Random thoughts on loot usefulness and hoarding

General
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I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not really sure what I’d want or what I think is good design in regards to this topic. I kind of just want to express what I’ve been thinking about and see if there’s any interesting discussion to be had.

Over time, the game has added systems that make gear that otherwise wouldn’t be useful to you something worth keeping for some use later. The trivial, original example of this is just crafting in general. Crafting means you don’t just keep drops that are good, you also keep drops that have the potential to be good with a few crafts. And of course this has expanded over time. Temporal Sanctum gave us legendary crafting. Now there’s a reason to hold onto extra uniques with LP on them and any exalted items that you might plausibly want to slam onto a legendary. Since the base doesn’t matter and you often only care about hitting the one exalted affix, this can include a lot of items you’d otherwise just leave on the ground. Then 1.1 gave us the Nemeses, who made it so that not only uniques with LP were potentially valuable saves, but no LP uniques as well.

And now I’m thinking about this again with the crafting options the trailer has shown off. We are getting:

  • Woven Offerings: Sacrifice one copy of a unique/legendary to reroll affixes of another. Sort of overlaps with nemeses but it’s another reason to hold onto copies of basically every unique you might want to play with.
  • Rune of Havok: Shuffle the tiers around amongst the affixes, potentially letting you roll to get the stat you want to be the exalted affix. This means that basically any exalted that includes the affixes you want at any tier are now potential pick ups.
    -Rune of Redemption: Changes the exalted affix into another one. So any exalted that has enough of the other stats you care about in the other slots could be rolled to get the one you care about as the exalted affix.
  • Set item crafting: Fortunately it looks like all this will involve is destroying them to make crafting resources, so while you’ll want to pick them up now, you probably won’t need to hoard them in the stash.

Now my mixed feelings on this:

On one hand, ARPGs have a problem where like 95%+ of the loot you find isn’t going to be useful and that number increases as you improve your gear. Before you know it you’re filtering out almost everything but the best of the best, leaving the rest to rot on the ground. This doesn’t feel right and I think systems that manage to make you feel like more of the things you find have value are cool. Now with these systems, these unique drops that are supposed to be cool and exciting can actually sort of stay cool somewhat even once you have one. Plus in general these systems just give you more ways to improve your character, both giving you more control and more of a ceiling to aim for.

On the other hand, I am a chronic video game hoarder. I pick up most of the things I find and save them if they might be useful. Over time as my stash has filled, I have gotten way stricter with the loot filter, only showing non-build items if they’re at least T7 or 2+ T6. Even then, I’ve still managed to fill up my stash remarkably fast. And on one hand, the odds I use any one of these is fairly small, but with legendary crafting, who knows when they might come in handy? What if I end up making a build that needs xyz stat? My offline stash is a nightmare which I will never clean because it would take too long to sort through what was worth keeping or throwing away.

And the game keeps giving me reasons why I am completely justified in behaving this way. And while the design part of my brain thinks all that is cool, I really don’t relish the thought of hoarding even more crap and picking even more up off the ground. Can you imagine the filter rules you’re going to need to take full advantage of all the different crafting options?

So like I said, I don’t really know what I want out of all this. I wouldn’t say stop making these new systems, but I do wish there was something that pushed back on that hoarding impulse somewhat. What do you think?

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I think there are two major things here:

  1. Players need to get better to judge what might be useful and what actually is useful loot. Depending on your amount of time sepnt playing the game and how many different builds/character you play this might vary a little bit, but a lot of the loot that is decent, will also not be decent anymore with more time spent. When you accumulate enough ressources the minimum amount of how good an item needs to be to be worthwhile will increase. So on top of that what you might store today, might not be worth storing in a few days. So constantly revisiting the stash and tidying up your stash also helps with alot of space.

  2. I think the game should challenge players to make decisions on what to hoard and what not to hoard. This is also one of the very few points where I majorly disagree with one of EHG’s decisions (together with the just announced mastery respec) that was relatively recently implemented: Stash Tab Cost reduction.
    I really think a more costly stash tab system is more beneficial because the player can’t keep up with the stash space if your are hoarding too much. Even with the old stash tab prices space was plentiful.

At the end of the day the loot spiral of games like this get more interesting in my opinion if the player is challenged more frequently what to really keep and what not.

On top of that there are different kinds of players that might hoard different kinds of loot.

I personally do not hoard gear as much, with the exception of Exalted Items.
But I do hoard idols a lot, because they are way harder to target farm on demand.

When I decide to play a new build/character having no gear in stash is ok, because I really like the gear progression in LE, but having a few very rare idols in stash still accelerates the power of my character quite a bit, which feels good.

More ways to make duplicate uniques useful like the new crafting that has been teasred is also good, because it both makes unique drops more exciting and in the long run not take up as much stash space when they are consumed.

4 Likes
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It’s not a problem actually, culling drops though should be something done going forward. GGG for example has the mindset of ‘we drop everything so you can craft everything you want freely’, which 99,999% of people won’t do, they won’t pick up a base usable in Act 2 of their campaign in T16 maps to craft for a secondary character on it. That’s just not a realistic situation to happen.

Hence culling everything below a specific baseline is a very good thing to improve render speed as 3D-models are usually what causes the highest load for the local machine.

Out of sight, out of mind. The current filtering system is faulty by displaying item beams despite having them filtered out. Those shouldn’t happen so this feeling doesn’t come up simply. That’s something to be improved definitely.

As a fellow hoarder I have to say: ‘That’s a ‘you’ problem’ solely. Setting yourself distinct limits is a viable option instead. For example only keeping 5 pieces of each item slot for future crafting, anything beyond causes the least valued one to be thrown out. Add 5 unique item bases for LP crafting, 5 exalted items per unique slot for LP crafting and maybe doubling that up for outfitting the next character.
If you’re CoF anything ‘beyond’ shouldn’t be of value to you at the given time unless it’s utter top-tier, and for MG the excess needs to be sold immediately instead.

Never, cause you won’t get the relevant amount of LP items with the equivalent LP value to use them up. And by the time you want to switch to a build having those you’ll already have a setup available, allowing to include a setup for a third character.

And so on.

Actually with the new runes the game provides you a reason to pick up less items rather then more. The limit on upper end crafts has risen, hence non-optimal bases have become less valuable as you’ll run out of hope glyphs otherwise anyway. By the time you reach your limit on hope glyphs all uncrafted items below the level of where you can at least sustain them becomes worthless to even look at, forever, without a chance to change.

Yes: ‘Show all exalted items with T7 affix’, ‘Show all exalted affix with rare T6 affix’, experimental affixes T4+, ‘Show list of common uniques with 2 LP’, ‘show list of rare uniques with 1 LP’, ‘show very rare uniques’, show specific needed rare affixes on items.

Your filter is finished. Bar idols at least.

If you still get too many - hence end game - item drops then limiting the bases they display is also a viable option, enforcing them to be filtered out after the mentioned ones. In MG once again it would then include the T6 rare affix exalted ones still afterwards as those have value on the market.

Cutting away the generation of items if they’re below a threshold of power related to respective content run.
Also item borders related to affix rarity on them. Currently we don’t have borders, so a system where that stays for items only having common rarity affixes on them is very viable. With providing - for example - a blue border for uncommon ones as the highest available one and a red border for rare affixes on them. Hence when you see an exalted drop with a red border you get excited by design. Sweet sweet dopamine because they actually have value visible right away.

TLDR though: Hoarding is a general ‘you’ problem that needs to be fixed with knowledge as well as personal limitations pre-set to not cause choice paralysis.

100% agreed, both very bad long-term choices.

1 Like
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As much as I agree with this for the most part, it’s really subjective. Every person is different and what they believe has potential can differ as much as the individual can differ.

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As I said in my post, it depends on the playstyle and way the player plays. And yes it is obviously subjective, but that doesn’t matter.

How you judge certain items will still change over time and when you actually try to learn the game, you will get better and judging items, based on your personaly subjective criterias.

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While PoE doesn’t show the beacons for uniques, you still hear their distinct sound when it drops. I’ve always found this useful (just like I find the LE beacons useful) because I can stop and check the item (disabling the filter temporarily, which both keys have a hotkey for) and make sure I didn’t skip anything important on my filter.

I actually disagree with this. If you play CoF and plan to play CoF on all your future characters, saving T7s can be a huge time saver for future alts. Lots of times, making a new character, I can immediately find good exalts to either use or slam within my stash.
Even if they’re not perfect base+affix, they’re at least better than hoping for a drop while I’m leveling. And for slamming it means I usually have a bunch of alternatives available right away and I don’t have to farm them on another character in advance to prepare for the alt and I can start playing the new build right away.

For MG I agree that hoarding isn’t as necessary, since you can find most gear cheap. But for CoF, having a big stash is a big help.

I personally keep one of every unique (they’re in tabs separated by item slot, like chest, helmet, etc). On some of the better items (twisted heart, ladle, etc) I’ll even keep a few copies. I also keep most WW items I find, if they roll some decent affixes for leveling (or for some specific build) or if they aren’t unveiled yet (though I stopped picking 14 or less).

For exalts, I basically keep all the affixes I think are useful. And I have at least one tab per item slot (bigger items like weapons or chests usually have more). I skip affixes which I haven’t used so far in any build (health on kill, dodge rating, etc), but I save the rest.
I must have around 70 tabs by now, so I could still hoard more.

I have to agree with this fully. I almost never pick up T7s related to melee stuff, because I don’t like melee builds. I also used to pick up any 2xT6, until I realized they tend to be mostly useless (compared to a T7 or even to a T7+T6, which isn’t that uncommon anymore thanks to Nemesis).
So I’d have to say that I have changed my stance towards what I hoard over time.