Very interesting idea. Some of the quotes I totaly agree with:

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- Because not only is the newbie at the disadvantage that all of you masochistic neets and old farts refuse to rank without perfecting your skills, but you also all spend hours gathering preps so you can be battle ready. The newbie doesn't stand a chance. The newbie doesn't delete, but his logins become more and more sparse until he stops playing all together.

- This will mean that players can only get PvP buffs from other players -- bards, trannies, etc. This will do a couple of things:

- Encourage more support classes to be rolled
- Make PK based more on (haha moron) ability to fight than ability to prep
- Make about 16 of the current 20 players stop playing entirely, but good riddance you power gamey loons

- People wouldn't have to spend hours and hours gathering preps as they would now be effectively useless in PK. This is a reduction in the time sink experienced by some players.
- This would diminish the learning curve for new players AND narrow the spread between the guys with* the prep lists, and the guys without.

- 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.
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Other than making CF easier for newbies (IMHO they are much more valuable than vets) I see another advantage: the necessity to interact more with other players (especially support classes) in order to be stronger. I think there's too much "lone wolf" who rely on their immense knowledge of the game to steamroll anybody they can. I think the capacity to steamroll (or be unkillable) is not only boring but bad for CF survival.

As I get older, my time gets more and more precious. One of the great satisfactions in CF is to be able to pk another player: not having to prep in order to reasonably expect to be able to do so is the main reason I rarely play something else than Battle Berserkers.

I'd love to role something else again but I don't have the patience/interest to run around loosing my time for preping. I prefer to spend my time interacting with other players.... too bad (but understandable as we get older) there's just less and less of them.

P.S. : I'm no coder but if the task to distinguish between buff provided by preps and player is too complicated, I would love to see the amount of prep reduced drasticaly.
P.S.S. : Wouldn't be cool to have, instead of Enchanters, an Alchemist class being able to make preps that would vanish (to avoid stacking) after a short amount of time ?! Would probably be a very popular pick...