There is a ‘problem’ with storage due special balance of items income in PWMA:
1) ‘birth_no_selling’ generate a lot of items which are optionally useful, but player can’t sell them. The only option is to dump them for later in town areas
2) items income is based at V-Angband which got free huge storage ‘0’ in city; in PWMA you could only buy houses which aren’t cheap and smaller onces doesn’t have enough empty space
It brings a problem that players put their items in ‘tavern’ or just hide them in the world surfaces (in ‘town’ locations items won’t be removed). And it brings yet another problem – ‘free’ items which new players occasinally finds – breaks newbie players experience.
In TomeNET/Mang problem with storage doesn’t exist as there you could sell items. In PWMA 95% of players are going with ‘birth_no_selling’, so we got this problem.
An example of this problem is live on server right now, screenshot:
On screen you could see my character and his items which he temporary stores at tavern; I got plenty of scrolls, amulets, rings.. and it’s not all, I dumped some other stuff which I wanted to use later; but I destroyed them not to ruin tavern with too much rubbish.
Now lets imagine there would be items not from 1 player, but from 10. Or 50. Everything woul be covered with several layers of rubbish.
There is a very nice way to solve this problem – to add ‘Home’ (‘0’ in terrain.txt) in custom town, so it work not only for base town in no-wilderness mode, but also in normal more (it could be an option in mangband.cfg).
So it would be a building like a ‘bank’. For ‘1-char/account’ this won’t break game balance, but reduce item managment inconvenience (one of the biggest problem in online roguelikes) and would solve this problem with rubbish. Ideally it would be system where you should pay certain amount of gold to ‘open’ more storage in the bank. But as current ‘0’ not too big, it’s alright as it is for now.
This ‘bank’ won’t remove the need of normal houses – because they could be used as player shops and additional storage; which, again, is very needed in online version of the game.. if player got the game on local machine he won’t notice this problem at all.. but at multiplayer version its pretty critical.