Inventory management and mapping in current POE causes burnout for casuals

"

ironstove wrote:

I've gotten to maps and I've started to already burn out for this league, which is really surprising because I actually like this league mechanic more than ultimatum, so I was asking myself what it is about POE that makes me get so fatigued?

I will sign on excited to play, then after literally just 1-2 maps, I feel like I need to take a break. I tab down the game or sign off and do something else.

What gives?

The answer for me is the current loot system. I'm always having to stop, pick up things, then see my inventory is full, open a TP, dump everything into my stash, then go back in, continue mapping and so fourth. This issue is compounded when I have encounters with Zana or Harvest. Harvest, I will have to put a full pause on my mapping to read mods, look for items, and go into trade mode for a while.

I like delve, but I don't like how scarce sulphite is, and it makes me have to constantly switch back to mapping and go into inventory management/trade mode again.

The amount of league mechanics in the game, and the inability for us to pick any particular one to focus in on has me constantly switching zones, going through loading screens, and click click clicking rather than playing the game as I think it should be played.

The depth in POE is great, but the dimensions that have been added in areas such as the inventory management, picking up of loot, and trading have not added 'enjoyable' depth to the game, but rather made things more tedious which makes a player such as myself feel TIRED and EXHAUSTED. It feels like doing things I enjoy in POE are tied to having to do things I do not enjoy as a price to play the game.

This feels similar to having to do 'chores' to go out and play with friends.

Yes, I could never pick up any loot, I would also have a very difficult time progressing my character forward.

There was a post made by Chris regarding the number of splinters being created due to a desire to avoid a 'gold' system or 'universal' currency, but maybe that's not such a bad thing. Sometimes simplicity can be good. If people decide to ignore other mechanics to be optimal, then that creates a sub market for those who choose to be 'inefficient' because there is still money to be made in those areas and because they enjoy the mechanics.

I get that one of the big money makers for POE is selling of stash tabs, as more leagues have been created, more stash tabs have also been created. We have essence, delve, prophecy, blight, and I'm honestly surprised we got a locker for Expedition!

I am just so tired of picking up loot, stopping my game to empty my tiny inventory, and then jump back into maps again, this whole 'stop and go' playstyle makes it hard for me to simply just 'be in the zone' and turn off my brain to play this game as I previously enjoyed doing back in versions of 2.X POE.

My suggestion to fix this problem is simple:

1. Increase the player inventory size, allow the player to fit in dramatically more loot. Make the player equipment page a separate page while the inventory page takes up a full 'stash tab' worth of size. The amount of things people have to pick up in this game has increased over the expansions, while the inventory size has remained the same. This has spawned a very tedious 'stop and go' style of playing which has killed the fun for me and caused me to burn out faster and faster every league because of how much 'down time' I have to spend after 1-2 maps to sort through everything, and that's not even including the time it takes to eventually clear the stash once it is filled with loot.

2. Alternatively, allow players access to their stash while in maps, also sub maps such as Zana or Abyss. This would also 'fix' the inventory management issue by allowing loot to 'automatically' go into the stash tab if it matches an 'affinity' so for example, if I pick up expedition shards, they will go into the locker if I have the affinity set, or if I pick up oils, the same applies for my 'blight' tab.

If this option is taken, I would like to see the affinities expanded so that we could set affinities for 6 socket jeweller's items, chromatic items, and so on.

3. Add a 'dump all' option in the player inventory, and a 'collect all' mechanic from the stash tab so we can mass move items to and from stash tabs. This would save so many clicks and if affinities could automatically sort through all of them, it would make life so much easier and less tedious and just let me enjoy this game instead of having to feel like I have to stop every 10 feet to do maintenance.

Conclusion:

In its current state, I hate how I have to carry portal scrolls and wisdom scrolls in the game. Everything feels so inefficient and I feel like I'm being inefficient, which tires me out. It makes me feel like my time is being wasted and the only way to move ahead is to grind against this inefficient system that has never been updated or kept up with the evolution of POE.

Having to portal in and out to deal with loading and stopping your game just so you don't lose loot on the map was OK in the past, when there wasn't that much loot because there were not so many mechanics. The only people who really faced this issue were people who used to super juice their maps with sextants and target farm shaped maps with their atlas, but now it's happening to a normal person like me (I imagine more efficient players are dealing with this even more!), it is not uncommon for me to have to make 2 trips in and out of each map just to deal with inventory because my inventory is too small and I can't access my stash. In the past, I remember I never had this problem.

The 6 portal system was originally in place for softcore so you couldn't just corpse charge bosses down but the lack of updates to inventory/loot management bitten down so much into player's efficiency that we're now forced to use these portals just to ensure we are not losing 'currency' by playing the game and/or engaging with mechanics we find tedious.