One thing I've never figured out in PlaneShift:  What is the preferred way of getting rid of things?  Many items can be sold, but some can't.  In particular, we are now generating lots of piles of dust during the gem enchanting process.  Now, maybe there is a use for this dust.  If so, I've not found it.

It raises the question though:  how can we get rid of unwanted items, other than leaving them around for GMs to deal with?  Which is not fair to the GMs.

Before mounts were implemented, I had a pet Groffel.  Since the changes were made to implement mounts, I can no longer summon him, though I can now summon a mount.

What is the status of these old pets?  Are they gone forever?

Since returning to the game a couple of weeks ago with a clean quest slate, I've run into some issues with merchant quests.  By these, I mean the ones that used to give "merchant" faction points, or which are given by merchant NPCs.

Basically, the few I've managed to get don't give faction points of any kind anymore, and here's the key part:

Most merchants won't give me quests at all, not even basic "kill some rats for me" ones.  In particular, no merchant in Ojaveda will give me quests.  I've tried Jirosh, Trasok, Brintec, Bjorid, Brado, Vladovic, amongst others.  These all used to have some basic quests of the sort that you'd think wouldn't have a lot of prerequisites.

On a similar note, though it's not for a merchant, Rylour won't give me his quest, though I've done lots of BD guard quests.

Since the decisions you make on quests now matter more than they used to and are better tied to roleplay, I am loath to simply do every quest in the game just for the hope that one might be a non-obvious prerequisite for another.  Nor do I really want to do quests that are not connected to who my character is, or be forced into in-quest actions that go against my character.

An inconsistency I've noted in settings as encountered so far is this:  Spells do not use reagents.  Reagents are given out as quest rewards and mentioned in some NPC dialog.  Other NPCs mention spells that need physical items such as gems and rings.  I have yet to encounter an NPC who will answer questions about reagents.  I am assuming that they are intended to be items needed for creating, researching, or casting spells and/or creating magic items.

It would be consistent to see some spells that require and/or use up objects when cast.  Not too many, mind you, and preferably only higher realm spells that would not need to be cast frequently, such as in combat situations.

Improve the forum search results.

Since we depend on these forums as a knowledge base and for much of our communications, we could all benefit from a better internal search engine, particularly improved result rankings and better matches.  The current SMF results seem to prioritise old threads rather than new ones, and also don't give a lot of priority to subjects in titles, or even exact phrase matches.

This thread seems to sum up the current state of affairs and recommends a mod to vastly improve searches:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=188513.0

Congratulations to the four Summer of Code students accepted this year:

http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2011/atomicblue

and also to the mentors.  These are exciting projects!

With a new computer, I'm finally able to return to the game.  Since I left, I gather there's been a quest wipe.  More controversially, winch access earned earlier seems to be gone.  The forum search function is less than ideal for finding "official" information, but hopefully someone can confirm this, or point me to how to restore access.  I can't imagine that the dev. team would take an action that would probably make many players give up on the game.

I'm planning on getting a new laptop-- nothing fancy.  Wondering if planeshift runs tolerably on intel i3-350m internal graphics on linux.