serialized attributes ftw!
what does it really matter in the places we use them? its neither a performance issue nor would we gain anything else from putting it to yet another and another and another table.
forget about total normalization, welcome to the real world.
hell, most of dol's tables could be even totally serialized textfiles, cause the server doesnt interact with them at runtime and uses is purely for persistance purposes, saving periodically. just some are really used a lot, for example the merchant lists ^^