The idea is to provide a way for players who normally end up vendoring items (after not having any bites in the AH) which may actually be useful, to be offered to the rest of the community for free. Some less fortunate players may have forever been scared away from using the AH as a tool due to sticker shock (if they never tried to refine their searches). I noticed that I would often vendor some of these kind of items and see on some profiles (especially in help threads) that they could have made use of those items. One of the fun things in D2/LoD was giving away loot which was still decent, but no longer really of use to you or your alts.
While I know this can be accomplished in D3 by joining a public game or posting in chat and/or a forum that you are hosting a giveaway, the system I’m suggesting does not require your constant presence where you’d need to deal with checking profiles, bothering other players who might be suspicious of the offer (in the case of the former) or having to deal with friend requests and game invites in the case of the latter.
Players would have the ability to enable an optional shared community tab within their personal shared stash. That tab would operate sort of like the trade window where anything you place into it, requires you to accept as a confirmation that whatever you placed in it, will become available to the community for free. Similar to the auction house, there will be a 5 minute delay for your stash to become available in a search. These are just two checkpoints to reduce the chances of accidents. You can remove/cancel any unclaimed item at anytime.
Whatever is in this shared community tab would get aggregated into a server wide database where players could then search through the community chest (basically reusing the AH code/interface). Players can only pick ONE item for free on some time-enforced basis (like weekly or monthly for example). This could be modified to be something like one free weapon and one free armor piece. They also need to meet the level requirements (this would just be one mechanism to stop low level bots from raiding the community chest even though the whole idea behind it is mainly for lower quality tiered items which mostly won’t be of interest to many anyway).
Players would have the ability to allow this shared community tab to be displayed for browsing on their profiles (forums and in-game for those in your social window) if they do not mind the lack of anonymity. To bring the fun factor further into play, players can earn goodwill community points for each item that is claimed. The points earned would be range based (determined by the vendor cost of the item) which gets tabulated towards a Feats of Strength achievement. Accrued points can eventually be redeemed in-game for some sort of account bound reward (those rewards would likely be cosmetic in nature since anything skill related will result in a tendency to exploit the nature of this idea – which is primarily meant to provide a service to the community).
I realize this idea may not sit well with those who see everything in this game as a cash/gold grab or that it would have a drastic effect on the in-game economy. It’s also not meant to be a replacement for farming gear (which is why there would be time enforced limits and number of items which can be claimed). For others though, being able to help out the larger community can be fun and rewarding in its own way.
