Let's first list the goals of the current design:

1. Make it so gathering wands isn't so quick and easy that most mages have a/s/b for every single fight.

2. Create an "exploration requirement" and/or reward characters who explore.

3. Create a tactical weakness for mages; force them to put themselves in sub-optimal situations where they might be ambushed by someone who knows their wand location.

Now, what are the peoples' complaints:

A. It gives an unfair advantage to people with OOC access to wand lists, thereby screwing placers without such access.

B. It creates a "lottery system" whereby a given character can potentially be disadvantaged by receiving crappy sleek spots.

C. It forces players with broad knowledge of wand locations (irrespective of how it was acquired) to mechanically check a long list of potential locations (i.e. not "real" exploration).

So how can we mitigate A, B and C while still achieving 1, 2 and 3?

How about this:

* Access to the sleek system comes through edges. There's an edge for each sleek type. Each of these has a level requirement, a (fairly high) exploration xp requirement and a minimal imm xp requirement.

* Each sleek edge activates that sleek type for your character and gives you information about the wand's location. This could be fairly specific or semi-vague (e.g. just the area name). The latter would give players who don't know all the locations the opportunity to do some "real" exploration.

* Each mage gets a single (free) relocate command for each sleek type. This command moves the specified wand type to a new location. Alternately you could make these inexpensive edges. In this case you'd let people take them more than once. When you relocate a wand you get the same location information as above.

* Go over the various wand locations from the perspective of each class and consider dropping some for certain classes. The goal would be to make the set of locations (for each class) as equally desirable as possible. If a certain location is "super-easy" for invokers (compared to other mages) then don't give that spot to invokers. Ditto for spots that are uniquely difficult for certain classes.

This seems satisfy 1-2-3 while more or less mitigating A-B-C.

Thoughts/disagreements?