Guns, Armor, and Tools are never removed from item economy

[phrstbrn]

I've only been playing for a week, and some of the stuff I'm collecting is starting to pile up. Weapons, armors, tools are all starting to overflow, while raw materials are still in demand, especially metal. I don't bother crafting armor or guns anymore, because if I lose one I have more in chests, and I find new ones faster than I lose them. When I raid, I get more excited about raw materials (and C4, of course) than I do guns and tools. As the server's item economy continues to progress without a map wipe, I imagine I'm going to start thinking of guns and armor as trash items.

As time goes on, players are going to craft more and more weapons, tools, armor, and the supply of guns, tools, armor will become more abundant, since they're rarely lost or taken out of the in game item economy. What I think needs to happen, is all equipment needs to naturally decay over time. In other words, a gun might start in perfect condition, after a day it turns to good, then fair, then bad, and then eventually broken. To fix item condition, you put a little bit of metal (or cloth/leather) into it and it improves the item condition. A broken item would take the same amount of material to craft a new one (or just slightly less).

Having stuff degrade with use won't fix the problem, since you can only use one item at a time, and adding item decay on use will hurt new players more than established players.

For a player with not a lot of stuff, the difference will be negligiable. If you make metal slightly easier to come by (slightly increasing drop rate from rocks/increasing from smelting) or make equipment slightly cheaper to craft than they are now, that will help counter-balance item decay for new players. However, players hording lots of stuff will have their items decay, and will have to spend lots of metal if they want to keep their stuff in good condition, or more likely, will just have their stuff break if they don't use it. Overall, a change like this makes it harder to keep stuff once you get it, while slightly easier for newer players if you do this in concert with a slight increase to metal drop rates or decrease in costs to craft new equipment.