One of the attractions of Addictmud is the generosity of the players. When I first started, I had help getting initially equipped. I have tried to return the favor by providing newbies with equipment starting out.

One of the problems with donations through the donation room, and especially for newbies, is the overwhelming generosity of players. Sometimes, the donation rooms have hundreds of items. If you are a true newbie, it will be impossible to sort them out because identify scrolls cost hundreds of gold/scroll, so it isn't economically feasible to screen these items.

So here are some possible ideas to help:
1. Give shopkeepers more money to buy equipment from people. As the system works currently, do the shopkeepers (esp armor and weapon ones) have any function in this game? This is also good for newbies who are starting out to generate cash.
2. Allow donation rooms to have storage so that someone can sift through the donated items and store them to prevent the items from disappearing after a reboot/crash.
3. If one is concerned of the potential for abuse, make stored items/donated items only accessible by a hero/immortal, or have them have a flag to be !remort.
4. If #3 is adopted, have a system so that items can be shipped to an area through the mail system that the designated people can sort and store the items in the donation storage area if deemed beneficial.

1 Good idea...
2 I don't like this idea so much. True enuff about the generosity of giving, however I think this is the wrong approach and would result in full storage rooms. A better solution, imho, would be to:
A) adopt policy of not donating everything one gets/finds, and be more mindful of what's donated.
B) make colored sticky notes in the don rooms hightlighting 'newbie only' info: blurb on library books, quest for strong athy dag, must rent and nearest location the Inn, haste shroom location (if nearby), heal potion locations (if nearby), website addie, etc...
C) adopt a regular re-boot schedule. This would serve to purge the don room and temples if needed. Ok... maybe this wouldn't really help newbies, but it would "help" others.

I like the idea of keeping some items though crashes/reboots.But most of the stuff that gets into the donation room is not useful for most newbie's. The donation room almost needs a filter to sort out excess items.(example) Only allowing 2 small swords instead of 30 or something with the flag (TRASH) would immediatly be junked and not go to the don room. Of course players should be doing that... seen some nice newbie eq lost during crashes and reboots would be nice to keep some for the new players...
*my 5 cents* (:>

ahh, some interesting concepts here..

Shopkeepers with money ... unfortunately gold is a bit of a bastard in the game right now. Old players have it in abundance. New players have a hard time accumulating it. The bazaar helps with this somewhat, however not a ton. There would also have to be some way of creating value on items that shopkeepers would buy - I don't think many of our builders assigned values to items in this regard because it's never been something we've looked at.

Donation rooms with storage.... interesting... maybe we could build on this...

What if, similar to the bazaar, there were different types of donation rooms? Almost like a donation complex? (salvation army?) Maybe within those room types there would be some sort of purge timer on items. Staffs/wands/potions would get a 1 day timer before they junk/delete. Treasures would get 2 days, Armor/weapons 3 days. Something like that?
Not sure how feasible this would be from a coding standpoint (sorry Bz!) - but it might help to accomplish some of what you're asking...

Not sure if we'd really want the rooms to keep items through reboots. As it stands after a longish uptime, the rooms overflow.
-G

Perhaps you could have the shopkeepers have nearly an abundance of gold but buy items for only a maximum; i.e. if an item has a value of 100000, the shopkeeper would only pay a maximum of 1000, regardless of its value. That way the rich wont get remarkable richer and newbies can accumulate cash more easily.