Item Hell: Ground Density & Stash Sorting

(Disclaimer: This isn't going to be random bitching. These are true concerns I have for future game-play enjoyment and overall popularity of one of my favorite games. I site my own difficulties as examples only. No pity necessary.)

Chris and GGG, you've managed to fuse together aspects of some of the best RPGs of all time to make a truly unique and enjoyable game with superb replay value. Retaining a business model based on donations and cosmetic and stash microtransactions is a huge boon. Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication. Chris, thank you for your integrity.


1.) Density of loot labels on the ground from enemy drops
2.) Lack of any auto-organization feature of stash and stash tabs


End-game of PoE is item and currency collection/trade as well as developing sophisticated character passive skill builds. The latter is working great (in my opinion), but the sheer density of items that drop on the ground is super-crazy-ultra-totally OVERWHELMING. Stash tab organization is also (to a somewhat lesser extent) a glaringly tedious mess.

I am obsessive compulsive (among other fairly serious neurological disorders). I don't mean that I clean too much or I'm afraid of germs... no, I've been diagnosed with clinical neurological disorders that make my life pretty hellish. Unless heavily medicated, paralysis takes over due to obsessions about how to act, think, or function when under stress to decide what is the "best" and most appropriate action or behavior. With medication and great effort I'm able to take care of myself and be mildly entertained by games and friends on good days. I'm not stupid or slow, just "blessed" with mental illness.

Path of Exile is a nice escape, but I haven't been able to play any more. The tedium and mandatory sorting and sifting has taken all the fun out.

Ground Drops

The latest expansion's features are great, and the 'beyond' league is fun and challenging, but with all those extra fiends just popping into existence on top of the already dense amount of foes to defeat in 'cruel' and 'merciless' the clutter on the screen is an eyesore and a pain to sift through.



A quick count revealed about 175 items on the ground in one single cropped frame. Considering that each item has at least two words and some have three or more, this is approximately 438 words on one cropped frame of the game, some of which will be occluded by the chat box and UI which means the player actually has to move their character just to see the items in front of them. The average human can read about five words per second. For most, it would take about 88 seconds (nearly a minute and a half), to accurately skim over the items. This does not count the time it takes to intemperate the jumbled/disorganized "list" of items on the ground and to process whether he wants to pick up particular items. We will completely disregard the actual analysis time of each item in inventory--that is a different matter entirely and a fundamental part of player experience.

Color-coded item labels help A LOT, but it's just not enough. Every experienced PoEer knows that there are valuable white items that drop like those we would want to use to craft a piece of equipment from scratch or white items with a large number of sockets and even sometimes items with quality. In a much rarer event, some blue items are desirable to pick up as well. I do have a simple idea that I think may help.

Include an option that does not show item labels for common (white and blue) items when the hotkey is pressed but will instead open a small scroll-able interface window that makes a list of all ground items by proximity. Upon clicking the colored name of the item in the window, the character moves toward that item and picks it up. Of course players could as well click on the available item labels to navigate characters to the item. Furthermore, allowing players to right-click or press skill hotkeys while hovering over the item name in this proposed pick-up window to use the animation skills like Animate Weapon and Animate guardian could be included... AND (you're going to like this one) a very small button that moves the character to the item and identifies it by using a scroll of wisdom, no inventory required. Once the mouse pointer is no longer over the pick-up window it will disappear after a short delay. The option could be disabled, and all items labels will show on the screen to be manually picked up.

This would help streamline the action game-play experience without risking dumbing down game sophistication like the shameful D3. The animate skills will be much more viable, not just a short-lived toy or a (VERY) situational and tedious endevour. Whether my idea is used or not, any effort to streamline this unpleasant aspect of the game and improve the flow would be greatly appreciated.

Stash Auto-Sorting

Lastly, somewhat less of an issue but an issue nonetheless: I understand that regular players purchase several additional stash tabs and that it's not uncommon at all for the average player to have 15-20+ tabs each full of precious hordes of loot.



Again, in the early game it's not so evident that this is going to be a problem, but as more loot is collected and stashed the stash quickly becomes very messy and difficult to sort or search for items within. The stash clutter is compounded when stash tabs from challenge leagues are amalgamated at the end of the season with the stashes of standard and hardcore leagues. This is simply intolerable since the stash is a vital component to advanced gameplay. I, myself, (again a bit of an extreme example) simply cannot play on standard/hardcore league when the challenge league season ends because the idea of sorting my stash out is too overwhelming to consider. I only once ventured to sort my stash tabs on standard... about seven cups of coffee and six hours later, there was some hint of order to my electronic belongings.

Programming a very simple set of sorting buttons in the stash UI is unavoidable to maintain playability, and putting off the work too long is inevitably going to damage the population of the game and leave players with a bitter taste in their mouths when they decide to just not play because too much manual sorting and organizing is necessary to even consider building a character. I'm not expecting an interface that wipes our butts and polishes our shoes, but at the very least we need a set of controls that allows us to:
reset the numeric value of stash tabs based on where they are located in the stash queue,
move the customizable/green (more expensive) tabs to the front of the queue,
move items in each tab to the top-left corner in a left-to-right up-to-down fashion,
bundle and prioritize the order of loot within the stash by category (currency, skill gems, unique items, rare items, and other) in separate tabs and then move these tabs to the front of the queue in an order that reflects value, item level, and usefulness.

Said programming will not be an easy task, but it's necessary for players to have a sophisticated and pleasant system to work with. We may be hard core tough-as-nails gamers, but in the end the whole point of playing Path of Exile is to have fun... and to instill in ourselves a false sense of accomplishment :P

I'm guessing most testing was done in early game-play by the programmers and developers, and this is why these issues have been overlooked. Like I said, I searched for instances of others having frustrations with these same issues, but I did not find many. This probably has something to do with lack of ideas on how to improve the current flawed systems, or the belief that these systems would require too much difficult programming to revamp and, as a result, pleas for reconstruction in these areas would go unheeded. Afterall, the player-base of Path of Exile is generally very intelligent. We all have a good sense of what is difficult to change, and what is no sweat.

Thanks for reading ;)

(Edit: Removed numerous grammar redundancies, shortened unnecessarily verbose sentences, added contractions to make an easier read. Sorry about such obvious errors and divergences.)

Do you realize you are highlighting walls of text on the ground with a wall of text on the forums?

Anyway, I agree that the tooltip vomit is a problem that negatively affects gameplay. If there were a filter to cut out most of the unnecessary text in the game, they could probably apply the same thing to the your post to clean it up too =D

Anyway, here is an idea I posted in another topic that might work:

"

Monster loot which would fail to meet any of the following requirements has a 50% chance of not being spawned instead:
-equip level of base item type close to zone level (within about 5 levels or 25%, whichever range is larger)
-has a minimum number of sockets (depending on zone level), if not maxed
-rare or better quality (this rule is only applied in maps)
-has superior attribute (alternatively: increase drop rate of glassblowers)
-is a gem, currency, map, or quest item

This game is in great need of a user customizable loot filter. Removal of iiq gem and nerfing of iiq does not solve the problem at all.

"

PolarisOrbit wrote:

Do you realize you are highlighting walls of text on the ground with a wall of text on the forums?

Anyway, I agree that the tooltip vomit is a problem that negatively affects gameplay. If there were a filter to cut out most of the unnecessary text in the game, they could probably apply the same thing to the your post to clean it up too =D

I'm sorry. I went back and cleaned it up a little. It's difficult for me to articulate my thoughts concisely. I'm always second guessing myself. Bear with me.

PoE's loot system is quantity over quality.

Zero determinism + full RNG + ridiculous number of base item types + drop rates = massive quantity of loot required to offer players enough chances for getting lucky

It is funny, we virtually need Strongboxes and loot-splosions to help us brute force the RNG, but at the same time these things can put a burden on us because we are having to deal with an endless stream of items that are dropping for no reason.

Maybe, if GGG would get passed its love affair with blind RNG and implement some base level loot determinism, less items would need to be flooding the ground.

Also, I totally agree that managing items in PoE is too tedius and a limiting factor for the game.

"

Perfect_Black wrote:

Maybe, if GGG would get passed its love affair with blind RNG and implement some base level loot determinism, less items would need to be flooding the ground.

Agreed. The best and most efficient way to solve the loot spam is probably to cut down the blind use of the dice roll.

Unfortunately determinism probably means mindless exploit loops will be the best way to gear up.

You did a great job of highlighting your problems.

I'm not sure I would agree with your solutions though. (Also no clue on GGGs stance)

play solo

solo players never see this kind of drops :)

"

sidtherat wrote:

play solo

solo players never see this kind of drops :)

While I agree that solo play has a lot fewer bugs, this is not a solution. Suggesting to play PoE solo to avoid flaws is like suggesting to only have half of a vital surgery to shorten the amount of time you have to spend in the hospital.

Loot sorting would be useful, even if it was only limited to character inventory and not stash.

Just a way to remove some of the useless weirdly-shaped spaces that accumulate between items if you're not taking the time to manually re-pack your inventory.

Dungeon Siege had something like this way back when: you pushed a button and it re-arranged loot to pack it more efficiently.

It would save re-arranging your inventory after every battle, which gets monotonous after a while.