1. I will have to check on this to verify. It is a common advent of tab-targeting type systems.
2. Yes.
3. Inventory space management has a purpose in design. There should always be reasons behind the amount of space provided to start, any that can be earned additionally, and the total amount of space capable of being obtained. Adding temporary space does not automatically resolve any space management problems people may come across. All it does is add another layer to the problem that many will run up against anyway. If anything it delays the inevitable.

Giving people temporary space on a timer is something I personally would not do. I would give people some amount of personal wallet space and then let them unlock more through play and/or pay for it in some way with real money or Stars.

If anything, start people with a "wallet" of a set size, then give an indicator bar on the HUD of how full it's getting so that people actually have a prompt to look at it and delete the crap they don't need more often.

A game with more limitations by rule has more places where exceptions can be made to exceed those limitations by unlocking stuff or paying for stuff, etc. That's what I would want. But that's just me.

I just hope we have a Dropdown option to change the location of the Status Bars.
ex:
[img]http://i47.tinypic.com/2hxvbrr.png[/img]

I really didnt like how in CoH/V, i had to search for the status bars (top) for Giant Monsters when i was fighting one at its feet.
Especially if there's more than one very tall Giant Monster and I cant have all of them targeted to monitor their status.

Radiac wrote:

I agree with Cinnder that just having less junk to have to manage is probably the best solution. That stuff, and the sale of it to NPCs for set rates of INF led to a lot of INF inflation in CoX too, according to Extra Credits, and most other people in the know. I mean, if you think your game is set up such that a Carbon Rod is supposed to be worth about 100INF, then you should probably make them drop infrequently enough that they're actually traded for that in the game at large. All that would mean is coding up the game item drop rates to make all items drop a lot less frequently. That or code up the NPCs to pay reasonable market prices for stuff, and have them NOT buy junk that's flooding the market at the moment. After enough people delete enough Carbon Rods, they'll get a little more scarce again, I would expect. Market forces, supply and demand, elasticity, etc.
If you know you have about X missions worth of space in your personal inventory, then you know how often the game expects you to go sell stuff off or whatever. The only real caveat in CoX was that you had to keep at least one recipe slot open at all times just in case a Purple dropped on you at random. And that could only happen at level 50 anyway, when you had a lot of space. And only a total cheapskate is going to be THAT annoyed that they have to delete some other recipe that might get them 50k in INF in order to leave that space open. When I played my Mastermind, I used to do 6-7 missions per day during the summer. One Dark Astoria daily, which usually yielded one or two Tip missions, then I'd chain together 5 tip missions, then I'd do the Alignment Mission if available to get the Hero merit. In doing that, I got like one random purple per month on average and about 5 million INF per day just from the INF dropped and other junk, the most reliable and lucrative being the common level 50 IO recipes, which sold to NPCs for like 100k each. I don't remember having to sell stuff to the NPC being as huge burden, or having to do it all that frequently to the point where it became an annoyance. I generally performed a junk dump like once per day after I was all done with the missions, as I recall. I think that's perfectly fine.

I doubt it's an issue if you are soloing since you can stop at any time to evaluate your inventory. I used to give people time to "go sell" after missions when I ran pickup teams too. Any time I wasn't the leader it seemed like I had more trouble since most of them seemed to move really fast. Stopping to clear out junk inventory could slow down the team. Especially if you are playing a Tanker or buffer/debuffer.

Radiac wrote:

I know some people are so freaking cheap that they cannot STAND having to delete the cheaper items to make room for what might come later, and they'll complain about it too, but you can't cater to that kind of stuff all the time and then end up with a game worth playing. If the game isn't causing you to have to make decisions, it's boring.

I don't think I'm ready to go that far. I wouldn't want to impose my standards on others. "Cheap" to us might not mean the same thing to someone else. I think I remember reading some long post on the old forums about making the most influence and someone sold [b]everything[/b]. It's a different playstyle than mine for sure and I don't have the patience for it.

I'm like you, I just deleted the cheap stuff. (Although a newer player might not know the cheap from the expensive stuff) If I remember right, I had a keybind telling everyone I was pausing for a second to "manage inventory".

I don't think the suggestion here is eliminating the decision as much as hitting the pause button on the decision when it would be less intrusive to other players. I also don't mind the idea that a newer player would have time to find out what items are worth keeping.

Radiac wrote:

If the decision in front of you is this: Do I stop what I'm doing and go sell off stuff now, or do I continue to mission completion, deleting some cheaper stuff to make room?
Then I would argue that allowing people to put off that decision until after the mission is over is tantamount to removing the decision entirely. You no longer need to stop and consider your options in mid-mission, ever, now. You just stop after the mission, like you always wanted to, and sell then, having lost nothing and having avoided any kind of meaningful decision point in the game in terms of inventory management. The decision is effectively gone. The game is now easier, and thus, less of a game. A game with no decisions to make is not a game. There is only a game there if there are decisions to make, and sometimes those decisions are not easy or enjoyable ones, but that's part of what makes a game a game.
The whole point of having finite storage space is that it makes management of such more of a game. Its also for realism, I guess. You can't expect to be hauling around an aircraft carrier full of stuff, not even for just an hour. Of course, nobody complains about immersion when it gets broken in favor of the player, so the devs can stretch that as far as they want.

That does definitely remove the decision to sell every drop you get so there is that.

I realize you and I don't care about selling everything we get of course so it won't effect us. I never actually had an issue with it personally. But not everyone played like I did.

In a way, I'd like to see all of the business of 'Loot' deferred until after the mission, particularly such things as 'salvage'. One reason is that I simply don't want to have to stop in the middle of clearing a warehouse (or whatever) to deal with inventory. Thugs are shooting at me, but I have to press 'pause', while I dig the lint and unwanted junk out of my pockets... It just doesn't seem heroic.

More effective, as far as I'm concerned, is to have All of the loot delivered to my base, so I can deal with it at leisure. My understanding is that there will not be 'Inspirations', so I presume there won't be random boosters dropping in combat? In that case, the only thing needed in inventory During a mission is whatever 'clues' get collected about the missions being done.

Training new powers, slotting enhancements, sorting items for the Market, all of this meta-gaming, can and should, in my opinion, be done at a time when there is nobody waiting for you to show up. I'm not suggesting 'infinite' deferred storage, but certainly generous, perhaps 'one day of missions' worth.

Now, I recognize that one purpose for loot-drops in-mission is to give the player a slightly more tangible sense of progression. Experience points and IGC are 'just numbers', but 'loot' actually has an Icon associated with its virtual existence. It's not any more 'real', but we can poke at it with a mouse, so the illusion of reality is stronger and more compelling. So, more loot equates to more progress in the players mind.

I'm not suggesting that player shouldn't be Able to access their inventory while on-mission and interact with it in the usual fashion, just that they shouldn't be forced to do so by game mechanics. Although... Okay, I'll admit to being Annoyed with teammates that do call a halt, to deal with inventory, so there's a temptation to ban them from doing so, at all, while there's a mission to do. My hope is that, by allowing players to defer inventory management until 'down-time', they'll be more likely to do so.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Darth Fez wrote:

Fireheart wrote:
I'm not suggesting 'infinite' deferred storage, but certainly generous, perhaps 'one day of missions' worth.
That's probably more likely to defer the problem rather than to create a solution. If this were in place then, instead of such people running off for five minutes to deal with their inventory, they'll likely be spending two or three times as long because now they've got the entire previous session's inventory to sort through and clear out. I'd rather have that full inventory reminder regularly, so I'll go clear it out, than have to remember to schedule half an hour at the end of my play session to get rid of hundreds or thousands of items.

Alright, I can see that too. Yet, if I recall correctly, there wasn't that much stuff dropping in CoH. It's one of the reasons there wasn't a 'Sell Junk' button, which is so very necessary in other games.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Of course, part of this subject, in a tangential sense, is the loot itself. Extra Credits, in one of their cartoons about MMO inflation, mentioned that having stupid NPCs that always pay a flat rate for common junk is part of what creates MMO inflation in the first place. If the NPC were a smarter businessperson, they would not buy tons and tons of unwanted Level 50 Damage SO Enhancements like they did in CoX, at least not for the prices they were giving.. They would instead pay something similar to the auction house, and even then they'd only buy stuff they felt like they could sell for a profit.

If that happens, then either the total cheapskates will not think twice about deleting junk, or there will be far less junk in the game in the first place. Either way, the amount of storage space would probably be set accordingly.

Personally, I'd give people some amount of "wallet" space for free, but leave them wanting more, then make additional space available in various ways (unlocks in the game, cash shop purchases, etc).

Diablo 3, I know I talk about it a lot, makes greater rifts drop loot at the very end of the rift and none during. Maybe too late to incorporate it somehow but if uninterrupted TFs becomes important, then this could be an option.

Radiac wrote:

Of course, part of this subject, in a tangential sense, is the loot itself. Extra Credits, in one of their cartoons about MMO inflation, mentioned that having stupid NPCs that always pay a flat rate for common junk is part of what creates MMO inflation in the first place. If the NPC were a smarter businessperson, they would not buy tons and tons of unwanted Level 50 Damage SO Enhancements like they did in CoX, at least not for the prices they were giving.. They would instead pay something similar to the auction house, and even then they'd only buy stuff they felt like they could sell for a profit.
If that happens, then either the [b]total cheapskates[/b] will not think twice about deleting junk, or there will be far less junk in the game in the first place. Either way, the amount of storage space would probably be set accordingly.
Personally, I'd give people some amount of "wallet" space for free, but leave them wanting more, then make additional space available in various ways (unlocks in the game, cash shop purchases, etc).

I see where we are differing. You see those people as "cheapskates". I get the feeling you feel they are not justified in playing that way? As in, that playstyle should be discouraged?

I just see them as playing the game different than I do and it doesn't bother me really so we are coming at it from two different perspectives.

What NW does on the bag space is to have a temporary storage area, BUT there are several things you can't do while you have stuff in it, so you do only use it as something really temporary.

Radiac wrote:

I have nothing against players wanting to get the absolute most they can for their loot. I just don't think that process should be made dead simple and effortless for them, because then the game itself loses something. It becomes less interesting and more "pre-won" for you, in some way. I think anyone who insists on getting every last bit of IGC out of every last item should certainly be allowed to do that, but I think they should end up spending a little more of their time ferrying that crap from the mission map to the market than some others might do. Then those players will have a reason why they'd want to acquire more wallet space, either by unlocking it or by paying for it, which gives them more goals in doing missions, etc or a reason to actually spend money on the game somewhere.
I have no hostile intentions towards "cheapskates" as I have called them, they have a right to play the game the way they want. But if you absolutely cannot STAND having to delete anything, not even a really inexpensive Carbon Rod that you know is only worth like 100INF in a world where good gear costs like 1 million INF, then the game, I feel, ought not cater to that attitude too much and just give you the Easy Button (TM). Those players who won't bend a little and delete a Carbon Rod once in a while are taking take a hard line stance and being insistent on getting every last penny for their loot. That uncompromising attitude should, to me, be met with an equally uncompromising response from the game devs that they're not going to make penny-pinching really easy for you. You'll have to work for it. And if you end up feeling like you're doing too much work for too little IGC, then stop bothering to do that and delete a bit of junk once in a while, it's not going to kill you.
The demand for an easy, programmer-delivered solution to the problem of storage space, one which solves that problem once and for all in a way that is hard-wired into the game itself and requires no thought or decision making on the part of the player, is, to me, yet another example of the players trying to win the game in the design phase, i.e. by complaining that it's too hard and making the devs design an easier game for them to win. You want to get all the loot and sell it off without any minor losses? Well, if you want to do that, you're going to have to schlep a lot of junk out of a lot of maps, even at times when you'd rather be doing something else. Is that non-ideal? Does it force you to make a decision between doing some extra lugging of stuff to and fro versus just deleting a bit a junk here and there? GOOD! That's a meaningful decision. Every good game has meaningful decisions to have to make. The more of that stuff you shortcut away with baked-in solutions that take the decision away from the players, the less game there is left to play.
Also, not for nothing, but even the smallest wallet sizes in CoX were really giving the player an unrealistically large amount of stuff that we could carry around, when you think about it. You don't see Captain America and Spider-Man lugging around suitcases full of loot in the movies and comics. To be sure, it's a necessary MMO game mechanic to have personal storage space, I'm not saying to get rid of it, but it is a somewhat immersion-breaking thing, or should be. Since it's in the player's favor, it gets a pass and nobody complains, if anything, people complain that they want something even LESS realistic. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I personally would draw it at "make the loot management system interactive and interesting, not boring and dead easy."

I don't see the problem honestly.

Your solution can affect other players who have to wait around for teammates to go sell more often or could result in someone being kicked from a team (you wouldn't do that since it was your idea, right? ;) ), while the proposed solution should not affect other players either way. I prefer that.

If a carbon rod is going to drop at all, I would like to think there must be a reason for it other than "make a choice between deleting and making your teammates wait". That sounds like a negative for someone either way.

Now...if implementing something like this takes a long period of time away from Devs who could be working on something else, I'm with you. It's a pretty minor thing either way imo...not worth fretting about really. It doesn't seem like some big "I win" button nor a huge "burden" if it's not done.

I disagree that there was ever a reason why a person in CoX should have tried try to find a loving home for every Carbon Rod and Circuit Board that they don't have storage space for in the middle of a mission. These are common, easy to find, low-value inanimate objects, not people. In fact, they're not even inanimate objects, they're digital, virtual objects, but the point is, they weren't hard to get. Also, for the record, I never kicked anyone for stopping to sell stuff off. I wasn't usually leading the team, FYI, but I never would have voted for that either.

Now, by the same token, other players have their priorities and I have mine. If the "cheapskate" wants me to wait around for them to offload everything, go to the auction house and do maintenance on like 10 different bids and sales, cash in a level up, and craft an IO for the new power, before taking another step that might cause loot to drop, I'm not waiting around for all that. That guy is going to miss out on some of the next mission, maybe all of it, if they're going to do errands like that.

I'm all for making the basic rules of the game somewhat restrictive and "hard" then putting in unlocks and so forth that can be earned or purchased to ease them up a little. That sort of thing always adds depth and replay ability to the game, to me, and I like that. I look for MORE ways to make the base rules a little tight so as to allow for there to be ways to loosen them up through play or something later. So I'm not arguing that this proposed storage timer thing wouldn't be helpful to players, I'm arguing that there's such a thing as the devs giving too much help and you need to avoid that.

Wouldn't it be MORE helpful if they simply increased the the amount of personal storage space we all got by a factor of, say, ten? I feel like that would be easier to code and would have pretty much the same effect as the proposed timer idea. Ultimately, they both lead to people having no real pressing need to worry about inventory management during missions. I think the people who want to "win the game in the design phase" won't argue for the 10x expanded storage space idea, but only because they don't expect the devs to actually go for it. Whereas this timer thing sounds like something you maybe could talk a dev into doing, despite the fact that it has basically the same effect, it frees us all from having to think about inventory.

If the devs don't want inventory management to be a thing that we as players spend time thinking about, they can make it so easy that you don't have to bother with it in any number of ways, the least complicated of which is just giving people WAY more storage space. The fact that there's a limit on storage space, to me, implies that they want you to have to manage it to some extent.

If I'm designing a game and I don't think inventory management should be a thing, then I'd make it as easy as possible. You have some large-capacity, nebulously-defined place where your random drops go, it can be accessed from anywhere and everywhere at any time. No timers. No restrictions on when you can and can't do certain things, just a huge aircraft-hangar-sized storage space that stores stuff for you for as long as you want until you decide to empty in out every once in a blue moon.

Now, if I wanted to actually have inventory management be a thing, for the purposes of immersive realism, I would give people limited storage space and force players to deal with that in various ways. I'd be willing to have unlockable and/or purchasable ways to raise the limits by some finite amount, but the system would still work pretty much as the one in CoX did.

The "space, but with a timer and restrictions" idea seems bad under both paradigms I just mentioned. If you want to avoid storage management altogether, it's not the best option. It's a less efficient, more complicated system than just having a big huge storage wallet. If you want immersive realism in your inventory system, the timer thing doesn't do that either, because it's not terribly realistic. You have to answer the question of how this weird, overly-complex system of inventory management even came into existence in the first place. Why do these timers exist? Why can't I do other things while I'm subject to the inventory overflow timer? If everyone gets that timer deal from the beginning, the answers to those questions are not going to be anything that fits in any immersive sense. You've just set it up to work the way you think you want the game to operate with no immersive roleplay explanation or motivation for it. That's okay, l but if you're going to do that, then why have the original inventory limits at all? You should just go with "big huge wallet" and be done with it.

Now, if you made the timer thing an upgrade that had to be unlocked, with some sort of in-game explanation of why it works like that, that would be something I could possibly get behind. Like if you had to do some missions or get a badge or do a TF for Mender Silos and as a reward he gives you a "Chronatomic Transdimensional Matter Transporter" that works as you describe, then I could at least see a reason for doing it that way because it makes some sense in that context. Just doing the timer thing for everyone, up-front, as part of the basic game mechanics is too complicated and unnecessary, to me.

I didn't realize we had to RP QOL additions. O_o

I think there is a middle ground between "you have 10 slots of inventory space use them all and you don't get drops anymore" and "you have infinite inventory space." Considering the position of strictly limited inventory, as was the case in COH, I prefer to have a little flexibility added as was originally suggested. Don't block my drops but don't let me take advantage of this stretch in my inventory. Allow me to play the game without worrying about missing a drop or having to stop mid mission to figure out which of 10 items I hope has the lowest value to delete so I have a chance at winning that purple drop.

There is definitely a middle ground between 10 slots and infinite slots. I wasn't even talking about Enhancement Tray Slots above, I'm talking about recipe and salvage inventory space, as it existed in CoX. Single Origin Enhancements were basically garbage in CoX after inventions came out, and for the most part, while leveling, you could delete unneeded crap SOs quickly and easily. You could also buy larger Enhancement Tray space, if I recall correctly.

An argument could be made for just giving people a 20-slot Enhancement Tray to begin with, which to me would have been plenty big enough for all intents and purposes, or that they should have made it scale up as you went up in level or something. I'm not against that. I am against any idea to make the Enhancement Tray, as minor a thing as it was in post-IO CoX, any more complicated via a timer thing of any kind like what was described above. Everyone had moved on by then, and pre-IOs, a second row of slots would have been simpler and better anyway.

As for the recipe and salvage inventory, that was the size it was for a reason, it scaled up with level, you could unlock larger wallet size (it was a Vanguard thing, right?), and that was fine as it was without needing a timer-based thing, in my opinion, and I used to do missions with my Mastermind that would roll up a lot of loot. I always felt I needed to keep a recipe slot open for a possible purple to drop. I didn't feel the need for and timed additional inventory space then, nor did I need that when teamed up with people. It felt like a reasonable amount of space, to me.

It seems to me that the prevalent "justification" for timed temporary inventory space here is to not have stop in the middle of a mission and/or "inconvenience" team mates in between missions.

For the first one. If you only wait to do inventory management once it actually gets full then, imo, you have already failed at it. We're not talking about so small inventory that one single mission could fill it from 0, I'd expect the minimum to be big enough to do at least 5 missions.

For the second one. Well, that's just pushing it on the future since the timer will sooner or later run out. Doesn't really matter if you can squeeze in 1 or 2 more missions before you have to go "dump" your inventory.

If we aren't supposed to actively manage our inventory, and by "actively manage" I mean making space when it gets close to full (instead of after it gets full) if one really wants to get every single drop, then I fail to see the reason to have a limited inventory in the first place.

Radiac wrote:

As an unlock later on, MAYBE, if it weren't TOO good, but as a way to motivate people to do content, that I could see.

Speaking entirely as a philosophical point, representing nobody but myself and saying nothing about plans for CoT, I would think that the only "unlock" of such a nature should be expansions to inventory.

So the relief is just having a bigger inventory, which still needs managing, but hopefully is a bit easier to manage.

i just hope we see (someday) a slider under the Inventory items when selling them like:

ex: red means its over the limit and should sell extras from the stack.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/oviV0i3.png[/img]

so i set the threshold and then click "Sell All Excess" items, and it remembers the limits for next time i sell. :D

AlienMafia wrote:

... make America great again :p

Mumble Mumble Mumble. :p

Auto-turn to face was one of those things in CoX that I never quite got used to. I always wanted to turn by myself and ended up overturning. YMMV.

Cameral Look-At Options:
- Always Look-At Targeted Foe (a few tween options, slow start then accelerates.. is my pick)
- Only Look-At Targeted Foe on power activation (a 'Foe Affected' one)
- Never Look-At Targeted Foe

like that?

Empyrean wrote:

Radiac wrote:
Auto-turn to face was one of those things in CoX that I never quite got used to. I always wanted to turn by myself and ended up overturning. YMMV.
Totally a personal thing, true.
I loved it and really miss it in other games. I liked the "I'm choreographing and then watching the action" feel that this plus cuing and auto-cuing gave CoH over the more "I'm controlling my avatar's every action like a marionette" feel that seems to have become the common approach. It led to some visually awesome action that doesn't happen with total control.
For example, in CoH I would often cue up a few powers and jump over a group while targeting the boss in the center. On his own, my hero would spin in the air to face the target and animate attacks as he arced over and just rained hell down on the boss, often landing facing 180 degrees from how he initially leapt. It was freaking epic and a little different every time depending on the angles.
Of course, if they included it and allowed you to turn auto-turn on or off as desired, well then, we'd have another one of those much-loved options :).

Yeah, I really loved doing that. :) Or having just beaten the foe in front of me, I could click (or tab) target the one behind me, click an attack button, any my character would immediately spin around and let the Hellion have a power blast to the face. Epic!

Cinnder makes a critical point about the difference between "turn camera" vs "turn character".

And I'd like to ad that, even if you are the kind that goes for realism (and I don't think realism and fun are generally at odds with one another), it's not like realistically you wouldn't be aware that someone was behind you whaling on your back and turn to deal with them.

Actually, I think that's more "realistic".

Regardless, as a spiritual successor to CoH, I'd think we would at least want to provide the option of giving a similar combat experience to CoH.

Mendicant wrote:

Yeah, I've been in MMOs (I'm glaring at you, CO), where I'll hit Target Closest Enemy and it'll pick one halfway across the melee because the one standing beside me and punching me is not in the narrow 'front' cone.

I'm equally annoyed by GW2, which will auto-target the NON-aggressive billy-goat, off behind my left shoulder, instead of the aggressive creature I'm looking right at. I much preferred the way CoH would auto-target the enemy that was Actually Attacking Me and not some civilian across the street.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Automatically turning the hero to face the thing he's attacking is fine, but the auto-camera adjust they did sometimes caused me some trouble, because I used to turn the camera myself too, and as such mess it up. But whatever, if it works like CoX or something that most people seem to think is better, I'm sure it'll be fine.