here are my thoughts.

If you thought the system as it stood was a good system, this is a good change.

If you disliked the original system, you're going to hate it even more now.

When implementing anything into any game, or assessing potential ideas, there are two questions that I tend to ask. Firstly, is it necessary? Is it something that is required to make the game work, achieve balance, etcetera. Secondly, is it fun? Is it something that's going to make the game more interesting and dynamic. I'm sure you guys are familiar with this line of thought so I'll continue.

Was this change necessary? Depends on your goals. If your goal is to break up OOC information sharing a bit, and make the system more dynamic, this is a good change. It's well done and well thought-out.

Is implementing this change fun? I'd have to argue no. In fact, I might even argue that the entire ABS system in general is un-fun, and I don't understand where some people derive fun out of the kinds of activity the system forces you to do. You may be dispersing OOC groups a bit with this, but you're encouraging elitism by broadening the amount of area knowledge and exploring experience a single player has to have in order to know where to look for these kinds of things. Additionally, by putting a level restriction on discovering blacks you're almost requiring people to do the same world-wide search for wands twice; once at earlier levels and again at a later level for your black, because you couldn't have discovered it before. All in all, you've probably at least doubled or tripled the amount of time a given character would have to spend finding these things. Notice, not just player, but this is something you're going to have to do with every single character. That's not fun, how could that be fun? That's time that same character could be spending interacting with other people by roleplaying or PKing. And I'm not saying this change in particular causes a lack of fun, I'm saying the entire premise of the system emphasizes spending many hours of exploring with every character, and this change only exacerbates it.

So the question becomes, do the benefits of breaking up OOC groups and adding a little bit of dynamicism to the system outweigh the consequences of adding hours of un-fun non-interaction time to an already broken system?

Well, obviously, the implementors believe they do, or this wouldn't have happened.

You know, I have a really hard time with this change, because from an implementor's perspective, I have to acknowledge that, depending on your goals, it's actually quite well-done. But I'm disappointed that the staff apparently failed to consider the consequences of making something that wasn't very fun to start with even less fun.

So now the question in my mind has to be; the work has been done, obviously we have to keep this system, there's been to much work thrown into it to simply chuck it out and start over, so how can we mitigate these consequences? I believe Mek was sort of on the right track, down below. There should be quests and skills (like detect artifact) to help you find your wands. These quests need to be implemented in such a way that they are not too easily obtainable (so that not any throwaway character can get them in hopes of just discovering and compiling a list of hints), and yet accomplishable by people with less experience exploring the game. Something along the lines of "Bring me 200 gold and these ten items and I will divine for you a hint as to where your wands of power lie." would work. As implementors of a game that tries to remain flexible as far as allowing there to be multiple ways to play the game, I would think you need to consider quests as a real possibility and alternative.

That about sums up this thread for me.