Ten Things I Hate About WoW : Inventory

So I've been back in Molten Core lately -- running it with my wife for reputation and some engineering recipes. Molten Core was the original 40-man raid instance, and it's now easy enough that me and my wife can do most of the bosses by ourselves.

Inevitably I'll trek to the instance, go to loot my first or second corpse, and then get that message every WoW player hates to see.

I'm seeing this because I have a three and a half bags filled with things I always need, and the other bag and a half is filled up with stuff I forgot to get rid of.

Why. Why am I still dealing with this malarkey in 2010? I think I remember one of the exhibits from the 1932 World's Fair : the MMO inventory system that totally worked and wasn't a hassle.

WoW's inventory system is not that bad. WoW, if you've never played it, has what we could call an icon inventory system. Every item you have is represented by an uniform-sized icon in your inventory. It's easy to understand and far better than the other MMO/RPG alternatives, which is either a giant list of items or a bunch of miniature items that look like the real items. The list doesn't give you as much information as icon inventory, and the mini-item system is just plain annoying. You're either playing tetris or unsuccessfully trying to click this spear in your inventory that's hard to click because it is long and narrow like a real spear. I realize this is more realistic (since Roman soldiers had to get really good at clicking the spears in their inventory) but it is not fun.

I don't think inventory needs to be a hassle. All inventory falls into one of two categories : stuff you want to keep and stuff you don't. We could further subdivide those categories (you want to keep quest items, rep items, certain tradeskill items, etc.) but basically we know what we want to keep and what you want to get rid of, and the game has some insight into this as well.

There's also this issue of the economy of bag space -- we can't have infinite bag space, both as a design constraint (it would be too unwieldy for players) and as a technical constraint (too taxing on blizzard's servers). That's why I run out of space when items drop in an instance.

I shouldn't be running out of space so easily. For starters, none of the three-and-a-half bags worth of"take everywhere" stuff should even be taking up bag space. I should not have to deal with gear in my inventory -- either I can use it, in which case it only makes sense in the context of an outfit on my paper-doll, or I can't use it, in which case why give it to me at all. Blizzard doesn't need to provide infinite gear space, but the game expects you to have at least two sets of gear if you do PvE and PvP, so storing at least two outfits would be a start. And neither of the "infinite space" limitations come into play here, as players already have to deal with gear so it wouldn't be unwieldy (it would actually be a bit easier to understand) and it wouldn't be a technical constraint, since Blizzard's game design is mostly what dictates how many sets of gear we need to have.

We could say the same about all the other things we like to "have" -- quest items, rep items, consumables, etc. We don't need to have them in our bags, we don't need to deal with organizing them or making sure we don't have too many -- we have as much stuff as the designers wanted us to have. Automatically store all this stuff in custom containers where I don't have to deal with sorting and swapping.

That leaves the stuff I don't want. A tiny piece of the "I don't want this" pie is subjective -- if there's gear that I can wear I might want it and I might not. I'm ok with making those decisions. Everything else that I don't want the game knows I don't want. The first 10,000 times I clicked on gray (junk) gear to sell it to a vendor that was cool. It's no longer cool. Just give me the option to automatically convert it directly to money at loot time and be done with it. Or better yet, just drop more money and get rid of gray items (and white junk items) completely from the game. I still like WoW after four years but I'm tiring of the "sorting inventory" mini-game.

That leaves tradeskill items. I don't think they should be fungible, or at least not as fungible as they are now, so the bag space issue is kind of moot. But I guess that's something to hate another day.