Inventory management is ruining the game.

Serenity

I wanted to take three professions: alchemy, provisioning, and clothing. I don't think that is too many to be reasonable, and I am willing to invest the time and skill points to level them. However, with the inventory the way it is, I can't do all three. At this point I think I'm going to have to drop clothing as there are too many ingredients in crafting and alchemy for me to also make room for clothing mats. I like to explore and have a lot of fun looking for plants as I wander around the zone...unfortunately, that fun is greatly diminished when it means I have to return to a town after every quest in order to store my materials, sell, and craft just to try and make room in my bank. I spend a significant amount of time going through my bank inventory trying to figure out what I can get away with selling...this is made worse by the fact that I can't see my provisioning recipes (by far the most mat heavy profession) unless I'm crafting, so figuring out what ingredients I can and can't use is just a bunch of guess work. I love this game, and I want to be immersed in the world, but the terrible inventory management is sucking me out of it constantly.

gothickaiserub17_ESO

To be fair, you want to do half of all the crafting in the game, maybe it is unreasonable. Although I don't seem to be having any problems managing it.

Also you are not saving too much space by dropping clothing, roll an alt, have them hold all your trait/upgrade material till your replacing your gear. Now its only a handful of materials.

Also just be smart with Provisioning, don't just grab anything, take a few moments to read your recipes. You can level to 50 provisioning in a few days on just the Lv.15 ones with 0 skil points in it (i did). If you put a skill point in and move to the next zone notice the items no longer relevant and stop grabbing them, you really only need to hold on to (meat/bread/soup(for your region) + the 3 levels of your tier) 6 for food, repeated for drinks (12 plus a few seasonings) (but only for XP, then narrow it even smaller for food you want to use once provisioning max, if you used a skill point you should do so by the 20's char level latest).

Alchemy also only has 18 plants + 1 water per 10 levels

Just cause a game has loads of items doesn't mean all items are for you, leave some behind, or get quick at popping back to town if you need to hoard.

Enchanting on the other hand does consume a lot no matter how smart you play it.

Brennan

Right above the New Discussion button is a Search field. You should practice using that. There are already more than half a dozen threads on this mattter and a poll that you can participate in.

As it stands all you've accomplished is segmenting the discussion which obviously inspires a great deal of passion into multiple threads that people now need to follow.

Great job obfuscating the discussion OP!

LastLaugh

I wouldn't go as far as to say it's ruining the game, but the inventory management issues do detract from the fun. I'm leveling 6 professions across 3 toons (2 each) and despite attempting to pick up only what I need I have to return to a city about once per hour to empty my bags.

I've bought 2 bag upgrades per toon and 2 bank slot upgrades. I'd like to get more but it's hard to raise the gold when so much of my time is spent doing this.

Santiago

gothickaiserub17_ESO wrote: »

To be fair, you want to do half of all the crafting in the game, maybe it is unreasonable. Although I don't seem to be having any problems managing it.

Also you are not saving too much space by dropping clothing, roll an alt, have them hold all your trait/upgrade material till your replacing your gear. Now its only a handful of materials.

Also just be smart with Provisioning, don't just grab anything, take a few moments to read your recipes. You can level to 50 provisioning in a few days on just the Lv.15 ones with 0 skil points in it (i did). If you put a skill point in and move to the next zone notice the items no longer relevant and stop grabbing them, you really only need to hold on to (meat/bread/soup(for your region) + the 3 levels of your tier) 6 for food, repeated for drinks (12 plus a few seasonings) (but only for XP, then narrow it even smaller for food you want to use once provisioning max, if you used a skill point you should do so by the 20's char level latest).

Alchemy also only has 18 plants + 1 water per 10 levels

Just cause a game has loads of items doesn't mean all items are for you, leave some behind, or get quick at popping back to town if you need to hoard.

Enchanting on the other hand does consume a lot no matter how smart you play it.

It's not unreasonable since the game clearly entices you to do multiple crafts.

Blackwidow

/agree 100% with OP.

Appren

Inventory management is for sure one of the worst parts of this game. It is not fun to have to go through the hassle of using numerous alts, just to store items for a few crafts. Elder scroll games are all about looting everything you see that isn't locked down, and then stealing that anyway. That is not possible in this game, for some strange unexplainable reason.

Thechemicals

In other words, inventory management is ruining your game.

Appren

Not ruining it, but severely reducing my enjoyment of the game, for sure.

banespwnb14_ESO

Don't store provisioning supplies. They are available EVERYWHERE. Gather only what you need. Look at your recipes and pick the ones you want to produce. Gather only the resources you need to make those. Provisioning is ridiculously easy to level. You can be level 50 within a few hours if you do it right.

Cascade_V

Appren wrote: »

Not ruining it, but severely reducing my enjoyment of the game, for sure.

agree exactly

Brennan wrote: »

Sure I'm an ass.

Brennan

Cascade_V wrote: »

Appren wrote: »

Not ruining it, but severely reducing my enjoyment of the game, for sure.

agree exactly

Brennan wrote: »

Sure I'm an ass.

Back to your bridge, troll.

Liquidus

If they gave you 300 slots you would want 400. Every single game has storage issues.. You just need to deal with it and move on.. Try not storing old mats that are below your current crafting level..That is where most issues come from.

LadyInTheWater

Brennan wrote: »

Cascade_V wrote: »

Appren wrote: »

Not ruining it, but severely reducing my enjoyment of the game, for sure.

agree exactly

Brennan wrote: »

Sure I'm an ass.

Back to your bridge, troll.

Cascade doesn't have enough inventory space for the materials to craft the bridge.
We should make a new thread about that...

Darkholynova

I started the game collecting everything I could click on... After I hit about level 20 I realized how ridiculous this is and stopped opening barrels and crates or getting runes since I wasn't actively leveling provisioning and enchanting. If you ONLY gather materials for skills you're working on, it's not so bad. Hoarders will have a bad time in this game.

Imagine if they implemented a weight system like the previous games had.... you could collect ALL the runes and grapes you wanted... but you'd have to run to town every time you picked up some heavy armor.

Serenity

Hi guys! I posted this before I went to work for the day and didn't get to read the responses, so I'm going to respond to everything at once, sorry!

- I don't think that having three crafting professions is unreasonable. Of course it shouldn't be *easy* to level three professions, but if I am willing to sink the time, gold, and skillpoints in to leveling them it seems really silly that I can't.

- I really don't want to level alts as bank mules. I don't have a ton of time to play and I want to spend time on my main character. I understand that I could just roll a random character, skip the intro, run straight to the bank and not leave, BUT, that seems like a really horrible way things are designed. The worst part of this to me is having to jump back and forth between characters any time I want to craft something because the bank is shared between all of them.

- I don't grab everything I see, I only loot provisioning, alchemy, and clothing materials. I used to grab ore and wood to put in my guild bank for my guildies, but quickly realized that would fill me up even faster so I left it alone.

- The "only grabbing the provisioning ingredients you need for one or two recipies" is a good idea - IF I was only crafting for my own personal consumption. I'm crafting to level the skill, for food myself, to give to guildies, to sell...and above all because I ENJOY crafting! Why do I have to limit myself because of bank space! I've put points into provisioning so I can craft all these cool things and I want to actually make them! I don't mind having to get rid of things from previous zones because I've outleveled those ingredients (although I don't love the idea, it makes it harder to whip something up for lowbie friends), however, not picking up mats that are MY level that I could use to raise the profession or sell for a profit as food simply because I've run out of bank space is really, really silly.

- In response to "If they gave you 300 slots you would want 400" : that is simply not true. I'm not asking for limitless storage, and I'm a very easily pleased kind of person. All I'm asking is to not have to spent 15-20 minutes managing my inventory for every hour of play (espcially since I can only play a few hours a day max!) Honestly, I don't care what the solution is as long as there is a solution. I personally liked GW2's way of inventory management, where space was very limited but materials didn't take up space in your bank.


Thanks for reading all of this. Sorry about the long post! I'd love to keep discussing this with you guys, especially if anyone has some ideas about what could be done to help fix inventory (micro)management.

Brennan

Here's my take on mule alts.

I recognize that the inventory is limited. In spite of this I am leveling all of the crafting professions on a single character. I recognize that my choice to do so has consequences.

1) I have a mule that holds on to the items that need to be researched. I keep a spreadsheet of what traits I have researched, what traits I have available to research (on the mule), and drop those trait items in the bank as slots for research become available. Once I am able to get more and more of this research completed, this mule will become obsolete but until then I can't keep 176 pieces of armor and 96 weapons in a bank or a crafting materials bank (they're not crafting materials, they're weapons and armor).

2) I have a mule that holds on to materials that I can not use yet but that I will be able to use in the near future. This mule also holds on to trait gems and improvement materials like resins and tempers.

3) I have a mule that holds on to enchanting mats. In truth I only need a fraction of the Esssence Runes that I have to make the glyphs I want, but for burning through my stock and trading with my Enchanting buddy to extract these glyphs, I keep them around.

4) I used to keep a mule for just provisioning ingredients that hoarded every ingredient. When I did a little research I discovered that most ingredients that I had only a few of were for Pact or Covenant. I put those in the Guild Bank for those in my Guild that are playing Pact or Covenant. I also recognized that gathering mats for Provisioning is as easy as walking through a town, cracking open every container, logging off, logging on, and repeating this until I had all the ingredients I needed. So I cooked up everything, sold what I wasn't going to use, and deleted this mule. If my guild mates that are lower lever need food they can gather the ingredients in the same way I can. Just run around town opening the containers and send me your Pork and Meal. I'll whip you up 4 +Health foods as quick as I can press "R".

Again, I have made a choice. It's a matter of personal choice and accepting the responsibility of your choices. I recognize that choices have consequences. Consequences don't ruin the game for me. They make your choices more meaningful. They require you to critically evaluate your choices and find ways to mitigate the corresponding consequences.

Tetujin

If you are doing provisioning that way then you may only be able to do provisioning alone.

I guess it seems like a mixed message having it all seem so open and available and then realize it isn't. They should have been more clear about it, and say that you are really only going to be able to do one or two crafts, unless you are cool with being tight on space. None if you don't want to be bothered with space at all. Put the reality of it before people start getting a vision of what they are going to be able to do.

They could have just limited you to one or two gathering profs as well, but this way gives some people the ability to squeeze more if they are willing to pay that price. I have my limit, I gave up enchanting and am much happier, but after thinking about it I could have just focused on keeping a few essence rune types instead of all of them.

Or they could have let everyone do all of the crafts without issue, as long as they wanted to spend the time and skill points developing it, but they went in the direction of making that hard and frustrating, probably for the reason the restriction is there in many other mmos. Maybe they'll rethink that eventually and say, why not?

In the meantime just try dump crafts until you no longer have inventory frustrations would be my suggestion. You can always pick them back up and keep going if you change your mind.

Valmond

As a person levelling 4 out of 6 crafting skills (2 hit 50 already so not counting them), i can understand your pain.

My solution is to spend all my gold on bag space (and two horses, one for bag space, one for speed), chuck out all stuff i am not using (either in guildbank or vendor), not bother with runes i have already translated or are not max level that i can use, not carrying cooking ingredients for foods i don't myself eat, and storing just enough items for trait research to keep research going non stop.

Also storing trophies from quests and public dungeons as well as maps (of zones i have not reached yet), but otherwise i'm of the "use it or loose it" mentality on items and mats

knightblaster

Serenity wrote: »

- In response to "If they gave you 300 slots you would want 400" : that is simply not true. I'm not asking for limitless storage, and I'm a very easily pleased kind of person. All I'm asking is to not have to spent 15-20 minutes managing my inventory for every hour of play (espcially since I can only play a few hours a day max!) Honestly, I don't care what the solution is as long as there is a solution. I personally liked GW2's way of inventory management, where space was very limited but materials didn't take up space in your bank.


Thanks for reading all of this. Sorry about the long post! I'd love to keep discussing this with you guys, especially if anyone has some ideas about what could be done to help fix inventory (micro)management.

It's working as intended -- they want you to be frustrated, and either accept that frustration as the "price" of doing what you are trying to do, or scale back what you are trying to do. That's the "soft cap" concept -- it's a cap based on personal frustration tolerance.

I don't think that the system can be easily changed, however, because mats are plentiful, and this is acting as the cap on overall mat supply. If they substantially upped mat storage, they would also need to down the supply/generation of mats to keep the overall amount of mats floating around from ballooning. That would also impact non-crafters, because gear drops in this game are a crafting mat. So I don't think a change is in the offing any time soon, as frustrating as I find the system.

I think for yourself, unfortunately you've chosen one of the more mat heavy professions in provisioning. Best solution there is to grind it up to 50 ASAP and then dump all of the mats you are not using other than the 1-2 recipes you are currently using for your own character. Guildies can either give you the mats if you cook for them, or they can put them in the guild bank. If you do that, your crafting space issues will be much less, because alchemy isn't all that space intensive (the number of mats is much smaller and other than water does not vary by tier). You may need one mule for overflow, though, if you want to save a lot of gear for research or for trait stones and that kind of thing. The big issues come for people who are trying to do provisioning and enchanting at once with no muling, for example.

Basically, under the current system (inventory small relative to number of mats, shared account bank), the idea is that if you want to 'do more' you need to pay the price of having multiple mules and shuffling things between them and the shared bank. That's the primary lever that they are using to limit supply in the game - unfortunately.

Celless

Hi Serenity,

Short version: Drop provisioning. Don't look in crates/barrels/sacks. Don't pick up ore or runestones. Toss out fishing baits. Enjoyment of the game may increase as a result of focusing more on the quests and adventuring area and less on ransacking enemy supplies.

Personally, my own enjoyment of the quests increased once I wasn't worrying about managing over a hundred provisioning ingredients and reaching multiple stacks of others.

Draaconis

An alt mule is definitely the way to go if you want to do three.

Kalizaar

When a game is created all systems need to be asked "Is this fun for the player or a detraction from fun?" The combination of a bajillion shinies (things to loot/scavenge) mixed with a very large number of unique, lootable items, mixed with a small inventory (compared to available items) definitely swings that question towards a detraction of fun.
An inventory system should fit together with the itemization system like a puzzle. Give the player just enough inventory space that they can carry most of what they're able to loot comfortably so that they can spend more time playing the game rather than constantly leaving the fun part of the game to deal with selling/banking.

They definitely didn't do that here. My only thought is that when they came up with the size of inventory that there must have been MUCH less itemization or looting potential planned.

Playing the game is fun. Spending XX% of your in-game time deleting items after/before every combat/chest/quest, and constantly running to wayshrines to go manage your inventory is not fun. Reducing the number of items looted at this point would cause much screaming, so raising the amount of inventory spaces available needs to happen. Not that I think it will any time soon.

I'm currently at 110 inventory spaces. I go adventuring and it takes very little time before I'm looking through my inventory trying to decide what to delete. When I finally am sick of constantly deleting items I then spend an absurd amount of time going to the bank, switching characters, going to crafting stations, going back to bank, switching characters. It was 10 times worse when I was still collecting provisioning stuff. *shudder*

EnOeZ

3 years later, Inventory Management is still a nightmare !!!

Soella

ESO+ has crafting bag, it is answer on all your inventory issues.

Rev Rielle

Inventory Management will become a huge issue if you try and do too much at once on one character. But as others have said; this is the case in every MMO. 200 inventory slots and 240 bank slots is actually quite a lot, but you can't do everything, especially without an ESO+ bag.

There are no surprises with this, we all know what our capacity is. You just have to make some decisions about what is most important to you/your character and focus on that. This not only includes what you keep in your bank/bag, but also what you do and don't pick up when your character is out and about.

Wreuntzylla

I started at early release and it's nothing now. Literally, the inventory management for me was multiple accounts with lots of mules feeding horses at the stables.

When the crafting bag came out I was a bit grumpy at first. I had developed such a huge system with maxed inventories and thousands of slots. A couple people even made addons so you could look up where everything was stored.

Once I used it though, the grump left because it solved one of my big irritants in the game. Logging in and out constantly. I am ofen a vocal critic ZoS, mostly to do with ethics and being veracity challenged at times (because that hasn't been the hallmark of the franchise), but they did systematically eliminate all of those irritants over a couple years span. I was always a subscriber, so to me, it was just bonus.

Which reminds me, aren't we missing this year's annual reward for account holders????

Ourorboros

You can do everything. You just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. I went for all six crafts on my first character, before 200 stacks, before bank upgrades, before potency runes stacked, before the many increases that have occurred to inventory. I did what I had to do to manage. I made frequent bank trips. I made a lot friends by leaving crawfish and crawlers in nodes , I made mules and logged when I needed to. The work paid off in the long run, as my Master crafter can handle any and all Master writs. It's not that I don't agree with OP, it's just that I KNOW what can be done. Whether we like it or not, zos has likely been as generous as they are ever going to be regarding more bag space. It's in their interest to keep it tight and thus nudge players to the craft bag. I think that's slimy, but it is what it is. To OP I can only say Get used to using mules and get rid of absolutely everything you rarely use.

Wreuntzylla

Ourorboros wrote: »

You can do everything. You just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. I went for all six crafts on my first character, before 200 stacks, before bank upgrades, before potency runes stacked, before the many increases that have occurred to inventory. I did what I had to do to manage. I made frequent bank trips. I made a lot friends by leaving crawfish and crawlers in nodes , I made mules and logged when I needed to. The work paid off in the long run, as my Master crafter can handle any and all Master writs. It's not that I don't agree with OP, it's just that I KNOW what can be done. Whether we like it or not, zos has likely been as generous as they are ever going to be regarding more bag space. It's in their interest to keep it tight and thus nudge players to the craft bag. I think that's slimy, but it is what it is. To OP I can only say Get used to using mules and get rid of absolutely everything you rarely use.

I don't know you but I h8 u. I have hated you since the early days. When I think of Dante's circles of hell, I think you will be deep, deep, deep..... But not as deep as those people that grab whatever you just pulled mobs off to get to...

Ourorboros

Wreuntzylla wrote: »

Ourorboros wrote: »

You can do everything. You just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. I went for all six crafts on my first character, before 200 stacks, before bank upgrades, before potency runes stacked, before the many increases that have occurred to inventory. I did what I had to do to manage. I made frequent bank trips. I made a lot friends by leaving crawfish and crawlers in nodes , I made mules and logged when I needed to. The work paid off in the long run, as my Master crafter can handle any and all Master writs. It's not that I don't agree with OP, it's just that I KNOW what can be done. Whether we like it or not, zos has likely been as generous as they are ever going to be regarding more bag space. It's in their interest to keep it tight and thus nudge players to the craft bag. I think that's slimy, but it is what it is. To OP I can only say Get used to using mules and get rid of absolutely everything you rarely use.

I don't know you but I h8 u. I have hated you since the early days. When I think of Dante's circles of hell, I think you will be deep, deep, deep..... But not as deep as those people that grab whatever you just pulled mobs off to get to...

Geez.....hate mail for a little cherry picking!? Would it help if I said I was a reformed cherry picker? I regretted all the worms I left behind when I started Master Angler .

Tawniey

Even before craft bags (which I now use), I never had a problem being a crafter and managing inventory. I used my bank for crafting mats and when I ran out of space there, I got together with some friends who also wanted to level crafting and we made a small guild and dumped mats into the guild bank. We then took out what we needed and traded crafting motifs and supplies. It worked out really well.

If you're not interested in social crafting, you can still manage it. Sure, there are tons of provisioning items, but as said before:

banespwnb14_ESO wrote: »

Don't store provisioning supplies. They are available EVERYWHERE. Gather only what you need. Look at your recipes and pick the ones you want to produce. Gather only the resources you need to make those.

Even if you do want to gather everything, sell what you can't store. You'll make gold for your effort that you can then use to buy mats you actually need when you actually need them.

My own bank was exclusively used for crafting mats until craft bags came out. I crafted far more often than I ran dungeons or trials, so I didn't need the space for dropped gear. I just deconned anything I didnt need to immediately use.

So yeah, the problem isn't inventory management as much as that the system is built to make you choose what parts of the game you want to invest the most time and resources in. If you had unlimited bag/bank space, people wouldn't sell anything. There wouldn't be a market. Gold would have no value.