I have a wand list. It's been passed around for a while now - several different people have sent me various forms of it (all mostly identical). It's really unfair to casual/new players to have wand locations secret information - all the good players already know where the wands are, and all the bad ones have to explore to find them. AFAIK, it includes probably 90% of the sleeks in the game. I'd post it in the interest of fairness, but obviously the IMMs have said clearly how much they feel it hurts the game.

That said, I have spent 20+ hours looking for my sleeks, even knowing exactly all the locations they could be. The idea behind detect artifact is really great - if you don't want to spend all that time killing really tough mobs at low levels, just rank up and you'll be able to identify your sleek. Me, I always try to identify them early, so it's still a time sink killing huge mobs at level 35.

Anyways, why not just make the location of all wands known in the Lyceum or something, or whatever? No matter what you do, there will always be the incentive to collaborate to share information - if I have 50% of a complete list, and my friend has 50% of a complete list, why wouldn't I share it and save myself hours? Because it's cheating? But I can't get caught - so it's a system that punishes the honest and the people who don't use other messaging programs, which is the opposite of how it should be. What if I've been looking for 20 hours, don't have enough edge points to take barrier attunement even though I've been all over the game twice, and I ask my friend "Does big mob X have a wand?" on AIM, to save myself an hour of trying to kill him, and he replies with wand.txt? Should I not open the file and keep plugging away and hope that someone doesn't find me scourged and with 0 moves while I'm killing this tough mob?

Honestly, the system is very good as it stands now for allowing the wands to be open knowledge - I know the frustration very well of having the list in front of you and not being able to find your wands after hours and hours of searching. That said, at least one of the locations I saw on the list was a room that I didn't even know existed, after several years of playing. Think you'll ever find that one without OOC help? Maybe. But if you don't, then you'll be at a disadvantage against the guy who cheated and found it there.

Hopefully, the responses aren't just "How about we ban the players who are circulating these lists?" If so, there is a fundamental misunderstanding about human nature and a significant disconnect between admins and players. In general, in threads like this, I think that it's hard for the admins to see things from the player point of view and vice versa - I think the thread below about detect artifact and the IMM/player reponses captures it very well - in the end, both players and administrators want a fair game. I think this would be a good first step towards an equal playing field.