Shards, Glyphs, Runes As Items

[Vherdant]

Apologies if this is the wrong place or it has been asked. I did a quick couple searches.

So i’ve heard this said in a couple streams but not really addressed, and i’m deeply curious about it. I generally find design decisions in Last Epoch well thought-out once i hear/read the reasoning, even when i may not 100% agree with them. So i’d love to know: what is the reason for the stated design goal that crafting materials should feel like items rather than currency?

As they stand now, i find them annoying. I have to stop and take time to click them. There was a thing mentioned in stream where there was pushback against further improving them based on "well, you should’ve seen how it was before." Which, obviously not a valid argument. So what i see now, it’s currency with a too-small vacuum radius that makes me stop, then start on again, only to realize some bits were just outside vacuum range, so i have to turn around and go back. It’s functionally identical to if gold behaved the same way, which… it doesn’t. So why don’t the same reasons apply to crafting materials?

Then, once i’ve stopped to pick them up, interrupting the flow of play, they fill up my inventory, forcing me to stop and open it while a map is shooting lightning or something at me, and, more than once, be killed while i try to manage my inventory (yes, i’m not exactly an advanced endgame player). Which just feels like needless busywork as much as the small vacuum range or having to manually pick them up at all does.

I see frustration and annoyance, and no upside. It’s been admitted that they don’t presently feel like items, but that they apparently should. So what i’d like to know is:

1. Why should shards, glyphs, and runes feel like items? And this question may need to be separated. For instance, shards are far more common. Even if we accept other crafting materials should feel like items, why shards?
2. How should they be made to feel like items rather than currency?

The only ways i can think of to do so don’t sound like much fun to me. But y’all are game designers beyond GMing TRPGs, so it may well be you have better in mind. I’d just like to know what since the axiom’s been stated but not supported.

To me, it seems like there’s no real cost besides patience to picking up every crafting material so long as they can just be sent to the bank, so why overcomplicate things? And if sending them off were restricted or a cap were instituted; if things were made less annoying as they apparently used to be, why? What would be gained by making them feel more like items than currency? In fact, what even is the distinction?

[XLVI_carpo]

This indeed is a frequently brought up topic. And I’m also really torn about it. This propably has something to do with player psychology. Devs create a bit of inconvenience to not feel like watching a bot on a railroad just zooming through the maps.

There’s a lot of automation possible. You could automatically pick up all shards. They could be sent to stash instantly. You could also skip the looting completely and just present a list of dropped items at the end if a map where the player can choose from. We could have unlimited player inventory. Items could have all the same size so you don’t need to puzzle.

There are so called MMOs out there that have auto questing where moving, fighting, looting, leveling up and everything else happens automatically.

Of course this is an extreme example of the exact opposite side. But the thing is that there will always be something you could automate to make it more convenient for the player.

I’m personally ok with the pickup of shards with the vacuum effect we have currently. I’m just not sure why we should have the shards and glyphs as items in our inventory. You can instantly stash them with a click of a button. People do it like that:
Press [i] - click "send… " - press [i].

Nobody looks at the shards. Maybe the fist few shards in your LE life, you hover over with the mouse. But as we have a materials list, theres no way anybody browsed his inventory to search for a specific shard. Why should we? We can’t use them from the inventory. In PoE you need to click them and then use them on an item. In the only possible interaction is “send to forge”.

So I’m really annoyed by having shards and glyphs fill up my inventory. The more items you loot on a map, the less place you have for shards and the more often you have to stop and send to stash.

If EHG keeps this “shards should feel like items” stuff they should actually do something so they really can be used as items. If the only interaction is “send to stash/forge” and there is no other choice what to do with them, this is a misconception in my eyes.

At least they should make shards and glyphs of the same type stack.

And/or implement a hockey for “send…” so I don’t need to open my inventory all the time.

[Shtrak]

@XLVI_carpo

At least they should make shards and glyphs of the same type stack.

I would add keys.

[Houlala]

@Vherdant

or it has been asked.

Pretty much by every player starting this game, yes…
Sadly, I haven’t read any kind of answer / explanation from the devs on this subject (doesn’t mean they never gave one, I don’t read everything).

As it stands it doesn’t seem to make any sense, not even remotely.
Devs work in mysterious ways: I can only assume they have some long-term plan with the shards for which they need them to be in inventory. Maybe?
I don’t know. I don’t get it. Nobody does.

There is ONE positive side to the situation, though:
While every other subject always get heated and controversial, everybody agrees this shard system sucks.
Maybe they keep it like that to have at least one thing uniting the player base.

[Shtrak]

@Houlala

Devs work in mysterious ways: I can only assume they have some long-term plan with the shards for which they need them to be in inventory. Maybe?

Trade? Maybe we could sell/buy shards? Maybe.

[XLVI_carpo]

If they plan a mechanic of trading shards that requires that you have to extract single shards from your forge, put them into you inventory to just put them into a trading window after that, I’d say they, should get rid of all the drugs.

Really: I don’t see why trade should require shards to be in your inventory as items. You could just choose shards for trading from a menu similar and linked to your materials window.

Nobody will trade single vitality shards! You will trade stacks of 10 or 20. Same with runes and glyphs. Yes there are rare one you won’t trade in that large stacks, but that is irrelevant.

[Shtrak]

I agree, but now I don’t see any other reason.
I’m pretty confident they will surprise us all!

[Feardemon]

@XLVI_carpo

You could also skip the looting completely and just present a list of dropped items at the end if a map where the player can choose from.

For monolith I don’t get why it is not like this. Why can’t everything that would drop just be sent to the chest that is at the end. Most of the time loot is trash anyway and yes you can set very specific filters but then the game feels like you get nothing. But in maps where the map is blasting lasers from the sky at you it would be nice not to have to stop and check loot drops to verify that they are indeed trash and cannot be made reasonable thru glyphs of chaos.

I just feel that the whole monolith progression would feel so much better for me at least if loot was not dropped in map.

As far as op there is no logical reason why shards, glyphs, runes or even keys should not just vacuum and be put away automatically. The devs are just human and have great ideas and bad ones. They should just add options and let the player decide. I sure players would also not mind if loot vacuumed up too. Cause you can set loot filters.

[darkdeal]

The reason is because they don’t want aspects of the game becoming meaningless. Every player action you take away from the process takes away from its perceived importance. I’m not saying it will become unimportant, but it will FEEL like it does.

People want to make all aspects of this game easier and more autoplay. There are some that want to be able to spend extra resources to guarantee crafting success. There would come a point where people would just want to max craft an item with one click because they have all the materials to guarantee that it will happen.

There are people that want most of the skills to be passive/auto cast.

I’m sure there are people that would even turn the game on and watch a bot play it for them. I don’t understand the point in that, but I guess it’s not too much different than people watching others play the game.

My point is, every minor step away from player agency takes away from the feeling of the game. It makes the game just that much less immersive, and a little more boring. How many of those before people start to feel like the game is just a “walking simulator” and get bored of the game?

[invispoet]

I understand not wanting to automate too much of the action, but sometimes it IS distracting to see all the loot flying while still in combat. I kinda like the idea of having all the loot drops AFTER the fighting is done, outside the echo.

It would also help tremendously if we could create loot filters to highlight the shards/runes/glyphs that we care about the most, and possibly even hide some.