[Hamahakki]

The way items recharged in classic WAS A BUG.

In a world where different item instances with the same ID are identical, merchants can keep track of their inventories with just IDs.

In Everquest, items are ALMOST identical. There is no item durability, enchantment, augmentation, or other mechanics which can differentiate one Shield of the Slain Unicorn from another. The only exception is charged items. Either charged items were added after merchants and the merchant code was never updated, or the merchant code was broken when it was written.

For better or worse, Everquest went live with a ton of bugs. Those unintended features were part of what made the game appealing for many of us.

Item recharging was classic, so one of the following is true:
A) Item recharging through merchants was one of the hundreds of unintentional features in EQ1.
OR
B) They wanted items to be rechargeable AND the way they wanted players to recharge them was by having multiple copies of the item, one of which was charged, and the rest of which were not charged, then to find a merchant which has room for player-sold items, then sell the charged item to the vendor, then sell all the uncharged items to the vendor, then buy back all of the items, and if another player buys it while you are using the vendor then they now own your items, and if you want to recharge multiple lore items you need one character per item you are trying to recharge, plus one to hold the charged version.

Obviously, A) is true. People arguing for B) (i.e. Samoht) are either trolling or really, really stupid.