by retro Thu Feb 14, 2013 1:12 pm
It's unknown if this is a bug, or if it's somehow related to the proliferation of item-spawned vagrants. There's not enough information to know for sure.
I was once doing low level gravelord hosting in the Parish. I dropped a single humanity for a couple invaders, but sometimes they didn't pick it up. When I died and respawned at the Parish bonfire, I returned to the area to find a prism stone (in item/ bag form) in the exact locations of the humanity items I dropped. When you die, items should disappear, so those items shouldn't have appeared there anyways. It happened more than once in that session.
Unfortunately, I tried a couple times to replicate this and I was unable to. But it sounds very similar to Automancer's post - where one item appeared, for a group of people online, it wound up turning into something else. My world just happened to be both the source (humanity) items and the newly respawned (prism stones) items.
I have no idea about the various accounts of finding miscellaneous items in offline locations, like the Firelink Shrine, though! Weird stuff.
Befowler, do you have any recollection of discarding unwanted items at the firelink shrine? Is that something you might do? Since my prism stones appeared after dropping other items and dying - I wonder if you might've dropped some stuff there, and then returned at a later time (perhaps loading the game up at a later date) to find those items "replacing" the ones you dropped.