[ThatOneMaggot]

I'm just gonna come out of lurking to say this isn't a bad idea on it's own, item degradation or item erasure in order to implement a money sink can in fact be a very beneficial option.

The issue is that with SL2's current design, implementing it can be rather rough and probably upset quite a few people.

I'll give you credit on trying to tie it to dying/ko's or losing durability which is more controllable and thus making it far more manageable, but that has it's own slew of potential problems.

I'm going to put a more detailed deconstruction on why this is my view point here, but I feel it could be seen as harsh, and it's a bit long. So feel free to skip to the tl;dr.

To preface, all of the scenarios presented punish new players harshly. That isn't a deal breaker on it's own, but if there isn't any benefit then that on it's own should probably discourage this mechanic from being added.

Let's start with the worst case scenario, time based degradation. For this one I'll use the more modern lingo and just say that I won't sugarcoat it: Hoarding.

This sort of system would encourage hoarding behavior to rather extreme levels. Potentially completely upending the economy to heavily favor tool making mains if it's only implemented for item qualities. This is because of the fabled 'Too good to use' syndrome in combination of quality changing items being tied to tool making 6 and hard to gather items. So you'll probably only see people using such items when 'they really need to'.

This scenario as a result defeats the whole purpose of trying to make it a money sink. Doing so with enchants and materials too may spread out the economic impact out a bit more, but then it utterly demands trying to seek out other players 24/7 if you want to keep your equipment up to date. Probably not exactly a healthy RP scenario either if people start seeing each other as upgrade dispensers.

The next two scenarios brought up aren't going to be torn up nearly as harshly as they avoid a good chunk of issues, but they still need to be addressed.

Death/ko based degradation is probably the best implementation of the bunch and even sounds nice at first, but we should go over why it probably doesn't get anything done. I'll also be mainly addressing it in a PvE standpoint. It's best I split this into 'party wipe' and 'character knockout', as I'm unsure which was intended.

First of, party wipe item degradation is very low impact, highly avoidable and could be argued to already be superseded by item loss. Secondly, 'character knockout' causing potential item degradation should probably be kept to one per battle, as otherwise you wouldn't want to get knocked out repeatedly in the same fight. It also makes play styles that get knocked out more frequently or easily more expensive.

The individual downsides are fair enough I feel, though the game already has enough issues encouraging playing through higher end content. So the main target that would be able to go for said content either uses builds that simply eliminate any form of risk or they just won't engage as they won't see it as worth the hassle.

A short note PvP Wise, less non-spar fights would probably be done in order to facilitate the 'hoarding' behavior from the time based one, though thankfully to a much lesser extent. Not exactly a ideal result though.

Durability based degradation I have the least to say on, but that's only because it just punishes the following from the top of my head instead of being a proper money sink: Bards, Any Weapon with inherently low durability or uses Ether and Desperado Strikers. It also skips out on potentially degrading armor as weapons are the only thing that use durability. Absolutely minimum impact and only really discourages certain play styles.

So, tl;dr: All three types of implementations encourage behavior that can overall degrade the game experience if used in the current system. Pardon the pun. So it'll probably just be regarded as a very bad move and make people angry. While also not getting the intended experience of being a effective money sink.

To be fair, figuring out a proper money sink mechanic that has minimal issues for SL2, Korvara or G6. Is pretty dang tough, so I'll at least praise the death/ko version on probably being the most reasonable of the bunch implementation-wise. But someone could probably spot even more issues that I didn't notice.

The important thing when trying to implement one I feel is to make sure it doesn't discourage the player from engaging with the mechanic, rather then encourage behavior that avoids said mechanic. A good example of this would be NPC shop only components for something temporary but beneficial.