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.
This.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Because I just don’t feel like playing vacuum cleaner simulator, if i am playing a loot-driven aRPG.
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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.
This really couldn’t be more wrong.
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.
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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.
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I just want to add one thing.
There is no auto-loot in LE. If you are zooming through a monolith really fast, you are leaving all your loot (gold, shards, items) behind you.
Gold does not auto-loot. It does an auto-pickup if you run over it.
Having the same for shards (auto-pickup if you run over it) still requires intent on the player’s part.
Just sayin’ …
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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 wasn’t talking about the code side of it. I was talking about the auto-collect vs auto-pickup.
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.
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We are speaking the same thing but I guess you are keeping your part on the client-side. So that was a partial misunderstanding on my part since it was ambiguous. I was talking more about the server transaction portion. Listener = heartbeat so the uuid’s would match and resolve the server-side transaction to keep things persistent. It is dependent action like you said before.
This whole thing sounds like a prime candidate for a loot filter option. Give shards a ‘send to forge’ option for the affixes individually, or separate them into a few tiers. Want to feel that weight and interact with the loot personally? Heckin go for it. Don’t care just get it in the bag like gold and I’ll look at it later? Option.
This is a personal taste and gameplay preference - not much different than a lootfilter - in my opinion. There is nothing different as far as ‘feeling the weight and interacting with the loot’ between this and literally hiding items I don’t want to even see. The exact same arguments against the idea of auto shard pickup can be used against the loot filter.
Make it an option in the loot filters and move on. Don’t use it if you don’t like it, do use it if you do.
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I mostly agree with you here. Especially your first paragraph. The problem is the devs want loot to be meaningful, but the current system precludes that due to the reasons mentioned above.
The only problem I see with tying it to a loot filter is accessibility for new players.
If auto-pickup is tied to a loot filter, a new player needs to setup said filter. Many new players may not play the game long enough for that to happen. It’s hardly a priority in the first ten to twenty hours to have loot filtered at all.
You want QoL features to be used by players when they need it, or when it stops being enjoyable to do the same repetitive task.
Auto-pickup for gold is implemented at level 1, because you need gold at the very start of your character, to buy items.
Crafting isn’t really introduced until you start traveling through time. It’s accessible earlier, but there’s a specific quest which introduces it as a function.
If you put it in the options as a toggle ‘Auto-loot shards’, everyone will tick that box. It’s a no-brainer, less clicking, more killing.
If you put it in the loot filters, everyone who uses filters, or reads a guide about them will tick those boxes. Again, a no-brainer.
If you assign it a weight based on quality, or quantity, people may not know why shards auto-loot. This could also be a toggle in the options, and again, would be a no-brainer.
If you make it a quest reward, people will notice it because their lives have become easier. Applying one of the previous options is still a choice as well, obviously.
If people have the option to make looting easier, they WILL take it.
Slightly off topic to the thread:
The issue really isn’t “How to implement Auto-Looting Shards in the best way”. It’s “Do we want to Auto-Loot Shards at all”.
Until the devs decide whether or not people should have this feature, and why it should or shouldn’t be in the game, trying to suggest potential solutions is a moot point.
I’d hope they are looking into numbers such as:
- How many shards are left un-looted, compared to items and gold.
- How many clicks are done per session-hour, looting shards.
- How many clicks are done per session-hour, looting non-shard items.
- How much time is spent between combat, looting shards and items.
In essence: How much time to do we waste by moving around after a battle, clicking ONLY shards.
If it’s on the order of 1 minute per hour or less… Who cares! It’s a tiny negligible portion of the gaming experience, which won’t change drastically if auto-looting becomes a feature.
If it’s between 1 and 5 minutes or more, optimizing the players time by allow auto-looting may be worth looking into. Clearly, there’s an issue if up to 10% of the time playing is devoted to clicking on a single type of item.
There is no way that adding a couple options next to shards that says “pick me up automatically” is gonna make the loot filter any more daunting to new players. Setting up a loot filter is something you do well into playing a character, once you’ve figured out what you want to filter. It has literally no purpose otherwise. No one who has no idea what they are doing is gonna jump right into culling items from their visible loot pool and then be mystified by an autopickup option next to some shards. They’ll be mystified by plenty more before they get there.
Expecting the average person to boil an “i dont like picking up all these shards, maybe if you did this it would be easier” post down into a bulleted clicks per hour per session per session-hour looting non-shard and shard items powerpoint presentation is also a bit mystifying, but I do appreciate the take. It’s a solid one.
There’s nothing wrong with proposing solutions to perceived problems on an Early Access Game’s Suggestions and Feedback Forum - The folks making this game are very able to extrapolate the information that there is a problem to be solved there. They dedicated this forum to Suggestions for a very specific reason I would imagine.
In this thread, and many like it, there are numerous people who are vehemently against this. Those people are the ones who make your sentence “If people have the option to make looting easier, they WILL take it.” itchy. The key word here is option. Wanna feel that weight? Feel it. Wanna sort through your shards by hand? Go for it. Want to see every item that drops? Have at it. Wanna color code them and cull 90% of everything that hits the floor from your visual space? Here’s a very thorough tool to do so.
Options be like that.
I can see the value proportion of what you’re pushing for here. But with regard to your counterarguments below:
It matters once there is a multiplayer economy.
As Heavy replied, it is more efficient for sure. But the more efficient solution may not always be the superior game design solution.
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I didn’t mean to imply that adding auto-pickup to the loot filter would make the loot filter harder for new players.
I meant that if the devs decide that the auto-pickup is necessary, tying it to the loot filter will make it harder for new players, who they want to retain, to have access to the feature.
As far as data about shards and whatnot, I meant that I hoped the Devs were looking into that sort of thing, in order to determine whether or not it was necessary to auto-pickup shards. I’d hardly expect someone to log their own session time and determine how much time was spent on X Y or Z activity.
If my previous post was being read as hostile towards you, I certainly didn’t mean it that way.