What about auto-looting shards that you have a certain number of?
If you already have 100-200 of X shard, just auto-loot it. Clearly, you’ve got enough saved up that you aren’t actively looking for them, barring a complete gear-swap.
Show only the rarer shards. It won’t be all the shards you want, but it’ll be most of the shards you don’t have alot of.
This would allow the ‘rare’ loot to show up and require clicking, while making ‘common’ shards disappear automatically, allowing you to know that you’ve already got extras. The only ‘abuse’ I could see would be people who have farmed out enough of every rare shard, a small enough chance to be negligible. If people want to farm 200 of every shard, just so they can auto-loot every shard… more power to them.
The problem I have here is that it still treats mundane and special shards the same. Like I said earlier, I don’t think quantity is the issue here. For loot to have “weight,” to be special, it has to stand out. I don’t think auto-loot thresholds provide this in a meaningful way, and in fact eventually turn the special loot into mundane loot.
in another thread I suggested to have a shard loot button. If pressed, it picks up all shards in a certain radius around the char.
This would still have some “weight” as there is an action to be performed. But it takes away the need to exactly click on a label. You can push the button while walking across.
Would also be a nice feature in regard to controller support.
Well… if shattering runes were more acessible / cheaper/ more common… It wouldnt incentivise the hoarding… It would incentivise the shattering process to convert drops into shards… so this would have no/little impact on stash space… and as the game allows opening the forge from anywhere, you could do the shattering in-map without having to lug stuff back to town…
That would require the runes to have a very low cost. Even if they were 1/4 what they are now, it wouldn’t keep up with how much stuff someone might want to save for that purpose. The other issues would still be present, though.
The feature is already amazing in terms of QoL. The difference between them vacuuming into your inventory or into the crafting inventory might seem negligible, but it’s a slippery slope. I honestly can’t really believe people have problems clicking on loot and then clicking “move to crafting storage” a single time. The more automated and less interactive the game becomes, the less invested people will feel. Many people seemingly want to just move through a monolith killing monsters without having to make choices about loot or click on materials, and that I feel is completely against the spirit of a loot-based ARPG. The QoL of last epoch is already well ahead of pretty much any game in the genre, so IMO people should just be grateful they aren’t looting for minutes like in the end game content of PoE. People will always ask for more, and I’m glad the developers have drawn the line where we are now.
I think players lose track of how much space they have available. Then that next shard send them over the top on having to click 3 extra times on I, press send to forge button, I then on their way again.
In NWN2 I did make a special tag for crafting but they had to buy a special bag for auto collection. The bag had a meta tag under it that searched for ITEM CATEGORY == ‘Craft’ and worked the same way as gold does now. The way they are changing the UI could align with that being the tag conduit to eliminate the “transfer” the forge is essentially a bag as it stands now.
There is a ton of hyperbole and just plain fiction in this thread.
The game designer already decided to auto-loot gold. They could have made gold clickable, but decided not to. I don’t see anyone complaining that this negatively affected the game.
Also, Runes auto-store, but affix shards don’t. Again, the devs just “decided” this. There is no math formulae on player satisfaction, or player engagement, or player retention that they studied for hours before making that decision. They just did it.
I am stating that I cannot see or even posit any tangible, measurable benefit to looting currency (gold + shards) by clicking.
I am also stating that I can see downsides:
it adds tedium
it slows down gameplay, incentivizing faster builds to make up for that time, leaving slower builds less-played/less tried.
it creates confusion & inconsistency (why does gold fully auto-loot, but runes only auto-store, and affixes require a fully manual process?)
it creates a crutch for developers to provide a better, longer, more engaging end-game.
These are real, tangible negatives of not having shards auto-loot. If players need to understand how shards work, making players click them with a mouse is not the answer the devs should be looking for. They should have a slightly better crafting interface (coming in next patch!!) and good enough notes in the Help section (which I think they do, honestly).
But to claim that picking up shards by click has any value seems nonsensical, and I think people claiming this need to at least put down either stats or at least logical arguments as to why.
Some of the reasoning behind auto-collect or not is based on server/client heartbeat exchange and the size of the data tables involved.
The whole thing can come crashing down like what happened to PoE Ultimatum launch when database pagination was the root cause of the meltdown. The amount committed to each DB R/W per packet has to be threaded in a way that makes it efficient for the server/client to resolve within that heartbeat resolve.
I am not going to profess to know how LE is handling data transferring, but it is one of the things that needs to be considered before unleashing a feature like this.
No, this is menial and pointless extra busy work that serves no purpose. These kinds of features in games tend to bore people, which makes them less invested. There are aspects of the game you do want QoL / stream-lining for. Mundane loot is one of them.
There isn’t a decision to make. You’re going to grab all the shards. The difference between whether a player cares what they pick up or not is if anything interesting stands out. Otherwise, the stuff that would otherwise be interesting gets lost in everything else.
D3 has better skill respec than this game.
Grim Internals mod for Grim Dawn has auto-loot for crafting materials.
D3 also has better info about about item comparison tooltip.
PoE has affinities for stash tabs that auto-sort stuff you want to put away.
Most games in the genre have significantly better pacing, especially with regard to movement speed.
PoE has better minion AI and options for manipulating them yourself.
Grim Dawn has a better respec system too.
Pretty much every other game has better UI management and NPC interaction protocols.
Wolcen’s dodge mechanic is better than any movement skill in this game.
Loot in most of these games (except maybe PoE) has some minimal level of value, even if you can’t/won’t wear it or craft with it, because it can be sold for a non-negligible amount of currency.
Of the games that have chat functions, pretty much all of them have more/better features.
D3 and Grim Dawn have alternate leveling mechanisms so you’re not forced to slog through the campaign on every new build you want to play.
I can go on for days like this, but I’m pretty sure I’ve made my point. You’re either ignorant or exaggerating the claim. I’m leaning toward the latter since you do make reasonable points on other topics.
I don’t completely fault EHG for many of these areas where it falls short of its competitors because this game is still in development and hasn’t had a chance to grow into its full potential yet. That’s totally understandable. However, I will be highly skeptical about the reasoning behind some of the ways things are implemented in the game, because that sets the ground work for those later features and adjustments. Also, I don’t believe in this Argument from Authority fallacy; devs can be wrong about things too. It’s our job to show them when an idea of theirs isn’t going to gel well with the players.
Pretending that manually looting items players are going to pick up anyway offers any sort of “choice” or “meaning” to that loot is both wrong in practice and foolish in conception. The solution I offered in the OP allows for loot to be meaningful by selectively excluding it from the mundane, so the contrast highlights its value/weight.
Not a valid argument, as you already are. It just requires 1 click to gather all the shards at once, and another click to clear your inventory. That’s just tedium. What value do those two clicks have?
Not a valid argument. I click my mouse and that exact same thing happens. Removing that mouse click would have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the server/client communication.
Actually, there is called an OnClickEvent which tied to the heartbeat that keeps communication. Unless you are a game designer with industry knowledge and the code to back it up I would not try to tell me what I do or do not know, that is a fallacy on your part.
I have 33 years of client/server software development experience. That is more experience than some of the EHG devs have been alive. I know precisely what I am talking about.
The client handles the click event. The client also handles the movement events. The client also handles geometric calculations such as when you are “over” a pile of gold. It also then handles Triggered events based on its Listeners.
There is already a Listener for when you move over a pile of gold, and it activates the “auto-pickup” event, which is then processed client side, and then (once the game goes multiplayers) sends the packets to the server to validate all of that information (your actual position, the golds actual position, etc.) so that you can’t use client-side cheats. The server validates the information, performs its part, and then replies back to the client to trigger the removal of gold from the ground and addition of gold to your inventory.
Now, replacing the Listener for your position with a Listener for a mouse-click on a shard, is 100% client side. Once that trigger is activated, the exact same Event plays out between client and server to “loot” the shards. It does not matter one whit if a positional Trigger or a mouse-click Trigger started off the chain of events.
So… yeah, I know how that all works at the code level.
