Random thoughts on loot usefulness and hoarding

General
1

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.

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3

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.

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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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6

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.

7

I’ve seen plenty of people thinking that they should sell items to the NPC to get money early in the game to afford stash tabs or anything… Those players believe that is useful and optimal, while in reality, it’s just not. This has even been said by Devs themselves: “they don’t want people selling items to the NPC for money”

So yeah, they can believe that is worth doing, but the outcome of them doing this is not subjective… they’ll simply waste more time and get less money than people who don’t fill inventories multiple times and sell everything to the NPC.

So I agree with Heavy… Players need to get better at judging what might be useful and what actually is useful loot. It’s an essencial part of becoming a good Exile-clone player.

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For that design-methods need to be included as much as possible to ‘nudge’ perception passively to the ‘right’ state of mind. That’s what great game-dev does, and what’s the biggest long-term thing for any game overall.

If a game is good at guiding the players then players do as the devs want commonly, hence those issues commonly don’t come up.

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As much as I understand what you are saying, that’s not the people I’m talking about. I’m talking about filling up Stash tabs b/c you constantly don’t have what you need for the build you are working on and having to spend hours farming for the right item with the right affix. This causes many to “hoard” so much stuff b/c they “think” it might be useful and they don’t have any other item with that affix (or that affix on that base).

So it becomes subjective based on what they “believe” might be useful in the future.

My comment had nothing to do with ppl who can’t adjust to the idea of not picking stuff up for vendoring.

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I read your post and as stated I agree with it for the most part. For further explanation of what I was referring to, see my response to @Folks below (I don’t want to say the same thing twice).

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If you have items with the right affix then you don’t need to farm for more… you need to craft.

If you can’t craft because you don’t have the materials for it then you can remove a part of the bases as you’ll get more of them by the time you have the crafting materials.

That’s your feedback from the game on where the balance is. I also had 10 tabs of exalted items for a while and never space to store more. Until I started to ‘listen’ to the feeback from the game in how many crafting materials I get. Now I got 1… and I’m still out of crafting materials, but never bases to craft on, just sadly also never upgrades to slap onto my character, which is frustrating.

So even if you pick up items which ‘could be useful’ they ‘can’t become ever useful’ since you’ll acquire more items before you’ll acquire the resources to craft.
This also changes over the course of playing long-term. After a while you get fever bases then crafting materials, so you can instantly craft on every base anyway, outside of those stored up for Legendary crafting.

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I understand. Just used that one specific example to show that, while personal player’s perspective is subjective, the outcomes of their actions are not.

You can apply the same to the example you’re using… If one hoards too much shitty items, even thought they think might be useful, they’ll end up with a whole lot of clutter in the stash and not a whole lot of good items in the long run, compared to someone who actually knows how to evaluate items according to the tools/mechanics the game offers to work on those items later, and/or the plans they might have for future builds etc.

Either way, players who are good at evaluating items will not hoard mindlessly just because… They only pick up items with a purpose in mind, thus, always being ahead in terms of farm and progression compared to players who are bad at doing that. This is not subjective.

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Yes, this is basic and I understand that. What I am saying is that sometimes you need that affix on the base that gives Endurance for example and you don’t have the affix there. Another example is when you have the affix on a wand but you need it on a scepter. Either of those cases are where you then need to keep farming. If you need the affix at the Exalted level, you can’t craft that.

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Yeah that’s kind of what I’m thinking. Even if it’s “wrong” to be picking up and storing as much as I do, the systems in the game feel like they nudge me towards that. There are explicit reasons the game gives me for holding onto things and the reasons for not holding things are implicit. If the designers want me to behaving in a more picky way, there should be some designs that reflect that.

Also like some others in the thread were saying, it does depend on the priorities of the player. I’m sure if you’re the kind of person who will play one character per season and just try to push them as far as possible, it should be fairly easy to keep hoarding to a minimum. Filter out everything that’s not directly useful to your character. You’ll still want to hoard some stuff like uniques for legendary crafting/nemesis/weavers will and exalts to attempt to slam onto your LP uniques since it’s not guarenteed, but obviously that would still be way less to hold onto than if you’re someone like me who will probably never play a character long enough to push them to super high corruption. (The first time I even played something long enough to go past 200 corruption was last season because I wanted to fight Abberoth.) I want to try a variety of builds, but it’s not like I know way in advance what I’m gonna go for, so I hold onto uniques that may be cool and then at least the decently rolled exalted items to potentially slam onto them. I don’t know in advance what specific affixes will be useful, although I’ve started trying to note when 2 affixes don’t make sense together like getting some item with minion affixes and player damage affixes. So it’s pretty easy to accumulate stuff. I’d be really sad if I found some cool build that used a unique I didn’t have so I’d have to spend a bunch of time farming for it before I could play it. Even with CoF target farming it can sometimes take a while to find a specific one.

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I mean… not really? For example, I have a bunch of T7s with +int/str/dex/etc. I won’t be crafting on them because I don’t know what other affixes the build that wants them will use. Do I add a cast speed to a +int chest? What if the build that is stacking int doesn’t want cast speed but rather minion damage?

Without knowing what all my future alts will want, I’d rather just store them all.

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Except that if the purpose of that exalted item is to slam on a unique, you can’t guarantee that, so you’ll probably need at least a few copies of both the LP unique and the exalts with the affix(es) you want to keep trying to hit.

This is one example of what I mean when I say there are systems that encourage hoarding.

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Absolutely, then it’s really easy.

If not… then you need to make a growingly complex system for that.
Generally bringing up a character to a specific state is a bit of effort though, you’ll need time. I’m going with the expectation that you’ll try to kill Aberroth with each, or at least make the character close to Aberroth viable if possible.

For that you’ll need a good chunk of time and a lot of items. But… you can specifically keep absolute and utter top-tier items (given CoF that’ll be T7+T6 items solely, and T7 rare affix items, nothing below would’ve relevant value for a non-planned build) as well as the distinct items for the next build only since it’ll need a substantial amount of time to bring up to the Aberroth power level anyway.

Obviously if you make a character after level 80 each time and do 20 per cycle… well… then nothing helps anyway, it’ll be a mess since you’ll have half-assed equipment on anything and never progress deep into corruption to acquire only top-tier items anyway. And the turnover rate between characters will be too high to acquire specified gear for the next build but rather have a mish-mash of ‘moderate garbage’ without resources to craft sitting about. Which is a call to weed out the worst picks anyway.

And that’s the biggest part definitely.
A distinct plan on ‘what do you want to play’ is basically mandatory to focus on things. Otherwise you’ll have a slew of non-optimal things stored up that’ll never see the light of day anyway.

Because as you said, without knowing what you’re going for you’ll likely accumulate dozens of items with an exalted affix that scales minions… but has direct damage components otherwise on it. Those can be mostly thrown out when the non-fitting ones are T5 already (since you can’t change em). Also if an item has a really bad combination of affixes you can likely also throw it out since your FP won’t last to finish it into a decent result.

So you got nothing planned for the next build and hence simply hoard em. Yeah, viable for specific affixes if you know which you’ll likely need. But if you got a acolyte chest-plate with Attunement for example… time to throw it :stuck_out_tongue:

Yeah, but that’s commonly what… 1 tab? Because if you got 5 duplicates for the same unique you simply won’t acquire before you got 5 other bases then… well… maybe it’s time to craft those 5 into the wanted end-result and throw any failed crafts out :stuck_out_tongue:

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Sure. There are a bunch of stuff I don’t pick up, even if they’re T7. I even skip on a T7+T6, or 3xT6 if the affixes don’t really go well together (although with the new rune that might change).

But that still leaves a LOT of stuff you want to pick up. Every +skills is a keep. Damage increases, cast/attack speed, rare affixes like shared penetration, etc. And even if the base is bad, you keep it, because it might be good for slamming.

But the upside is, when I make a new alt, I almost always have something that I can use. When all your characters are CoF and you know all your future characters will be CoF, hoarding is good.

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Hard disagree. D4 (and D3) take the approach that all loot matters. I like that philosophy. I think LE could lean harder into making it easier to mine items for affixes, and giving us a method of converting large numbers of common affixes into rarer or affixes only available via crafting.

IMO it’s PoE taking the worst aspects of D2 loot and going nuts with it, and then creating a loot filter as the answer to, “all the shit on the ground is useless” problem they created. That does nothing to address that 99% of the loot drops are pointless. You coming through and tell us that it’s actually good, does not make it good. It’s just what you are used to, and how you like to think about loot. It’s the “I want infinite possibilities, so I need infinite drops” mindset that makes playing the game more of a grind the longer the game lives. I’d like a more curated experience, with more ways to influence the drops, and ways to convert drops I don’t want into crafting materials that I will use.

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The current bottleneck in itemization is not the acquisition of affixes. That’s plainly spoken piss easy.
The problem is to get a craft finished. Which is why people have 50 rare affix shards available for their main skill after a while and nothing to use it on. Because that main skill is needed in T6 and T7 after a while and hence you can’t ever use a shard for it. The others are generally filled up with uncommon or common affixes.

I don’t remember when the last time was I was actually missing a shard for crafting, and that despite removing rare affix bases which aren’t exalted from my filter since months.

Yes, agreed. Item bases should be shifted out of existence over time, but they aren’t. Which is why it’s so important to have ‘core directions’ for the bases available and respectively scale them with increasing content.
PoE 2 currently has placeholders for the higher tiers of bases, you get ‘advanced’ and ‘expert’ bases after a while since they haven’t finished the implementation yet. But overall if you got - for example - multiple bases with ‘causes bleeding’ then you’ll only want the best one anyway, why drop the lower one?

What it does do though is allowing you to use those drops to create items for character at a specific level range. It’s rarely done… but can be done. And you would phase those options out then.
Given that LE doesn’t provide proper level requirement information while crafting it is clearly one aspect not focused and hence used even less, so it would be viable to phase out. Nothing against that.

We don’t know how EHG wants ti implement further things into the future though, so depending on that phasing them out is viable… or leaving them in is important actually.

Either/or, you would still need a filter as with respective amounts of progression even exalted items start to clutter the screen. Also… if you’re searching for rare affixes on items (which happens long into end-game) you’ll want to pick up even otherwise worthless bases to get them removed or shattered (if out of removals). So how will you take care of that?

Yes, and those games generally tend to have less replay value as it’s substantially harder to create a well oiled machine there rather then simply removing ‘bad’ drops to be visible. EHG already can’t handle properly keeping up with the market, that would make it even harder for them. We’ve seen their content pipeline is still a mess, with hopes to get better after 1.2 (but not promised obviously)… so why adjust things in a way which will make it all the more unlikely to have that happen? Because the content pipeline issue is vastly more important then optimizing itemization drops for every specific stage of the game without causing downsides for any situation.