What's the point of stack sizes?

I hope GGG never changes stuff like this.

It is insanely hard to find games that don't 'streamline' their game and their inventories to where you might as well remove that shit altogether and make it a facebook game.

Currency taking up space may seem pointless but it adds to the game in ways that most people don't really get nowadays. Same idea with the inventory tetris and light radius stuff. I actually enjoy things like this.

If you don't like it you have the option of other games out there that love to 'streamline'.

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xxxmetalgearxxx wrote:

And no, nobody buys stash tabs for currency alone. Which is why they should make stack sizes unlimited (or at least larger).

Yet your whole reasoning behind making stack sizes large is so they dont have to buy stash tabs for currency? You seem to be trolling so hard I didnt even realize it.

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VoxelSquid wrote:

I'd like to continue from my point on page one.

Stack size is fundamentally not an inventory management or microtransaction-incentive issue. GGG made the stacks large enough that inventory management is not excessively inconvenient, but still small enough that orbs do take up some visual space, which reinforces the fact that they are items and not just numbers on a screen. This is a trade-off where a small amount of inconvenience is added for the sake of flavour. Personally, I think the inconvenience is small enough that I am willing to put up with it for the awesome flavour and atmosphere of the game.

This.

There is no gold in the game. What we have instead is a barter system. If we, let's say, make stack sizes unlimited, we might as well un-itemize currencies(as they consume only one space each), and put them in a box at the bottom right of your stash saying:

Wisdom:802
Portal:300
Alteration:500
Exalt:80
Etc:???

Doesn't feel barter anymore. It's like copper, silver, gold system in a different form.

TLDR: Flavour

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Ocylix wrote:

"

VoxelSquid wrote:

I'd like to continue from my point on page one.

Stack size is fundamentally not an inventory management or microtransaction-incentive issue. GGG made the stacks large enough that inventory management is not excessively inconvenient, but still small enough that orbs do take up some visual space, which reinforces the fact that they are items and not just numbers on a screen. This is a trade-off where a small amount of inconvenience is added for the sake of flavour. Personally, I think the inconvenience is small enough that I am willing to put up with it for the awesome flavour and atmosphere of the game.

This.

There is no gold in the game. What we have instead is a barter system. If we, let's say, make stack sizes unlimited, we might as well un-itemize currencies(as they consume only one space each), and put them in a box at the bottom right of your stash saying:

Wisdom:802
Portal:300
Alteration:500
Exalt:80
Etc:???

Doesn't feel barter anymore. It's like copper, silver, gold system in a different form.

TLDR: Flavour

Fantastic point. You sir...win the argument with that reasoning. I'm impressed. I've played games with bronze silver gold etc (wow, GW2, etc) and they freaking suck because currency gets out of hand quickly. Hence they start using in game items as currency.

There's likely a programming reason behind it too. Each item in the inventory/stash needs to be stored in memory somewhere. Every square in the stash page has a binary # attached to it that tells it what item (or what part of what item) is stored in that slot, with each # corresponding to a different item.

(Note that the following paragraph is conjecture based on what my limited programming knowledge tells me is more memory efficient).

Now every stacked currency item is given a different binary # for each stacked item. In other words, a 19 stack of scrolls of wisdom is assigned a different item # than a 20 stack. There's a total # of different binary item #'s in the game. This total # determines the amount of space that any single block of stash space requires to store in memory.

(Strict truth resumes here)

Most modern computers only allow for integers to be stored in certain sized formats: 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit, each corresponding to 2^8, 2^16, 2^32, or 2^64 total possibilities respectively and requiring 8, 16, 32, or 64 binary "bits" to store (1, 2, 4, 8 bytes each). The same follows for the total # of items: if PoE was to exceed the current threshold that it is stored under, the amount of memory required to store every stash block would DOUBLE.