Anyone here remember the first Diablo?
You'd start off by killing stuff down in the dungeon. Every now and then you'd find an unnamed piece of equipment; from there, you have two options:
1) Equip it
2) "Appraise" it (using FFXI terms)
If you equip it, you'll see what it is immediately. Unfortunately, a lot of items were cursed...they not only gave negative stats, but they could not be unequipped unless you paid a LOT of money to a person back in town (assuming you ever made it back).
However, you could safeguard yourself by appraising it first. The first option would be to cart it back to town and have an NPC do it (for a fee). The second was to use an appraisal scroll. Doing it from the NPC was 100% success, but doing it on your own (via a scroll) could lead to the accidental distruction of the item.
To me, this sounds an aweful lot like SE is copying Diablo. But hey, I actually enjoyed that game :D