I experienced this once and now another buddy told me he had this too

You look at some mob, see he has certain item, kill him, but then no item. It just disappears somehow.

Anyone experienced this? Any explanations? Or you just think we should drink less?

Most limits are fluid with the player base. Sometimes the mud will reboot and an item's limit will be, say, 2, but then as uptime goes on the limit might drop to 1. The mob doesn't auto purge, so when it dies the item goes away. Same thing happens to gear worn by a PC.

Let's say random limited item goes from 5 to 4. Currently, 4 PCs and 1 NPC have it. Or 5 PCs and no NPCs. What are the rules for who loses their item?

If it is a PC that dies first then I don't think it crumbles/rots unless the corpse does and it goes to the pit. If it is the NPC then it just isn't in the corpse.

n/t

a

...That the reason the bone hunting knife disappears from the felar trapper in Balator when you disarm him is because it's limited?

Is this also true of the key the Innkeeper holds in the Galadonian Settlement? That also acts the same way.

nt

The felar trapper is like this (bone knife). So is the inkeeper in the galadonian settlement in the past (key). It's really annoying. Either an item is real and you can get it, or it isn't, and it should be taken out of the game.

IIRC, I think items can actually be set that way. Most seem to be rot-death though, so I could be wrong.

The other option I can think of, is that if they're limited items, they could have spawned overmax (due to shifting PC counts, etc), and when that happens, whoever so happens to be the first person to die with that item, it's going to vanish, whether it be PC or NPC.

How is it possible to overmax items? If certain item amount is at its max, new one wont appear on the mob so noone will get it

Lets say there are currently nine instances of an item, and each one is in the hands of a player. For that particular item if there are 1000 pfiles the count will become ten. Mob dies when there are 1001 pfiles, the tenth instance spawns on it. Before a player grabs it, two people delete, there are now 999 pfiles and the max count for that item goes back to nine. Mob dies, tenth item goes poof.

But yeah most commonly it's pfiles fluctuating up and down.

Are area builders allowed to set hard limits (like 1) or do all limits fluctuate with the population?

If CF somehow had a million active characters, would there be a few dozen hummingbird pendants? How about something that is limit 1?

Some items have constant limits, most don't.

Edited to add: Also, the area author doesn't get to pick the limits.