As most people probably know, I’m usually a firm defender of EHG and their choices for LE. This one, however, is one that I don’t agree with, even though I accept it.
Basically, the reason it’s this way is because the devs want you to make an active choice to pick them up. They feel that this is good for the gameplay loop. I don’t personally agree with it, but they themselves are players and the whole premise of LE was to make the game they wanted to play. So I accept it.
And, to be fair, it really is a choice. After not too long you’re simply ignoring most affixes because you already have too many. Basically, if it’s not a red affix, you only bother to pick them up if there’s a lot of them and close by. And even then, you still have way more common shards than you can realistically spend.
So that part actually sort of plays out to their intentions. What, to me, makes less sense and would be much more welcome would be to autotransfer shards. It doesn’t make sense to me that we have shards taking space in inventory and have to be periodically transfered. It’s just annoying.
Still, I don’t feel that it’s such a big issue, so I accept it and move on.
Lastly, I just want to mention that Mike also said before that they intend to make changes to shard drops, making them drop less often but in higher numbers, so you stop seeing drops of 1 or 2 affixes.
And he also mentioned that they want to include some system where you can transform shards into other shards, at a loss. Something like 100 int shards being converted to 10 fire pen shards, or something in those lines.
So, in conclusion, this is one of the things I think EHG should consider changing, especially autotransfer. I’m ok with not having autopickup, since I’ve gotten used to it and at this point I have so many shards that it doesn’t bother me. But I don’t think this is a net positive experience for the majority of the players.