Capacity and item weight, something's wrong.

So with the newest change to how overweight/encumbrance works, there seems to once again be an intent to enforce a "proper" way to play the game.

However, it's my personal belief this won't fix how people play, and in fact will just infuriate the few players who still play the "Regular" way, because most other players take advantage of the obscene benefit that is the mule character, which this change will not impact.
Also did I mention ghosts are still overweight? Which is a silliness in and of itself.

Using a mule, you no longer have to unload between hunting trips. And considering that a single hunting trip of less than 10 minutes can overload a level 80+ character with a potion going, there is something considerably wrong with the weight distribution. Depending on the zone and where your "drop-off" point is to sell/store goods, this adds between 20% and 120% in your gold/hour returns, due to not having to skip over items, or having to spend too long leaving an area/returning.

The new changes don't have any real effect on the mule, for a couple reasons:
#1. autowalk still works
#2. blink still works
#3. A stack of pennies on the forward key works if 1 and 2 fail at some point.


It just means while your normal character is off refilling vendors/being social once a week or once a day, your mule spends those ~30 minutes moving at a snails pace back to town.

So, given that this won't actually fix anything, what ideas can we brainstorm to actually make people -want- to play the proper way instead of feeling forced into buying a mule character?

Besides just setting all lootable items to 0 weight.

Some ideas that people have thrown around previously, being quoted verbatim:
1. Allow field-salvage of items, maybe at a slight penalty to skill
2. Disable blink while overencumbered
3. Put a maximum weight in, disallow characters carrying more than (2/4/8/whatever)x their max weight.
4. Give up and realize people will always attempt to play in the most efficient way possible and when you put in artificial barriers they will find artificial ways around them that punishes players who don't break their immersion
5. Make "trash" items non-tradable
6. Rebalance item weight and set a target of 30 minutes-1 hour of hunting should fit in an average character inventory.
7. Everything's fine, we want all players to have mules since it gets more accounts sold

 

I need a stack of quarters on this keyboard... but yes, $45 gets those with the cash around game mechanics, again.

 

Or just spend the time get str to 40 and then bump your heavy lifter up as a goal for your single character to be able to spend more than an hour in a scene hunting and looting everything. The min maxers may feel heavy lifter is not to their benefit, but many of us already trained it for the simple purpose of being able to stay out in the field longer, and make fewer trips to town and not worry about keeping up with the Jones'.

Instead of getting that next skill to GM, spend a little bit working the Heavy Lifter skill without trying to game the system.

 

Lace, I generate over 400 stones of weight in 10 minutes of loot.
Heavy lifter is woefully inefficient, and yes, i haev that near gm and str also near gm, as well as several strength buffs.
I have to have those maxed just to get through a single hunting circuit while keeping my speed up high enough to be effective plus the obsidian potion.
Even if both of those were gm, it would only give me an extra 2 minutes of hunting before overload.

or I can just use a mule to hunt for a few hours then spend no time unloading it.
My mule tends to go town with over 10,000 stones of weight.
Others i've checked in tend to do that around 5k stones from an average hunting session.

This isn't just a simple of "i'm lazy so i took a mule".
It's "even with this char near as high as is reasonable, i would lose over 70% of my gold output per hour without a mule".
And that's not good design. People shouldn't be punished for trying to play "normal".
I hate that a mule is required.