market and thus retaining that item’s rarity.

As for aesthetics… I expect the fame cost for trading UTs to appear similarly to this:



And the trade window would notify you how much fame the trade would cost:



*The fame cost of Wyrmhide is just a placeholder value. The actual values would be up to DECA’s discretion. Values would change based on the rarity/demand of the individual item.

That’s it for now! In the future I’ll be updating this thread to contain what I suggest as the fame cost for each item. Please leave any comments, remarks, or changes that you thing should be made to the idea below!