My only question is--why wasn't this issue noticed and corrected ages ago, before it became so commonplace?
It is very,
very easy to walk around and see that items are sticking out of houses. If this was not okay, it should have been nipped in the bud a LONG time ago. There is NO WAY that they didn't know about it unless they don't review GM reports, don't look at bug reports, don't read any forums including their own, don't talk to players,
and don't ever log into the game and just look around (not even PLAY, just LOOK).
You can't blame players for doing something that the game mechanics allow them to easily do through normal gameplay/building, which has not been explicitly, prominently stated as against the rules in a manner and place easy and obvious to reference, and which has gone uncorrected for years. At that point, it looks like it's an okay thing to do and working as intended. It's highly probable that some people have done this entirely accidentally and not had reason to think anything of it. I am a million percent against cheating, but using an everyday game mechanic that happens not to work as expected
and that has happened not to work as expected for YEARS without official condemnation or comment does not meet my threshold for the definition of cheating.
And before anyone starts flinging baseless accusations, no, I don't do it and have no stake in the issue. I didn't know that was how people were making things visible out of their houses, and if I had I would only -maybe- have used it for a few simple terrain items for RP reasons as
@Deraj described above, and in a house that I have no wish to redesign again and that's remote enough it's highly unlikely to just trip over unless you're looking for it specifically or out meandering/lost anyway. It doesn't create meaningful performance issues for me. It's irrelevant to my personal gameplay.
My issue is that it should have been noticed and either fixed or publicly denounced as illegal or likely to be changed a long time ago. This is the same thing that happened with tamers and Shadowguard. The mechanics existed for a couple of years before it was suddenly a problem that needed fixing. Tamers were upset, and rightly so--they were playing as the mechanics were in place, it went unfixed and uncommented on for ages, so why wouldn't they have? It's not like it required a cheat program or some fancy circumvention of game mechanic--it WAS the game mechanic, and there's no way the developers didn't know about it.
Both sides of this argument are valid--yes, it is causing performance issues (and not just for people with older computers--and frankly, a 21 year old game should not require an epic state of the art gaming rig anyway), and yes, it was left this way for years and nothing was done or even stated about it, so why
wouldn't people do it? There is no good solution at this point.
There
might be a reasonable middle ground for maybe allowing a small section of the front, first floor of a building to show to everyone for x type of items (auction safes, terrain type items, flowers, or whatever), or being able to flag x number of items to show outside your house, but I don't know how hard that would be to program or if it would meaningfully improve the performance issues some players are experiencing.
Either way, it shouldn't have gotten to this point in the first place.
It died in 1998 then.
