Dropping items on the ground, an essential feature

Far too many so called MMORPGS, massive multiplayer online roleplaying games, for those who do not know the term, do not allow you to place items on the ground in the game world. One such game that is popular and lacking in this feature is World of Warcraft. When I first began playing World of Warcraft, I thought it would be more like Ultima Online, except with more races, a level based system, and better looking graphics. However, I realized within a few hours of playing the game, how many important features that I had come to enjoy in Ulitma Online, World of Warcraft lacked. In Ultima Online, just as in Crossfire, the engine Wograld is based on, you can put items on the ground. Evenutally these items decay on a set timer, either from the time they were last picked up, or from resetting an area as in Crossfire. Otherwise, memory and space in the game world would be eaten up with items. Ultima Online eventually found a way around the player tendancy to save every rusty dagger and empty box, a method called housing lockdowns. The way the lockdown system works, is you have a certain number of "places" for items to belong in your house. Each container holds a certain number of items, in UOs case, that number was 125, that would automatically not decay. Also, each piece of furnature would count towards the lockdown limit. In order to lock it down, your character would have to say "I wish to lock this down" but really that could have been changed to anything. Anyway, it would not allow you to make anymore than the number of lockdowns on the house into non decaying items.

Diablo2 also has items that can be dropped on the ground and a decay timer, so I was somewhat surprised that this was not implimented into World of Warcraft, given that even a classic 3d game such as Ultima 9 had this feature of being able to place items on the ground.

Anyway, I feel that, along with housing, dropping items on the ground should be an essential feature of rpgs. Putting items on the ground opens up numerous possiblities for roleplaying your characters that not putting them on the ground does not. For instance, you could make a circle out of an item, like say, flowers, and leave it up for an in game celebration of some event. Impassable obsticules like say, crates, can slow players down who are trying to get somewhere, given they would have to pick them up and move the crates to get through the area. After a long hard day of adventuring, it is nice to be able to put that mug of ale on the actual counter in the tavern, instead of just having to hold it in your inventory.