I'm not going to vote, because the topic goes beyond a simple yes or no debate. Back when refinements were first mentioned by the devs, I would have immediately voted yes; because the idea has long bugged me that we have whole categories of armor that are effectively useless at any skill level and for almost any player. (And we may as well throw in all the weapons, items and skills for which the same can be said.) On its face, this only looks like bad game design. My issue starts way down at the bottom of the ladder of balance, with the kind of armor that you can buy off vendors or find off monsters, and ends way up at the top, with rewards and crafted sets. What does it look like when a new player is told to simply ignore all of the garbage? Answer: it looks like bad game design. Any competent player is going to wonder why such massive quantities of it were put in the game in the first place.
In this very particular aspect that I'm describing, Ultima Online should be more complex than it is, because the game is (and always has been) billed not just as an RPG, but as a virtual world where everything you can interact with matters in some way. Simple and casual were NEVER words that Richard Garriott wanted to see us throwing at the game's crafting mechanics. Those terms weren't even in the industry vernacular when UO was created. Casual MMOs came several years later in response to overly complex RPG systems. I'd never ask the devs to roll over and serve that trend--it wouldn't get them anywhere significant at this point anyway. All I care about is how the amount of outright garbage the game's database spits into the game world doesn't represent simplicity; it represents bad game design, or (to put it in a fairer, more understanding tone) a culmination of "junk DNA" that has resulted from otherwise impressive updates and patches over the last 15 years.
Even though that sounds like a yes vote, it's not necessarily. But then again--and I'm saying this even as a fan boy for the dev team--I don't think my vote (or even yours) matters. Implementation is the important thing, as we all seem to agree, and I knew as soon as I read the OP that this wasn't a discussion about what Americans or Europeans want. So my first thought was, "Okay, why can't we just have our rule set and the Japanese players have theirs?" But my brain quickly countered with a sack of cold, hard bricks: at that point, we would be receiving special treatment in an increasingly tiny margin. And that's the quickest way to get publisher support for your localization shut down when the accountants are combing their books. Here in the year 2013, we're probably better off as suckerfish, to put it frankly.
Japanese players far outstrip our subscriber numbers and dollars--particularly our dollars in the item shop. Westerners have a bad habit of not really trying all that hard to financially support the games they claim to love. If you've bought something in the item shop recently, good for you, but you're part of the minority in our market. Without the Japanese players, we might be griping over nothing less than the game's closure right now. I don't think Americans and Europeans will be able to bend that reality out of existence with an Internet poll on Stratics.
