A case for "soft item" breakage

Ok deep breath.. I might need to take a step back and sleep on this since I'm obviously not finding the right phrasing here. Generally speaking I don't expect to sway anyone who doesn't agree with me.. I just want to make the point to a certain level of understanding.

I'll admit that depending on the numbers.. demand and resources may not be a serious issue and I am strongly biased against an artificial inflation of costs. That would encourage some kind of gold farming which is something devs have said they want to avoid. RG has talked before about not wanting gold inflation, yet artificially inflating costs seems contradictory to this vision (if only indirectly).

Now ideally you shouldn't need to repair very often and an item not in use doesn't repair at all. So now you've got your sword (or whatever else) that you use for special occassions.. That is the one. It's YOUR sword.. it's the one you care about. It's the one you spend your money on. It's the one you want to use when you need a strong weapon.

So what about the rest of the time? The rest of the time you don't really care so much about. So you need a new weapon just for hacking and slashing through every day stuff. Ok you've got a crafted sword for 500 gold that's kinda nice.. or you have some looted sword for 200 gold. It's not as nice but it gets the job done. You don't really care cause you've got your strong weapon at home. So you buy the cheap loot to get your by. Doesn't matter cause it won't break on you anyway and it'll get stronger if you use it long enough.

You've got your cheap every day weapon and your strong super sword that you care about. Your cheap one is starting to cost money to repair.. you want to save your money for things you care about so.. buy another cheap looted weapon and toss the old one. Demand for new crafted gear suddenly isn't so great. Demand for repairs on gear people don't care about won't be great either.

I guess that's the part I've been missing. When people horde their good stuff they don't care so much about secondary gear. It's cheaper and easier to just chuck it and replace it than put a lot into repairs if it's just something to get you by inbetween the times you want to use your good stuff. Why put all that time and money into multiple sets of good gear when you don't need to?

Long term effects.. increased inflation, low demand for certain crafted items.. lower demand for repairs.

Now add breakage.. crafted items generally get better durability.. they last longer than loot (more desirable) but will still need to be replaced. Let the market determine the costs and there will be no direct cause of inflation and demand remains high in the long term.

If that doesn't give you a better idea of where I'm coming from I'm not sure what will.