In all the years I've spent trying to hero in this game, preps have been the bane of my existence.
While I have found a few, that scroll of armor and yellow flowers don't really do me much good in a PVP fight. Playing any Elf, DE or Gnome already puts you at such HUGE disadvantages due to vunls, your enemies don't need preps. But when they are prepped? You're just slaughtered. The other problem I see with preps is when you DO find them, you can't divest yourself of that knowledge when you start your next character. Just like knowing where to find decent starting gear, you get huge advantages over the complete noob who thinks his Aldervari bracers are the shit.
And let's be honest. Some of you guys have been playing for years. You know these areas inside and out. And even when you do find a noob and decide to hold their hand, you drag them around behind you with text is flying off their screen to the point they're totally lost. It then takes them hours of reading logs, assuming they do log, to even figure out where they were. For those of you who are old like me and remember playing DAOC and the issues they had with buff bots, it's the same problem. *
IMHO, simply knowing where to find gear and an understanding of the mechanics of the game gives you enough of an advantage over noobs that you don't need preps.
And as far as the coding is concerned, that would be easy. Any prep would have a flag. If you attack a player or a player attacks you, all flagged buffs vanish.
Here's a test. Take a look over the next week at how many pre-level 20 characters you see. Note their names. The next week, take a look at how many of those that are still around. CF has never been noob friendly and while I don't see it in any danger of closing it's doors soon, logging in to find only 4 people online is rather discouraging. Any step toward making this game easier for noobs, I support.
* I'm not sure if this is the way it still is, but if you've never played DAOC they had/have an issue where you absolutely needed to run 2 clients, one - your main character, two - an alt cleric who loads you up with buffs. If you don't have that buff bot cleric, you're damn near useless.