I’m perfectly okay with someone disagreeing with those points. I made that list solely to dispute the claim that LE has the best QoL of games in the genre.
Similarly, I do understand that people dispute the importance or need for auto-pickup. However, as much as I love where EHG’s hearts are, and I definitely respect their thoughtfulness and intentionality in design, I do think that it’s easy for them to get caught up in the biases of a beta test community.
I’ve seen this trend in several other games (not just in this genre) where the avid supporters of a game will slowly form an echo chamber with the devs, praising them, agreeing with them, everyone making and drinking the same Kool-Aid… only to have the game release and fall flat on its face. The beta community failed to provide adequate criticism or to acknowledge the general pulse of the larger gaming community. This is especially true for really niche games.
I’m not trying to make the case that such a situation is currently the case with this game. I just don’t want to see it devolve into that either. We don’t have a certain way to know how the game will be received once it officially releases. The best we can do is try to compare similar features and similar games and see who did what right.
(It is alarming to see how much PoE hate goes in chat all the time. Really points to the dangers of the beta circle jerk phenomena I described above. Would rather not have that.)
At minimum, we can’t ignore the fact that most new players who pick this game up run into the shards/inventory thing really early and immediately ask themselves (or chat), “Why don’t these just auto-collect?” There’s an obvious expectation there. Maybe it’s a feature that not everyone wants to use. This is what Settings options are for. The argument that “everyone will just use it” never rings as a reason to object to it, in my eyes. It’s just reinforcement that the game should offer it. If someone decides they’d rather not use it, they would still have that choice.
By the way, I understand how what I said came off as too strong. You aren’t the only one to point it out to me. I admit that it was phrased a bit too aggressively. That’s why I had to clarify and soften it up a bit. I’m trying to make an honest case for this, offering constructive criticism and feedback, not become some weirdo fanatic who is immune to it myself.
If you seriously think i tried to bring you a so called “valid”,“tangible” or “measureable” argument after everything you stated here, you are mistaken.
I just wanted to tease you, because you are sounding like a very elitist person, that devalues other peoples statement, because you think that your point of view is superior.
Your whole attitude is something i sincerly despise in forums.
We are here to discuss about different viewpoints.
But it seems that you cannot ackowledge other peoples viewpoints.
Not sure why you participate in forums.
I think I may have missed a step here. Where was he being elitist or arrogant? I’m sure I could have been accused of the same thing (despite not intending to be) for having a similar style of conversation/argumentation. All I saw him say there was that on the back end the features look identical to the system, so the reasons to oppose it would need to be something else.
You are right. It’s exactly the style of delivering arguments that’s very combative and dismissive. Even if the underlying argument is sound, it puts people off.
For someone like yourself or Zaodon (and I include myself as well), you might think you’re being direct and saying things as it is, and that should be the whole point of it. But not being able to deliver the (albeit sound and logical) message, in a way that persuades and convince people with different viewpoints, is a problem for left-brained individuals.
PS: this is something I struggle with too. But I am well aware of this problem I have, and in written form, where I could reflect on my instincts first, I always try to remind myself of my tendencies.
This is such an apt way to put it. When I hear a suggestion that’s kind of like something already there, but still different, my brain doesn’t just read the words, it puts them into logical functions–I even mentally visualize them as a mathematical equation of sorts.
Like earlier when someone suggested a capacity limit to try to achieve something similar to my OP, I immediately mentally compared it to two really similar, yet slightly different, equations–only really having a sign difference–but the result at the end is different as a result. That’s why my objection to most of these could be read as people suggesting different equations and me pointing out, “No, you’re still missing (1/x²) in yours!”
It literally has nothing to do with trying to make them feel lesser in some form, and it’s certainly not the intent. It’s just not the level of analysis I’m usually operating at.
I can empathize. And I know exactly what you mean.
The only reason why I’m doing “better” now is because I always get scolded by the wife for “talking down” to her. I was operating the same way as you are!
Yeah, I think having a special character to denote the shards before the name would help. Something like
“ Increased Critical Damage Shard”
That said, the devs would still be left with the problem of how it feels like a pointless chore to manually loot and then store the shards all the time. I still like that this solution addresses the same core problem mine seeks to.
To be honest, I think just making loot filters be able to filter shards as well would be enough on its own.
For me, the reason I would want shards to autoloot right now is because they feel exactly like gold to me. It’s not worth the time to read each shard to look for the “good” ones because I’m going to pick them all up anyway. Since there’s no quick way to differentiate the shards I’m hunting for from the shards I have thousands of, I never notice when I get a good shard and I never get that “Oh, sweet!” feeling from shard drops. Shards are simply a resource that slowly builds up - basically the same as gold (just with a different purpose.) So, naturally, it seems weird that two resources I interact with in the same way loot-wise have different looting systems.
If the shards I’m looking for could be highlighted just like good gear drops, though, I think it would really help this problem. The shards I have thousands of could just be hidden entirely, while the one’s I’m actually hunting can have some brightly colored shiny text that gives me the “Oh, sweet!” moment that’s missing right now. This would make shard looting feel much less like gold looting, which would mentally justify it requiring clicking vs. just being autoloot. (Bonus points if the loot filter can take into account the number of shards you have banked in order to dynamically hide/recolor shard drops! )
Also, since it’s come up many times in this thread; “slippery slope” is a logical fallacy and is not a good basis for an argument. I’m not strictly for or against shard autoloot, but the idea that implementing it would inevitably cause the entire game to become an autoloot vacuum just isn’t true. It’s better to give concrete examples rather than assuming a specific chain of events if you’re trying to support a counter argument. For example, one direct result of shard autoloot would be that new players might not even notice the shard system, know where the shards are going, or understand how shards are obtained. This could be a reason not to implement shard autoloot, or at the very least is a concern that would need to be addressed if the feature were added. If we focus on these types of things rather than chains of hypothetical events, I think we’ll have a much more productive discussion.
This is where the toggle option in the Settings is really important. In the first place, it gives the players a choice. In the second, by having it off by default, it allows new players to engage with it before opting to auto-collect, ensuring they understand what they are and that the crafting system is centered around them.
I’ll probably edit the OP after I wake up to include this, because it just makes too much sense to have this rather than assuming it would always be on for everyone no matter what.
I did notice that the shards are assigned a gold value. 15 gold at the moment, nothing worth going out of the way to vendor. But if the value was increased, then the player would have the option to sell unwanted shards before dropping them into the forge where they can’t get them back out until they are used for crafting.
I agree with this sentiment. And honestly, I feel like the current implementation of shard pick up already made shards lose their “weight” and individual value.
For shards to have “weight”, there must be a material decision of what is picked up or not. The current implementation already effectively causes all shards to be picked up. There is no weight or value to the 1000 fire resist shards which I, and every other player, have automatically picked up.
Conversely, In a game like POE where you need to consciously decide if a currency piece is picked up, everything do have weight and value. Wisdom scrolls, portal scrolls, transmute orbs, … all these have weight and value in POE because if I start filtering them as an endgame player; and there will be time I need these currencies, I actually need to trade valuable currencies (e.g. Exalts or Chaos) for these “low value” currencies. But if GGG had implemented the same kind of autoloot for currencies in POE, endgame players will be swimming in hundreds of thousands of wisdom scrolls and there is no real weight or value to them.
Or there could be a trade in system for the shards. A vendor recipe of 5-10 of the same shard will get you a random mystery shard back. Would allow choice before depositing, thus giving choice when picking up a better feeling.
If your currency tab was attached to your player instead of your stash, they would pick up every currency piece. I can agree from a game design perspective that those currencies have weight in the way you described, but the “PoE culture” ensures that they still don’t precisely because you can trade 1 chaos for a ton of tp scrolls, so tp are almost never worth picking up and do get filtered out. It stops being a choice there too, and that’s really a good thing, because tediously looting crappy stuff (even if you need some of it) feels awful for gameplay. Just because it theoretically has “weight” doesn’t mean it’s “good” for gameplay.
It would have to upgrade them to something not entirely random–has to be something reasonably sought after. Trading “more trash” for “less trash” is still tedious busy work. People have suggested something similar for idols and I have the same objection there.
I’m fading out here. I’ll catch up with you guys when I wake up.
Increased Critical Damage Shard”
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