Please reduce the amount of loot

[algroth]

 

You don't have to pick it up if you can't be bothered to sell it. That solution may be better than denying all other players that loot.

 

I'm annoyed by the glowing nature of the loot lying on the ground.

 

 

I blame my OCD: if I see something on the ground or in a container, it doesn't matter what it is, I just *have* to pick it up. This is especially annoying in Planescape: Torment where a third of the items are literally unsellable.

 

To echo what Wormerine's mentioned before, some changes have already been made to both the drop rate as well as the stash display, making it so that equal items are stackable and thus don't occupy two pages' worth of your inventory. I think that's the bigger issue with the first game over the abundance of items, though I do feel that the first game did have a few too many "unique" items which were really not all that special (again something that is being looked into, from what has been said in the Q&As). Generally though I don't think the stash will look or feel as bloated this time around, though those with beta access might have other opinions on the matter.

Edited December 4, 2017 by algroth

[swamp_slug]

IMO the problem with loot drops in PoE1 was the non-stacking of identical items, this made selling a hassle especially if like me you sent everything to stash and only really sold things when you were naturally near a merchant, you could spend 5 minutes mindlessly clicking on items to add to the sale area. With stacking implemented for PoE2 this should make inventory management and selling easier, however, what I would like to see is a way to mark items for sale and a "sell all junk" option in merchant screens, much like you can do in Divinity: Original Sin 2 or Dragon Age: Inquisition.

[Katarack21]

A trash filter? What is trash for you guys?

Well for one thing ****ing animal pelts and books I've already read.

[rjshae]

IMO the problem with loot drops in PoE1 was the non-stacking of identical items, this made selling a hassle especially if like me you sent everything to stash and only really sold things when you were naturally near a merchant, you could spend 5 minutes mindlessly clicking on items to add to the sale area. With stacking implemented for PoE2 this should make inventory management and selling easier, however, what I would like to see is a way to mark items for sale and a "sell all junk" option in merchant screens, much like you can do in Divinity: Original Sin 2 or Dragon Age: Inquisition.

 

With an option to set a "junk" filter based on a maximum item price and type, please.

[Lephys]

I still wish trash stuff would have more uses than just to make a couple of extra shillings per trip back to town. Limit the inventory and make people carry the stuff and the problem becomes "That's valuable stuff, because I can sell it to people!". Make the inventory unlimited, and the problem becomes "Now why WOULDN'T you take all the stuff and just sell it from your magical tardis stash when you get back?", as well as "now there are SO many things for me to sort through!"

 

I think the solution should be two-fold:

 

A -- Everything shouldn't always be valuable to everyone. In other words, there are valuable things to use wolf pelts for in the game, but everyone does not want to buy them or use them in any way. So, if you don't want them, you don't just get overruled by the fact that they're worth money and money is useful for hundreds of other things you do want.

 

B -- There should be a use for things other than selling. Especially with your ship crew, maybe you just cleared a beach of raiders, and you send a message via bird or something back to your ship's crew, and they send a team out to the location and gather all the arms and armor, so that they can break them down and re-use the materials for ship repairs and/or to make new weapons for the crew, etc. And/or maybe various NPCs just need stuff. I don't mean "I really need 5 rabbit nostrils. Bring me 5 rabbit nostrils and I'll give you a reward, then I'll mysteriously never need any more rabbit nostrils ever again!". I mean that, in general, they just need stuff. Maybe you bring herbs to the herbalist, and they give you free tinctures or coupons or something. Maybe sometimes they just buy stuff from you. Maybe they just owe you a favor, which you can call in later on in a different quest.

 

There are a lot more interesting systems to have than just "Here's stuff... like one time you might want to actually use this equipment, and the rest of the time, it's either pointlessly existing in the game world for verisimilitude, or it's basically just loose change you're leaving lying on the ground, but with the middle-man of having to tote it around and sell it."

[thelee]

FWIW, Icewind Dale 2 did a thing where most enemies dropped the gold equivalent of whatever loot the enemy would have had, with some exceptions. It was nice because I got really annoyed at having to manage all the umpteen gems that dropped in Baldur's Gate I/II. Plus, Icewind Dale 2 was more dungeon-intense, so there was far less opportunity to unload trash.

However, I will concede that it made fighting enemies a little more emotionally unrewarding, even though it was more convenient.

There is some happy medium, though. Because PoE on Path of the Damned had so much trash loot/craftables that money was never an issue (something that sells for like 5 is eventually worth a lot if you have countless quantities of it; never mind the boundless quantities of exceptional trash you could sell in the DLCs), and more critically, would start to dramatically lengthen your start/load times as various vendor inventories filled up with hundreds of xaurip spears and vessel fleshes. If Deadfire could hit a happy medium where the game economy was preserved and they fixed whatever Unity issues caused that save/load bloat while still having enemies drop some loot, that would be great.

Edited December 15, 2017 by thelee

[Katarack21]

I still suspect that a lot of that save/load issue could have been done away with by making vendors clear their inventory every few weeks or something.

[Wormerine]

Vendor’s inventory influence loading times = mind blown

[JerekKruger]

I'd be surprised if vendor's inventory has an affect on loading times. I almost always sell everything I find at the Black Hound (to avoid inventory bloat of good vendors and because I believe, perhaps wrongly, that after rescuing the cook I get better prices there) and yet never notice longer loading times in Gilded Vale or the Black Hound. Also calling up and modifying a list of a vendor's inventory should not be a computationally demanding task (we're talking reading/writing a few hundred numbers).

 

I was very much under the impression that the loading times problem was related to repeated use of the quick load/save function. This would certainly match my own experiences since, whilst longer than one would expect, my load times never get slower as I play and I never use quick load/save (my PC is not particularly amazing and I don't have an SSD).

[thelee]

I'd be surprised if vendor's inventory has an affect on loading times. I almost always sell everything I find at the Black Hound (to avoid inventory bloat of good vendors and because I believe, perhaps wrongly, that after rescuing the cook I get better prices there) and yet never notice longer loading times in Gilded Vale or the Black Hound. Also calling up and modifying a list of a vendor's inventory should not be a computationally demanding task (we're talking reading/writing a few hundred numbers).

 

I was very much under the impression that the loading times problem was related to repeated use of the quick load/save function. This would certainly match my own experiences since, whilst longer than one would expect, my load times never get slower as I play and I never use quick load/save (my PC is not particularly amazing and I don't have an SSD).

 

the longer loading times are not specific to the area, but in general anywhere, which is why you wouldn't see anything special about black hound/gilded vale vs anywher else. i think a dev has remarked on this in the past; there was a related bug where the chanter chant that laid those frost traps caused *explosions* in save file sizes and save/load times because they weren't being cleaned up at the end of their duration, so the game was recording lots of extra entries for those dummy hazards/traps.

 

If longer save/load times was related to repeated quick save/loads, that would be even more baffling, because that would suggest some sort of massive memory bloat/leak related to those functions. I highly doubt the game is that busted, whereas increasing vendor inventory makes more sense (and aligns with other comments I've seen). Though I wouldn't be *that* surprised if that was the case, since the version of Unity they used for PoE sounds like it had weird issues (like how a small change results in a multi-GB patch to download).

[JerekKruger]

If the increased load times aren't specific to area why would vendor bloat affect them? Surely when I enter Durgan's Battery the game isn't fetching the data about all vendor inventories.

[thelee]

If the increased load times aren't specific to area why would vendor bloat affect them? Surely when I enter Durgan's Battery the game isn't fetching the data about all vendor inventories.

 

It does, essentially, because AFAICT it's all packed into the same compressed file and every area load is accompanied by an auto-save, and the serialized objects need to be processed, compressed, and are expensive.

 

This isn't exactly news. When the chanter frost and rime trap bug was around, a lot of people were digging into this. And yes, dummy traps in random parts of the world would definitely cause load/save inflation in e.g. Caed Nua (where one would not expect to have tons of empty traps).

 

See these threads as examples: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/73986-chanter-rime-and-frost-traps-get-saved-causing-mobileobjectssave-to-grow-out-of-control/

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72764-quick-saving-and-loading-times-increased-greatly-after-20-hours/page-5?do=findComment&comment=1615960, which includes this gem of a discovery: " That is 97% of all stored objects being rime and frost traps!"

[Mygaffer]

Nope. I want to find a xaurip spear on a dead xaurip who attacked me with a spear when he was still alive.

Part of my agrees with this, part of me hates the tedious nature of selling six pages worth of weapons from my stash. I'd like to see not every enemy have gear they were using, as some gear would surely break in the battle anyway, and instead of have other types of loot, like currency, consumables, ingredients, etc.

Edited December 18, 2017 by Mygaffer

[injurai]

 

Nope. I want to find a xaurip spear on a dead xaurip who attacked me with a spear when he was still alive.

Part of my agrees with this, part of me hates the tedious nature of selling six pages worth of weapons from my stash. I'd like to see not every enemy have gear they were using, as some gear would surely break in the battle anyway, and instead of have other types of loot, like currency, consumables, ingredients, etc.

 

 

Could just have an auto-sell feature that let's you mark certain item tiers or item types as being sell on sight.

[Wormerine]

While we're at it, can we please reduce the amount of game in this game? I really hate it when games have game mechanics.

If those are not interesting mechanics and they bog down experience, instead of enhancing it, then yes. It’s like saying more writing in game is better.

 

The underlying issue with PoE loot is not that there is a lot of it, but that 90% of it is a junk you have no use for, except destabilising local economy by flooding market with hundred spears at a time.

[Mashiki]

 

If those are not interesting mechanics and they bog down experience, instead of enhancing it, then yes. It’s like saying more writing in game is better.

 

The underlying issue with PoE loot is not that there is a lot of it, but that 90% of it is a junk you have no use for, except destabilising local economy by flooding market with hundred spears at a time.

 

 

The big problem in CRPG's has always been money to buy things, it really hasn't changed all that much since the days of Fallout.  That kinda leaves you with two options, changing the way currency/trade is handled in the game or simply allowing lots of junk loot and letting people decide just how much they want to haul around.  I take the second option.  The upside is in most newer CRPG's the weight system is far more forgiving either not existing at all or allowing a "magical stash" to simply ship items off to.

 

The best option is to allow a "junk/misc" option like in Divinity OS:2 and let people throw stuff into there then dump it all at a trader.  That is unless the dev decides to be sneaky or there's a design change and use one of those junk/misc items for crafting and you didn't know about it.

[Lephys]

Could just have an auto-sell feature that let's you mark certain item tiers or item types as being sell on sight.

 

Hahaha... Sorry. This just makes me think of the MMO term "KOS", or "kill on-sight," which was typically used when a faction was so unhappy with you that the guards of their settlements would attack you immediately when you got into range (sorry, I know... over-explanation for a forum of gamers who probably already knew that).

 

So, now I'm just imagining a bunch of merchants standing outside a town gate with the guards, wielding sacks of money and bull-rushing you, turning you upside down, shaking all the marked items out of your pack and pockets, and taking them whilst paying you for them. 

[injurai]

 

Could just have an auto-sell feature that let's you mark certain item tiers or item types as being sell on sight.

 

Hahaha... Sorry. This just makes me think of the MMO term "KOS", or "kill on-sight," which was typically used when a faction was so unhappy with you that the guards of their settlements would attack you immediately when you got into range (sorry, I know... over-explanation for a forum of gamers who probably already knew that).

 

So, now I'm just imagining a bunch of merchants standing outside a town gate with the guards, wielding sacks of money and bull-rushing you, turning you upside down, shaking all the marked items out of your pack and pockets, and taking them whilst paying you for them. 

 

 

For Prime™ members only

[Gfted1]

Since loot, excuse me "too much loot", is junk, destabilizes the economy, is annoying and repetitive and probably kicks puppies too, how about simply removing unlimited carrying capacity? It was added to the game explicitly to "remove the drudgery" of walking back and forth for all this loot ().  

[Lephys]

^ Seconded.

 

Loot is always valuable (even if it's only a few shillings here and there, that's just being frugal.) If the game's gonna Skyrim the loot and give you no reason not to join every faction and gain unrestricted bonuses from becoming the Head of the Thieves' Guild AND the Archmage of the Wizards' Guild AND the head of the Imperial Guard, etc., then why should you restrict yourself?

 

One of the only reasons to ever not loot everything and sell it was difficult to do so. Why should the game say "this is free money, but pretend like it's a bad idea, 'cause we're just gonna let you do it"? It's a bit silly.

 

Again, you can make "trash" loot exist for the few reasons that it can actually contribute to the game world, but also make it useful in several different capacities (and not always useful yet annoying-to-pick-up).

 

The single biggest problem with trash loot in games (and the reason it's known as "trash" loot) is that it's basically just a proxy for handfulls of coins. Inventory management isn't bad. Inventory management of a big Xaurip-spear-shaped IOU slip worth 3 coins is a hassle. The easiest thing to do is not simulate for simulation's sake (since the system isn't perfectly simulating things anyway... you don't ever find chipped Xaurip spears or need to swap out the hafts on your weapons, so why does it matter if EVERY Xaurip is technically carrying a spear, so you should technically be able to loot them?), and to simply make Xaurip spears rarer and worthless. If you really want a Xaurip spear for some reason (maybe its design could make it actually functionally different from any other spear you can find in-game, instead of just another piddly-level spear?), you can keep an eye out for Xaurips, kill them, and you will find a spear without much trouble, but you won't find 17 Xaurip spears after every combat encounter with Xaurips. Also, you won't be able to trade every single Xaurip spear you find for definite money, so there will be no artificially perpetual reason to want them in your inventory.

 

That's the easiest fix. Not "INFINITE INVENTORY! 8D!"

[Katarack21]

Since loot, excuse me "too much loot", is junk, destabilizes the economy, is annoying and repetitive and probably kicks puppies too, how about simply removing unlimited carrying capacity? It was added to the game explicitly to "remove the drudgery" of walking back and forth for all this loot ( ).  

Screw that. I *love* my unlimited stash.

[Lephys]

If I loved infinite health, would that be reason to include it in the game?

 

I love Clicker Heroes. Make PoE combat like Clicker Heroes, so I can love it.

Edited December 19, 2017 by Lephys

[KDubya]

Just say no to inventory Tetris!!!!!

 

Reducing the amount of trash loot is fine. Making salvaged Xaurip spears worthless would be fine. Just don't force us to make multiple trips back and forth in order to sell it off. I always imagine that instead of a magic bag holding all my stuff I have a team of mules that follow along and carry my stuff.

[Katarack21]

Even the BG games acknowledged the tedious nature of inventory management with bags of holding, gem bags, scroll cases, etc. The stash just simplifies all that down.

[Gfted1]

Didn't everything stack into piles of 25 pieces in the BG series? Like mentioned, that would probably go a long way in quality of life improvement.