Having read Cilwand's post about eq naming as the "most evil thing" ever
coded, I, as one of the wizards who did _not_ code it, have an alternate quiz
in mind.

1) Reincarnation is expensive, costing highbies millions of gold. <yes/no>
2) While a highbie might want to keep the "best" eq, he might not have any
issues selling "good" eq. <yes/no>
3) While a highbie party might struggle against the toughest monsters, they
can kill strong monsters with considerably more ease. <yes/no>
4) A player earning money at the rate of 500 gold per HOUR still makes 1M gold
in about 3 months. <yes/no>
5) Making at least 500 gold per hour can be done by soloing bunnies (or
monsters of similar strength) at low levels. <yes/no>
6) A highbie could kill a strong monster with good eq and sell it to a newbie
killing bunnies to greatly finance his reinc. <yes/no>
7) If highbies thought they could get large sums of cash from monsters they
could easily kill, even if they never had any intention of using the eq
themselves, they would do so, and sell the results to players who were far
weaker than the monster with the eq. They would also do so routinely,
"eqraping" as it were. <yes/no>

You can add one point per yes if you want, but I think I've made my point.
Regardless of how you may or may not feel about the eq naming system, the
previous system involved almost nobody making their own eq (there wasn't much
point, if you could get the cash with such minimal effort) and all monsters
were being slaughtered by players far stronger than they were meant to fight.
Under the eq naming system,

-- anything you make is yours indefinitely, barring such rare situations as
disint or no-restore-crash.
-- eq you make has better stats (ask around, it's true) making it better than
the next level up of eq that you bought
-- yes, the [sales] channel has taken a hit, but that was kind of the point.
It may have gone from "everyone buys their eq" to "everyone makes their eq",
but if I had to pick one extreme over the other, I'd pick the one involving
violence. This isn't MerchantMUD, after all.

As for naming vs. eqraping -- I'll admit, if a party of 9 (say, an eq ss+)
wanted to each have their own eq from the same monster, they would need to
wait a while since the monster's antirape would kick in. This is true, but
most organized ss+'s that I know of work out an eq sharing system. After all,
does the party really need 9 mega-azes of uberdeath? How many tanks do they
have?

EQ is the life of this mud and the wizards are always looking into how it is
done. Really. We are open to suggestions, but "I don't agree therefore it is
stupid and evil" is not a suggestion. It is whining. And it lacks dignity.

Shinarae Lluminus