Broken, cracked, ripped

[Pojodan]

Fishing poles break because fishing was a part of the original game back when the only thing you could catch was tattered sandals (I bet half the population of the game back then, lvls 1-50, wore tatterned sandals they got from fishing), rusty daggers (The ideal pet weapon as it was extremely cheep to aquire during downtime or waiting for the boat), or fish (Cheep food!), and was basically another thing that you can do other than kill stuff and yack with people during down times.
It eventually evolved into a source for baking and brewing recipies, then quest items as there are today. The pole randomly breaking aspect of it just stuck around.
Seeing as how you can get a fisherman's companion for pretty cheep these days which allows you to summon unlimited fishing poles and ale as you want the breaking side of it is pretty much trivial.

[KyrosKrane]

There are two ways to look at item decay: Item deterioration and item destruction. I'm all in favor of item deterioration. I'm strongly against item destruction.

The way I'd see it, item deterioration acts exactly like recommended levels on a product now. An item has, say, 100 "deterioration counters" (DC's) when you first acquire it, and it provides full stats and benefits. Each time you use it (swing that sword, take a hit on your armor, etc.), there is a very low chance that it will lose a DC. Each time it does, the stats on the item are recalculated as the current number of DC divided by the original number of DC. So, if your sword has 60 out of 100 DC left, and it originally gave +10 STR, it now gives +6 STR. An item can never go below DC1, and calculations are always rounded up, so you always get at least 1 for any stat on the original item.

Deteriorated items can be repaired. This would work much like sharpening stones do now. A fail always returns the item, with no changes to DC. A successful repair adds some DC back to the item; the amount added would be a function based on the skill of the person repairing.

Item repair would require "repair kits" of differing prices, and each item would specify which kit is needed to repair it. This adds a cost to item repair, but not an unbalancing one. You can't "brute-force" that repair with low skill unless you're ready to shell out lots of plat on kits. Much cheaper to find a skilled smith or tailor or tinker or what-have-you and pay a small fee for the repair.

I'm not entirely sure how to handle repairing no-drop items. Perhaps a dedicated "repair forge" which can be used by two people? Person_01 puts in their Uber Sword, Person_02 puts in a repair kit, then Person_02 clicks combine. Person_01 receives the sword back, repaired or otherwise. Person_02 never has direct access to the sword, nor Person_01 to the repair kit.

This would breathe MUCH more life into tradeskills. Yes, it means everyone and their kid brother would suddenly want to be able to repair their own equipment -- but we currently have the Shawl quests, and the Solstice earring, and the Aid Grimmel quests. This wouldn't be worse than those items. And with tradeskills being as difficult as they currently stand, I don't see too many of the "casual repairers" getting beyond skill 100 or so -- enough to repair low to average gear, but not the good stuff.

Thoughts?