I am not concerned with individual playstyles, but the quality of the MMO as a whole. Giving reagents alternative sources only makes them more plentiful. Increasing their need gives reagent harvesting more value. Just because reagents could be gathered through fishing or gardening in this hypothetical idea doesn't mean you would need to fish or garden so you can use magery - it means that another player that enjoys fishing or gardening could harvest these resources, and then you could purchase them from him in larger quantities instead of dealing with the NPC vendors, thus contributing to a more active MMO economy.
Casting a spell consumes certain reagents. Why? What is the purpose for having this rule in a game? What value does having it bring? And if a shortcut is implemented that can completely bypass this rule, then once again, what is the point of it? Reagent cost and 100% LRC are contradictory ideas. Anyone here could make a reasonable case for 80% LRC, 90% LRC, hell you could even make a case for 99% LRC, but 100? It would be like if I put a statue in the Medusa room and said you can click it once per fight and you get a chance of a slither without having to fight Medusa. How many people would actually fight Medusa at that point? And how many people would tell people like me to leave the statue alone and just "fight Medusa if you want to". That is not a game. There has got to be risks, challenges, trade-offs and costs. If we're going to have 100% LRC in this game, we might as well not even have reagent costs or the LRC property.
People are way exaggerating the "burden" of actually having to carry reagents. Back in the day, I carried 150 of each reagent. That was enough for any average dungeon crawl without LRC and frankly it wasn't a huge ordeal at all. Now, I am telling you that we should restore reagent costs through an LRC cap of 60%, and I am also telling you that we should have insurable reagent bags that reduce weight like quivers, and I am also telling you there should more ways to harvest reagents, i.e., more ways to play the game, i.e., more playstyles! And to top it all off, I am also suggesting more powerful spell effects for the use of reagents, for greater template variety and incentive. So in effect, I am suggesting a teeny-tiny bit of extra challenge in your average gameplay in exchange for more variety, more economy, more playstyles, and even more power, but managing 8-10 reagents is apparently too much stress for the average user, despite the fact that the "worst case scenario" of no LRC, no hypothetical reagent bags, and annoying NPC vendors was the everyday reality prior to LRC and everything still somehow worked out.
A final point, the entire argument that I should just not use LRC if I love reagents so much, misses the mark by a mile. I'm not asking for a reagent cost so I can watch the numbers in my reagent bag go down every time I cast a spell, or so that I may twiddle my mustache and laugh diabolically at all the poor, innocent UO players now forced to fumble with reagents under the chains of my tyrannical LRC cap. I want reagent costs for the potential opportunities and challenge they bring to the shared experience of the MMO. Our playstyles should not exist in a vacuum totally isolated from each other. They are interwoven in such a way that results in a more complex experience than we would find in a single player game. There is more here at stake than merely being able to observe reagents burning.
