Look, I never said anything about lag
Hmm, I didn't want to do a huge quote, but I was referring to your quote which referred to MA's statement. For clarity, this is where lag was mentioned:
(From that above link -- from MA)
...
The main purpose of removing the ability of dropping items on the ground in "public" places was to improve performance. Having a large number of low-value items scattered across busy servers was negatively impacting performance for everyone on the server. On some busy servers the effect of "item art" and random litter was very detrimental to performance.
So, something "negatively impacting server performance" is synonymous with "Lag" which is why I was on the subject of lag (and I'd quoted you because you'd quoted MA's statement, which talked about it). And the reason I felt it was important to bring up that I personally had no complaints about lag, is because (just to reiterate) I have a low-end system... both my system itself, and my internet speed... So, if I have poor specs and yet I have no complaints about lag, then we should be fine and dandy... But even if someone does have complaints about lag, I don't believe that hidden items in the landscape are the primary culprit for lag. Hope that clears things up.
Some people are freaking out, again, over something that is not vital
The question is where does that stop? These things are also not vital:
- Emotes
- The ability to walk (rather than run)
- Friends list
- The ability to choose between 1st or 3rd person
- Chat channels (all of them)
- Displaying armor on your avatar (I've played mmos where equipped armor doesn't affect how the ava looks)
- The auction
- The ability to trade with other players
- etc
Pick one feature and remove it and the game is still
playable which means the feature was not
technically vital ... Yes but, the argument was never that dropping items was
vital to be able to
run the game. The sentiment, in the case of the removal of item dropping, is that it's a slow whittling-away of the MMO sandbox/interactivity aspect of the game. It means that down the road, another feature may be removed, and further down the road, another feature may be removed. Already many features have been removed, so it's not unrealistic that this will continue, until the game is something very different than the game we're all familiar with and that we all love. Dropping might not be important to you, but it's important to others, I hope you can understand why.
Btw, I hope this isn't being interpreted as hostility. I wasn't trying to make anyone upset and I appreciate your time.